Only wanted to apologise for *unconsciously* creating the impression that I agree with all the points mentioned by Murray Cumming against Jeff. That is not the case and I only agree to what I myself also observed based on my own experience that I described in my blog.

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is the gupnp-av-cp playing a song from my n81 on the coherence media renderer:




Many thanks to Frank Scholz and Visa Smolander for helping me in making sense out of UPnP specs, otherwise I still would have been confused on how to implement them. The CP is not yet ready but I will try to complete it before the end of the year 2007.

I would like to avail this opportunity to make it very clear to everyone that I have nothing against Coherence project and/or python, in fact I have been using Coherence myself extensively to test my GUPnP code. The reason people get the impression that I am against coherence/python is that I express the following reservations of mine regarding python, quite often and I end-up giving a wrong impression:

1. I do not believe that python is ready for embedded systems yet and vice versa. Both python and embedded systems need some time before they can be happily married.

2. There is also the fact that when I would write (or support) a framework, I would like that to be equally attractive for all kinds of developers and the best way to do that would be to write it in C. That way, once I have the framework ready, I can provide wrappers for all kinds of languages, including python. OTOH, when writing an application, I might want to do it in python myself (assuming that I don't expect it to be used on embedded systems).

On a side-note, I have been talking about UPnP so much that Ansku recently had a dream in which someone was talking to her about it. :)

Just writing this blog entry to make my gratitude to dobey for putting my hackergotchie on planet.gnome.org, very public. :)

I couldn't have said it better. What made me really pissed is his lying tactics. I once mentioned on the gnome foundation ml about me waiting for his replies for more than an year (literally) and I got a quick reply from him telling me that he has sent me replies. I believed him (after all he is the director of gnome foundation), assuming that his mails must have ended up in spam folder for some reason but all of a sudden my spam filter started see his mails as not spam. After a little conversation, he promised to put my hackergotchie on the planet and after that I started to receive complete silence from him again. I send him reminders from time to time but I never got any response (it's been 2.5 months now). I am sure, he'll tell me that he has been sending me responses if he reads this blog entry or if I make it an issue on the gnome foundation ml again but I see no reason to believe his word anymore.

P.S. If the 'reply-to' header of an email only contains the addresses of the receivers only, I won't blame my spam filter to treat the email as spam. :) I notified Jeff about this and this was his reply:

>>P.S can you please set the correct reply-to header in your emails.

My client does what it's told to do.

In search for Bertrand Russell on video.google.com, I found two video clips that I wouldn't have expected, one is a clip from an old bollywood movie where the hero is given an opportunity to conduct an interview with Russell and another is video of the song 'Jihad' by Singing Fools. The former is a bit surprising but I didn't quite catch the jihad song and it's connection with Russell. Also
I knew that americans were supporting Jihad in the 80's but didn't know they were so loude and active in that.

As some of you already know, I've been working on a simple AV-specific control-point as part of gupnp-tools. While at it, I've been trying to keep the UPnP AV parts as separate and generic as possible so that they could be move to a separate library later on. One of the first things that everyone wanted to create a nice wrapper for is the ugly DIDL-Lite. Jorn tried his best to convince me and others to not create a GObject for representing each DIDL-Lite object but I didn't listen and ended-up writing a very resource hungry API. To see what i mean, please look at memory usage of gupnp-av-cp after populating it's treeview with the content hierarchy exported by coherence:



I was quite sure that most of this 28M is taken by xmlDoc and I was right. Now that I have got rid of xmlDoc usage and replaced the gobjects with an API to deal with xmlNodes, here is how the memory usage looks like:




For people who are curious on how this simple AV control-point would look like, here is a screenshot:



One reason why the development of GUPnP might seem much slower compared to that of other UPnP projects out there is that we (especially Jorn) are trying our best to provide a nice and simple API while making sure that no part of the project is resource hungry as we are targeting embedded systems where saving bytes is more impotant than providing lots of features. Jorn already have a plan and some half-baked code for the handling of DIDL-Lite xml and contents on the server-side (ContentDirectory implementation) without wasting lots of memory and CPU.

Finally! I found a person who claims that Mango Lassi and Milk-shake taste different to him: Daf. So I see no choice but to change my claim to:

Mango-Lassi is the name of a typical 'western' drink that consists of two extremely delicious items: Lassi and Mango. However, the drink is completely unknown to people who are born and raised in a particular town in the south-eastern part of Sindh which is famous for it's production of Mangoes and a particular Lassi shop all around Pakistan. IMHO, those people should not be blamed for their ignorance since they are quite far from the western world to know about such new inventions.

For some reason, I am unable to connect the mindstorm IDE to communicate with the mindstorm using bluetooth so I use USB for downloading my programs to NXT. Didn't get a lot of time to play with it but the first thing I would want to build is a rover that move in a straight line but turns left (or right) if something comes in front of it (already done) unless if it's a red ball in front of it and pick it up instead and keep going.

Yes! Lennart it's no doubt a nice icon for a Mango milk-shake. :)

There is no such thing as Mango Lassi. There is Lassi and then there is Mango, both very delicious but separate objects and both lose their taste as soon as you combine them. Unfortunately, many Indian/Nepalese restaurants in europe are spreading the wrong message just to simply their task of selling both on the same ignorant (of Indian cuisine) customer. I was already annoyed enough by the Waiter bringing me a Mango Lassi each time I order a Lassi in Nepalese restaurant and now I'll be seeing (maybe also using) a nice free software project by the same name. :(