Present Perfect

Oslo, continued

We ended up not getting much hacking done at all. The whole trip ended up being more of a get-together trip than a full-blown hackfest. Which is fine by me, in a way. Wim didn't get back to us, so we assume he stayed in Helsinki while he was there anyway instead of trying to claw out a way to Oslo.

Snowboarding

On Saturday, we went to one of Oslo's skiing slopes. Both Leif and I had snowboarded before, so we got ourselves a board while the others, most of whom had never ski'd before, got skis. Christian and Owen took care of teaching them the basics of skiing while Leif and I went straight for the pistes. It was extremely foggy and snowing, so it was hard to have a lot of control of where we were going. But on the other hand, the snow was excellent and fresh, so I finally got the off-track experience that I missed this year on the previous ski trip. We took a few trips below the elevator, with quite a few jumps on the tracks and several high drops.

I had such a good time I didn't even stop for food but just kept going. After a while my goggles were totally useless and I ended up skiing without eye coverage. That hurt a little but at least I was more in control of my trajectory. The others ended up stopping some time earlier. Erik seemed to get the hang of it by the end of the day, even though he managed to go over the side of a red slope.

Traveling

It's Sunday and we're going home. It amazes me how people drive here in Norway. It feels more like rally driving than anything else, continuously jerking the steering wheel while skidding over the icy roads. I don't think I would really enjoy driving that way, but it was entertaining nonetheless. It's even more scary when the airplane you're in is taxiing for takeoff on similar icy roads at the airport. But it's a pretty sight to see another airplane rev up it's engine and see gusts of snow being blown from the tarmac.

Back to work on ALSA

Getting back to work after some time off always sucks. Tons of e-mails to go through, tons of things to follow up on and sort out, and so on. Having a major deadline tomorrow doesn't help either, but luckily it got shift a whole week.

My main problem is working out how I can record S/PDIF from our mixing desks on the Hammerfal 9654 cards we bought for this. Luckily Paul Davis, who wrote drivers for the Hammerfall, has responded promptly to all of my questions,

ALSA itself is pretty hard to figure out. It's not easy weeding through the docs and figuring out which are still relevant, and lots of important nuggets are hidden away in other documents.

Hope I figure this out soon enough.

Dental work

One of my fillings broke free during my skiing trip and today I went to the dentist to get it fixed. The tooth got refilled without anaesthesia (luckily, the tooth has had root canal before). Then she cleaned up plaque and toothstone from all of my teeth, and I really HATE that. It feels terrible.

Then I went out to console myself by buying a bunch of CD's. I feel in a sharing mood so here's what I got today:

Grant Lee Buffalo - Storm Hymnal, Gems from the vault of

I love this band, and I have a bunch of the B-sides, but I still felt I had to get this double CD anyway

Faithless - Sunday 8 PM

Got it cheap, wanted it before

Gomez - In Our Gun

Got this even cheaper

Ben Harper - Diamonds on the inside

Anything by Ben is a must-have, so this was a no-brainer

At The Drive-in - Relationships of command

One of those acclaimed classics people should probably own, not sure yet if it's true though. I like Sparta, so why not try this too...

2-Meter sessies

A bunch of unplugged recordings from Dutch radio/television. Including Coldplay, Jayhawks, Tom Helsen, Stereophonics, Ben Christophers, Tom Barman

The Folk Implosion - The New Folk Implosion

I really liked One Part Lullaby. Apparently this one is totally different, but I'm pretty interested in it

Jeff Buckley - Grace

I end up buying CD's I really love cheaply to give away just because they're cheap. This particular one is going to someone I know who has a copy of the CD. I figured I had two options, either shoot the person in question or forgive them their transgression and make sure they have the real original disc.

I should do something about my uncontrolled spending sprees someday.

Oslo, continued We ended up not getting much hacking done at all. The whole trip ended up being more of a get-together trip than a full-blown hackfest. Which is fine...

Going to Oslo

Got up way too early, got dropped off at the train station and left for Brussels. Got on the Thalys, which had electricity ! I started writing my first Python application, a media test suite for GStreamer. Should be a good exercise to get me started. Having electricity made me feel luxurious so I watched the latest Sopranos episode I brought along on my laptop. I really start to enjoy the freedom of taking my virtual VCR tapes around with me. And watching TV on a laptop is actually very bearable.

Arrived at Charles De Gaulle, Paris, not much more than an hour later, where I was faced with a three hour wait. At check-in time I started worrying to death that I hadn't even considered if I needed my passport or not. Luckily it seemed my regular identity card was enough to get me in, even though later on I saw that it had already expired for two months. I guess they're not expecting any terrorists here.

I borrowed a second battery from one of my co-workers. These Toshiba's generally don't last for more than two hours. Which brings me to a point, if any of you laptop makers are reading this: it would be fantastic if laptops had a small internal battery that could last for a few minutes allowing you to replace the big battery while the laptop is still running.

I generally reboot my laptop only once in a month or something, but taking out the battery when not plugged in forces me to shutdown properly first. I'd love to avoid that.

So, five days ahead of me without having to worry about the incredibly disheartening deadline at work next Tuesday. Hooray for procrastination.

Arriving in Oslo

Got picked up from the airport by Raphael and drove to Uraeus 's apartment. From there, we went on to the parking place where the trail to the cabin starts. A two mile hike through waist-deep snow is a perfect way to start a hackfest. Somehow it felt good to be one of the more sporty types in a group.

Arriving at the cabin, we noticed a bunch of skis outside and apparently the cabin was doublebooked. The other occupants were a class of physical education teacher students. The female ones seemed to catch the attention of some of our hackers pretty quickly.

So we're still missing Wim and Leif, whom we haven't heard of. Hope they make it. It seems that Wim's plan to get in Oslo was to just go to the airport and take the first possible plane.

Lugeing

The next day we went to the centre of Oslo, from where we took the subway to one of the higher points of Oslo. There we rented a couple of luges, which basically are pieces of metal with some sort of flat surface as a seat. The idea is to lay down on them and go downhill as quickly as possible. Sadly the course is pretty bumpy and you end up flying about half a meter high and landing repeatedly. Pretty amusing and spectacular at the same time.

Wim doesn't have his mobile phone with him, so he called Christian from a cell phone. The message was pretty short; all he said was "Hello, this is Wim Taymans. I'm in Helsinki now. I'll call back later." and then some snickering. The snickering is totally justified since Helsinki is about 1000 km away from Oslo.

After that, we got confirmation from the Tourist Centre that there was some sort of mix-up, and we got assigned a new cabin. We went back to the old one, packed, then decided to eat first, so I started cooking. We made the two mile hike back at midnight, with all of our backpacks strapped on. It's a pretty surreal sight to see a bunch of complaining GStreamer hackers make their way through the snow and the dark.

We arrived at the new cabin at about two o'clock, only to find out it was freezing inside (there was some ice in a pot in the kitchen) and that there were no blankets. So I went out with Christian to get a bunch of blankets and sleeping bags from his mother's house for the people who only had sheets. Christian and I finally went to sleep at about 3.30 AM.

Hacking

It's Friday and it's the first day of actual hacking. A bunch of us started doing a code review of some core features. We started out with the scheduler. It's a pretty complex piece of code because it needs to do so much stuff and do it in weird ways.

Since getting on the plane I had started on my first ever Python application. It's a simple app to test handling of media files in GStreamer. Basically, it runs a bunch of pipelines involving md5sink on a bunch of media files and compares the md5sum of the decoding against the known good value. Today I worked on it some more and it's already basically done. It' surprising how easy it is to get started in Python.

I'm reading through Christian's copy of Havoc's GGAD manual, to figure out the basics of GtkObject/GObject from scratch again. I was trying to figure out how recasting actually works for the first time, and it dawned on me that the whole GObject system relies on a pretty cool hack inherent in C. Since each GObject has the parent structure as it's first structure element,the structure at the bottom of the object tree contains all parent classes in it's structure. Since they then all start at the same address, pointed to by the instance pointer, you can cast it to any of the structs in the ancestry tree and dereference it from there. Which is a neat trick. And apparently, it's also the reason why GObject can't do multiple inheritance.

Now, that's all boring stuff. But the real question here is: What would GNOME look like if, for some reason, C didn't have this behaviour at all ? Would there even be GNOME ?

Going to Oslo Got up way too early, got dropped off at the train station and left for Brussels. Got on the Thalys, which had electricity ! I started writing...

Warning

This entry extremely low-diet on technical stuff due to obvious reasons.

Holiday

Went snowboarding last week, had a good time, good weather, didn't fall nearly as much as I did last year. I should really really do it more often because I enjoy it immensely.

Work

Greater responsability comes at a price : I get stuck checking and approving invoices, keeping track of contracts, and so on. It drains me from doing coding or productive work. On the plus side, I just got in a new computer and two Hammerfall 9636 digital cards, which will be fun to toy with. That will force me to check if GStreamer's ALSA support is still working ok.

The beauty of open source - I couldn't figure out how to actually control the cards and change routing on them, and I sent a mail to the LAD list and Paul Davis, the driver author, replied in less than a day.

Train

I ride the train to and from work each day, which takes about an hour, even though I have a car. I enjoy just sitting and not having to do anything to get anywhere, and being free to work on stuff two hours a day on my laptop. This week however, after coming back from holidays, I decided to not do much and just catch up on recorded tv shows from the Dave/Dina box. I must say, it was incredibly relaxing to just copy over the recorded shows and watch them on the train, should do that more often. I watched some Dawson's Creek (don't comment) and West Wing. West Wing is really really good, it's both funny and moving. The only thing I dislike is the blatant patriottism.

Oslo

Booked my plane and train ticket for the GStreamer Oslo Summit next week. Lots of thanks to Uraeus for putting this together, it's just what I need, another short holiday :)

Didn't really dare ask my boss, since we're on a very tight schedule, but he was ok with it. I'm psyched.

Fedora

Currently in some sort of IRC meeting, first time I've done that. Not sure if it's all that productive to try and hammer out things over IRC. Fedora is heading in the right direction though. People are setting up guidelines, discussing best practices, and eventually stuff will fall into place. We're striving for a huge goal, so it's ok if it takes some time. Rather do it right than very badly.

As for mach, both Ville and Matthias (from FreshRPMS) seem to like it and have provided patches. It's great to see the two of them discuss possible feature additions :) The project takes on a life of it's own.

Warning This entry extremely low-diet on technical stuff due to obvious reasons. Holiday Went snowboarding last week, had a good time, good weather, didn't fall nearly as much as I...

FOSDEM

It's been over for more than a week already but I hadn't yet written anything about it. And now, a week later, everything seems a blur. So the blur I see is this :

• Living in Nerd house central, with six foreigners arriving and opening up their laptop, yet still managing to make it cozy
• Having Gman, Uraeus, andersca, hallski, rhult, kris and sxpert stay over in my house
• Meeting Julien, Noelle (his wife) and Matthias (from Freshrpms). If you meet people in real life, it's so much easier to relate how they come across on IRC. And, we also invited ourselves at Julien's house in Spain for a Fall GStreamer multimedia gettogether.
• Going to good talks, enjoying Michael's, Havoc's and Guenter's.
• Having my housemate demonstrate Dave/Dina, with a lot of interested people asking questions and being impressed with the whole setup
• Talking to Havoc and Owen about when and how and why they got into programming on Linux
• Hearing Michael get silly about unrequited love issues and joining in the fun
• Jamming with Gman at three o'clock in the morning and having my other housemate wake up at the noise
• Doing an OK presentation generating a lot of interest afterwards, as well as getting me a whole bunch of questions on GStreamer issues and lots of people interested in giving it a try
• Having the author of Juk, a KDE jukebox program, switch over to GStreamer partly. This is very important to us, because we want to work with KDE as well to get GStreamer in.
• Having Noelle ask me if I could "show us tango" as a totally irrelevant question during my talk :-) So I showed her later; Julien, take her dancing.
• Putting together a Gnome Gazette and having some guy freak out over the blatant sexism in it (according to him)

All in all, I had a great time. And I have Pictures online of it as well.

Snow

And right now I'm in France having a great time snowboarding. Right now I'm too tired from yesterday's going out, so I'm sitting here at these nifty windowmaker/Linux terminals, typing in mozilla, and it Just Works. I wonder how many people use these things and actually realize they're not using Windows. They probably feel something eerie but can't put their finger on it... That's great though. These things just work.

FOSDEM It's been over for more than a week already but I hadn't yet written anything about it. And now, a week later, everything seems a blur. So the blur...

FOSDEM

FOSDEM is great. I'm seeing lots people I got to know in GNOME again. Went to some good talks; Havoc Pennington on freedesktop.org, and Michael Meeks going at break-neck speed through all of Gnome 2.2.

The funny thing about Michael is that he has a really dry sort of English sense of humour, and at the speed is going you don't always get the joke until it is too late. I really appreciate someone being able to spice up his talk like that...

Anyway, my talk is tomorrow so I should get some sleep. I'll upload some pictures for those who care.

FOSDEM FOSDEM is great. I'm seeing lots people I got to know in GNOME again. Went to some good talks; Havoc Pennington on freedesktop.org, and Michael Meeks going at break-neck...