Present Perfect

GStreamer

Our new hire is arriving tonight. I'm very excited he's coming in. I hope we can help him find his place to settle in soon enough, and that he's motivated to get things done. I know I am.

Finally finished merging the new error handling into GStreamer. I'm pretty happy with it, but it needs some more documenting and cleaning.

Meanwhile, I finally have time again for nautilus-media and friends, and as I had noticed before, but didn't protest loudly enough, there are some things missing from the current core to restore nautilus-media's functionality. This is going to be a tough one because the person who replaced it with a better system didn't really implement everything it needs, and he takes things overly personal. It doesn't help that he thinks nautilus-media is a crap idea.

I've grown beyond caring about personal issues, I just want things to work and make good on the promises GStreamer delivers in general. We could be doing so much awesome stuff if we were all pointing our heads in the same direction ...

Fedora

I was very excited six months ago when I first learned that Red Hat wanted to open up and wanted to use our project's name for the new project.

Today, I feel that Red Hat doesn't have or want to invest enough resources to really open up development. You can sort of feel it on a number of levels, but just looking at some of the facts out there probably says enough already.

We're six months further and there's still no way to influence/submit/codevelop packages. The fedora.us QA queue is still completely full, and packages aren't really moving much to the new Fedora.

Worse, we have no idea what Red Hat wants to do with the public submission servers, what to use as the build system, and so on. Enrico Scholz has been doing marvelous work on the fedora.us build system based on top of mach and vserver. This guy is incredibly smart and talented, but Red Hat engineers haven't commented on it yet AFAICT. It is very frustrating, because there are some very talented guys willing to work on this together with Red Hat. To me it seems like the basis of getting this community project infrastructure into place, and all we get to see from Red Hat is them being busy on just working on Fedora Core 2.

The irony of it all only really sunk in when I was going through my backlog of fedora mail and came across this mail asking to make sure to have your packages built for Fedora Core 2. I thought I had missed some mails that detailed the submission had been opened up. Took me some time to figure out this really was just an internal mail to Red Hat employees that we happen to have the chance to see :)

I'm not really sure what can be done about all this. I'm sure it's not the intent of the Red Hat engineers to have it happen this way. I just think that Red Hat currently doesn't have the resources to pull off opening the whole distribution to outside contributors.

The extra cost they have to invest at this point to make sure people that have the ability to contribute - talented people that have proven they are dedicated to helping out, like Enrico, Matthias, me, Panu, Seth, Ville, and so many others - seems to be too high for them to actually do it. (Warren, I'm not mentioning you since you don't seem to get ignored :) But let's not go into that here)

Anyways, I'm not sure if the Red Hat people we know understand our concerns and frustrations. I do hope they do something about it sometime soon, though, because we're getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed to the point of losing interest.

Concerts

The first one in Brussel was quite alright. I didn't get to see Greg afterwards because he ... fell asleep. Totally ruined my image of him. Amsterdam was incredible. They were in very good form, tore all the way through the songs. The only drawback was the set was pretty much the same.

Best quote of the evening - "You don't pay a hooker for sex. You pay her to leave after sex." I tried taking some pictures, but they didn't turn out too well. With flash, the nice show colours are completely gone. Without it, the colors are right but the pictures aren't sharp. If anyone knows how to do this right, let me know.

Belgium

On the one hand it felt good to be back in Belgium again. I had a great time, and I realized how much I love Gent as a city. On the other hand, things had already changed; a department store was rebuilt, a delicacy shop in the street were I lived as a student had changed, and so on... I was getting homesick not for living there, but for living there as a student. I walked by my old apartment, and felt it wash over me. Silly, but true.

I am also starting to acquire traits some would describe as being feminine - I drowned my emotional distress in a shopping spree. I got home with 7 CD's, the Art of UNIX Programming, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer PS/2 game. As well as some presents for my girlfriend.

On the topic of her, she did the cutest thing before I left. She was still asleep, and she was flirting with someone in her sleep : pouting her lips, nodding agreeingly, grunting approvals, and so on. I just hope she was flirting with me in her dreams ... :)

You teach your children some fashion senseThey fashion some of their own GStreamer Our new hire is arriving tonight. I'm very excited he's coming in. I hope we can help...

Life

Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me back to the old world.

I mailed my favourite singer yesterday, who used to front The Afghan Whigs but now forked his own band with The Twilight Singers on the off chance of asking for entrance at the Amsterdam show. The guy got back to me in no time telling me I had passes waiting for me both in Brussels and Amsterdam. As someone on the mailing list once said - That guy has style by the mile.

GStreamer

Two thirds of the way through converting the old error method to the new. I've gotten a good view of the kinds of errors we currently throw, and I think I have them catalogued pretty well. The actual conversion work is just plain boring in a way, but on the other hand it seems very necessary work and just another step in getting GStreamer where GNOME and possibly KDE wants it to be.

Last weekend Julien added DVD support in gst-player and Totem. People will say "so what, other players did that years ago". True, very true. The wonder of it though is that Julien didn't really need to do anything special beyond telling the player to use the dvd source element.

After some people, like thaytan, had worked on fixing up some of the interactivity stuff which they only tested using gst-launch pipelines, and trying to make sure that clicks were sent through from one of the video sinks to the rest of the elements in the pipeline, it just worked in the player like magic just by using the right element. Now that's class. GStreamer is number two on the style-by-the-mile-list today.

I was sort of down on GStreamer for the last month. but Uraeus's relentless energy while staying here for New Year's, combined with things turning out for the better, Ximian having a good hacker working on GStreamer/GNOME integration, us hiring a great hacker arriving next week, Christian's article on OSNews and Slashdot, and exciting plans in the pipeline, I'm totally on the upswing again.

There was one vitriolic comment on SlashDot I had to reply to. It mentioned that gstreamer-universe wasn't apt-gettable for over a year. I don't think I ever got more than two comments on that, all on IRC, no mails or anything, so I guess I lost the motivation to keep it in sync. Anyway, I totally not get people who get their self-motivation or their delusional sense of self-cool from always being down on whatever project for whatever reason. If you think it's cool to diss anything or anyone for no reason at all, you're a moron and showing your lack of self-confidence as clearly as a piece of corn walking through a chicken barn.

Number three on the style-by-the-mile list is stevebaker, doing a presentation on GStreamer right now in Australia at linux.conf.au

I hear the talk went over well, congrats Steve. I really sort of miss his presence, and I wish he would blog a little, and I'm wondering how Bronya and the new kid on the block are doing ... He was a great guy to have met if only for a short period, before he went back down under.

Theora

I should start taking a look at where we are in GStreamer wrt. Theora. We have some exciting plans for it in the near future, and I want us to be ready for it.

Life Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me...

GStreamer

A few weeks ago I thought I had discovered the worst bug ever in GStreamer and I was wondering how come nobody ever ran into it. I was listening to RhythmBox on my laptop on the way to work, and it just started skipping like mad.

At work I tried to figure out what was wrong but couldn't reproduce it. It took me a few days to realize the skipping was in sync with my footsteps, and after some physical experimentation involving jumping up and down and walking around with my body at various angles I had to conclude it was a physical problem.

Somehow the weight of what was in my backpack pressed against the laptop in such a way that the cursor keys got pressed by accident, causing RhythmBox to skip madly. I was both incredibly annoyed and very relieved when I realized the bug was not in GStreamer, but since it's a bit harder to get rid of it still sucks.

If you're wondering why I have time to make an entry like this, it's simply because I just added working i18n to GStreamer and am waiting for make distcheck to finish. After that, I continue working on the error stuff.

Life

Going back to Belgium on thursday for a Twilight Singers concert. I am so incredibly looking forward to that. Will stop by my old job to grab something to eat with ex-collagues and see what the hell they did to my network cabling and other things...

GStreamer A few weeks ago I thought I had discovered the worst bug ever in GStreamer and I was wondering how come nobody ever ran into it. I was listening...

gettext

Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will need for GStreamer. I had looked at David's i18n stuff in GStreamer, but it looks to be a half-finished job so I'm assuming he gave up.

My goals were

• integrate it with autogen.sh like the other autotools

• do a minimum amount of tweaking, and clearly separate the tweaking from the generated files

• figure out how to update all of the stuff in po/

I made a sample tarball that works out well. I learnt about autopoint too, which treats me a lot better than gettextize has. The sample is in CVS, in autostars CVS. It'll take some days to show up, what with SF's bad anoncvs lag.

I'm starting to wonder about the necessity of glib-gettextize though. Maybe it's time to kill it off.

Also, it's wonderful when you mail someone you think will never mail you back (In this case, Bruno Haible, the gettext maintainer) and you get a reply back in two hours. That's a lot quicker than I myself tend to reply to things.

Linux

Talking to Matthias a few days ago made me remember how I got into Linux. I used to program C in DOS using the trusty Microsoft C 6.0. I think I had a copy that came on 6 1.2 MB disks, and I had it installed on my 20 MB HD. The second disk contained the IDE, but it had a data error on it, so it was a very crashy affair for me. So I never had much else than EDIT.com as the editor and the DOS prompt to compile stuff :)

Anyway, when it was time to do my graduation thesis, I wanted to do a programming one again, but I didn't feel like learning Windows-based programming. I was still stuck in the DOS age. So at the university we had gotten used to the Solaris servers for programming tasks, and then someone told me about Linux and how it was similar.

So I installed Linux just to have something that looked like a DOS box :)

When today I look at my purty GUI GNOME desktop, programming a lot better and easier than back in those days, I'm very happy I made the right decision for the wrongest of reasons...

Now Playing

Been listening to The Blue Nile *all day* and still don't get tired of it. This album took about four years to grow on me, but its simplicity and mastery stands out.

gettext Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will...

Life

Bastien finally got some mail. I hope he realizes there are more types of mail than just electronic ones :)

I was so damn tired yesterday. Spent ten minutes trying to figure out why some module wasn't building as a module, when I realized that in the Makefile I had put -DKNORENEKL instead of the NOKERNEL it needed. That's three typing errors in one word.

GStreamer

Spent a few hours today trying to figure out why nothing in the core was being i18n-ized. Then I started doubting if it worked at all, and realized nothing was actually being translated. Also, our Makefile.in.in in po seemed horribly outdated. So I gave up for the day.

Tomorrow I go through gettext again and make a skeleton module. Also, I need to figure out whether it's smarter to run gettextize once and commit stuff, or have it run from autogen.sh all the time.

Kernel module packaging

After polishing some of the macros for inclusion in autostars, I applied them to qc-usb, which has drivers for the webcams at work. The Makefile was again some ugly custom job, so I just threw it out and autotooled the whole thing in fifteen minutes.

Then I ran configure (with a kernel config thrown at it), make, and the module insmodded fine !

Tonight I try to write a small test kernel module, try to build it for a bunch of archs and types, and test them on the other machine. I'll install some smp and 586 kernels on it to make sure the versioning is right.

Then I need to reply a mail from someone who asked about it. I'm getting back to you soon, honest ! :)

Life Bastien finally got some mail. I hope he realizes there are more types of mail than just electronic ones :) I was so damn tired yesterday. Spent ten minutes...