Computer Stuff

What I'm Currently Working On

I'm currently most interested in these three projects:

• Mezzo is the next-generation audio back-end to the Audacity audio editor
• lock-free data structures, especially as they apply to Mezzo's real-time system.
• a long-term aspiration to replace TeX. I know it's pure hubris to even consider such a thing, but I feel like there's room for interesting work in this area.

Because these projects are active and changing so quickly, I don't want to say anything more specific about them here. Instead, I am keeping a log at http://www.reverberate.org/log/.

Other Projects

• FixDumbWindowsUsernameMangling.pm - a brief but tricky way to work around Microsoft's dumb DAV authentication
• htmlarchiver.py - An easy way to embed images in html files

Opinion

• On Arch and Subversion, a subjective comparison of these two leading open-source revision control systems.

Where I've Been

I've been a major contributor to the Audacity audio editor since 2001. In the early days I was working on fairly simple things like building the preferences dialog and writing importers/exporters, but since then I have learned a lot about real-time audio which led to a redesign of the audio back end. My current work on Mezzo is closely tied to my Audacity experience.

In August of 2003, I contributed FLAC tagging support to Rhythmbox, an iTunes clone for GNOME. (I no longer run Linux full-time, now that I have a PowerBook).

I have worked a lot on PortAudio, a portable sound library that wraps native APIs like DirectSound, ALSA, OSS, CoreAudio, etc. I was working on an implementation for BeOS in the summer of 2001 (I was a huge BeOS fan, and it was hard to see it go). I didn't know anything about audio programming at the time, but it didn't matter since no one was using BeOS or my implementation. The next summer I wrote an implementation for JACK, a system for wiring audio applications together, and I started working on an implementation for ALSA. Lately my interests have shifted somewhat, and I sort of abandoned the JACK and ALSA implementations. Luckily Arve Knudsen has picked up the slack and made lots of improvements to the ALSA driver. I think that his work is really important for Linux audio. People don't realize that ALSA is simply not a user-level API; it is a hardware interface slightly abstracted and exported into userspace. In my opinion, PortAudio should be thought of as a native API for Linux that happens to use ALSA on the underside. For example, OS X's native API is at the same level of abstraction as PortAudio.

In high school (between 1997 and 1999 or so) I followed development of the Allegro Game Programming Library. I was very inexperienced and it was a great opportunity to learn more. The people were nice and not too hard on me, even when I said really dumb things (which I definitely did, repeatedly).

Over the years of participating in Open Source and reading mailing lists, there are several people who influenced me a lot. Most of these people I didn't know personally, I just read a lot that they wrote. Even when I didn't agree with them, they made me think.

• Dominic Mazzoni, the lead developer of Audacity. I have learned a ton from Dominic in the years since I started working on Audacity, especially the value of a good user interface and user-friendliness in general. Dominic is Audacity's project leader, but he also spends lots of time doing mundane things like creating the web page and answering the flood of questions that come in to our help list. Since I started working on Audacity we've become good friends and we've done some contract work together.
• Shawn Hargreaves, the original author of the Allegro game programming library. I can hardly say enough good things about Shawn. He writes first-rate code, he knows how to lead a project, and he's really kind and understanding too. For a good example of his wisdom, see the advice he gave to the Allegro developers about their plans for a new version (he is not involved with Allegro these days, but he gave them this parting advice).
• Paul Davis, primary author of JACK and Ardour. From Paul I learned a lot about how real-time audio systems are designed and why. Paul is strong-headed and insistent, but fair and (to me at least) pretty convincing.
• Tom Lord, best known as author of author of the Arch revision control system. Tom is very capable, and an advocate of a pure UNIX-based approach to problems. He is on this list because of his frequent digressions about the software industry in general, digressions which culminate (in my eyes) in this post to arch-devel: engineering ethics and rhetoric in the modern age. Tom definitely makes me think, and even when I think he's nuts he's very entertaining.

There are probably others. This list has been fun to make, and I look forward to adding to it.

Last modified: 7 June, 2004