ALSA:ThisWiki

From the ALSA wiki

Latest revision as of 20:40, 11 February 2007

2006-12-22 - Mediawiki!!!!

I'm now almost done transfering all the pages to the new MediaWiki site. I'm just finishing my job, checking with a small script wether all old sites are available on the new adress (and continue to work, once the adresses are switched). I think this is done today or at least tomorrow. Please have a look at it, and tell me if there's anything else to do. If not, finally the wish of a MediaWiki can be fullfilled :-)

Ingo

2006-12-17 - Mediawiki!

Thanks a lot for reactivating the new wiki! I was happy to find already many transfered pages. I already transfered another couple of them. One question about the current wiki: is there a special page or anything to show a list of all pages of that wiki? That would be very usefull!

See PageSize, LinkTable, OrphanedPages, WantedPages and PageRefs.

Greets, Ingo

Wow, I see you have been very busy. I have to confess that I turned off the alsa2 site because, for a few months, there were no changes at all and I got a few complaints about folks being confused by the alternate site, so I thought "this is not going anywhere, I don't have the time" so I dropped a plain index.html in it's folder. I did not look closely enough to realize all the initial work that Saul and others had put in so I apologise to those guys! I am now keen to swap the sites ASAP.

Just a little idea: is it possible to have a {{Prettytable}} style like in wikipedia. This makes good looking tables much easier. That'd be great.

Greets, Ingo

I found it myself. Pretty easy :-) You just have to edit the page "Template:Prettytable".

2006-12-15 - Mediawiki!

PLEASE bring back the media wiki! I'm thinking about how to improve the Alsa documentation for about one week and I think this would be a very good start. The current wiki contains a lot of information, but it is quite messy and I think it's hard to find what one is looking for.

I agree, the current site is a mess.

At the beginning, there should be a big note "this is a sandbox" like akb said, or it could even be htaccess protected, to avoid users using some unfinished documentation. The new wiki's articles could have urls like http://alsa2.opensrc.org/Articles+title, so once you see that everything from the current wiki is ported to the new one, it could replace the current wiki and all the existing links would still work. If then someone decides to change the structure, he would create a new page http://alsa2.opensrc.org/New_Articles_title and redirect the old article to the new one. Plus if someone really follows a link on google or somewhere and doesn't find what he was looking for, he would be able to use the new search function and find it anyway.

Sounds good. I we keep in mind the new page URLs need to be the same as the old ones whereever possible then they obviously still work via Google and my main concern about changing the site is non-existant.

If you help me and a friend of mine, we are already three to work on that new wiki, so it could be done that time. Plus if there's an htaccess protection, we can take our time and still nobody will be irritated. What do you think about it?

Greets, Ingo

Thanks Ingo. If there are a few people that are prepared to put in some effort to make the change to Mediawiki then great, let's do it. If there are any complaints then I can put it behind a .htaccess so we can work on it privately but, for now, it's as it was from a few months ago. Let me know, here on this page, if there is anything needed with this particular Mediawiki installation or this server.

2006-08-01 - Mediawiki? Huh?

Er, not to be ungrateful, but why is mediawiki at alsa2.opensrc.org? Is it supposed to be the new place to do things? Is it a sandbox? I'm totally confused.

We now have two wikis, one of which (alsa.opensrc.org) is pretty wacky (white space is significant for tags, makes its own guesses about punctuation in urls and internal links, has a date problem) and the other one of which is based on solid software, but is sort of sitting out there not being linked to or updated; I've been editing content here for months... is it going to be wasted? Are we going to have to port it over? Are we just going to stick with this (functional but slightly flaky) wiki sw?

 --akb 2006-08-01  

Thanks for your thoughts. The main reason that mediawiki has not been swapped in as the real site is because of the amount of work involved in transferring the current wiki content to mediawiki format. The 2nd most important reason is that the number of linked-to URLs from Google and other sites is quite significant and they would mostly change in an inconsistent manner that would be difficult to use rewrite rules to manage. A much less important reason is that mediawiki is heavier on system resources and is more difficult to fit into the server setup scheme used on this server. The current wiki is extremely light and simple compared to mediawiki. Sure, it might have some brain dead functionality, and not have spam prevention or user login ability but it, for the most part, does the job and provides a result for most offsite searches as it currently stands.

I've almost swapped it over a couple of times but the amount of work involved for me to then patch up the mediawiki version, so it is some semblance of the current wiki is significant... perhaps a full week where I won't be able to do much of anything else. Both times I had more important things to do so I backed out and at the end of the day, this current wiki kind of works and does the job. Aside from that, your are the first person to really "complain" about this situation for quite some time so from my point of view is the inevitable disruption to the ALSA Wiki, and my time, really worth it. I'm also not a huge fan of mediawiki and would rather use a leaner more fully object-orientated codebase but the nearest thing to my ideal wiki would be a PHP5 version of the python based "trac" which does not exist. I'm not saying I won't do the swap but I guess I need some extra prodding to make the effort.

I'm fine with keeping this wiki; like ya said, it does the job. Mediawiki ain't perfect either, and the longer you wait, the better the sw will get. I'm a strong believer in "links should never stop working, ever". I just found the current situation confusing. Maybe the alsa2 mediawiki should have a big "this is a sandbox" warning plastered on it?

 -- akb 2006-08-12

2005-12-25

MediaWiki is now set up at http://alsa2.opensrc.org. Merry Xmas!

2005-12-22

Saul: I also wish to extend a hearty "thanks", I see very little in the way of useful guides or howtos for applications programmers. I have been, for 9 months, working through trial and error; the best documentation I have found for writing programs that perform asynchronous playback is in this Wiki (by Stephan K). Since the developers are leaving us to fend for ourselves, a Wiki is the best solution for our sharing information. This Wiki, however, seems to lack "Talk:" pages where discussions about an article's contents can be held. IMO, this would be an important addition. (Is it appropriate to append comments to the end of a page?)

Mark Constable: yes certainly, or even inline with content by indenting or using 2 x single quotes like this response. MediaWiki will be installed shortly so real Talk: pages will be available RSN.

2005-12-14- Thanks and Where should this go

Question moved to CCRMA

2005-12-07 - Well Done

I just wanted to pass on a friendly word of thanks. The wiki was very helpful; the FAQ in particular. BTW: I would also second the other comment about switching to the MediaWiki. It's not extra complexity; it's nice because it gives a common markup syntax for all the FOSS projects that are using it. You could use a different wiki or the wiki you have now; but it would be nice if you shared the mediawiki markup syntax. The alsa project using the media wiki is like showering love on friendly allies.

Mark Constable: thanks for the thanks and you have tipped me into action. I *will* install MediaWiki by the end of 2005. I will set it up for this domain and have ALSA as a subsection so any current and future projects hosted on this server can take advantage of the same backend database.

2005-05-10 - Developer documentation

I may have been looking in the wrong place, and I may not be an audio expert either, but I've had a hard time finding documentation for application developers on the alsa library. This wiki only has one or two pages on the subject aswell, containing links to rather unhelpful (sometimes even unrelated) websites. (I consider the official alsa documentation unhelpful)

I'd like to see a wiki used as the base of some good documentation for this. After a fair amount of fiddling I managed to get my application to work, and I'd be happy to write some sort of guide on how if it may help getting other developers to start documenting aswell. Mind if I use this wiki?

MediaWiki sounds like a good idea, btw.

-- Stéphan K.

Please... in fact a big PLEASE... feel free to add any developer orientated documentation. If you have any thoughts about structure then just go ahead and try something out, no need to ask. Obviously the "For ALSA Software Developers" sub-section is a good place to link to a new set of pages if nothing else is more obvious. Don't be shy in making any changes as anything can be undone if you mess up :)

MediaWiki is the most obvious software upgrade for this site... a bit more pushing and I'll commit to it one day... however, I also like the absolute simplicity of this current software and not sure of the tangible benefits MediaWiki would offer. Is the extra complexity, for the user, really worth it?

2005-02-22 - CSS Update

Over the last few weeks I've tried a few tweeks to the look n feel of this site via CSS. Last night I got serious, or carried away, and altered the headings so they have centered text and inside a subtle popout box. I also added the mozilla/firefox rounded corners effect and various other tweaks. The horizontal rule looks out of place most of the time now. If anyone dislikes these changes then please say so here.

Many thanks to pzad for catching the latest spamming on the front page.

2005-01-24 - Spam

You know... just a crazy useless thought... but the litigation thing in general is getting so bad that I would not be surprised if some spammer got his lawyer to send me a threat about removing their spam links from this site. Technically, the front page says edit any page so by removing spam I am am infringing on the rights of the spammers! Not really, and I know it's silly to even contemplate the idea, but like I say... I would not be surprised if such a thing happened one day.

And personally speaking, one of the worst things about this spamming crap is here I am making some useless note about the spamming and not about some new ALSA innovation!!! Hmpf.

2004-11-03 - Hacking

It is funny to see, that some loosers are wasting their energy to something like "hacking" these pages. :-)

Wow, that surprised me, I forgot that freepats.opensrc.org is using the old Wiki software but it still has access to the same database. Thank you for catching that one and I'll update that site to the new software and authentication RSN. Yeah, some people must have nothing better to do. At least the pro spammers are probably getting paid for their efforts! And yes, this software must go. I discovered it was causing a lookup on MySQL to determine old pages for every page, so for every page view there were 500+ extra database lookups! I've turned off that "feature" so that pages (or page history) never get deleted. Anyway, that was the last straw, this software has to go. I'll set up a MediaWiki test site soon.

2004-10-22 - More on Software Update

Mark Constable: some notes after a few days of using this newer 0.25 version of the WikkiTikkiTavi Wiki software.

• There was still a hung returning page after an edit. I eventually found that by removing the nice search engine friendly rewrite rule in the .htaccess file seemed to solve that problem.
• There are some changes in the way paragraphs are rendered in this version of Tavi. The old version used {{<br>}} for line breaks and this version makes better use of {{<p>}} instead. The raw editable source can now have spaces between paragraphs that do not get doubled up in the rendered page.
• Use a {{/}} to join adjacent lines together.
• Use {{//}} to provide a single line break without a blank line in between.
• All Wiki links are split when displayed which is much nicer IMHO.

My apologies to those who disagree with requiring authentication before making edits but it was the simplest path available to stop the spamming without changing the software, or making unreliable hacks to add some image based method for anonymous edits. The problem with changing the software is that the 500 or so pages need to be adopted to some other Wiki format, whereas now the spamming is stopped and we don't have to massively update each page. I'm still evaluating the right software package to upgrade to.

2004-10-19 - Software Update

Will reported that he could not save edited pages once authenticated so the site software was updated to the latest stable WikkiTikkiTavi v0.26 from Sourceforge. This seems to have fixed that particular problem. Please drop a note here or via an email to mailto:admin@opensrc.org if you have any problems with this site.

2004-09-23 - Wiki

Any wiki which requires autorization will be better then this. linuxtv.org in near past choose MediaWiki

2004-09-22 - Site not working on 2004-09-21

Mark Constable: Sorry about that but the server had register_globals for PHP turned off and not all sites were checked for the impact of that change. Yet another reason to upgrade the software running this Wiki as it's showing its age.

2004-09-13 - New Site Software

Mark Constable: It needs to be PHP based with a SQLite or MySQL backend. I've been waiting for a nice Subversion based PHP5 Wiki option (to store the versioned diffs) to become available but that could take until 2005 before something as slick as that becomes available. An obvious choice is PHPWiki or MediaWiki, or even a portal like Drupal with a Wiki module.

Any thoughts about the "just right" kind of software for this site ?

I would not use a login system, that would take away the whole Wiki idea. I would use a security image (if this is not in PHPWiki we could make it ourself), if a non-bot spammer is able to type a security image he is also able to make accounts.

Mark Constable: True, but the convenience of a cookie based login system is that, at least for regular users, once logged in then the awkwardness of authenticating all the time is just about non-existant. A spammer would have to sacrifice a legit email address to gain access. Dealing with an image based block for every edit may be worse, then again, it may be an Ok solution as another option to logging in. I lean towards installing more of an overall portal solution that also offers blogging and project management (media uploads, FAQs etc) features along with a Wiki module specifically for this site. Personally, I only want to have to transfer the content from this system to to another one just the once, so "the other" system better be worthy of the effort. The only reason I have held back from "expanding" the services of this domain is bandwidth usage as anything to do with media files can soak up a lot of bandwidth. I'm hoping that sometime in October (2004) I'll have plenty of bandwith to play with so if this pans out then more of a portal/CMS will become the focus... if not then PHPWiki will be used, unless something better becomes obvious. Whatever the case, hacking in an optional image based, but still anonymous, Wiki update feature should be quite possible anyway. This could be interesting with a Wiki module...

http://www.civicspacelabs.org/

2004-09-10 - Cleaning up DmixPlugin

I'm also thinking of cleaning up the Dmix and Asym pages. They are quite a mess. Thinking of an explanation at top what dmix/asyn can and can't do (in relation to aoss too). And below that a few steps to get it working. And move most of the usefull comments to the bottom. I'll setup a new page for review in the next few days.

Mark Constable: Or just make your changes at the top and leave the parts you are unsure about at the bottom with a note saying you need help or an opinion about what to do with the rest. Suit yourself though. Whatever you do will be appreciated.

2004-09-08 - Yup more spam

Yes, we had quite a spam storm a week ago. All methods of preventing spam make it harder for anyone to make edits so it's a gut twisting decision to put in authentication or image-with-access-ID as you suggest. Let's see if it continues to be a problem. The best defense for this site is that it's accessed daily so removing spam happens rather quickly, keeping it down to an annoyance. Maybe "they" will get bored and go away... then again, maybe not.

2004-09-07 - Yup more spam

Automated or people in India getting payed doing this. The reason to do it is to get a better search position in Google. But what do we do about it? Maybe a security image from which people need to type the numbers (you know it). This would stop bots. - Paul van Schayck

2004-09-07 - More and more spam

Is this an automated thing? How lowlife can you get to spam into a wiki? I mean how receptive are the people visiting this wiki gonna be wrt to the spam? Talk about negative advertisement.. - tapas

2004-08-03 - FAQ screwed up

Someone seems to have fsck'ed up the FAQ. I don't know how tro retrieve the archive versions besides c&p..

2004-06-20 - Top 10 List

This might be somewhat controversial, but it would be nice to know which sound cards are fully functional under the alsa drivers. While it would be counter-productive to bad-mouth vendors, I think it would be appropriate to reward vendors that have supported alsa specifically, and FOSS in general. That being said, I have created a Alsa Preferred Soundcards page to kick it off.

Mark Constable: Absolutely excellent, I really hope that pages gets some attention as it could be a truly valuable source of info. Thank you for your effort to kick start page.

2004-02-20 - This Page

Mark Constable: Thanks to whoever came up with this message/discussion style. I just squished up the headings against the message parts so they are seperated by a single line break, otherwise they have too much vertical seperation (to me)... it makes the editable content a little less clear but it's the final presentation that is more important. Change to taste.

2004-02-18 - Re: TOC

I like your AlternativeTOC but I think it should complement rather than replace the existing front-page of this Wiki http://alsa.opensrc.org/. The TOC is a hierarchical layout of the subject categories which is very useful if you know enough to know approximately which subject area you need to look up. However, if you don't know very much about ALSA then the front-page, which is a flat layout of many of the commonest concepts in ALSA, might be more useful because you may suddenly spot something relevant without having to click on too many unfamiliar subject categories as in the TOC. How about adding a link to the AlternativeTOC underneath the FAQ link on the front page?

Mark Constable: Grouping the table of contents like this is very interesting. Perhaps it could become the main front page TOC if there was a very clear and obvious "Read this first" type of page that took care of explaining some obvious points about the TOC, and the site in general, so that this extra info is there for newbies but does not get in the way of regular visitors.

2004-02-17 - TOC

Hi, I was wondering, if the TOC could be redone so that info is more neatly and logically organized. I created a page AlternativeTOC to experiment.. I haven't categorized all [or even much] of the available info on this wiki, but it's more about the general idea..

Mark Constable: Excellent inititiative, thanks.