Present Perfect

Dave/Dina

Spent last week reworking my set of anaconda patches for Dave/Dina going from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9, then touching up the other bits. It's a lot less painful now that I use quilt. ncm, it was me who plugged it here. If you were looking for the site, it's at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt/

Anyway, Thursday night the unthinkable happened. After a quick reboot of my main machine it failed to boot up. And this was just as I was about to go to sleep. Blind panic ensued. Started swapping out components, and it seems the Matrox G400 has died. A bit of a pain, since this really still is the best card to do TV/OUT with.

I went and collected my friend's Dave/Dina box, swapped out the cards, compared with another spare one I had, and so on, until it worked. The three cards are all different in board layout, interestingly enough. They also all get detected by kudzu differently, but get the same name. Strange.

Anyway, it's probably time to move to DirectFB on newer matrox cards and start experimenting. But Friday was a huge waste of time trying to get things to work again, just as I was pretty much finished with setting up the whole Dave/Dina install tree.

So all I have to show for last week is this screenshot. Hope to do better this week.

Work

Still enjoying being unemployed. On the other hand, looking forward to my new job more and more. It's funny how I really don't miss my old job. I miss some of the people sometimes, but I made the right decision overall. Next week I'm going to Barcelona for a whole week to hunt for an apartment. Rent is pretty expensive there by European standards, but I hope to find something for the two of us that's under 800 euro.

Will also bring my new rollerblades to go out skating with Matthias.

Meanwhile, my new boss already ordered my new laptop. Things are going well, I feel taken care of.

Music

Had an interesting Sunday accompanying my girlfriend. There was this pop festival where she had to do interviews. So I got to meet Liberty-X (I've always thought Jessica looked yummy, and she does :) ) and Melanie C. Mel had her leg in a cast, and she was at least a head smaller than me. She's actually very petite in real life.

I'm not really starstruck at this sort of thing since it's not my kind of music. Meeting people like Thom Yorke or Thurston Moore or Greg Dulli in the past was a lot more awe-inspiring. But it's weird how on the one hand some people really act superhyper when meeting "famous" people, and on the other hand those "famous" people seem to be very down-to-earth and friendly.

For the guys who care: Mel C is taken, and she seemed to be very much in love with her pretty hunky guy.

Dave/Dina Spent last week reworking my set of anaconda patches for Dave/Dina going from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9, then touching up the other bits. It's a lot...

mach

Tested and released a new version for mach, 0.4.2, which has stuff for the third Severn beta. Nice to be able to sometimes just do a simple release that only does one thing.

Well, I did muck about in the config file as well, but ...

quilt

For Dave/Dina, last time around I hacked on anaconda. I did simple things, like changing install paths and binary names to DD-anaconda so I could still install both, and changing RedHat to DaveDina everywhere.

That was on the 7.3 anaconda, and now I wanted to move on to the 9.0 anaconda. Last time I just put the sources in CVS and patched directly in it, because I had no clue how to maintain different patch sets... This time, I looked at a few suggestions people had sent me for this kind of problem.

I got quilt and packaged it up for Fedora, and then decided to try it out. The docs are crappy (because quilt is a reworking of a set of tools by Andrew Morton, and the docs point you to his readme, which works with the old commands) so I should send a patch for the docs now that I know how to use it.

But as for using it, it's pretty much what I was hoping to get. You can define patch sets, add source files to them, and push and pop patches to and from the stack. So, as I was working on the patch that replaces the prefix to DD-anaconda, I noticed one more RedHat that hadn't turned into DaveDina. So then I just went "quilt refresh" to store the current patch, "quilt pop" until I was at the bottom of the stack, fixed this mistake in the same source file I was editing before, saved, "quilt refresh", and then "quilt push" until I was back at the patch I was working on.

Compared to the patch extraction by hand, this was decidedly more easy to use. So based on a patch from my version to the original source code, I was able to split out the big patch into four smaller ones that are logically grouped.

I made packages for Fedora on RH80 and RH9, so give it a try if you're interested.

Work and Life

So, I'm moving to Barcelona at the end of next month. I'll be working there for a company of dolphy. Details will follow, but it looks like I'll be spending some time on stabilizing GStreamer, which sounds awesome.

In two weeks, I hope to find an apartment. I've given myself one week over there to find something. Fingers crossed.

ask a dick

Peter and I made it on one of our favourite sites ! Here's our story. And some good advice gotten too ! :) For a touch of class, you can count on Dick.

mach Tested and released a new version for mach, 0.4.2, which has stuff for the third Severn beta. Nice to be able to sometimes just do a simple release that...

Crap

I sort of have vague recollections and feverish nightmares of what sort of crap avifile was from a packaging perspective.

Today I wanted to try out a new version of vcr that has come out and works with avifile 0.7.37 and tried updating my spec for avifile again.

Here's a snippet of the list of tarballs they currently have up for download:

• avifile-0.7-0.7.38.tar.gz
• avifile-0.7.37-20030522.tgz
• avifile-0.7.34-20030319.tgz
• avifile-0.6.0-20011220admin.tgz
• avifile-0.53.5.tar.gz

Apparently, they're STILL doing the same sort of silly things from back then.

People, if you want your project taken seriously, then:

• settle on one or two formats for your source distribution. Have them have sane suffixes. I suggest .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 If you settled on tar.gz, then choose either .tgz or tar.gz, but don't use both
• settle on one version naming scheme. I count four among the five tarballs I just listed. I see no good reason for changing to have an extra 0.7 at all in the last release.

It's no wonder just about any packager for Red Hat I know has decided not ever to package avifile again.

Crap I sort of have vague recollections and feverish nightmares of what sort of crap avifile was from a packaging perspective. Today I wanted to try out a new version...

Life

Actual phone conversation with my girlfriend:

 Her: Honey, I'll be home later. Me: Uh, ok, why ? Her: I have a phone interview with INXS. Me: Uh, ok. 

INXS ? I'm pretty sure Michael Hutchence has been dead for some time. I think my girlfriend is seeing someone else.

GStreamer

Got 0.6.4 out the door, yay ! Need to work some more on the packaging though. With Fedora being in a semi-limbo state, I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.

mach

Pushed out a 0.4.1 this week as well. Getting more and more polished. I'm waiting for some people to contribute now :) A yum backend would be nice...

Life Actual phone conversation with my girlfriend: Her: Honey, I'll be home later. Me: Uh, ok, why ? Her: I have a phone interview with INXS. Me: Uh, ok. INXS...

Documentation

Yesterday I had to take the train somewhere, and since I don't have a laptop anymore, I decided I was going to print out the GStreamer manual and check if it's up to date and correct where necessary.

I didn't really know before that of course that the documentation build had bitrotten again. I remember spending a lot of time the last time around on them, so I wasn't looking forward to just trying to quickfix it.

So instead I took it apart and rebuilt from the ground up. It did take quite some time, but in the end we once again have perfect .ps, .pdf and html documentation from a few docbook xml files.

Images are generated from either .png or .fig, and I completely checked if it works in all cases (for example, $(builddir) != $(srcdir))

Having done that, I was able to print the documentation, and having read through the manual, there are some obvious things that need fixing, and some more subtle things. It will make a good exercise to fix up the docs.

Spanish

So, I started Spanish classes this week. On the one hand I've always wanted to learn Spanish, because it's a language that attracts me. Some of my favourite movies are in Spanish as well. On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed getting by with the little Spanish I knew.

In any case, Spanish seems doable to learn. I'll help myself along by setting my desktop language to Spanish, and by watching Buffy and West Wing with Spanish subtitles.

GStreamer

Spent quite some time last weekend fixing and closing bugs for 0.6.4. I'm down to one more bug, and I'm thinking I will punt on it.

I started fixing stuff in the python bindings as well. I've really enjoyed developing with them, but now I've hit some bugs in GStreamer that require some low-level fixing.

Meanwhile, we've started discussing if GStreamer 0.8 should go into GNOME 2.6. Maybe that's a good idea, but it will take some work...

Music

New Jeff Buckley double CD out and I didn't even know it: the Sin-é sessions. There was an EP before, but the two disc set contains a whole slew of songs. They really capture him at a time where he was just digging out his own style, and it's obvious from the recordings that he felt at ease there. Very nice.

Some of the songs on it are amazing. I shall be released is my favourite for the moment...

Movies

Went to see "Jeux D'Enfants" yesterday. Very very good. Easily in my top-twenty. Also, similar to some of my other favourites, like Toto Le Héros, Amélie and Los Amantes Del Circulo Polar. I seem to have a thing for magic-realistic movies.

mach

Been getting some patches and feedback from Matthias from FreshRPMS. I added some more features, fixed some bugs, added Fedora Core 0.94, and I hope to release very soon again.

unemployedness

doesn't really feel like you have more time. Strange.

Documentation Yesterday I had to take the train somewhere, and since I don't have a laptop anymore, I decided I was going to print out the GStreamer manual and check...