Present Perfect

Finally. Our 0.1.0 release has arrived. There are bugs, but there are even more cool features. Today we used four machines to create a stream, everything from the GUI wizard. So after some French floating point fixing, we tagged the release and threw out packages.

Here's the tarball. Knock yourself out and start filing issues.

Now excuse me while I go home and have some quality time with my overly neglected girlfriend who I dearly miss.

Finally. Our 0.1.0 release has arrived. There are bugs, but there are even more cool features. Today we used four machines to create a stream, everything from the GUI wizard....

Spent the last weekend hacking with the boys. We were incredibly productive. I rewrote the perspective broker client factory of Twisted using keycards after getting some very good ideas on the bike ride home on Friday. And after a long hacking session that again taught me the value of good regression tests, I'm happy to have finished my keycard-based system that handles challenge-response nicely to log in to the server. Then over the weekend we finished up a whole bunch of loose ends, and Johan made some nice changes to the wizard as well. Still needs some UI love, but it will always need more work.

Despair
is when you have decided to release your project to the public at large, and your final testing hinges on having shippable packages, and you get stuck packaging a bunch of dependencies, where some of them have a crappy build with hand-rolled python code sort-of-using distutils with nice little globals and wrongly indented code (Which I thought was not possible in Python, but what do I know ?), and you want to strangle the maintainer because really, all you want to do is package YOUR project.

Ecstasy
is when you take those packages when they are built, and install them on all the different machines in your support department, and you start a few commands, start the GUI wizard, click some buttons, and everything starts up nicely out of the box, and the media player you are also a part of somehow plays the stream nicely. On all the machines. Yes there will be bugs, but the foundations are laid down nicely and we're ready to go.

Music
My companion CD for the weekend was The Arcade Fire's debut album. Quixotic little record, highly recommended (that goes for you doubly Jeroen, it slightly tops out Bloc Party).

Spent the last weekend hacking with the boys. We were incredibly productive. I rewrote the perspective broker client factory of Twisted using keycards after getting some very good ideas on...

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again...

Weekend

Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the mountains, climbed a bunch of trees, jumped off some platforms, swung from cables, and did all sorts of safe adventury stuff. Lunch was in a typical Catalan restaurant, with wine being served from the special caraffs which have a second neck to drink from. You're supposed to tilt the bottle, getting a very fine flow of wine, and direct it in your mouth, then extend the arm as far as possible without spilling any wine. When you're done, you get the bottle back to your face then stop tilting.

Needless to say, lots of variations on the theme were tried, with the climax being a couple pouring for one another without spilling a drop.

We were happy to have chosen the quad riding for the afternoon. On a quad, no one can tell when you're drunk (Well, except for the poor woman who managed to land her quad off the road TWICE). The other half was not so lucky apparently - one guy managed to fall of a platform during the drunk tree climbing, straight into a bush. And some other guy managed to run fullspeed into a rope he managed to not see, and got catapulted back some ten meters.

Anyways, it was a good preparation for the very same activity at the same place for this weekend, which for obvious reasons (to the parties involved at least) I am not at liberty to discuss any further...

New employee

Fluendo wants to welcome their newest employee. Zoë weighs a good 3.2 kilos and is in perfect health. I'm sure she'll be an excellent asset to the team. Congratulations to the happy mom and dad !

Telefonica

As other inhabitants of Spain can attest, sometimes dealing with Telefonica can be really frustrating. Both phone and ADSL went dead last wednesday. Called on Thursday. They called me back on Friday, saying it was probably a problem in the central switching station. By Saturday, the telephone was fixed, but the ADSL wasn't. Tried to get into the help line for ADSL (since of course that's a different line), keyed in my number, got disconnected with the message that there was no one available to take my call. Called again, keyed in number, got some waiting music and a message saying that everyone was busy. After eight minutes another voice said no one could take my call, and I got disconnected. Sigh.

Apparently Kristien had called as well, since when I got in the lady told me that she called. I was going to get a call back in the next 48 hours from a technician. Tuesday morning, I get a call. What kind of router I use ? A Nokia one. Yes, I'm sure it works. No, it's not one of yours. No, it isn't the fault of the router - it's the third time this year you managed to turn off my phone and ADSL at the same time, so I'm pretty sure it's not our fault. Yes, the phone works again.

Then the guy tells me that the telephone guy turned off ADSL completely in the central station. Why on earth did he want to grill me on the router then ? Anyway, he would have it fixed. During the day Kristien lets me know that it works again. And when I check, I realize that I understand WHY they messed it up in the central station - I had double the download speed as before. So it was all part of Telefonica's cunning plan to give you double the speed in one week and no speed at all the next.

Anyway, I'm happy for this week.

Music

I had been impatiently pining for the new Interpol disc, "Antics". When I finally got it the day it was released, I had two quick cursory listenings to it and was hugely disappointed. Nothing seemed to grab me.

This weekend I gave it another go, and I haven't listened to anything else ever since. There is not a single bad song on this CD. And the emotion I thought lacking at first listen is all there under the surface. I love to be suckerpunched by music that way. Highly recommended.

Food

We finally managed to cook tartiflette, a typical Savoie dish which I love eating on skiing trips. It came out great, we were very impressed with ourselves. So were our guests, Jochen en Kristien. It was better than on ski holidays, though it made me long to have my feet stuck to a snowboard on a white mountain. Jochen made the dessert, impressing me with a stunning pineapple carpaccio with mint and sugar.

On days like this life just feels right.

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again... Weekend Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the...

Tim, you obviously got the number one reason not to be at the GNOME summit completely wrong. If airhead celebrities like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Janet Jackson are going to be there, what better reason do I need not to show up ??

Now, if famous superstarts like Havoc, Dave, Owen, Miguel, Jeff, ... would have been there, but maybe. But those girls ? No way will the make my GNOME desktop more sexy.

Jennifer Lopez on the other hand I wouldn't mind having met.

Tim, you obviously got the number one reason not to be at the GNOME summit completely wrong. If airhead celebrities like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Janet Jackson...

I *hate* doing multiple releases in short succession.

Did a GStreamer 0.8.6 release yesterday, finally, after being stalled by unresponsiveness to revert threats, internet loss at work, and internet loss at home. Ronald pushed me for a new plugins release as well, which is supposed to go into FC3. And then Wim did two simple great fixes to the core, prompting me to release a new core. It's not brown paper bag, it's just that good a fix. But still. I was trying to get some actual WORK done today. Sigh.

In unrelated news, I was happy to make this screenshot this morning. I fixed the code to display "1 week" instead of "1 weeks" after the server was started, and added regression tests for it. In any case, having the server stream rock stable from an SMP machine using threads inside GStreamer to an average of 2500+ clients for over seven days is a pretty big milestone.

There are very few streams that actually manage to attain that number of clients anyway.
We found some "indenpendent" Microsoft-funded studies comparing Windows Media Server and RealServer, and on the same hardware for the same bitrate they manage 900 streams, and Real a few less. Ours is pulling a peak of 3700 at the moment, pushing over 40 Mbit/sec, using 5% CPU and some 5% of 1GB of memory. Pretty good, I'd say.

Of course, after making the screenshot I had to restart the streaming component, since I had made it log to a file through stdout with lots of debugging enabled, and about 98% of the 16 GB disk was taken up. And I couldn't find a way to close stdout for that process, so I was forced to stop the process to actually reclaim the diskspace. You live, you learn.

I *hate* doing multiple releases in short succession. Did a GStreamer 0.8.6 release yesterday, finally, after being stalled by unresponsiveness to revert threats, internet loss at work, and internet loss...