Ninux.org Wireless Community

Just back from Berlin, where I went with my Ninux friends at the Wireless Community Weekend 2010. As always a lot of interesting news and it is good to see old friends involved in Wireless Community Networks in other cities and countries.

It was 8 Italian Ninux guys, 7 from Rome and 1 from Pisa. Yeah, this year Ninux is spreading country-wide. The students from Eigenlab with the strong tech help of Gioacchino are starting a new Ninux network in the city of Pisa.

This trip as you can imagine, was a lot about nerds and programming/installing/debugging software firmwares and so on … but not only…. Anyway here the picture of the arrival at C-Base, computer+beer

As my friends know I’m also a fun of riding bicycles in the cities as an alternative to cars, and Berlin is a way ahead of Rome in this direction. I’ve seen several fixies around but also cool German bikes not easy to find in Rome. Here in the picture some nice bike I’ve seen parked around

We also had a lot of typical German food, especially Berliner beer, club-mate and Doner Kebab. Nerds diet consists in eating a lot of food regardless of time and space, so whenever hungry the nerds quit of all the activities to go finding food In C-Base this was easy because the legendary Freifunk Barbeque was on 24/7, and it was possible to go there at any time and cook something.

Talking about some mesh tech, I spent most of the time with Mitar installing the Nodewatcher developed in Ljubljana (Slovenia) on the Ninux network. It is really a great software and I’m already looking and to graphs generated for the Ninux nodes. The system gives you a lot of precious information to debug/monitor the network. The work together was very productive and Mitar opened a lot of tickets on his Trac, because this was actually the first installation on another network.

Also the meeting solved some nasty bug of OLSR with IPv6 that Gioacchino reported to the OLSR team.

Me and Claudio had a meeting with Kloschi to brainstorm a bit about the Radiomate project, that is starting in a few days. Some very useful thoughts came out of the discussion and I just can’t wait to see the results !

Well next nerd event is soon ! Even if time every time in Berlin flies away so quickly, I’m happy anyways, because I’m meeting many of my German friends again in Bracciano for the BattleMesh !

Saverio

Nelle scorse settimane nella sede del SabaziaLUG, ad Anguillara Sabazia, nell’ambito di una serie di seminari one-shot, si e’ tenuto il corso di sopravvivenza alla battaglia delle mesh, con grande entusiasmo dei partecipanti! Chissa’ che non nasca qualche mesh anche intorno al lago…

Clauz

Siamo già immersi dentro a C-Base !!!!!! :O Una vera e proprio astronave spaziale dentro Berlino.

Un bel viaggio nerd ! Birra mateclub e computers ! 🙂

E’ appena arrivata un email di Henning che è stata rilasciata la 0.6.0 di OLSR … yeah !

Siamo arrivati qui ed abbiamo depositato una tonnellata di flyers del Wireless Battle Mesh !! Tutti guardano i flyers e dicono “WOW” !!!

Provo a scollare gli altri nerds dal PC per andare a cena ma non sarà facile ! 😀

Saverio

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Saverio

Siamo arrivati a Berlino per il Wireless Community Weekend 2010.

Ci siamo sistemati nella solita casa, e ci siamo collegati alla solita WiFi WEP crakkata da “uno di noi a caso”, la necessità fa l’uomo hacker 🙂

Dopo una lunga dormita ed un abbuffata di biscotti al peanut butter siamo pronti per andare a C-Base !!!

Saluti,

Saverio
Raf
Clauz
Sandro
Marco

Hello all,

so we have a cool name for the Web Radio Programme Scheduler Project that kloschi picked up: “radiomate” 🙂

Last monday we met at Fusolab for a startup brainstorming meeting. It was me Claudio and Dario (his mentor).
We started from what we wrote before on our wiki page.

The key idea is to develop and package a software/system to give out to people that want to run a webradio.

The package will contain a complete system:
* Website
* Programme Scheduler + Icecast

Usually web radios (as you can see from liquidsoap examples) are just about playlists and some live shows.

We have some more complex scenario at Fusoradio because we have people transmitting from home and actively booking the time slot in the programme schedule to start their transmission.
We have in mind a web radio where the listeners may hear a pre-recorded transmission that a Web Deejay (WJ) loads in the system with a mp3 file, or the listener may hear a live transmission. If there is no content to play, neither live or pre-recorded, the fallback should choose a random podcast to play.

Regarding the front-end to the listeners and the WJs, the web site must have these features:
* Writes on a DB that gives to the scheduler information on the on
going transmission
* upload of mp3 with pre-recorderd radio transmissions
* manage time slots booking for WJs to transmit
* manages podcasting for listening old transmissions

A strong requirement is that each transmission has some extra content/description on the web site, like a flyer, a description and so on.

We should agree on a CMS to start from, and develop custom plugins and themes.
There is still a on going discussion on this 🙂

The CMS will have to handle different types of users, administrators, WJs etc etc.
Admins for example will be able to alter the programme scheduler without restrictions, while the WJ are only able to book time slots from 30 to 90 minutes.
For live shows a user should be able to be temporarily unlocked to start an audio flow immediately, without waiting for a time slot.

Technically about the program scheduler:
We understood that we have to write some logic in python/lua. This logic has a “telnet” interface to liquid soap, where there is a finite state system that is triggered from the external logic. So the python/lua handles the db interaction, and moves the state of the liquidsoap program.

The whole picture:
The WJ transmit from home via Internet, their shouldcast protocol media stream is received by liquidsoap as a input.harbor source. The liquidsoap core will be ready to accept that input because of its state machine controlled by the database, that has been previously setup with the help of the web site. The liquidsap bounces the output stream to a icecast server, where the listeners are connecting to listen the web radio.

This is about all, we started a mailing list with the people from the community actively working in this project. Me and Claudio will be in Berlin at WCW2010 to discuss live with our other Freifunk friends.

Saverio