Present Perfect

A quick one

I just had to chip in quickly on pfremy's crockery all over.

Here are a few points :

You specifically mention Nautilus 1.0 without mentioning that this is the OLD Nautilus developed by Eazel. All your points are ONLY valid about the OLD Nautilus, and even then they're skewed at best.

Why don't we compare KDE1 or KDE2 Konqueror with the Nautilus you bash ?

Yes, you are right that the original Nautilus 1.0 developers didn't put integration with the rest of GNOME high on their priority list. That is because Eazel was foremost a COMPANY trying to make MONEY on Eazel services served by Nautilus. Man, you really are comparing apples and oranges here.

You say "it is not possible to reuse parts of it". Well, ha ha ;) All code that is reusable has been abstracted out into other libraries which now are used throughout Gnome. There will ALWAYS be code in an application that is not reusable, otherwise you would have a lot of exactly similar apps by definition. So you're wrong.

You say "it is not possible to integrate external code". Well, ha ha ;) Guess what I've been doing this weekend ? nautilus-media is an example of external code that integrates into nautilus nicely. You should have picked another application to try to bash on integration issues, because Nautilus is a really good example on how to do integration nicely.

I'm afraid the one who doesn't get the Free Software spirit is you. I say this without any intention of bashing either you or KDE. As hadess points out, the code does the real talking.

KDE is a great effort, it just not fits my needs. Gnome is too, but it does fits my need. You do both KDE and Gnome a disservice by trying to instigate some sort of fight based on very skewed assumptions and giving a lot of reasons that are easily disproved. Code talks, and my code disproved your point.

By trying to throw fire on this fabled desktop war, you don't get the free software spirit a lot more than others. Please stop putting red blushes on KDE developers' cheeks. They write code, as we do for Gnome, and they have the right to criticize software.

You are not even at the stage where you can criticize Gnome as a user since you obviously didn't even try to remain objective about this.

I wanted to add a quote from the band I'm going to see play tonight : No one's interested in something you didn't do.

A quick one I just had to chip in quickly on pfremy's crockery all over. Here are a few points : You specifically mention Nautilus 1.0 without mentioning that this...

Nautilus

Set myself up to create a nautilus view for audio using GStreamer. I didn't know it would be that steep a learning curve. I'm trying to document as I go and I'm making a tarball with a test view for nautilus so that other people who want to write a view can get the autotools stuff and so on out of the way.

Back in insomnia land again, so I got up to finish it some more, and it isn't much yet, but it parses track length using GStreamer. Which is great, because it means it automatically will work for all audio that GStreamer can handle.

A preliminary screenshot is up. It doesn't look like much yet, it has no controls, and it doesn't play yet, but that will be the easy part.

Thanks to the help of snorp, I was able to also write a simple app that loads the view outside of nautilus. Helps a lot in debugging. And furthermore, I'm actually trying to get this right by writing simple test apps and abstracting bits and so on.

Maybe I'll even get to finish this one.

Time for bed now.

Nautilus Set myself up to create a nautilus view for audio using GStreamer. I didn't know it would be that steep a learning curve. I'm trying to document as I...

gcc 3.x includes

gcc 3.x by default warns about including directories that are already listed in the system include directories. A lot of projects provide .m4's which always gives out the path to the installed header by default, whether it's in a system include dir or not. I think they might be correct in doing so, since the package itself has, at install time, no way of knowing what gcc will be used. The detection of whether it's a system include dir or not can only be reasonably done at configure time. It seems pkg-config already does this, but I don't know how it does this.

Anyway, since in GStreamer we depend on lots of outside libraries, we need to take care of this. So I wrote up a little .m4 macro for Autostar Sandbox. I should really do a release of some sorts for this, even though it's a natural fit to only work on this in CVS.

In any case, the macro is simple and effective; it queries cpp for the system include dirs and removes them from the given CFLAGS. If you know of any improvements I could make, let me know. And if you

• work on a project that installs an .m4 for development
• work on a project that uses other libraries which provide CFLAGS that give warnings

try this macro out and feel free to stick it in.

(peeking ahead to the next bit) You know, if I was bytesplit, I would probably just complain, call the gcc maintainers crackheads, and wonder why on earth they didn't mail me to let me know they were planning on doing this. As it stands though I'd rather roll with the punches and think of creative ways to deal with it.

bytesplit

is living proof that there are still people who

• fail to understand basic concepts of services they use, even though they have been explained in that same service by the maintainer of that service
• easily make false conjectures about the services they use
• don't take the time to verify these assumptions
• start accusing "other people" wildly on the base of these assumptions

Bytesplit, there are some character traits I see in some of the good hackers around that are very critical if you want to be both good and social :

• understanding the thing you're working with
• not blaming everything else for what goes wrong with you or the thing you're working on (like you just did with raph)
• verify your assumptions before acting on them (makes you look like less of an ass when you act on them)
• even when you find faults or disagree with someone, tell them so in a polite way, instead of insulting both them and Mother Theresa.

I wonder why you want to be part of this community if you keep criticizing it like this. You sure you want to even be here ?

My predictions for the nearby future regarding bytesplit :

• bjf, chipx86 and maybe even me get told off for the way we try to explain him what he has done wrong this time.
• I might NOT get told off but ignored because I've said he's going to tell us off
• bytesplit will apologize in his diary (but in a clumsy "you didn't explain to me personally how this rating system works" way) to raph, realizing himself that he was wrong in a major way, but not letting it come out like that
• bytesplit will continue to post some other entries about various stuff like other people do here, being a regular contributor, and hopefully gain "open source maturity".
• rinse, repeat

Metal Gear Solid 2

Since buying this game, my housemate has hardly stopped playing it. On monday he started somewhere in the evening and stopped at six AM. Yesterday he played all day, stopping at three AM. As a testament to how good this game really is, he told me that he went to sleep not because he wanted to go to sleep, but because the game actually started pestering him about not having a social life, and playing for too damn long, and letting him know there's a world out there. I told him I thought he just hallucinated it himself, but he swears it's in there. I'm wondering if I really have to play it for ten hours straight to see this happen ?

He also said he did want to continue the game because he was at a point where he's apparently butt naked, and the game makes a point of choosing camera angles to not reveal his more private bits. I want to see that ! And I want to find out if he's pulling my leg or not ;)

gcc 3.x includes gcc 3.x by default warns about including directories that are already listed in the system include directories. A lot of projects provide .m4's which always gives out...

Sorry

For the decidedly non-technical entry, skip it if you don't like reading regular life stuff...

Metal Gear Solid 2

I got it this weekend, hoping it wouldn't affect my hacking weekend too much. Boy was I doomed. This game is sooooo pretty. And it makes so much sense from a lot of perspectives - the interface is actually pretty damn good. Once you've fumbled about a bit, it's second nature to stick to the wall, take a peek around the corner, crouch down, peek a little more to the left, draw your gun, and jump out and shoot. All using very fluid and intuitive controls. Needless to say, Sunday was pretty much wasted.

I have to say though that there are too many cut-scenes in this game. At one point I had nothing to do for half an hour.

What IS a touch of class is how at the start you get asked if you have played the game before. If you answer "yes", you play a sort of trailer to the actual game, in which you play the same guy as in the "first" game. Even the interface and the "you're dead" screens looked the same as the first game. But all of this is switched around when the "actual" game begins, very discomforting.

My housemate started the game as well, and he hadn't played the first game, and he got dropped straight into the main game. Now THAT is a touch of class for those who played the game before. Nice idea.

Chasing Amy

was on TV this weekend. I tried not looking at it, telling myself I should rent it again because it is just sooooo good. Kevin Smith is a great director, but this probably is the movie with him having the most to say. Quite literally, perhaps, as the character he plays in the movie, Silent Bob, gets the longest bit of line in any movie with Jay And Silent Bob. And the lines hit home.

So as you might have guessed, I ended up watching big chunks of it anyway. How sad. But what a great movie.

GStreamer

I should get off my ass and get some multimedia stuff going for Gnome. I have some ideas on what to do, but I want to put an effort in it and I currently don't have enough time to do it properly. Especially now that I can feel I'm really close to getting a first release of Dave/Dina out. After that I hope to focus some more on Gnome-related things.

The only thing that bugs me about GStreamer is the start-stop-development which is at the heart of any project that doesn't have full-time developers on it. Development goes more in leaps and bounds, linked to people having time to work on it. Sometimes Wim comes out with great stuff all of a sudden, I wonder how he does it. Both "how he keeps going all this good code when he has a day job" and "how can he keep all this good stuff on his own disk for so long without committing to CVS" ;) I swear, I have to commit just about every few days or I lose stuff or break my tree or whatever. I'm more an incremental kind of person.

Dentist

Here's my top five list of things I don't like about going to the dentist :

• getting an injection straight into your infected nerve
• the metal construction with the vanilla-scented stretchable piece of plastic that goes flapping madly when the air suck pipe is installed when you're getting a root canal
• the smell of things being burnt inside your mouth
• getting an injection into your gums
• getting toothstone removed from between teeth without anaesthesia with thet pointy metallic scrapy bit

I could have added "being so irritated at having to go the dentist that I forgot to take out my bank card out of the ATM machine. This experience taught me something useful about interface design - sometimes you dislike an interface because you don't understand why it's there. Case in point: I never understood why Selfbank ATM machines ask you to give your code twice, once at startup and once when actually taking out money. After actually forgetting to retract my card of the machine and stepping out with just the money, I know why. Thank you banks for being foresightful enough of my stupidity.

Tango

Our teachers had two spare tickets left for a tango concert after which they were due to perform a few dances. So we went, which was a good idea. The concert itself seemed ok, though I don't really have a frame of reference. There were a bunch of school kids there who had to go for their aesthetics class. I thought that was cool, but they obviously didn't.

Afterwards, there was a live band and we got the opportunity to dance. I get the feeling we're getting pretty good at it. You can feel you're getting decent at it because you don't have to spend half the time thinking about what to do next, and when you make a mistake, you're good at covering it up. Kind of like real life.

Par-taay

It was Peter's birthday last weekend, so he invited some friends over at our house for a party. He showed them around, showing Dave/Dina, the kitchen computer and the music boxes upstairs. They seemed impressed, always a good thing.

Peter was happy with his Atari sweater (he hasn't taken it off since) which allowed him to finally join the ranks of the cool nerd club.

Sorry For the decidedly non-technical entry, skip it if you don't like reading regular life stuff... Metal Gear Solid 2 I got it this weekend, hoping it wouldn't affect my...

Another fun week in hacking ...

Red Hat 8.0

I had managed to get some packages before the actual release, which allowed me to fix up bitches to support it. That in turn allowed me to rebuild GStreamer for Red Hat 8.0, which worked out surprisingly well. The C++ plug-ins didn't get built properly, however, and a week later I managed to figure out why : -lstdc++ wasn't added to the plug-in library flags. If someone knows why the plug-ins did manage to get built properly with previous Red hat gcc's, let me know, I'm curious.

All packages have been put in the GStreamer apt repository. It's great that a GStreamer build and set of RPMs can once again depend on a clean Red Hat install.

Send us bug reports, people !

Radio

This week, the college radio I work for started broadcasting again. The weekend before that, I had started working on a mixer program using GStreamer to replace my four year old thesis project, mpegmix. Someone led us to believe that the past week was just the test week, so I stopped working on that program during the weekend, concentrating on Red Hat 8.0 instead. Bad mistake - seems we were due to start broadcasting that Monday after all ;)

Problem was, the mixer wasn't ready at all, and we had about eight hours left to get everything ready. Everything means, in this case, software, testing of the copper line feed to the antenna, testing of the studio, and so on.

It was close, but we hacked up a simple automatic system that plays the hourly tune and commercials on time, and switches between computer and live feed. The more interesting stuff will have to wait a bit.

GStreamer

Things are progressing fairly well. wingo is going to Africa for two years, though. I'm happy for him, but for GStreamer it's too bad. He did some amazing work on the editor, I hope someone can pick that up and continue where he left off.

It's time we start discussing how to get GStreamer into Gnome. I've done some thinking on the subject, I hope my ideas go into the right direction. I should start mailing people and discussing them.

Dave/Dina

I have made some excellent progress over the last week. Due to the reasons mentioned above, however, my week off from work wasn't as productive as I had hoped it would be. For one thing, due to the installer graphics still not being finished, I couldn't work more on the installation part.

So I concentrated on going over all of the current packages, and finishing up some loose ends on the integration part. On Sunday, I re-installed the main Dave/Dina machine from scratch, then proceeded to weed out the apt tree and installing the packages one by one, working out small kinks.

It is a great feeling when you have made a system that you're able to re-install from scratch relatively painlessly. That's probably one of the bigger advantages of doing it the hard way like I am now. At least now I have a prayer of getting it to work for other people, like our very first customer who's anxious to get it to work.

On that note, a silly story - our first customer has just returned from Indonesia. He bought 30 DVD's down there, none of which looked entirely legal. So I asked him, "are you sure these DVD's play on PAL systems ?" "What's PAL ?" Oops. "They played on every TV there, and those TV's looked exactly the same as the ones over here."

Well, we tried a few in the Playstation 2, and they all turned out black and white and grainy. And yes, they were NTSC. That depressed him a little. But sure enough, playing them on Dave/Dina was alright, just like you would expect from a DVD. So now he's happy he's actually getting a Dave/Dina system.

Work

I'm at the point where I'll soon be able to do some cleanups in some of the systems I've set up. That's always good - you find problems before they happen that way, because you actually have to ask yourself - What should I do today ?. I'm not at that point yet though, so I'm anxious to get there ;)

Today, I'll just clean up all of the packages I've written that make up our radio RDS system, polish them a little, and document them, in the (probably vain) hope that someone will be able to make sense of it when I don't work there anymore.

Music

Got to see Idlewild play last week, great ! I love their new album, decent rock with good harmonies. Been playing Interpol's debut album to death lately : Turn on the bright lights. Yes, the voice and some of the music are reminiscent of Joy Division and might be derivative, but I wouldn't know since I don't know all that much about Joy Division. The music is great, dark and broody, and it really draws you in. A cathartic experience, well recommended.

Tonight, I'm going to an angel music concert : Sigur Ros. Been a long time since I saw them play, looking forward to it. I invited my favourite partner in music, Willeke.

Another fun week in hacking ... Red Hat 8.0 I had managed to get some packages before the actual release, which allowed me to fix up bitches to support it....