Present Perfect

GStreamer

It's incredible ! We got it out of the door, our 0.6.0 release. This is the one going into Gnome 2.2, and hopefully Red Hat 8.1. I'm psyched, I hope we didn't drop the ball on any part.

I'm glad we got this far. There were some last-minute problems, as always; Wim snuck in an ABI change which he felt needed to be made now, but in doing so introduced a few sneaky bugs. We've worked them out, but it came in handy that Gnome 2.2 had been pushed back one week as well.

I should also start preparing my FOSDEM talk. Some people I don't even know have mailed me saying they're going to attend, which is nice... I'll also be having some guests over for the weekend, I need to figure out where to take them during the weekend :)

GStreamer got selected in this month's Linux Format (the print version). I bought it especially to see that. They were very keen on the editor.

Fedora

Warren has gotten the server together and installed some vserver thingies. I tried out mach on it and it worked after some tweaking to not make it use bind mounts.

Last Thursday, I had to work late because we were having a planned power outage. A perfect opportunity to create GPG keys for Fedora and sign each other's keys.

We ended up calling each other, putting up signature files on various servers, reading out public code, and so on... I felt like a little boy in a treehouse writing secret code messages to fool the girls.

But, on the plus side, I know have validated and signed GPG keys. On to the packages !

Red Shoe Tea Party

Last weekend a few friends of ours threw a tea party. Seeing as they had just laid new carpet, they asked everyone to wear red socks and take off their shoes. We had a really good time, which prompted me to reconsider my division of free time :) I should really make effort to hang out with friends more than I used to in the past. I always am happy when I do.

Bought a great game to play there, too. It's a German game, and apparently it's all the rage too. The Catan Colonists, it's called.

De Nachten

Went to De Nachten festival to see Arab Strap play, finally. Pretty good, though as a two-piece the bad singing tends to get in the way of a good performance. It's the first time I saw them, and I had pictured the singer totally different. Aidain striked me as a cross between Hadess and Michael Meeks.

There is something wrong though with my world view if I start comparing my rock stars to hackers I know. I'm pretty sure I should be doing it the other way around.

Work

Well, I got promoted. I guess this means I'm something akin to CTO now. This sounds better than it is I think. For example, yesterday all of Belgium was miraculously snowed under. I drove for an hour and a half to work, while normally it only takes half an hour. And when I arrived, I found out I had to return to the exact same place I came from because the radio antenna was out of commission due to snow covering up the dish.

And today, I had to do the same in another town, and when I arrived, it had just started raining gently, so the snow had already melted from the dish. Got out on a perfectly good saturday night for no good reason.

GStreamer It's incredible ! We got it out of the door, our 0.6.0 release. This is the one going into Gnome 2.2, and hopefully Red Hat 8.1. I'm psyched, I...

Phoebe

I installed Red Hat's beta on my home machine yesterday. For some reason it was thrilling to see the installer install packages like gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins and nautilus-media. Nautilus-media apparently made it into the base packages. That was pretty cool to see. Also, it just worked out of the box. Terrific ! Exciting times are ahead.

Started Rhythmbox as well, it failed parsing my GConf audiosink pipeline. I remember having made a patch for it in the past, made a note to myself to discuss it with jorn and have it integrated. That mental note lasted for about half a day because, on coming home, I read his mail about GStreamer's "stability".

It's his decision, but it's still sad, after trying out Phoebe, to know that given his decision Rhythmbox probably won't end up in Red Hat 8.1

I sent a mail about it, replying to his mail and using "Reply to all", and the mail got bounced back to me because gst-devel@lists.sourceforge.net doesn't exist. Of course, it's gstreamer-lists. The bittersweet irony of life : the mail I sent pointing out communication problems and there not being enough, and it bounced because Jorn used a wrong address for the GStreamer list :)

GStreamer

As for GStreamer, exciting times are ahead. Wim is pretty much done with the cothreadless scheduler. I still want to add two small bits to the plugins that would help nautilus-media along. I hope we can release 0.6.0 about a week before Gnome 2 final. We did an important API change (but this time, with a compatibility header, yay !) that will help along API bindings and which was long overdue. Good to know that after all this time, stuff still keeps moving along.

libuecp

At work, I'm laying the finishing touch on the library I wrote to speak binary to our RDS encoders. I don't think it matters much but I'm going to get it open-sourced anyway. Not sure if people will be able to use it, but you never know. I also wrapped it with SWIG so I can use it from the application I've already written. Now I just need to test it.

Tango

Got the two books and the "Tango Lesson" DVD I ordered from Amazon. My best friend's girlfriend asked if I wanted to teach her some bits, and she's actually pretty good at it. I hope she takes classes, gives me more people to dance with :)

Food

On Saturday, we got invited by Jeroen, our first Dave/Dina customer. We had a good time, discussed ideas for starting up a company, and talked well into the night. I had forgotten how good it is to just hang out with friends. I should be doing more of that.

Then yesterday, we did the same somewhere else; a dinner meeting that had been postponed too many times to count. For some reason we actually started talking about Linux because they were interested in what it was about. I got carried away talking about it and explaining stuff, and for some reason they didn't mind at all. The times they are changing indeed.

Hearts

that are broken can argue about the silliest of things without either really wanting to. But if they don't want to, how can they avoid it happening in the first place ? I'm sorry.

Phoebe I installed Red Hat's beta on my home machine yesterday. For some reason it was thrilling to see the installer install packages like gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins and nautilus-media. Nautilus-media apparently...

complaints

I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring.

alsa

While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used alsa as an example for a special-case numbering. I probably got the idea from dobey I think. To avoid silly names in versions, like "rc", "alpha", "beta", we'll subvert the spec file release number to indicate part of the version.

For example, alsa 0.9.0 rc6 would be specced as alsa-libs-0.9.0-0.18.fedora.1, where 0.9.0 is alsa's version, the 0 means it's not a final release, and 18 is the number of release iterations made up to that point. Why 18 ? 12 beta's and 6 rc's up to now. If your project goes through 12 beta's and 6 rc's over the course of almost two years, maybe you shouldn't have jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 in the first place. I don't know why people would ever think this is a good idea. The same thing, more or less, happened to xine. They jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 quite some time ago as well, "because we're almost ready".

So I check the xine download page today, and what do I see ? xine-lib-1.beta2.tar.gz, and it works with xine-ui-0.9.17.tar.gz Sigh :-)

cvs

I was trying to integrate ffmpeg's cvs into gst-plugins' build. The FFmpeg guys told me that they thought it was better to cut'n'paste code for libavcodec for now instead of linking to the .so

So I wrote an .m4 to check out/update ffmpeg code at configure time if gst-plugins is in cvs mode. So my idea went something like this :

• choose a date tag to indicate what version of FFmpeg cvs to use
• create a Tag file in the dir where ffmpeg is checked out under
• if this Tag file differs from the Tag file in ffmpeg/CVS, the code needs an update, so update to the base Tag file.

Now, the Tag file contains one line like this: D2002.12.14.12.00.00 So, I thought, cvs takes just about any sort of argument to -D, including a lot I would never use, like "tea time", "a fortnight ago", "last year". So you would expect cvs to be able to take -`cat Tag` and parse it's own format, no ?

Of course, sadly, cvs doesn't parse it's own Tag date format:

 [thomas@thocra ffmpeg]$ cvs update -D2002.12.14.12.00.00 cvs [update aborted]: Can't parse date/time: 2002.12.14.12.00.00 

So I'm stuck specifying the same date twice: once in the Tag file, and once in the .m4 macro.

life

I never seem to be able to do right by people I want to do right by.

sit on a plane, reading a book
same damn planet every time I look
all I am is a body floating downwind

complaints I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring. alsa While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used...

Dave/Dina

Kristof has done some cool work on the VCR parsing side. I just scheduled a recording of Dark Angel for tomorrow, and it looks like it'll work ok. I packaged about 10 perl modules that it needs to RPM's, will drop them online as well too. Jeroen will be pleased to see the vcr thingy.

As for CD's, we now have about 400 in the system. I've gone through pretty much of all of my own CD's now. What next ?

nautilus-media

made it into Phoebe, the new Red Hat beta. That is pretty cool but pretty scary as well. Need to work on it some more very soon. Going to install Phoebe soon on my home machine to test if it works well.

people

mglazer : yes it could. It could happen to you.

ankh : Tango doesn't allow barefoot dancing. After reading your answer I realized that you were the person sitting next to me barefooted during one of the talks at GUAD3C :) Are you always barefooted ?

coding

At work I'm now working on a code-only project : a library to implement the SBU-490 UECP protocol, which is a binary communication protocol for RDS encoders. It is great to put everything I've learned in practice on a well-written spec and have code come out looking pretty... It's not overly hard, and it ends up looking like really nice code, with the right set of abstractions.

If you do radio work and you're interested, drop me a line.

family

My mother is weird. She needed to rack up expenses for her tax deduction. So she wanted my advice on a laptop, and she took me into town to buy one. We ended up getting an Acer Travelmate for her (which is a tablet pc, and it only comes with a QWERTY keyboard but we use AZERTY over here. She selected it solely on the property that it fit into her bag), a Compaq Presario for my sister (which means I probably get her old one, which was my fourth PC, and will be nice in our kitchen :)), two radio CD players (for her and for my sister), a VCR (for my sister), and a small TV (for her kitchen).

Then she went out to get a new mobile for my sister as well, and I jokingly said that mine was old, and she got another one for me. I was stupefied. Then after seeing the holes in my coat, she took me to the clothes shop, and asked me to pick a coat. I picked one, she liked it, I did too, but it didn't have a hood, so she told me to pick another one with a hood, and she bought both. While waiting in line at the checkout queue she also asked me to get a shirt and a sweater. I think we were in there for all of 3 minutes.

I think I know where I got my bouts of compulsive consumerism from.

Sadly, when going home my car broke down. After two hours of wrestling with it I dumped it somewhere on a parking lot, need to figure out what to do next.

holidays

I'm not particularly fond of them. I like the opportunity to see my family once in a while though. My cousin, who now lives in London, asked if I or any friends of mine had good business ideas, because his hobby is now "hunting for VC capital". Maybe I should take him up on it :) If you have good ideas, let him know.

Dave/Dina Kristof has done some cool work on the VCR parsing side. I just scheduled a recording of Dark Angel for tomorrow, and it looks like it'll work ok. I...

Dave/Dina

It's incredible - Jeroen likes his Dave/Dina system. He's sending mails every few days about suggestions and problems and so on. That rocks. Making stuff can be fun; making stuff that gets used is rewarding. There's a pretty big difference between the two and I like it.

Kristof worked on the video recording backend some more. It's starting to look really good. In the screenshot, you see descriptions of the show, plus icons to schedule recording this show once, every week, or daily.

Needs some polish, but Jeroen is going to love it ...

GStreamer

The 0.5.0 release was actually rather good, even without as much testing. It's funny how much people resist change - people get all confused about having a "development" and a "stable" version even though it's been talked about for months. I see the same behaviour in myself, though it's more of a mechanism to not have to put time and effort in things that can be avoided.

When I started out with Linux everything was new to me and things went by quickly. After some years you come to realize how much time things take regardless of what it is you do.

Work

Busy designing our i-mode website. i-mode seems to be the replacement for wap and has taken over Japan by storm, I've been told. Not sure if it's going to work over here, but it's fun doing something different for a while.

On the other hand, i-mode websites are like websites halfway through the nineties. 256 color at the moment (but of course with a different color palette than websafe colors, duh), no tables, and so on. I feel old-school.

Apparently a health inspector stopped by yesterday. The first thing he noticed was a Destiny's Child poster attached to my network cabinet. He seems to have said the poster might be deemed "offensive". Somehow I think this is very funny ;) I work at a radio station, the poster promotes their latest album, and Kristien from right across me has pictures of A1 and perfume commercials portraying men, but my very work-related poster is offensive and might induce sexual intimidation.

I asked our secretary to arrange his next visit on a day when I am at work so I can discuss his concerns. That ought to be fun.

Playstation

Funny how I haven't played any major game over the last three years (except for Metal Gear Solid, bought on a whim when it came out), and now I find myself playing quite a bit on the Playstation. What is striking is that it shows that the world does progress, technically speaking. If you leave any technology alone and don't see it for a few years, you're bound to be surprised when you pick it up again.

For example, the faces in the Getaway look really good. This was one of my major gripes with Metal Gear Solid - it all looked really good but the faces were ugly bumpmapped affairs that stuck on. It was as if everyone was wearing mountain-scape masks.

I haven't even finished GTA: Vice City yet, and Kristof is already on to the next game. He seems to like being unemployed a lot. I'm partly jealous. As for GTA, got to Vigilante level 93 using a tank. I got busted when I got cornered by three other tanks. I must have tried doing Vigilante with a regular police car a hundred of times, only getting to level 10. Should've realized this earlier...

Music

Had four consecutive nights of concerts. It would have been five if I hadn't forgotten to wind my watch's day dial at the end of November, so I missed JJ72. I'm too unorganized.
Thursday, I went to see Mambo Kurt. He's an oldish German guy who plays old classics and current pop tunes on his Hammond organ, and mainly making a fool of himself in a good way. Did an amazing version of both The Cure's Killing an Arab (you have to imagine it with a techno-y chorus) and Faithless's Insomnia.
Friday was Arid, a band from Gent. I've seen them over ten times, and each time they amaze me at how well they play and how good Jasper's voice is. Other than that no, big surprises, except at the very end when they played "Last Goodbye". That's probably the closest I'll ever come to having a Buckley experience.
Saturday I went to see The Gotan Project. Good concert, too short though, and no place for dancing, sadly. Before the concert we cooked some great rice tortillas with red cauliflower from the Mexican cookbook. It was wonderful. One of the best things about cooking is the day after: great food, zero effort.
And on sunday, it was Richard Ashcroft from the Verve. Started the concert with my second favourite, Sonnet. Liked the concert for it's craftmanship. I only have his new album and I already lost it so I wasn't able to listen to it beforehand.

Life

Got a haircut, not sure if I like it. It's weird having to go back to a barber's after such a long time. Got new shoes, not sure if I'll like them. I'm walking them in today. The funny thing is I wanted shoes that were better for dancing, but at the store I realized I didn't really know what that meant. And it's not like you can ask the girl in the store to dance to try out the new shoes, can you ?
Tried doing Christmas shopping over the weekend, failed spectacularly. Started reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Why I never picked up on it before is beyond me. I wonder what it'll be like. Right now it feels like I'm a Rebel pilot reading Stormtrooper diaries.

Xander and Anya not getting married ? Boo ! I need TV to tell me the world is a safe and romantic place. I feel cheated.

Dave/Dina It's incredible - Jeroen likes his Dave/Dina system. He's sending mails every few days about suggestions and problems and so on. That rocks. Making stuff can be fun; making...