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• Revision 33563 : spanish language file. May be we should use Salvatore, right ?

  7 décembre 2009, par gaitan@… — Log

  spanish language file. May be we should use Salvatore, right ?

• Ode to the Gravis Ultrasound

  1er août 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  WARNING : This post is a bunch of nostalgia. Feel free to follow along if you recall the DOS days of the early-mid 1990s.

  I finally let go of my Gravis Ultrasound MAX sound card a little while ago. It felt like the end of an era for me, even though I had scarcely used the card in recent memory.

  
  
  

  The Beginning
  What is the Gravis Ultrasound ? Only the finest PC sound card from the classic DOS days. Back in the day (very early 1990s), most consumer PC sound cards were Yamaha OPL FM synthesizers paired with a basic digital to analog converter (DAC). Gravis, a company known for game controllers, dared to break with the dominant paradigm of Sound Blaster clones and create a sound card that had 32 digital channels.
  
  I heard about the GUS sometime in 1992 through one of the dominant online services at the time, Prodigy. Through the message boards, I learned of a promotion with Electronic Arts in which customers could pre-order a GUS at a certain discount along with 2 EA games from a selected catalog (with progressive discounts when ordering more games from the list). I know I got the DOS version of PowerMonger ; I think the other was Night Shift, though that doesn’t seem to be an EA title.

  Anyway, 1992 saw many maddening delays of the GUS hardware. Finally, reports of GUS shipments began to trickle into the Prodigy message forums. Then one day in November, 1992, mine arrived. Into the 286 machine it went and a valiant attempt at software installation was made. A friend and I fought with the software late into the evening, trying to make this thing work reasonably. I remember grabbing a pair of old headphones sitting near the computer that were used for an ancient (even for the time) portable radio. That was the only means of sound reproduction we had available at that moment. And it still sounded incredible.

  After graduating to progressively superior headphones, I would later return to that original pair only to feel my ears were being physically assaulted. Strange, they sounded fine that first night I was trying to make the GUS work. I guess this was my first understanding that the degree to which one is a snobby audiophile is all a matter of hard-earned experience.

  Technology
  The GUS was powered by something called a GF1 which was supposed to use a technology called wavetable synthesis. In the early days, I thought (and I wasn’t alone in this) that this meant that the GF1 chip had a bunch of digitized instrument samples stored in the ASIC. That wasn’t it.

  However, it did feature 32 digital channels at a time when most PC audio cards had 2 (plus that Yamaha FM synthesizer). There was some hemming and hawing about how the original GUS couldn’t drive all 32 channels at a full 44.1 kHz ("CD quality") playback rate. It’s true— if 14 channels were enabled, all could be played at 44.1 kHz. Enabling more channels started progressive degradation and with all 32 channels, each was only playing at around 19 kHz. Still, from my emerging game programmer perspective, that allowed for 8-channel tracker music and 6 channels of sound effects, all at the vaunted CD level of quality.

  Games and Compatibility
  The primary reason to have a discrete sound card was for entertainment applications — ahem, games. GUS support was pretty sketchy out of the gate (ostensibly a major reason for the card’s delay). While many sound cards offered Sound Blaster emulation by basically having the same hardware as Sound Blaster cards, the GUS took a software route towards emulating the SB. To do this required a program called the Sound Blaster Operating System, or SBOS.

  Oh, how awesome it was to hear the program exclaim "SBOS installed !" And how harshly it grated on your nerves after the 200th time hearing it due to so many reboots and fiddling with options to make your games work. Also, I’ve always wondered if there’s something special about sampling an ’s’ sound — does it strain the sampling frequency range ? Perhaps the phrase was sampled at too low a bitrate because the ’s’ sounds didn’t come through very clearly, which is something you notice after hundreds of iterations when there are 3 ’s’ sounds in the phrase.

  Fortunately, SBOS became less relevant with the advent of Mega-Em, a separate emulator which intercepted calls to Roland MIDI systems and routed them to the very capable GUS. Roland-supporting games sounded beautiful.

  Eventually, more and more DOS games were released with native Gravis support, sometimes with the help of The Miles Sound System (from our friends at Rad Game Tools — you know, the people behind Smacker and Bink). The library changelog is quite the trip down PC memory lane.

  An important area where the GUS shined brightly was that of demos and music trackers. The emerging PC demo scene embraced the powerful GUS (aided, no doubt, by Gravis’ sponsorship of the community) and the coolest computer art and music of the time natively supported the card.

  Programming
  At this point in my life, I was a budding programmer in high school and was fairly intent on programming video games. So far, I had figured out how to make a few blips using a borrowed Sound Blaster card. I went to great lengths to learn how to program the Gravis Ultrasound.

  Oh you kids today, with your easy access to information at the tips of your fingers thanks to Google and the broader internet. I had to track down whatever information I could find through a combination of Prodigy message boards and local dialup BBSes and FidoNet message bases. Gravis was initially tight-lipped about programming information for its powerful card, as was de rigueur of hardware companies (something that largely persists to this day). But Gravis eventually saw an opportunity to one-up encumbent Creative Labs and released a full SDK for the Ultrasound. I wanted the SDK badly.

  So it was early-mid 1993. Gravis released an SDK. I heard that it was available on their support BBS. Their BBS with a long distance phone number. If memory serves, the SDK was only in the neighborhood of 1.5 Mbytes. That takes a long time to transfer via a 2400 baud modem at a time when long distance phone charges were still a thing and not insubstantial.

  Luckily, they also put the SDK on something called an ’FTP site’. Fortunately, about this time, I had the opportunity to get some internet access via the local university.

  Indeed, my entire motivation for initially wanting to get on the internet was to obtain special programming information. Is that nerdy enough for you ?

  I see that the GUS SDK is still available via the Gravis FTP site. The file GUSDK222.ZIP is dated 1998 and is less than a megabyte.

  Next Generation : CD Support
  So I had my original GUS by the end of 1992. That was just the first iteration of the Gravis Ultrasound. The next generation was the GUS MAX. When I was ready to get into the CD-ROM era, this was what I wanted in my computer. This is because the GUS MAX had CD-ROM support. This is odd to think about now when all optical drives have SATA interfaces and (P)ATA interfaces before that— what did CD-ROM compatibility mean back then ? I wasn’t quite sure. But in early 1995, I headed over to Computer City (R.I.P.) and bought a new GUS MAX and Sony double-speed CD-ROM drive to install in the family’s PC.

  
  
  

  About the "CD-ROM compatibility" : It seems that there were numerous competing interfaces in the early days of CD-ROM technology. The GUS MAX simply integrated 3 different CD-ROM controllers onto the audio card. This was superfluous to me since the Sony drive came with an appropriate controller card anyway, though I didn’t figure out that the extra controller card was unnecessary until after I installed it. No matter ; computers of the day were rife with expansion ports.

  
  
  The 3 different CD-ROM controllers on the GUS MAX
  

  Explaining The Difference
  It was difficult to explain the difference in quality to those who didn’t really care. Sometime during 1995, I picked up a quasi-promotional CD-ROM called "The Gravis Ultrasound Experience" from Babbage’s computer store (remember when that was a thing ?). As most PC software had been distributed on floppy discs up until this point, this CD-ROM was an embarrassment of riches. Tons of game demos, scene demos, tracker music, and all the latest GUS drivers and support software.

  Further, the CD-ROM had a number of red book CD audio tracks that illustrated the difference between Sound Blaster cards and the GUS. I remember loaning this to a tech-savvy coworker who disbelieved how awesome the GUS was. The coworker took it home, listened to it, and wholly agreed that the GUS audio sounded better than the SB audio in the comparison — and was thoroughly confused because she was hearing this audio emanating from her Sound Blaster. It was the difference between real-time and pre-rendered audio, I suppose, but I failed to convey that message. I imagine the same issue comes up even today regarding real-time video rendering vs., e.g., a pre-rendered HD cinematic posted on YouTube.

  Regrettably, I can’t find that CD-ROM anymore which leads me to believe that the coworker never gave it back. Too bad, because it was quite the treasure trove.

  Aftermath
  According to folklore I’ve heard, Gravis couldn’t keep up as the world changed to Windows and failed to deliver decent drivers. Indeed, I remember trying to keep my GUS in service under Windows 95 well into 1998 but eventually relented and installed some kind of more appropriate sound card that was better supported under Windows.

  Of course, audio output capability has been standard issue for any PC for at least 10 years and many people aren’t even aware that discrete sound cards still exist. Real-time audio rendering has become less essential as full musical tracks can be composed and compressed into PCM format and delivered with the near limitless space afforded by optical storage.

  A few years ago, it was easy to pick up old GUS cards on eBay for cheap. As of this writing, there are only a few and they’re pricy (but perhaps not selling). Maybe I was just viewing during the trough of no value a few years ago.

  Nowadays, of course, anyone interested in studying the old GUS or getting a nostalgia fix need only boot up the always-excellent DOSBox emulator which provides remarkable GUS emulation support.

• Piwik 1.12, New Features, API Improvements, Stability — The Last Piwik 1.X Release

  30 mai 2013, par Piwik team — Development

  We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of Piwik v1.12 !

  • Download Link
  • How to update Piwik ?
  • List of all tickets closed : Changelog

  Piwik v1.12 is a major new release with four big new features, seven smaller new features, several API improvements and all together 82 tickets fixed. This is also the last major 1.X release, which means after this release we will be working on releasing Piwik 2.0. This also means that you should upgrade to PHP 5.3 or higher if you haven’t already, since Piwik 2.0 will only support PHP 5.3 and above.

  Finally, this release contains two breaking changes to the API. If you use the Piwik API click here or scroll down to see if you’re affected.

  Table of Contents :

  1. New Big Feature – Beta Release Channel
  2. New Big Feature – Segment Editor
  3. New Big Feature – Page Speed Reports
  4. New Big Feature – Device Detection Reports
  5. Other Improvements
  6. API Changes and Improvements
  7. What we’re working on
  8. Participate in Piwik
  9. Summary

  New Big Feature – Beta Release Channel

  

  For those of you who want to help test Piwik 2.0-beta releases as soon as they come up, we’ve made it easier to use our beta releases. Navigate to the Settings > General Settings page and click the The latest beta release radio button. You will then be able to upgrade to beta releases.

  This isn’t truly a major feature, but we think it’s just as important because it will allow us to create more beta releases and thus catch more bugs before we make a final release. This means more releases and more stability for you.

  New Big Feature – Segment Editor

  

  The Segment Editor is a long-awaited new feature that allows you to view, save and edit your segments.

  Piwik has supported segmentation (filtering visits and reports by arbitrary criteria, like browser family) for quite some time now, but it has never been possible to visually create and modify them. Nor could they be saved for later recall.

  Thanks to the eighty individuals and company who funded this feature, it is now possible to :

  • visually segment your visitors, instead of creating URLs.
  • save segments and easily switch between them, instead of remembering URLs.
  • get suggestions for segments that might be helpful to view.
  • learn more in the Segmentating Analytics reports user documentation..

  New Big Feature – Page Speed Reports

  You can now see how long it took your webserver to generate and send pages over HTTP through the new Avg. Generation Time metric.

  This metric can be viewed on both the Pages and Page Titles reports :

  

  And the average page generation time for all the pages in your website/webapp is displayed on the visitors overview :

  

  You can use this new information to benchmark your webapp and web server.

  New Big Feature – Device Detection Reports

  Piwik 1.12 also includes a new plugin that provides reports on the device types (tablet, desktop, smartphone, etc.), device brands (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) and device models (iPad, Nexus 7, etc.) your visitors use to access your website :

  

  The new plugin also enhances Operating system detections (detecting sub versions of Linux, Windows, and more).

  Note : This plugin is not enabled by default, but will be in Piwik 2.0. If you want to view these reports now, you can activate the plugin in the Installed Plugins admin page. Navigate to Visitors > Devices to see the new reports. You may also use the new (beta) ‘Device type’.

  The new plugin was developed with the support of Clearcode.cc our technology partner

  

  Other improvements

  Majestic SEO Metrics

  

  We’ve added two new SEO metrics to the SEO widget, both of which are calculated by MajesticSEO.com. These metrics will tell you the number of external backlinks (the number of links to your site from other sites) and the number of referrer domains (the number of domains that link to your site).

  We thank the team at Majestic for their support and hard work in bringing you these metrics to your Piwik dashboards !

  Real-time Visitor Count Dashboard Widget

  

  There is now a simple new widget you can use to see the number of visitors, visits and actions that occurred in the last couple minutes. We call it the Real Time Visitor Counter !

  New segment parameter : siteSearchKeyword.

  There is now a new segment parameter you can use to segment your visits : siteSearchKeyword. This parameter will let you select visits that had site searches with a specific keyword.

  Ignore URL letter case when importing log files.

  We’ve added a new option to the log import script, –force-lowercase-path. When used, the importer will change URL paths to lowercase before tracking them. This way http://domain.com/MY/BLOG will be treated the same as http://domain.com/my/blog.

  Updated ISP Names

  

  We’ve also modified the Providers report so prettier and more up-to-date names of ISPs are displayed.

  Customize the background/text/axis color of graphs.

  

  It is now possible to change the background color, text color and/or axis color of the graph images generated by the ImageGraph plugin. To access this functionality, use the following URL query parameters when generating an image :

  • backgroundColor
  • textColor
  • axisColor

  For example :

  http://demo.piwik.org/index.php?module=API&method=ImageGraph.get&idSite=7&apiModule=UserSettings&apiAction=getBrowser&token_auth=anonymous&period=day&date=2013-03-21,2013-04-19&language=en&width=779&height=150&fontSize=9&showMetricTitle=0&aliasedGraph=1&legendAppendMetric=0&backgroundColor=efefef&gridColor=dcdcdc&colors=cb2026

  Send your users to a custom URL after they logout.

  If you manage a Piwik installation with many users and you want to send them to a custom page or website after they log out of Piwik, you can now specify the URL to redirect users after they log out.

  API Changes and Improvements

  BREAKING CHANGE – renamed segment parameters.

  The following segment parameters have been renamed :

  • continent renamed to : continentCode
  • browserName renamed to : browserCode
  • operatingSystem renamed to : operatingSystemCode
  • lat renamed to : latitude
  • long renamed to : longitude
  • region renamed to : regionCode
  • country renamed to : countryCode
  • continent renamed to : continentCode

  If you use one of the old segment parameter names, Piwik will throw an exception, so you should notice when you’re using an old name.

  BREAKING CHANGE – changes to the input & output of the Live.getLastVisitsDetails method.

  The following changes were made to the Live.getLastVisitsDetails API method :

  • The method no longer uses the maxIdVisit query parameter. It has been replaced by the filter_offset parameter.
  • Site search keywords are now displayed in a <siteSearchKeyword> element. They were formerly in <pageTitle> elements.
  • Custom variables with page scope now have ‘Page’ in their element names when displayed. For example, <customVariablePageName1>, <customVariablePageName2>, etc.

  Filter results of MultiSites.getAll by website name.

  It is now possible to filter the results of MultiSites.getAll by website name. To do this, set the pattern query parameter to the desired regex pattern.

  Get suggested values to use for a segment parameter.

  The new API method API.getSuggestedValuesForSegment can now be used to get suggested values for a segment parameter. This method will return a list of the most seen values (in the last 60 days) for a certain segment parameter. So for browserCode, this would return the codes for the browsers most visitors used in the last 60 days.

  Use extra tracking query parameters with the JS tracker (such as ‘lat’ & ‘long’).

  We’ve added a new method to the JavaScript tracker named appendToTrackingUrl. You can use this method to add extra query parameters to a tracking request, like so :

  _paq.push(['appendToTrackingUrl', 'lat=X&long=Y']);

  What we’re working on

  As we said above, Piwik v1.12 is the last in the 1.X series of releases. This means we are now officially working on Piwik 2.0.

  Piwik 2.0 will be a big release, to be sure, but it’s going to bring you more than just a couple new features and a bag of bug fixes. For Piwik 2.0 we will be revisiting the user needs and the ideals that originally prompted us to create Piwik in order to build our vision of the future of web analytics.

  Piwik 2.0 won’t just be a bigger, better web app, but a new platform for observing and analyzing the things that matter to you.

  Participate in Piwik

  Are you a talented developer or an experienced User Interface designer ? Or maybe you like to write documentation or are a marketing guru ?

  If you have some free time and if you want to contribute to one of the most awesome open source projects around, please get in touch with the Piwik team, or read this page to learn more…

  Summary

  For the full list of changes in Piwik 1.12 check out the Changelog.

  Thank you to the core developers, all the beta testers and users, our official supporters, the translators & everyone who reported bugs or feature requests. Also thank you to softwares we use, and the libraries we use.

  If you are a company and would like to help an important project like Piwik grow, please get in touch, it means a lot to us. You can also participate in the project —

  –> if you like what you read, please tell your friends and colleagues or write on your website, blog, forums, stackoverflow, etc. <–
  

  Peace. Enjoy !