Present Perfect

pyrate-radio

Work is progressing nicely. I wrote a DAD browser component in three hours, I think. It lets you search on artist and title in the DAD database.

Yesterday, I realized that at the radio they also need a way to play temporary audio, like something they just mixed for one show only.

So we set up an SMB/NFS share on one of the servers, and I wrote a different browser, a file browser, just for this. It took me about 15 minutes. Python really really rocks for fast GUI development.

So now they can both browse our digital audio database, as well as one temp space directory, and drag and drop files to a player. It looks like this.

In the end, if the player is done, it can also be integrated in one big application windows, and we can drop the window manager completely. It will just be the full-screen pyrate-radio application.

pyrate-radio Work is progressing nicely. I wrote a DAD browser component in three hours, I think. It lets you search on artist and title in the DAD database. Yesterday, I...

Fedora

So, we merged with Red Hat. After those strange weeks of preparing for it, and those months of arguing and setting up things, this is a nice positive turn of events. I hope it stays positive. Red Hat developers, please protect our integrity :)

mach

Didn't get too much feedback on the 0.4.0 release, but the feedback I did get did matter and helped a lot. Some people are interested in working on a yum back-end, and some are interested in using vserver instead of chroot. We'll see what happens.

I've deliberately held off working on it for some time, to force my self to use the released version for a while. Apart from one silly bug where the root stays locked after a successful build, it works fine.

Radio

A short recap: I quit my job at the national radio, and at this moment I'm doing some things for the college radio I've helped out at the last eight years.

I've started writing some software for playback using Python/GTK/GStreamer, and it's turning out great. All the things I read about developing in python really are true (both good and bad). At the moment I'm reaping the benefits. I hope to keep it structured well enough and release the whole project as well. How does pyrate-radio sound ?

On the administration side, we had six new computers to install. I set up a local Red Hat mirror, then I mirrored bits of the XD2 ftp site. I got the go-ximian script, modified it to use the local installer, and then made the GUI installer use the local repository, and it all worked out fine at the first try. Then I set up a PXE boot on the server, hid all the clients behind a switch connected to the server, and now all of them should be able to install from the server cleanly.

After having struggled for more than two years with RIS on Microsoft at work, it is refreshing to see how easy it is to put the bits together on Linux.

Music

Too much good music all at once. Saturday, Spiritualized. After anxiously waiting for their new album (which has some very good moments, but isn't as perfect as any of their previous ones), I was hoping the concert would put me in my place. But it was too short, and he didn't play any of my favourite songs at all. That, and the lack of added instruments (like, say, background singers, or trumpets), made it a bit of a letdown. On a bad day, Jason Pierce is still very good. But knowing what it could have been makes it a letdown anyway.

The highlight of that night was one of the opening bands, Mew. They're Scandinavian, and their sound has echoes of My Bloody Valentine. Very strong songs.

Sunday, Elbow. Can you believe it ? They confirmed this concert a week before, I didn't even know about it until I went to the festival site. So I immediately bought tickets on the spot. Apparently the concert was actually for An Pierlé (a Belgian singer) who was concerting with a 20 piece orchestra and a 50 piece youth choir. While I'm not particularly interested in her songs, the concert was very very good. A nice appetizer for Elbow, who got on stage at 11.30.

Having had so little announcement, we were able to move to the front of the venue (which had seats) easily, so we shared a nice quiet intimate evening with Elbow. I remember thinking Elbow was just a "new acoustic wave" novelty act, until I got their first album and gave it a few good listens. There is no other band that likes them has mastered the art of being so minimalistic and so rich in song texture at the same time.

This was exemplified in songs like "Grace Under Pressure", where the singer plays chords instead of notes for one of the two lines of lyrics the song has, while the rhythm guitarist takes his job quite literally by playing one chord only all through the song. In "Switching Off", the drummer only used one hi-hat and, once in a while, one other part of the drums.

They served me a triplet of my favourite songs, and it all sounded sublime. If you ever get the chance, and you like some class and intelligence to your music, but all the while have it kept simple and beautiful, go see Elbow. and get their second album !

And yesterday night, Tom Mc Crae. Again at the same venue. I'm not yet tired of seeing him live, and yesterday was another fantastic gig. His voice was crystal clear, and the sound was perfect all the way through. For his first encore, he did the coolest thing I've ever seen someone do at a concert. He refused to let his guitar get plugged in, and explained without a microphone that he loved the venue so much, and since it was the last gig of the tour, he wanted to try and do the next song completely acoustically.

So there he is, in a room with 2000 people, singing at the top of his voice. You could hear a lighter getting drawn from fifty meters away, that's how quiet it was. A very brave stunt for a performer to pull, and it paid off nicely. He got four standing ovations in a row :)

So cheers Tom... As for oncoming gigs, loads and loads. Heather Nova, Grandaddy, Arab Strap, Maximilian Hecker, Ed Harcourt, Six By Seven, and more and more to come.

Fedora So, we merged with Red Hat. After those strange weeks of preparing for it, and those months of arguing and setting up things, this is a nice positive turn...

Back

home. We had a very productive GStreamer hacking meeting. Some things got set into motion, I hope we can keep the ball rolling. I reverted some of the premature error handling commits, and created a branch to fix that. I sollicited some feedback but didn't get much yet, maybe I should just go ahead and implement what we think is right.

It's been a much-requested feature, so I want to get it right.

Radio

I am officially unemployed now :) Time to hack. I still am connected to a student radio, and I decided to try and throw together some code to be used there based on my experience. I want to test the gst-python bindings, and this seems like a good way. Here's a screenshot.

pfremy

Since I'm migrating from my old work laptop to my desktop, pfremy showed up again in my recent log. And unsurprisingly, more pointless drivel on KDE vs GNOME. Really, who cares ? I bet he could actually get something useful done if he directed his energy to something positive instead. But some people just choose to be negative for no good reason, hurting both sides.

So I modded him down to 1 in the hope I don't have to see his diary again.

Anyways, his claims are easily disproved, since the application I am writing has been evolving at an incredible pace thanks to the wonderful python bindings for GNOME. jamesh, you rock my world. Notice how I was able to say how I like the GNOME bindings without making any sort of bad comment about KDE. Take a hint, pfremy.

Avast

AAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR. Are you prepared ?

Back home. We had a very productive GStreamer hacking meeting. Some things got set into motion, I hope we can keep the ball rolling. I reverted some of the premature...

Advogato

Hm, having a hard time trying to find out how low pfremy's diary is getting rated for me. It's less than 3, which seems pretty appropriate considering his latest entry. But now that someone pointed me to his pointless drivel (one entry in four months and he still doesn't have interesting to say besides making predictably disparaging comments at GNOME), I can't seem to figure out what score he has and why advogato's rating system happens to be working so well.

As for pfremy, I wonder if he realizes how much he hurts the KDE project by making stupid comments like this. Any sensible person who is undecided on the issue will not be swayed by his potshots to try KDE over GNOME. I might even think it would convince them away from it.

As for all you people, just try both GNOME and KDE, and give them both a fair chance. Then make a decision. Don't listen to me or pfremy, or anyone else for that matter, unless you know and trust those people.

Advogato Hm, having a hard time trying to find out how low pfremy's diary is getting rated for me. It's less than 3, which seems pretty appropriate considering his latest...

Barcelona

Down here for a day, Barcelona is great. Yesterday evening we met up with Nat and Miguel in some swanky restaurant down by the sea. We're still not sure who paid for dinner, we hope it was Novell. Anyways, Nat's a lot of fun to hang out with; he's always all over the place, stealing stuff from everywhere and everyone, and moving from big corporate guy to little kid in mere seconds.

I was impressed as well at how my girlfriend Kristien had no problems getting to talk to both him and Miguel, and all the other people there. I realize I have something special here.

Getting the word on all the industry gossip is fun too. There's going to be some exciting times ahead, and I'm glad to be some small part of it.

Interesting side note: neither of these two bigwigs had any clue that GNOME 2.4 was going to be released the next day. Go figure ! A surer sign of sellout has yet to be found, the corporate whores :)

On a side note, congratulations to all the rocking GNOME hackers for making my life better one byte at a time !

Dreaming

I've always wondered what part of the brain projects the dreams we get at night. Last night was particularly weird. I was dreaming I was at some sort of conference, and Nat and Miguel were speaking. And I was sitting somewhere out on the cement, and some other Ximian guys I had never seen were arriving. One was on a skateboard, and as he drove past, he was high-fiving all the other fanboys there, and he was just about to pass by me, and I reach out to high-five him. That's when I woke up because the motion of actually high-fiving him brought my head in direct contact with the monitor on the side of the bed, ouch.

I swear, I don't get what part of the brain decides to actually take an action in real life, outside of the dream, that you are doing in the dream as well. I think the people around me should be well scared if I did everything in reality as well as I do in my dreams.

GStreamer

So, the contestants are arriving and we have a definite list: Uraeus, David Schleef (just got here after the cab ride from hell), Ronald (getting from the train as we speak), Benjamin (coming in tomorrow), me and Julien.

I'm really wondering how well we will fare this time. Too bad neither Erik nor Wim are here.

Barcelona Down here for a day, Barcelona is great. Yesterday evening we met up with Nat and Miguel in some swanky restaurant down by the sea. We're still not sure...