Present Perfect

Network

I'm sitting at home when suddenly I realize how surprising it is how quickly things evolve. It's only a few years ago I was sitting at my DOS-based computer that only allowed me to run one application at a time, and only connected to the outside world through some old crappy modem.

And here I am, sitting at my laptop, and what am I doing ? Comitting code to various cvs servers, logged in to another machine at home that is encoding a DVD, logged in to the computer in my room upstairs to update and test stuff, logged in to the home server to build packages in the background, and logged in to Dave/Dina to tweak some settings.

Meanwhile, I'm also logged in to the company's webserver, and half an hour ago I was connected to the office server from which I connected to the studio broadcast PC's to fix an on-air mistake (two tracks playing at once).

So it hits me - was I logged in and doing useful stuff on 10 different computers at the same time ?.

If you look at what has changed, it's hard not to wonder about what computing will be like twenty years from now...

Extreme Sports

A spontaneous round of mounted frisbeeing yesterday. Each thursday evening a bunch of us get together, pick a random sport and play it somewhere. We probably do this to avoid the potbelly and turning 30 syndrome, but it's great fun nonetheless. Make sure you get out once in a while.

Network I'm sitting at home when suddenly I realize how surprising it is how quickly things evolve. It's only a few years ago I was sitting at my DOS-based computer...

Network

Yesterday I was working from home, and at noon I got a curious call from work that everyone was logged off of the main (Windows) server. I tried logging in and suffered 80% packet loss from both of our external IP's. So I couldn't get in and fix stuff or at least take a look around.

Then I got a call that our studio network was also down, and the codec we use to do our live broadcasts had also crashed.

Experience tells you that such diverse things do not happen without reason. This, however, seemed to be a one-of-a-kind experience.

I started driving to work but I knew I wouldn't make it in time, so I called the live broadcast people to get ready for a bare-bone broadcast, and I told the studio guy to disconnect the hub in the studio from the office hub, so that the studio might work again.

The second thing "fixed" it temporarily. At least the news could go on air as usual.

Investigating all of the logs of the linux machines revealed that there probably was a huge network spike at some point. All of the Realtek cards complained with the same error: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x0001

I cannot for the life of me say though what caused it. It did make sense for the net result; even the codec for live broadcasting was plugged into the network for monitoring purposes.

Anyway, I decided it was time to physically separate the critical broadcast network from the office network. Only, the firewall/gateway I installed already had three network cards in it. So, time for an experiment.

An hour later, I managed to put 4 network cards in the same pentium/166 machine. That surely is a record for me - anyone topping that in an office environment ?

Network Yesterday I was working from home, and at noon I got a curious call from work that everyone was logged off of the main (Windows) server. I tried logging...

Work

Time flies so fast and I keep wanting to note down stuff for later because I do not want to forget what I'm going through.

I'm a radio broadcast engineer by trade, and I got appointed CTO at the start of this year. It's just a fancy name in practice, because it's not like I make much more than before, and basically it just means I'm even more responsible for what gets done by myself :) In effect, our technical team is down to two people.

Anyway, so we have a bus that drives through the whole country, from which we broadcast every day for three hours. The bus was incredibly over time in being ready for us to work in, and the PC's with the proprietary broadcasting software were delivered late, and so on.

And now it seems that the broadcast PC's have a tendency to skip during playback. I just noticed that the memory used by the playback program had climbed up to using about 700 MB, and when during the newsbreak I exited it, it all got freed at once. Beside that, we have loads of other problems, as well as not having enough resources to fix things properly.

I don't want to complain too much, but it seems I'm at a point where I grow increasingly irritated at the fact that I've had 50 to 60 hour work weeks on a regular basis and it doesn't look like that is going to change any time soon. And my boss keeps telling me that it will all pan out once I get everything arranged and delegated.

The trouble is, I end up having to delegate the things I like doing myself , so there's something wrong there :)

I love my job, but sometimes it pains me to not be able to figure out how to get out the rut.

Today though, I'm starting to feel like I'm slowly getting control back of the things that were going on above my head. I'm just going to take down everything that annoys me or that needs to be done one by one until it's all good.

Birthday

So, my girlfriend and my housemate and his girlfriend set up a surprise birthday party for me yesterday ! I was amazed - I know everyone says this, for a surprise party, but I had no clue at all. I had a shitty day at work, but it just made it all better. My girlfriend had invited me to go out and eat something, and we had Mexican in Gent, which was great. I only remembered it was my birthday because she asked me out last friday. And for some reason she really managed to not attract suspicion at all.

We drove with her car because all of the drinks were in her trunk, and I didn't notice she wanted to drive her car. She drove really slowly on the cobblestones and she said she was afraid of the trams, when she was just driving slowly to not break the bottles. And she kept telling me how she was happy we were alone with the two of us for dinner so we could have a nice relaxing evening.

I didn't even smell the coffee when she asked me to wear the silly "happy birthday" hair pin in the car.

So picture me, wearing that stupid thing, walking into my house, and seeing wardv sitting there, when we just talked about inviting him over now that he's back from London. It still didn't register. Then I take another step and I see April, his girlfriend, sitting here. Still no clue. And I take one more step and the living room is filled with people I know, and I'm thinking, why are they here and why wasn't I invited ?

And then I think, hm, I must look silly with that hair pin on. And then I think, wait a minute, these people are here for me. And I look stupid !

And then it hit me, I got set up. No nice quiet evening with the two of us... I've been had !

I had a great evening that more than made up for the crap day at work. Apparently someone hijacked my camera and took pictures, so I checked and uploaded them. I'm sure other people have more pictures, maybe someone even has the stupid hair pin...

So, thank you friends ! My first surprise party was a success.

GStreamer

As for programming, haven't had much time due to work. Hope to get back to that really soon. I have some pending commits still to do, some bugs still left to fix, and we really need to get on with the error stuff.

Music

Saw a great Radiohead concert ten days ago. They're not the same Radiohead I've seen seven times before, but they were awesome. It's incredible how a band that has amazing songs like Blow Out, You, Thinking about you, High and dry, My Iron Lung, No Surprises, Climbing up the walls, and more, can play an incredible two hour set and not play any of these great songs...

And last week, a very good Counting Crows show. Adam is looking more and more like a pineapple every day, and I still can't get over how some guys in the band take on a hard rock pose when they play the simplest of guitar solos, but the music is still very very good.

As for CD's, bought five more, among which the Yeah Yeah Yeah's and the Mars Volta discs stand out. And Dave/Dina just passed the "800 CD's" mark yesterday. 50 GB of good music, that's how I like it.

Sorry

Again for the decidedly non-technical content. I could go on about the issues we have with broadcasting and the IT-related problems there, but it's unlikely you'd be interested :)

Work and the days go by so fast Time flies so fast and I keep wanting to note down stuff for later because I do not want to forget what...

GUADEC

On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event, because last year and Boston was so much fun and such a great experience. And in the last two months before GUADEC, I started to feel less and less enthusiastic about coming, for various reasons.

But now I'm here, and I just got back from the pub, and I listened in on lots of conversations, and talked to lots of people, and it just dawned on me that GNOME really IS a community and there are real people hidden behind the About box that write the software I have come to use every day.

And I might not always agree with all of them or just generally not have a clue about what it is they are doing, but I tend to notice that on the whole the software I use every day is getting better and better.

And as I walk round the pub, with Nat singing in my ear behind me, and Gman getting a round of applause for his truly EXCELLENT work on organising all of this, and people having a good time and slowly getting slightly drunk, I look around. And I see the person that writes my window manager and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I see the guys that write my file manager, and the guy that employs one of them, and the guy that writes my new software installer, and the guy that is responsible for tying all those releases together, and the guy that uses GStreamer to rip CD's, and so on.

And I see that these are the people that write my desktop, and over time I am becoming one of them, and these are all good people sharing a common goal And I got to know them and trust me when I say that they can be trusted to do the best possible job, whether employed by a company or in their free time. And I look around, and I see that it's all good, and tomorrow there will be more of us, and what we are doing makes sense.

And I'll probably re-read this all tomorrow morning before posting and think that I didn't write anything coherent or useful at all, but since I'm promising myself now to go ahead and post it anyway tomorrow, it'll be out there. It might seem silly or sentimental, but it feels good to be a part of it, and it is just as much relevant to everything being said here as anything.

Having a purpose and feeling good about that purpose and the people you're sharing those purposes with is what makes the difference between working on something once in a while and wanting to be a part of it.

Next day

I'm not even going to bother rereading what I wrote. Felt really sick again this morning, waited for it to pass. Then went into Trinity, bought three CD's (I can hardly pass by record stores without getting something), and then went for the killer: two PlayStation 2 dancemats. They're impossible to get in Belgium, so ...

GUADEC On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event,...

GU4DEC

Had a good two pre-conference days, meeting up with old acquaintances and trying to get my presentation written. Spent some time with most people, really, talking a bit to the Ximian and Red Hat crew as well as all the other non-corporate GNOMErs (like Hallski and the other Swedes, and jdub and Gman, who's organising the whole thing. Also met up with all of the other GStreamer people slowly trickling in.

The one thing I really miss about my job is not being around people that are working on similar things and know about the same things as I do, and I can learn from.

Trying to get my talk written in OpenOffice, but it has a fairly high crash rate. Saving my presentation is impossible, it crashes every single time. Even worse, it then brings up bug-buddy and gdb automatically, and if you kill those you lose your temporary saves.

Luckily, Michael Meeks arrived this morning and now I had my chance to poke at him for crashing software. He always does that to me (though playfully). He tells me I should remove the old .openoffice directory and then everything should be fine. I'm not going to do that just now since I don't actually have my presentation on my disk apart from the temporary files OpenOffice saves and I don't know how to get at those other than starting the application.

So I'll just march on through the regular crashing, do the presentation, then figure out a way to fix this without losing it.

Nobody at Ximian noticed because they mostly tested fresh installs, not upgrades. Makes sense, somehow.

So now I'm stressing out about my talk later on, making slides, and getting into the habit of saving regularly, even though it crashes, in the hopes that I'll have a finished set of slides soon and can test my presentation.

Why on earth did Gman put me in the really big 400 people room ??? I might love him later, but I hate him now :)

GU4DEC Had a good two pre-conference days, meeting up with old acquaintances and trying to get my presentation written. Spent some time with most people, really, talking a bit to...