Present Perfect

Maybe it's the fever messing my brain, but today I found humour in strange places.
From freshmeat: Snd is a sound editor modelled loosely after Emacs.

Compiler reaches self-awareness and suggests improvements that are actually being made by others in the GStreamer codebase:
error: too few arguments to function ‘gst_event_new_new_segment’

I hope someone wakes me up when we reach twenty arguments to that function.

On an unrelated note, I bought Wired for the first time in my life. A bit fluffy, but it had a feature on the filming of A Scanner Darkly. Apparently it's ready to hit theaters this summer. Doesn't this trailer look totally *awesome* ?

Maybe it's the fever messing my brain, but today I found humour in strange places. From freshmeat: Snd is a sound editor modelled loosely after Emacs. Compiler reaches self-awareness and...

As usual, as time goes by and spring blossoms disks fill up to their maximum capacity everywhere. This past month it happened both at work and at home. This is more annoying at home since I have less time to react to it when it happens, and it messes up Kristien's ability to do recordings when it happens on the home partition of that machine.

So I decided to make a quick inventory of what I had lying around and I was shocked. Apparently, on the three machines I have running at home, I now have over a Terabyte of online storage. Wow. I still remember when we started getting Gigabyte hard drives, and how we used to marvel at news stories of Terabyte machines.

Half of this Terabyte is mirrored with software RAID as well, so underneath it's actually 1.5 Terabyte of raw storage space.
My largest drive is 400 GB, which is in my media PC in the living room, and that one was only half-used, so I could move some extra content from various /home partitions to that drive, freeing up the space necessary for more mirroring of Fedora Core stuff, and backups.

Beside that, I also seem to have collecfed 11 non-connected drives around the place. Some of them are quite useless these days - I have perfectly fine 6 and 20 GB drives for example -, one is the drive I dropped, some contain actual files, or backups, or old live systems but with a few bad blocks, and so on.

So I'm going through them now, using e2fsck to check and mark for bad blocks, so I can use some of them as emergency backups for content I already have mirrored somewhere else. I'm guessing that's pretty much the only thing slightly-broken hard drives can be good for.

Tip of the day

If you have large drives these days, remember ext2/3 reserves 5% of those drives for the root user. If you have a 200 GB drive just for, say, mirroring install trees, you're wasting 10 GB of space that never gets used. Use

tune2fs -m 1 (partition node)

to reclaim most of that space. I ended up recovering a good 100 GB all over this way, which is half a normal drive these days :) And at work, the same thing gave me a stay of execution for now.

Well, if it helps you decide on your wardrobe, I'll be wearing an "I'm with Stupid" t-shirt. As usual, as time goes by and spring blossoms disks fill up to...

Somehow the internet connection at the hotel is pretty flaky - hosts go away all the time, connections get dropped, and so on.

I couldn't post my last post because it claimed our server was done.  A traceroute showed

[root@otto qc-usb-0.6.3]# traceroute thomas.apestaart.org
traceroute to thomas.apestaart.org (64.233.185.111), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1  * * *
2  200.175.64.1.adsl.gvt.net.br (200.175.64.1)  17.764 ms * *
3  ge (200.175.89.129)  23.807 ms   20.764 ms   19.847 ms
4  201.47.192.33 (201.47.192.33)  18.507 ms   21.117 ms   25.016 ms
5  pos (200.139.112.86)  269.329 ms   266.176 ms pos (200.139.112.146)  33.425 ms
6  GE2 (213.140.51.237)  178.371 ms   397.465 ms   398.535 ms
7  So5 (213.140.36.65)  177.001 ms   176.764 ms   178.495 ms
8  so (213.140.43.125)  177.432 ms   179.925 ms   177.145 ms
9  Google (213.140.52.142)  392.205 ms   392.007 ms Google (213.140.52.42)  179.016 ms
10  216.239.46.19 (216.239.46.19)  178.093 ms   177.834 ms   179.362 ms
11  www.hackerteen.com.br.localdomain (72.14.236.201)  396.576 ms   391.961 ms 72.14.236.178 (72.14.236.178)  179.753 ms
12  66.249.95.149 (66.249.95.149)  189.074 ms   392.318 ms   392.449 ms
13  72.14.239.17 (72.14.239.17)  393.403 ms   393.549 ms *
14  * 72.14.238.194 (72.14.238.194)  393.850 ms   392.496 ms
15  pop.gmail.com (64.233.185.111)  180.478 ms   197.719 ms   202.391 ms

Notice how

• the local DNS server resolved my server name wrong
• not only was it wrong, but having it be so wrong as to point to gmail.com is probably not just an accident
• hop 11 has an, uhm, interesting host name

Editing /etc/hosts, adding an entry, and forcing a new traceroute allowed me to finally post my entry.

Somehow the internet connection at the hotel is pretty flaky - hosts go away all the time, connections get dropped, and so on. I couldn't post my last post because...

Facts of life in South-America:

• At night a red light is merely a suggestion to slow down a little bit at crossroads
• Houses are surrounded by grills and fences
• Your toilet paper is not supposed to go in the toilet, but in a wastebin

I had noticed this on previous visits, but I was reminded of these things again here.
My GStreamer talk went well - for a talk that early into the conference, there were a fair number of people in attendance. All my demos worked. I was smart enough to test my laptop's CRT output the day before - it seems FC5 has an X.org that no longer allows me to have Fn-F7 (switching output modes) to Just Work on my Thinkpad. Instead I had to fiddle with xorg.conf and convince X that a) I want to have something attached to the CRT and b) that I would really like to use a resolution more standard than 848x400.

People seemed to be impressed with both cortado and Elisa as well - I got a few questions even after my talk outside in the main hall.

Paolo, who's responsible for the streaming here, is using Flumotion. 7 rooms are being captured using 7 flumotion managers who then relay the data to an Icecast server using a component Paolo adapted from a previous implementation that was in our Trac. Everything was working fine the night before the conference. The first day however the Icecast server started dropping sources due to socket timeouts. The network guys of course claimed it was Flumotion's fault. After some simple tracerouting (I discovered mrt, which is *excellent* for this) I noticed that the first hop outside the conference had 30% packet loss. Now, I hadn't actually tested Flumotion in such a lossy situation, but it doesn't surprise me that 30% presents a problem for a live stream. At least it made the network people accept the possibility of there actually being a real network problem.

The next morning, the packet loss to their server was up to 90%. That's when I offered to stream through stream.fluendo.com instead, and though it pained me to set up Icecast there, it was the quickest way to transport their existing configuration. Well, quick - I had to build icecast myself, because the version shipped in Fedora Extras doesn't even do Theora. And I had to rebuild some other things as well, because the server runs RHEL4.

Ever since then, the streams have been rock solid. Ward, a friend of mine who know works at the FSF, set up a mirror on gnu.org because the GNU people want to follow tomorrow's GPLv3 discussions. See, Fluendo is not completely evil after all!

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation on Flumotion in the Babbage hall at 12.00 local time, which is 15.00 UTC. Open http://stream.fluendo.com:8000/babbage.ogg in your Theora-enabled player (hint: try Totem) to tune in.

Facts of life in South-America: At night a red light is merely a suggestion to slow down a little bit at crossroads Houses are surrounded by grills and fences Your...

I arrived late last night in Porto Alegre and was welcomed at the airport exit by Fabricio and Felipe, with a sign with my name on. They promptly dropped me off at the Comfort Inn where I crashed on the bed after 24 hours of travelling.

I spent today writing slides, helping Paolo with some last-minute Flumotion configuration for the streaming, and wrestling with X.org in FC5 and projectors. It's 2006, yet I'm expected to read man pages for X.org drivers to figure out how to a) get my CRT output working and b) get it to work in a resolution other than 848x400 (that was definitely a first for me). Before FC5 this "just worked" when I hit FN-F7 on my Thinkpad, but now it seems this is a feature that needs enabling. Good thing I took some time to test that today.

The people organizing FISL have been very friendly and helpful. It looks like at least 5000 people will show up, and it's a pretty big place with 7 conference rooms and a big hall.

My talk on GStreamer 0.10 is tomorrow at 12.00 local time or 15.00 UTC. It should be streamed if you want to watch it - the Icecast relay page for the Flumotion streams is http://stream.softwarelivre.org:8000/, and my talk is in the Babbage room.

Of course, if you're already here at FISL, it's probably easier to just drop by.

I arrived late last night in Porto Alegre and was welcomed at the airport exit by Fabricio and Felipe, with a sign with my name on. They promptly dropped me...