Monday, January 15, 2007

For the record ...

This won't be written in my so called diary or journal or what ever. Been busy writing programs these days, sort of caught my whole attention so I haven't been updating my diary.
But here, I will for the word I gave ...
Oh and further notice is postponed.
I learned a few things in the past few days :
  1. If doing something -like fixing a program in my case- is important, and yet on your nerves -because its got bugs and you don't know how to fix them and there is no tutorial and the reference is not descriptive enough-, don't continue doing it for at least two or three hours; And if you can't even stop thinking about it in those few hours cheer your self up, and see which is more important you, a human or it; And if you still can't do that, then keep on doing what you were doing until you fall off your knees. Then you'll learn what I just said.
  2. Never get upset of the computer, its a machine, it doesn't want to hurt you.
  3. When something is very important and crucial to you and doesn't work out, seek inside your self, see if you'r aware of the creator ... He might have done this to you to let you see how you react ... and learn from that. If he gave you the problem then ask him to solve it.
  4. If you were dumb enough and didn't know the last point-like me- then he will kindly solve your problem and teach you the last few points.
I am getting emotional ... got to stop.

Emm! Announcement :
Did something to cheer me up. Wrote a little program named salam that greets you back with something like :
Salam ali! Che khabar?
Its smart enough to use your login name to greet you! The output in general is :
Salam [login name]! [a greeting]
One can add his own greetings with the -add [new greeting] option.
You can think what you like, but my dad said it's like how Mr. Bean sent Christmas cards to himself and got happy when they arrived through the post.
I would like, if anyone wanted to give the code so they could use it or change it, work on it and perhaps send it back if it got better.
Added two lines to .bashrc on my home directory and it greets when ever I open a terminal.

And the program that was important is named Audvis. Audvis plays .av files, a kind of animation. The animation is made from sound; It is supposed to help the deaf, hear by seeing the animation that was generated by the sound they couldn't hear through their ears. Its like they hear the sound by seeing the animation. Producing that animation from the sound was a PHD thesis of about ten years ago and is not my work. My work was writing a program that could play those animations e.g the .av files. Audvis stands for Audio Visualiser. My problem was learning to synchronize the animation with the sound. Each frame had to be synced with its corresponding 20 ms of sound. That means the animation is 50 frames per second. Walt Disney gives you animations of 30 or 20 fps.
The original program was written on a UNIX power station ten years ago, and so I decided to continue on Linux, but from scratch. For the visual part I used Gtkmm, a C++ wrapper for GTK+ and for the sound I used ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture).
The Program aims a day when it can work real time. I mean produce and play the animation as the sound is being generated. In this way a deaf person can not only hear what people say, he/she can listen to music, hear the horn of a car, listen to the sound of flying birds.

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