kassoulet codelog

SoundConverter 2.0

2011-12-05T23:45:00.000+01:00

Refactoring and Internal Changes

Time for a new release of SoundConverter. This one was long-delayed because of the changes I made to the code base. I wanted to split the source in several files, and this was long and painful, but I think it was worth it. The loading is faster, and the structure is much more clear now. It's still far from perfect, and more work is needed to totally finish the cleaning, but I'm happy with this release. Another big change is the simplification of many classes.

OK, enough talking about the internal changes since you don't care, and let's see what's new for you.

Important problems fixed
The Vorbis output was badly broken since a few releases, causing snapping in the converted files, this is fixed now.
Several crashes were fixed too.

Faster Adding
SoundConverter was sometimes slow and unresponsive when adding huge amount of files, because it tried to read tags the earliest it can. Now it reads the tags just before converting. And only if needed by the target filename renaming.

Adding files speed test. 16x faster!

After a seance of profiling, it was clear that adding file by file to the UI was slow, so now files are added only when we are done scanning them.

Adding files speed test. 3.5x faster!

The results speak for themselves, we went from 2 minutes down to 2 seconds. That's 60x faster!

New Filename Patterns

Speaking of filename, {Ext}, {DiscNumber} and {DiscTotal} were added to filename patterns.

Interface Changes
When converting, progress bars now appear next to the files, so you can watch all the parallel processing occurring. That's what you are paying for, so it's important to see it :)

You can't see it in this early screenshot, but the preferences now have a dedicated toolbar icon. Hopefully this will allow SoundConverter to be usable in Ubuntu Unity...

Speed limiter
It's a bit ironic, as we were striving to get the maximum speed out of your hardware -and many of you are really happy with this- but alas some users were also complaining about overheating/crashes when SoundConverter used lots of processes for converting. If you were affected, rejoice, you can now limit the number of parallel conversions in the preference dialog.

Other Problems
We now exclude all files with .iso extension, since we can't read them...

Hurrah for Fedora

I've now to thanks the wonderful Fedora packaging team, for being so nice and patient with me. They fixed a few problems in their packages, but I was slow to integrate them. This is done now. Hopefully now, the Fedora packages should be vanilla SoundConverter packages, and releasing will be easier for everybody.

The Future
After this release I plan to fix the inevitable problems that will emerge, but the next big step is a total rewrite in python3, a brand new gtk3 interface. You guessed it, version 3!

Gnome Thumbnail Cleaner

2011-02-10T13:43:00.000+01:00

Thumbnail-cleaner is a simple tool I've done a long time ago, time for it to go public :)

Gnome keeps a cache with all generated thumbnails by Nautilus. There is only one problem: if you delete files with thumbnails without using Nautilus (eg. command line) the thumbnails are not deleted. Recent Gnome versions limit the total size and maximal age of thumbnails in the cache, but this is not enough for perfectionists like you and me.

So here it is, simple, fast and sexy, as always.

Yes I know, there are already a few scripts doing the same thing, but mine is just better OK ?

https://github.com/kassoulet/thumbnail-cleaner

Jankis Duplicate Finder

2010-09-09T23:10:00.001+02:00

Jankis is a GTK graphical program to find and delete duplicate files.
It's very fast and designed to be powerful yet easy to use.

Grab it now: http://github.com/kassoulet/jankis

Meego 1.0 on the Samsung N150 netbook

2010-06-02T16:30:00.001+02:00

It works.

SoundConverter 1.5.0

2010-05-20T00:38:00.006+02:00

Haaaa. Finally a few days of full time work on SoundConverter, so I can launch the 1.5.0 version.
We now have a fully asynchronous core. The old task manager was polling, a reminisent of good old gstreamer 0.8 era, causing tasks faster than 10ms to wait. And the results are awesome, just take a look at my little benchmark bellow:

And that's only numbers. Try it to see the difference. As a bonus, multithreading is also much faster with the new version. And don't ask for the 1.4.4 results with 16GB of sound files, the test wasn't able to finish without crashing.

While investigating on a crash with a friendly user, I remarked the huge amount of memory used by SoundConverter. And just to load tags! I never used it with lots of files at the same time, but this had to be fixed. I tracked down every byte allocated to remove all the unnecessary ones. To my surprise, I was storing all tags passed by gstreamer (even embedded pictures), when we only use a few ones to build filenames, that alone saved a ton of memory. Anyway there it is. Using 3x less memory and 6x faster to load files. Happy converting!

Pygtk leaks memory when using signals

2010-05-12T10:57:00.001+02:00

Be careful when using connect(): gobject will keep a reference to the callback, preventing your object to be destroyed. You must call disconnect() to be sure the memory is freed.
It doesn't matter when you have only a few objects, but when you are creating thousands of objects...

@see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1364923/how-to-connect-to-a-gobject-signal-in-python-without-it-keeping-a-reference-to-t

How to uninstall a python program, packaged with distutils (setup.py)

2009-05-20T23:01:00.004+02:00

So you have installed a program by running something like sudo setup.py install and want to remove it, without forgetting a file or mess with the system ?
It's simple in fact. Install checkinstall. And run sudo checkinstall python setup.py install to create a package for your system, and remove it with dpkg -r NAME_OF_PACKAGE.
Checkinstall is an handy tool, it replays the install procedure while inspecting what is being done, and creates a package doing the same thing. With uninstall.

Luc Besson contre la Joconde

2009-04-10T20:40:00.004+02:00

"On ne vole pas les tableaux au Louvre il me semble !" -- Luc Besson

Non, on n'a pas le droit de voler la Joconde...
Mais on a le droit d'en avoir une photo.
On a le droit de faire une copie de la photo.
Et le droit de faire une copie de la copie de la photo.
Et la Joconde est toujours en place, épatant non ?

Nautilus-folder-actions

2009-03-01T22:07:00.002+01:00

You want to add buttons in the Nautilus toolbar, all read from a custom file in the current view ?
You want to add a button to launch "git gui" from your code folder ?
So nautilus-folder-action is for you !

Auto Vectorize Decorator

2008-06-26T21:41:00.007+02:00

def vectorize(f):
"""
Allows a traditionnal python function to be called with
iterables arguments.

So when you call func([array]) it will do the iteration for you,
call func() for each element in array, and return an array.

All arguments must be iterable, if you want to pass something else,
use a keyword argument.

"""
def _vectorize(*args, **kwargs):
    if not isiterable(args[0]):
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    else:
        return [f(*arg, **kwargs) for arg in zip(*args)]
    return _vectorize

# to use it:

@vectorize
def my_func(arguments):
# do something interesting, on ONE element.

my_func(my_args)
my_func(my_super_list_of_many_values)

Get a hash of a given module in python

2008-03-18T16:53:00.005+01:00

This small function use the inspect and sha modules to return you a hash of the given module/class/function.
Note that we only hash the bytecode, so only really modified code will change the resulting hash.

import inspect

def get_module_hash(root, obj=None, hash=None, verbose=False):
if not obj:
obj = root
if verbose:
print obj.__name__
if not hash:
import sha
hash = sha.new()

for member in inspect.getmembers(obj):
name, child = member

if inspect.ismodule(child):
if child.__name__.startswith(root.__name__):
if child != root:
if verbose:
print child.__name__
hash = get_module_hash(root, child, hash, verbose)

if inspect.isclass(child):
if child.__module__.startswith(root.__name__):
if verbose:
print '  ', child.__name__
hash = get_module_hash(root, child, hash, verbose)

if inspect.ismethod(child):
if verbose:
print '    ', child.__name__
hash.update(child.im_func.func_code.co_code)

if inspect.isfunction(child):
if root.__name__ in child.func_code.co_filename:
if verbose:
print '  ', child.__name__
hash.update(child.func_code.co_code)
return hash

hash = get_module_hash(yourmodule)
print 'version hash:', hash.hexdigest()

Dose2 - Now in fullscreen splendor

2008-02-12T22:55:00.002+01:00

I love the Dose2 [1] demo by mfx, but I always wanted it to run in a better resolution, as it is fully vectorial. So here it is, finally you can run it in 1600x1200 if you dare!

Download the sources [2], compile and run!

You can try the following command line options:

-fullscreen : obviously, switch to fullscreen.
-stretch : use the current resolution.
-nofill : do not apply the magic xor - some kind of wireframe, search fillcopy() in main.c to see some f*cking clever code.
-WIDTHxHEIGHT : choose resolution. WIDTH and HEIGHT can be any size.

[1] http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=3289
[2] http://kassoulet.free.fr/files/dose2_2008-05-03.tar.gz (new, 2x faster version!)

Ed: Now also on github.
Ed2: Backbuffer was blitted two times, new version is 2x faster in big resolutions!

Splitting a mp3 album (mp3+cue) in separate files without recoding

2008-01-23T11:43:00.000+01:00

So you have demovibes and you would like to have it with separate tracks so you can skip one?

This is really simple, here is the magic command: (in one line)

mp3splt -c demovibes3.cue demovibes3-80mn_scene_music_compilation_mixed_by_willbe.mp3 -d demovibes3 -o @n-@p-@t

You will need the nice mp3splt of course, and it works also for ogg vorbis!
If you want tags, you can extract them from filenames, with easytag for example.

How to clear disk cache in Linux

2007-12-05T11:37:00.001+01:00


sync ; sudo echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

edit: better safe than sorry: flush caches before, as suggested...

Vice Dual Sid patch

2007-07-30T15:23:00.001+02:00

Here is my crappy patch to Vice 1.21 to add my special 6581 + 8580 stereo output. You can listen to some examples.

After applying the patch, you will just have to select the dual sid option (note that this will also disable the previous dual sid functionality). You will now have both 6581 and 8580 in separate channels, in real time and record mode. Enjoy!

edit: updated patch for Vice 2.0

Knights demos on youtube.

2007-07-09T16:43:00.000+02:00

Yeah I encoded styler2 and schtroumpf2 and uploaded them on youtube.
The quality is rather bad, I will upload high quality videos somewhere else soon.

Faster ListStore

2007-05-31T01:50:00.000+02:00

Your are wondering why ListStore.append() is so slow in your code?
No more turtle-soft: disconnect the view and the store by doing TreeView.set_model(None), edit the ListStore, and then reconnect them.

Tadaaa, this is just thousands of time faster here...

Returning a array of structs with dbus-glib

2007-05-11T18:39:00.000+02:00

I was looking for an example on how to return an array of struct in a D-Bus program, and I found nothing. So here is a fast note for later reference.

This is pseudo code, just to show you how to proceed.

So you want to return a "a(si)", that's it, an array of struct containing each a string and an integer.

in your example.xml: (process with dbus-binding-tool as usual)


<node name="/com/example/Example"></node>
    <interface name="com.example.Example"></interface>
        <method name="getExampleArray"></method>
            <arg type="a(si)" name="array" direction="out"></arg>
  </method>
 </interface>
</node>

in your example.c:


// you define your structure here by using get_struct 
#define DBUS_STRUCT_STRING_INT (dbus_g_type_get_struct ("GValueArray", G_TYPE_STRING, G_TYPE_INT, G_TYPE_INVALID))

gboolean desktoptracks_get_example_array(DesktopTracks *obj, GPtrArray **stats_data, GError **error)
{
  for ( each element you want to return )
  {
      element_string , element_int = the element you want to return

      GValue *value;

      value = g_new0 (GValue, 1);
      g_value_init (value, DBUS_STRUCT_STRING_INT);
      g_value_take_boxed (value, dbus_g_type_specialized_construct (DBUS_STRUCT_STRING_INT));

      // field number, value, G_MAXUINT at the end
      dbus_g_type_struct_set (value, 0, element_string, 1, element_int, G_MAXUINT);
      g_ptr_array_add (array, g_value_get_boxed (value));
      g_free (value);
  }
}

Easy uh ?

SoundConverter 0.9.6

2007-04-28T16:20:00.000+02:00

I've just uploaded a version, which fixes a stupid problem in one Makefile.am (No, there is no need for DESTDIR there :) ).

Previous 0.9.5 version mainly fixed a problem with spaces in filenames when encoding to the same folder (Hell must be filled by escaped characters).

And website look was updated as well!

I think we are pretty close of a 1.0, we need more test, more polish and more love and we are done. And after 1.0 we will add some new features.

gXiso website updated

2006-12-14T11:44:00.000+01:00

I just updated the gXiso website.

I will maybe do some enhancements to this nice program soon, including a port to MacOSX.