Present Perfect

Have commited some of my build patches to some of the Xiph modules now. I broke one small thing but luckily I was keeping a close eye on the mailing lists.

So I've gained enough trust to do release engineering on the imminent libvorbis 1.1.0 release. So I've first fixed distcheck which was broken due to the doc build setup (a common problem), then fixed some smaller issues, and now I'm going through the differences to check what to do to the library versioning.

Attended the Xiph IRC meeting again last night, but given how my ADSL resets every fifteen minutes and that the meeting is at 2AM, it was a waste of my time. I really should get that fixed.

Have commited some of my build patches to some of the Xiph modules now. I broke one small thing but luckily I was keeping a close eye on the mailing...

I'm trying to keep a todo list around of what we need to do at work.

I've started thinking about the user interface, and have translated one of the use cases to a scenario. It's enlightening to force yourself to actually try coming up with a UI, because it adds a bunch of design restrictions and forces you to cover your ground again.

I'm happy we're using Python and that we have Johan around. He's fixing bugs in PyGTK as we encounter them and I can bother him nonstop with all sorts of newbie PyGTK questions. Making GObjects in Python is insanely easy compared to the equivalent in C. So much so that you just create a GObject when you need it, because you can rely on its signal handling working well, whereas in C you'd hack around it.

So I've written a UI for a producer using a test signal, and a UI for a preview window for video that you'd be able to insert in any of the components on the server to see what's happening. Now back to the drawing board to incorporate things I need that I've figured out with these tests.

Need to stresstest the server regularly as well. I've found a bunch of HTTP stress tests but they focus mainly on how well a server processes requests. We're looking for something that would either allow us to "capture" requests together with their low-level read/write times and then play them back. The difference with HTTP request replayers is that we really want to replay the specific read/write behaviour, since this also effectively emulates both the speed the client reads at, as well as the specific burstiness of the client.

Or, any project that can generate requests this way, where you are in control over the simulated clients' speed and their specific request profile would be good. Drop me a note if you know of a good one.

I'm trying to keep a todo list around of what we need to do at work. I've started thinking about the user interface, and have translated one of the use...

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new IP address assigned every fifteen minutes. The net result is that both my IRC and IMAP connections are pretty much unusable.

Also, some machine somewhere was asking my DHCP server for an IP address every minute, always pretending to come in via a different nonexisting host.

Friday evening I wanted to try and fix this. I started by trying to find the rogue host. I couldn't find the MAC address in any ARP table, and I couldn't figure out if there was a decent way to ping MAC addresses.

In a short flash of lucidity I configured my DHCP server to give that MAC address an IP address, to see what happened. After some waiting, that worked, and it got an IP address for me. So the host was somewhere close !

After portscanning it and telnetting to it, I realized it was my old Compaq Router locked in the fake ceiling. Why it never showed up in ARP tables I have no idea, but there it was, the bastard.

Anyway, fixing that didn't really solve my ADSL problem. So back to that. Only then my main server started throwing errors, and then I couldn't log in anymore. Reboot the machine, hard disk problems. Lots of IDE timeouts, sectors unreadable, and so on...

Sigh. So I bit the bullet - I'll stop using the old machine - it had the irritating problem of not accepting hard disks bigger than 30 GB anyway, and the mirrors I try to keep locally for fedora.us and rpm.livna.org building have grown bigger than that. And to replace it, I used some other machine lying around that I know some people will hate me for.

Anyway, it took me until about five in the morning to save what was left saving, migrate configurations, test stuff, and so on.

Luckily, the day after we were expected at Julien's place :) I felt a bit tired the next morning, but Wim, Johan, Kristien and I left in my car around 1. I had chosen not to bring my laptop :)

The rest of the weekend was a mix of great barbecue, floating around in the pool, having fun, laughing, playing petanque, reading, talking, playing guitar, singing, and staying up late. I almost forgot about my server trouble. Almost.

Anyway, we had a great time, and finally headed back home Sunday afternoon. After which I went back to fixing up the server. And I'm still stuck with crappy ADSL, hurray.

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new...

Yesterday I met a girl that I was sure I had seen before, and she stared at me the same way. She was the first to actually ask, since, you know, coming from me it would just be a cheap come-on line :) So we spent some time trying to figure it out. We were from the same city, and we had two people in common, and could think of a few incidental occasions where we could have met, but none of them seemed to be where we knew each other from.

But we couldn't figure it out. I stopped naming activities we could have known each other from after she laughed at my suggestion that we could have met in dancing class in the last year of high school, because she made me feel like a geek for having taken those classes :)

And after an hour I remembered. So I asked her if I had her last name correct to check, and then said that I knew her from the inter-scholary student union we had started up in that year with about twenty people from different schools. Heh, so she had been just as much a geek as me. Especially given that one of the projects we had that year was to have a dance as a fundraiser for some good cause, and we were taking classes so we wouldn't look stupid at our own dance...

But that's not the point of the story. The point is, as soon as I realized who she was, I knew her last name and her street address in one flash. This was information stored in my brain and not used for over ten years, but it was just as readily available as it was back then. It seems to be stored as factual information - I could have remembered it in my head as being typed on a piece of paper, or someone saying it to me, or whatever. But that's not how it happened - I just "remembered" it in its processed stored form.

There are things which I of course remember based on smell, sound or vision, but this wasn't one of them. Makes me wonder again and again how the brain actually works, but I'm pretty positive we won't know enough about it in my lifetime.

Now, if someone wants to help me on my quest of figuring out what deja-vu's are about, preferably with decent links to studies, that'd help me a lot as well :)

Yesterday I met a girl that I was sure I had seen before, and she stared at me the same way. She was the first to actually ask, since, you...

So - had a nice couple of days with my friends from Gent staying over. I had a great time, I hope they did too. Having them over has made me realize a few things though.

In life there typically aren't many moments where you don't have friends and have to make an effort to make some. The last time I probably had to do so was in kindergarten. After kindergarten, you always seem to carry over some old friends on your way to making new ones. So people see that you already have friends, so you're friend material, and everything works out fine.

So you start to take friendship in general for granted. On the other hand, moving to a completely different country changes all that, and for the first time I've had to think again about how the process of making friends works. I make it sound really boring and calculating now, and it's not like I sit around all day thinking about it :) But, subconsciously you do tend to mull over it. So having had my friends over I realize I don't have friends like that here, and it's unlikely I will any time soon, since these old friends have only become really good friends over a long period of time.

A second thing I've realized is how people can behave in certain situations. A long time ago I had a girlfriend that went to live in Venezuela for a year. I went to visit her for two weeks after around seven months. I had looked forward to it immensely, but the first ten days were a complete let-down. She was incredibly distant, unemotional, and cold. And while I could speculate on why, and we discussed it in the final (great) four days, I never fully understood what had happened.

But now I do. Saturday, the last day they were here, I was in a pissy mood because I realized that the next day they'd go back to their lives in Gent, while I'd stay here. And even though I like my life here a lot, the city is great, and so is my job - I still felt homesick. Also, while we had a lot of fun, apart from politics we didn't really talk about anything serious, and I realized afterwards that I kept my distance on an emotional level. It makes sense when I think about it, and it's probably the same thing that happened to me in Venezuela.

I'm sure I'm overanalyzing right now. So bottom line is, Kristien and I need to spend more time with people here :)

Anyway, I had a great time, so thanks to all of them for coming over. We did some sight-seeing, formed a five human pyramid in the water (after about twentyfive tries), went for great tapas, had a perfect barbecue (Jeroen's steak preparation rivals Julien's), and just had lots of laughs. Hope some of them come over sometime soon again.
It also means we have to invest a bit of time in making good friends.

So - had a nice couple of days with my friends from Gent staying over. I had a great time, I hope they did too. Having them over has made...