April « 2009 « codeblog

April 19, 2009

recording from PulseAudio

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,General,Multimedia,Ubuntu — kees @ 11:42 am

Every PulseAudio “Sink” has a “Source” named “monitor”. This lets you attach to a given Sink and chain more stuff to it, for example, recording the audio that is playing through PulseAudio at any given moment. This is very handy for creating, for example, PubQuiz-style clips of songs, movies, etc.

Here is a script to find the monitor for the most recently added Sink, record from it, and shove it through “sox” to get a WAV instead of raw sound data (requires recent sox, Pulse, etc):

#!/bin/bash
WAV="$1"
if [ -z "$WAV" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 OUTPUT.WAV" >&2
    exit 1
fi
rm -f "$WAV"

# Get sink monitor:
MONITOR=$(pactl list | egrep -A2 '^(\*\*\* )?Source #' | \
    grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | awk '{print $NF}' | tail -n1)
echo "set-source-mute ${MONITOR} false" | pacmd >/dev/null

# Record it raw, and convert to a wav
echo "Recording to $WAV ..."
echo "Close this window to stop"
parec -d "$MONITOR" | sox -t raw -r 44k -sLb 16 -c 2 - "$WAV"

Comments (19)

April 17, 2009

Goodbye Gutsy

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 3:05 pm

(In reading my prior EOL posts, I realize I should have said “Enough Edgy” or something like that to be appropriately alliterative.)

Gutsy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 25 hours, 6 minutes, and 47 seconds building 208 security updates. (And 18 hours, 23 minutes, 45 seconds doing 335 builds during the Gutsy devel window.) As before, these times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc.

Current combined devel/security build standings per release:

dapper: 51:27:29
hardy: 171:21:40
intrepid: 84:23:19
jaunty: 18:43:09

Thank you Gutsy! You were much nicer than Feisty, especially for wifi on my poor laptop.

Comments (6)

April 9, 2009

CODEGATE 2009 ran Ubuntu Intrepid

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 9:05 pm

I’m pleased to hear than the CODEGATE 2009 International Hacking Contest ran Ubuntu Intrepid for both the qualifying rounds and the final match. The host machine was running the 32bit -server kernel, so NX was active (along with all the other memory-corruption protections). From what I can see the compiled challenges were stack-protected and fortified, so the contestants had to work around that as well as the randomized stack, heap, and library locations. Sounds like it was a fun contest in a real-world situation. All that’s left now is for 64bit to become the standard. And PIE too. I can’t wait to hear more. :)

$ nm cracktris | grep _chk
         U __fprintf_chk@@GLIBC_2.3.4
         U __printf_chk@@GLIBC_2.3.4
         U __sprintf_chk@@GLIBC_2.3.4
         U __stack_chk_fail@@GLIBC_2.4
         U __strcat_chk@@GLIBC_2.3.4
         U __strcpy_chk@@GLIBC_2.3.4

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