Yesterday my brother released his second Free Software package, the SECCURE Elliptic Curve Crypto Utility for Reliable Encryption. (Recursive acronyms, yay!)

The seccure toolset implements a selection of asymmetric algorithms based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In particular, it offers public key encryption / decryption and signature generation / verification. ECC schemes offer a much better key size to security ratio than classical systems (RSA, DSA). Keys are short enough to make direct specification of keys on the command line possible (sometimes this is more convenient than the management of PGP-like key rings). seccure builds on this feature and therefore is the tool of choice whenever lightweight asymmetric cryptography -- independent of key servers, revocation certificates, the Web of Trust, or even configuration files -- is required.

Anyone willing to work on the Debian RFP?

(The first Free Software package of him is ssss, an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme)

Marc-Andre was so kind to upload the improvised mini-slides we had prepared for GUADEC's sound BOF. Unfortunately there is no recording of the BOF, so this is all we can offer for those interested but who were not able to attend GUADEC.

In related news: Thanks to jat there is now a native PulseAudio driver for MPD (in SVN), and I updated the MPlayer patch, which adds a native PulseAudio driver to MPlayer.

Diego and others who complained: PulseAudio in SVN now uses Avahi natively for ZeroConf. The old HOWL based code has been removed.

davidz: Shams King is currently working on HAL support in PulseAudio. He's planning to extend our module-combine to automatically combine all available hardware sound cards found with HAL into a single virtual sound sink. That way, if the user plugs in an USB loudspeaker set it will automatically output the same audio as the internal speakers did before. I believe this is the behaviour most non-technical users would expect from a well designed system.

Right now PulseAudio sink names cannot be used to identify the underlying hardware devices, since they are generic names like alsa_output or oss_output2. However, it might be a good idea to use the ALSA device name (i.e. alsa_output_hw_0_0) or even the HAL identifier if it is available. If this dialog uses the normal GStreamer PropertyProbe API to query the available devices (and does not use HAL directly), we should be able to support this easily in gst-pulse (right now we support this interface in GstPulseMixer, but not yet in GstPulseSink).

Marc-Andre, I wonder how the differentiation between "Sound events", "Music and Movies" and "Audio/Video Conferencing" touches the "role"/"class" model of GSmartMix?

Regarding power saving and PulseAudio: First of all, PulseAudio right now is intended to be run per-session, just like esd was. However, there is some incomplete support for running it as system-wide instance.

I think instead of integrating PulseAudio with gnome-power-manager the way you described it is probably a better idea to close the sound device when it is idle regardless if we are in power saving mode or not, and hope that the driver authors fix their stuff to not produce any click or pop sounds when the device is opened or closed. To be honest, all driver/sound card combinations I have access to work properly in this area.

In ALSA you usually open devices in O_RDONLY or O_WRONLY mode (and not in O_RDWR) anyway, so falling back to it is not really necessary.

The few images with GNOME people I made at GUADEC are now online, too.

I finally found the time to sort my photos from Vilanova i la Geltrú and Barcelona.

My Windows of Barcelona series:

A few other nice shots:

These are:
1st row: Casa Milà; dito; dito; dito; dito;
2nd row: Palau de la Música Catalana; dito; Mies van der Rohe Pavilion; dito; Vilanova Lighthouse;
3rd row: Sagrada Família; dito; dito; Hospital de Sant Pau; dito;
4th row: Sagrada Família, seen from Sant Pau; City Center/Barri Gòtic; dito; dito; Plaça Reial

A panoramic view of Barcelona photographed from the Montjuic towards the north:

Those "thunderclouds" on the right side of the image are actually a result of not using the same exposure settings on all photos that are part of the panorama. Which is a mistake I didn't repeat with my second panoramic view, which again shows Barcelona from the Montjuic, but this time towards the east:

Dont miss the the entire album!

We're proud to announce the first release of PulseAudio after the name change from Polypaudio. Besides a variety of sed -i -e s/polyp/pulse/g changes it mostly contains minor bugfixes. Get it while it is hot!

In related news PulseAudio now gained its own domain and a new Trac-based homepage: http://pulseaudio.org/. And thanks to Rafael Jannone and Pierre Ossman we now have a logo:

Together with PulseAudio 0.9.2 we released updated versions of all the auxiliary GUI tools. A new utility has been released as well, named PulseAudio Device Chooser. It installs a tray icon and allows the user to quickly change the sound server attached to the local X11 display, showing a list of servers that is accumulated using ZeroConf service browsing. In addition it allows you to quickly start one of the other GUI tools and shows notification whenever a new PulseAudio server/sink/source appears on the network. Everybody loves screenshots:

There has been some confusion about the date of the Sound BOF, since the BOF Wiki said a different date than my blog story of yesterday. To make this clear: the BOF will happen on friday, 4 p.m.

There will be a Linux/Gnome Sound BOF on Friday, 4:00 p.m. I will be there, promoting PulseAudio, as will be Marc-Andre of GSmartMix frame. Everyone interested in the future of audio in Gnome is welcome to join us!

Due to the generosity of the GNOME Foundation I have been able to get to the GUADEC 2006 this year. I'd like to thank Jeff Waugh and Quim Gil for the "last-minute" funding of my trip to Vilanova, and all the sponsors who actually are providing the funds. If anyone wants to talk to me about Avahi and/or PulseAudio (aka Polypaudio) (or any of my other projects), just try to find and speak to me. (Bungalow 870)

In related news, the new PulseAudio homepage will be "inaugurated" soon, becoming the official new home of PulseAudio/Polypaudio as soon as we release 0.9.2, which hopefully will be pretty soon.