In this post I show some more useful debugging tricks. Check also the other posts of the series:

This is the continuation of the GStreamer WebKit debugging tricks post series. In the next three posts, I’ll focus on what we can get by doing some little changes to the source code for debugging purposes (known as “instrumenting”), but before, you might want to check the previous posts of the series:

This post is a continuation of a series of blog posts about the most interesting debugging tricks I’ve found while working on GStreamer WebKit on embedded devices. These are the other posts of the series published so far:

I’ve been developing and debugging desktop and mobile applications on embedded devices over the last decade or so. The main part of this period I’ve been focused on the multimedia side of the WebKit ports using GStreamer, an area that is a mix of C (glib, GObject and GStreamer) and C++ (WebKit).

This depends on Bounce (the N900 .deb) and SDL 1.2 being installed. Google "bounce_1.0.0_armel.deb" for the former, and use n9repomirror for the latter.

This is the second part of my porting odyssey; for the first part, follow this link.

In case you have a sense of deja-vu when reading this post, it's because indeed this is not the first time I try porting a device to Ubuntu Touch. The previous attempt, however, was with another phone model (and manufacturer), and did not have a happy ending. This time it went better, although the real ending is still far away; but at least I have something to celebrate.

Qt published its New_Features in Qt 6.0.

Some noteworthy items in their list:

• QPromise allows setting values, progress and exceptions to QFuture
• QFuture supports attaching continuations

I like to think I had my pirate-hook in it at least a little bit with QTBUG-61928.

I need to print this out and put it above my bed:

Thiago Macieira added a comment – 13 Jul ’17 03:51 You’re right Philip Van Hoof added a comment – 13 Jul ’17 07:32 Damn, and I was worried the entire morning that I had been ranting again. Thiago Macieira added a comment – 13 Jul ’17 16:06 oh, you were ranting. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

Thanks for prioritizing this Thiago.

This question often pops up, when you need a random direction vector to place things in 3D or you want to do a particle simulation.

We recall that a 3D unit-sphere (and hence a direction) is parametrized only by two variables; elevation \theta \in [0; \pi] and azimuth \varphi \in [0; 2\,\pi] which can be converted to Cartesian coordinates as

\begin{aligned} x &= \sin\theta \, \cos\varphi \\ y &= \sin\theta \, \sin\varphi \\ z &= \cos\theta \end{aligned}

If one takes the easy way and uniformly samples this parametrization in numpy like

phi = np.random.rand() * 2 * np.pi
theta = np.random.rand() * np.pi

One (i.e. you as you are reading this) ends with something like this:

• uniform: spherical coordinates
• biased: 3D projection to Cartesian coordinates

While the 2D surface of polar coordinates uniformly sampled (left), we observe a bias of sampling density towards the poles when projecting to the Cartesian coordinates (right).
The issue is that the cos mapping of the elevation has an uneven step size in Cartesian space, as you can easily verify: cos^{'}(x) = sin(x).

The solution is to simply sample the elevation in the Cartesian space instead of the spherical space – i.e. sampling z \in [-1; 1]. From that we can get back to our elevation as \theta = \arccos z:

z = 1 - np.random.rand() * 2 # convert rand() range 0..1 to -1..1
theta = np.arccos(z)

As desired, this compensates the spherical coordinates such that we end up with uniform sampling in the Cartesian space:

• compensated spherical coordinates
• uniform: 3D Cartesian coordinates

Custom opening angle

If you want to further restrict the opening angle instead of sampling the full sphere you can also easily extend the above. Here, you must re-map the cos values from [1; -1] to [0; 2] as

cart_range = -np.cos(angle) + 1 # maximal range in cartesian coords
z = 1 - np.random.rand() * cart_range
theta = np.arccos(z)

Optimized computation

If you do not actually need the parameters \theta, \varphi, you can spare some trigonometric functions by using \sin \theta = \sqrt { 1 - z^2} as

\begin{aligned} x &= \sqrt { 1 - z^2} \, \cos\varphi \\ y &= \sqrt { 1 - z^2} \, \sin\varphi \end{aligned}

With Google cutting its unlimited storage and ending the Play Music service, I decided to use my own Nextcloud more seriously.
In part because Google forced all its competitors out of the market, but mostly because I want to be independent of any cloudy services.