Present Perfect

Desktops

ottawaDave, I think your reasoning is of little practical use. The question you ask is asked over and over again, and the answers are pretty straightforward.

• Posing the question makes it very obvious that you are not a programmer on either of the two. Thus, you have very little chance of actually influencing either KDE to merge with GNOME or the other way around. That's not a fault, a flaw, or a problem, just an observation.
• The only people ever to wonder or ask why GNOME doesn't just stop and merge bits into KDE are either people that don't use KDE or GNOME at all, or people that mainly use KDE.
• The only people ever to wonder or ask why KDE doesn't just stop and merge bits into GNOME are either people that don't use KDE or GNOME at all, or people that mainly use GNOME.
• The actual developers on both GNOME and KDE that realise there is duplication effort going on and actually want to do something about it have joined forces on Freedesktop and are making reasonable progress in sharing basic infrastructure.

I just don't understand why people ask this question over and over again and fail to just see the simple answers.

So, obvious questions as a reply. If there was only one project, what language would it be written in ? What would the UI look like ? Would everything be configurable or would it have a small set of preferences ?

If you can't answer those questions, then you already answered your question on why GNOME and KDE do not merge.

Also, the way you phrase the question makes it sound so simple. Why are there two when there could be one ? As if it is dead simple to just take the best bits of both and put it in either one.

By no means is this a personal attack against you, or GNOME, or KDE. It's just that I think you're asking the wrong question from the wrong perspective, and it's being done over and over, and your write-up of course sollicited the obvious reply.

Web Shops

Tried ordering a present for someone on the web. I went through fifteen webshops. The two where we were succesfully able to place an order screwed up at the very last minute, after we filled in all our details. One of them threw up a popup for payment that the browser blocked, and after that there was no way of getting back to that popup to fill in payment details. The other one just didn't allow credit card payment AFTER we had filled in all of the other information.

Sigh, still a long way to go before the IT world allows us to simple things.

Parents

They visited me over the weekend. We had a great time, though I am reminded of the fact that it is impossible to try and make the storm that is my mother change direction at any given point in time. It's better to go with the flow. Especially since the flow brings many good things, like excellent restaurants, and a brand new deepfrying machine. I am going to hypothesise from your point of view that

Desktops ottawaDave, I think your reasoning is of little practical use. The question you ask is asked over and over again, and the answers are pretty straightforward. Posing the question...

Music

Wednesdaynight, Lamb was in town. A spirited performance, they seemed to love being in Barcelona. Half an hour before the concert, the concert hall was still three quarters empty. The room itself was a nice old dancing room.

Life

I think I found my favourite view of the city. Yesterday morning I decided to blade to work, since my laptop was still at work. So, falling wouldn't cost the company too much :)

So I skated to the sea, and then followed the coast line for a while. It was warm enough to be skating in t-shirt. And the nicest view here is that run by the sea, with the morning sun reflecting in the waves breaking on the beach. It very much beats the sight of cars stuck in traffic in Belgium :)

Of course, I ended up following the wrong tower, and while the tower I arrived at is only about half a kilometer from work, the straight line is across the water, and the actual road to take is in a huge arc between those two. So I arrived about an hour late. But I had a good workout.

This weekend my parents are here. They seem to think we chose a really nice apartment. While I don't actively go out seeking their approval, it does feel good to know that there's nothing to argue about or nothing to defend. They seem to be enjoying themselves here as well.

GStreamer

Still some rippling after the Wars Before Christmas. I made a release today. We need to pick up the pace in releasing. For that to happen I guess I need to finish the media test suite so we can at least have computers check for us if it plays back everything. The rest of the steps could do with some automating as well.

Started working on tasks pages for the websites, similar in spirit to the GNOME bounties. But, obviously with less money. I'm going to add some this weekend; I have a bunch more but the code needs a bit of massaging to be manageable for new people.

Mike Hearn showed me some examples of using XML and XSLT to generate this sort of stuff. I wish I found out about XSLT earlier. While I don't understand the first bit of what I'm doing, it does seem like a very smart way to treat web content. I managed to figure out how to crosslink pages, and how to present clickable links for source code in the various CVS repositories. Cool stuff.

We're also moving CVS to freedesktop.org this weekend. I think I've got everything prepared well enough, and I tested the important bits.

Sweden

When you've gone fishing, it's nice to come back home with a fish. I think we caught a good one. We'll be able to tell soon enough :) I'm very excited, it's nice when you can get important stuff right.

Music Wednesdaynight, Lamb was in town. A spirited performance, they seemed to love being in Barcelona. Half an hour before the concert, the concert hall was still three quarters empty....

GStreamer

Things are like a yo-yo at the moment. The friction that I had anticipated after both leading figures on GStreamer have taken a break is starting to get to us. Which is good, in a way. This will force us to deal with some of the issues we've been struggling with now that we don't have a clear community leader.

I had anticipated much worse than this when I realized that Wim was also going to take a little break. I had feared development would have ground to a halt. Right now, development isn't as clean or careful as it used to be, but in the end we're still getting in the features we need. I guess I am going to have to be slightly more aggressive, but in a nice way, to make sure the end result is a buildable working product. And I'll have to do that without hampering others too much in their work style.

People sometimes say that a pure democracy doesn't work, and a dictatorship doesn't really work either if people don't stand behind the dictator. For a project like ours, I guess for now the best way of getting stuff done is to divide responsibilities among people that know how to live up to it. That means, don't let someone who just wants to code and do new stuff maintain the build, for example. But it also means for someone like me at this point to not interfere too much with actual development. Something I'm not doing, by the way, at this point.

Since GStreamer is now part of my job, I will however get back to coding again soon enough. My selfimposed break from GStreamer to work on Dave/Dina has paid off well, but I need to get back in the game.

So, it seems dolphy is finally able to get back on libgstplay again now that the dust in the core is settling down. There are some minor RGB issues left to be fixed, and some seeking work to fix, and then we can throw out a player again. The nice thing is that software scaling and interactivity now works, so that means that I can finally live up to our promise to Michael Meeks. We're coming for your desktop, monkey boy.

With Robert Love (his Linux 2.6 book is funny, well-written and understandable for non-kernel-hackers, so get it) being hired by Ximian/Novell to work on desktop/kernel/whatever integration, I hope Ximian finally realizes that multimedia is the one missing link from their corporate desktop offering. All those suits just want to play their funny videos from evolution. And we're getting ever closer to being there.

mach

0.4.3 (Hot Water) is out the door. It now has support for Fedora 1, finally.

Right before releasing I couldn't figure out why it had completely stopped working. It was ignoring my custom config file for some reason. After trying everything, I just gave up and started reverting patches one by one.

It seemed I had put a # to comment a line, while I could only use //. I was trying to figure out what was wrong, poking Gustavo Niemeyer in the process, before I realized that I had to use //. I told him that was the problem, and suggested apt should at least warn me the configuration file is wrong...

There are projects that you use every day and you get some sort of mental image in your head, and you're a bit timid when approaching these people. And most of the time, when you do, they all turn out really nice. Well. Of course I haven't ever had a reason to poke the xscreensaver developer :)

Barcelona

I was getting worked up today by the way internal conflicts were turning out. One of the differences between work stuff and open source development is that arguments tend to be drawn out more in the open, for all to see. People were breaking out the popcorn and so on. I'm not going to bite into too much flamebaiting. I just want us to get the job done.

And when you go out at night and rollerblade through the city, getting teached the very basics by the best teacher in Barcelona, for free, you tend to put things in perspective. After two hours of wearing my body down, and being teached by a great teacher, who takes time to explain everything and answers every question, and does it all with style, grace, and humour, you can only be humbled by someone's enthusiasm for something.

When experiencing something like this, you tend to let go of all the negative energy you built up in the day before. I'm very relaxed right now.

So, time for bed !

GStreamer Things are like a yo-yo at the moment. The friction that I had anticipated after both leading figures on GStreamer have taken a break is starting to get to...

GStreamer

Watching long compile sessions gives me some time to update the log. Not sure yet if that's a good or a bad thing.

This morning I wanted to try some new plugins and I ran gst-register and it segfaulted, leaving me no idea of what went wrong. So, back out with the debug log and so on, and gdb, and I realized that for some reason the xvid plugin was segfaulting upon load.

That hadn't happened to me in a long time. Normally I would just delete the plugin for now and move on with what I wanted to do. But I got fed up with the fact that the one application that just isn't supposed to segfault, segfaults.

So I spent a bit of time installing and removing segfault trappers around the plugin loader functions. It's probably not reentrant and threadsafe and all that, but when a segfault happens, does that matter much ? At least now it prints out a message about what was wrong and what to do about it:

 ERROR:Caught a segmentation fault while loading plugin file: /home/thomas/gst/cvs/gst-plugins/gst-plugins-0.7.2.1/_build/ext/xvid/.libs/libgstxvid.so   Please either: - remove it and restart. - run with --gst-enable-segfault and debug. 

That seems fine for now.

I got everything to distcheck nicely again, so I'm going to try and release before ds merges his huge caps rewrite. He just keeps going at it, nice to see all the action.

Time to get back to work on the media test suite.

Also need to keep moving on Fluendo.

Life

A short update for the friends out there that read this to get news on how we're doing here in Barcelona. The rest of you can stop reading here :)

The pictures are online, start browsing in the personal gallery.

A short recap of the last two weeks by picture.

Most of my stuff that I don't really need for now is in the basement at my grandmother's. Feel free to bid on items you like.

It ain't a real road trip until the socked feet hit the dashboard.

First sighting of Barcelona road signs resulting in a weird effect composition.

The flat doesn't look too good when we arrive. Which gives us all the more motivation to clean it up and redo it.

Here's how to paint like a poet. And here's how girls paint when they're in love.

We bought an excellent couch that can fit four easily, or even two sleepers.

On the first weekend, I finally got round to installing TV and PlayStation. Playing SSX3 is really all I need at times.

It took us thirteen days to finally get a boiler installed. Here's my first hot bath in two weeks time !. You just can't imagine how nice that felt.

So, the living room is painted now. We need a TV cabinet. I don't think Kristien will let me keep this setup like this for very long.

In the meantime, we also got our dishwasher connected (finally), we went out and bought a laundry machine which was installed today (hurray ! clean socks !), and our bedroom now has a bed and a nice red color.

And last friday, we had a wonderful company dinner in which I ate a fourth of Kristien's food as well since it was too much for her. After that, every drink you would want and a tad bit of dancing.

Barcelona is treating us really really well. It's turned out better than I expected.

GStreamer Watching long compile sessions gives me some time to update the log. Not sure yet if that's a good or a bad thing. This morning I wanted to try...

The Difference

When I used to use Windows, I would just write mail and click on send and the mail would go out and that was it.

The last two days, every time I click send to get a mail out, I see those glasses and those curls and that beard and think about how little I know about the guy that makes my computer send the mail.

I've only met Ettore twice or three times, at GUADEC's and in Boston, and I haven't spoken much with him. but it's impossible to send a mail now without thinking about him. For every mail you send with Evolution, God gives Ettore an extra rice grain in his pudding. So never stop sending mail.

I wanted to write at least something today, because I have other stuff to talk about but it feels inappropriate to do so in the same post. Time to get some sleep.

The Difference When I used to use Windows, I would just write mail and click on send and the mail would go out and that was it. The last two...