Present Perfect

Dave/Dina

I took a week off from work this week to clean up bits of my life and work on Dave/Dina. I've made some excellent progress - I was able to take apart large chunks of Anaconda (the red hat installer), and replace text, images, and functionality. It's my first experience with python, don't know yet what to make of it.

Red Hat also has some scripts included with Anaconda, which I only realized halfway through creating my own. So I switched and started customizing those. They generate all of the boot disk images, cd boot images, and so on by themselves, based on the RPMs in the distribution dir. Basically, the whole process bootstraps itself, which is pretty impressive.

Meanwhile, I also switched to Red Hat 7.3 packages as a base, and reworked the kernel packages, to include a kernel-BOOT rpm which also has the right banner. As I understand Red Hat's policy, they want you to remove all references to Red Hat from your custom distribution so as to not reflect bad on their name. I can understand that, of course, but you have to know this stuff, otherwise you'd think they WANT you to acknowledge you using their stuff.

I have run into a bit of a problem though where I get a GdkWindow error during the install, which doesn't put me in Pdb, but just reboots the machine. That's nasty. So I started adding debug code all over the place to at least get some feedback. I wish I could make these errors non-critical, the way you can for glib, so that at least I can get some sense of where it's at.

I've also resolved myself to using VMware to simulate the install. It is a LOT faster then using a real machine. Basically, you connect the bootnet.img to the floppy drive, which alone saves you a minute in loading time each try.

I'm doing all of this because a friend of mine bought all the parts for his own machine, so I'm guilt-forced into finishing parts of this up. That's great, I needed this kick in the butt. I hope having an actual .iso image that can be installed might get some attention and bring in new people so we can actually start working on planning and implementing some of the features better.

I find it amazing how much you can learn over time. There' s stuff I do today on this project that I wouldn't have dreamt possible last year. It's also fantastic how stuff you do on other projects helps you immensely, and how much you can actually draw from your own experience.

For example, using bitches, the RPM build tool I wrote for GStreamer, helps me so much in Dave/Dina as well. It's simply amazing how much time this sort of thing saves me.

The reverse of this is also true: when I look at scripts I wrote five years ago, or code for my thesis, I'm ashamed ;) So the big question is : What will I think five years from now about stuff I did today ?

GStreamer

Slowly gearing up for a 0.4.1 release. Doing lots of bug fixes. I'm personally concentrating on <hype word>Out-of-box experience</hype word> for end users. There are some really simple-to-fix bugs for first installs which all of us never encounter since we all have GStreamer on our machines since ages. They're embarassing, but very educating to go through. Every project should do this.

wlach, thanks for the good words on my presentation. The latency issues during that demo are totally normal, however. Maybe I didn't make that point clear enough back then. Suffice it to say that GStreamer has everything you need to control latency the way you want it to. Latency is an often misunderstood issue. The demo didn't have any sort of latency control at all. It just sent out data each time the device was able to receive. There was no sort of buffering at all.

Basically, it's always a tradeoff between "hiccups" or underflow and buffering. Increase the buffering and you decrease the risk of underflow. Of course, increasing the buffering can be bad for your responsiveness, unless you take measures. These are all application-level decisions. GStreamer provides stuff to be able to do this, but doesn't enforce any kind of policy on that topic.

So the demo was basically bufferless. It was GStreamer in it's raw mode. I could have added a buffer in the pipeline, but I was just too lazy.

Pukkelpop

Going to the Pukkelpop festival today. Great stuff - going to see a bunch of good bands, including the Breeders, And You Will Know us by the Trail of Dead, Jimmy Eat World, Promise Ring, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and more. Even Guns 'n Roses are supposed to appear !

I wish I had applied for an interview with the Breeders sooner. As I said before, Kim Deal is just too damn sexy. Hope I'll get to meet her today if I get there.

Dave/Dina I took a week off from work this week to clean up bits of my life and work on Dave/Dina. I've made some excellent progress - I was able...

Gnome Stuff

Today I wanted to check out the development version of the Gimp, because I want to try and move as much of the applications I use to the sweet Gnome 2 look. So I dove into garnome again and made the gimp target (without allowing it to build it's dependencies, since I already have those). I checked my Applications menu, and there was an entry there ! Tried it, looks very sweet, a lot better-looking than gimp 1.2. Anyway, I proceeded to drag the entry in the menu to the panel, but it refused.

So I right-clicked on it in the menu, and got an error instead of an option menu. This puzzled me, so I looked for the .desktop file and noticed that the gimp.desktop file was a symlink, and none of the others were. So I thought to myself, this should be an easy bug to fix...

So I went through some of the stages of being a good Gnome developer :

• Check bugzilla - couldn't find any bug referring to symbolic links in gnome-panel
• Check gnome-panel source code - noticed that the error dialog popping up is the result of a call to gnome_desktop_item_new_from_uri
• Tried to use the LXR browser at Gnome's developer site, but noticed that it wasn't providing me with any results
• Checked out gnome-desktop, which seemed to contain that function
• Saw a Gnome-VFS function call that actually seemed to open the file, so checked API docs to see what the options were
• Added an extra argument to the opener indicating that symlinks should be followed
• compiled, reinstalled, restarted gnome-panel

Yay, that worked ! I could drag a launcher to the panel.

It all went downhill from there ;) I checked out the CVS version of gnome-desktop and noticed that the fix I put in was already there ! So I went through the changelog and noticed that Jacob Berkman fixed my bug a month ago. I read through that bug report - it apparently took some time to figure out where the bug was hiding. Well, no patch from me then ;)

So what did I learn from this ?

• Doing bug reports is really helpful in any case
• Some bugs are really easy to fix, and it is worth a fragment of my time to at least investigate if it could be an easy fix or not instead of working around it
• I need to spend more time using Gnome's Bugzilla to actually figure out if the bug I have is already reported or fixed
• I learnt some more of Gnome's internals
• I might have what it takes to actually fix system bugs in a desktop environment.

Best thirty minutes I spent this week in any case !

Vorbis 1.0

chipx86 : There are indeed problems with the vorbis 1.0 packages, as I mentioned before here. I have had some suggestions from people on how to fix them, and they're worthwhile avenues. The question is if it's actually worth the effort in trying to implement this temporary solution before major distros catch up and rebuild depending apps. I might need prodding if you feel this is the case.

Gnome Stuff Today I wanted to check out the development version of the Gimp, because I want to try and move as much of the applications I use to the...

Life

It's been three days of highs and lows. The sort of stuff that makes life worth living.

Work

I got treated like a kid by my boss at work. At one point he actually told me to shut up because he didn't want to hear about it anymore.

The thing is, it was because I was supposed to program something on a hardware device, which he thought was possible, and which I confirmed with the manufacturer to be impossible. So I tried other ways, but none would work or they'd be very ugly hacks that would fail in lots of other ways. My mistake was that I didn't call him up directly to let him know.

He was very mad because, from his side, he figured my job was to come up with a plan to do what he wanted done, whatever the cost. In his mind he needed a fix for this problem very soon, but since he left me out of the loop on all of that, not telling me how important this is and all, I made the wrong call and continued work on other urgent matters.

So really, the only thing I can come up with I did wrong is I forgot to call him soon enough. He had no call in lashing out like that; he uses me too much like a band-aid he applies when he sees no other way out.

Maybe that's a sign that I should start considering options. I don't get paid enough to be treated like this. The reason I'm doing this job is because it happened to be challenging and I got the respect I deserved for the job I did. If those reasons are gone, then the sub-par pay isn't going to cut it.

Vorbis

Later on in the night, just before going to bed, I see someone dropping in in the #vorbis channel and complaining very whiningly about them. Bear in mind, it's the first person dropping in experiencing the problem he has, but he assures us that he has tried helping a lot of people with the same problem. Now, the problem is that the rpm's I made pick up an alsa library dependency. I provide RPM's for that at the GStreamer apt repository, as I explained in the readme I put up with the RPM's. The readme never made it onto vorbis.com, and I suppose that would've helped this guy complaining.

In any case, he was very abusive to me, told me I didn't care about users at all, without knowing me, and taking it way too far. He got me really mad, and I went to bed being angry about how people sometimes treat you like shit for the work you do voluntarily. Now, this guy pays me even less than my boss, so I'm going to ignore him in the future.

Wedding

Yesterday, one of my close friends got married. They asked me to read in the service, even when knowing about my track record for being late. I was on time ;) Everything went great - the wedding ceremony was good, the party was excellent. For those that were there or just plain curious, there are pictures. We danced all night long, and it was a rare treat to be among friends and just have a lot of fun. It had been some time since I had such a good time.

Lazy Sunday

Today was the perfect lazy sunday afternoon. Got up really late, uploaded pictures, rented a great movie, Speaking Of Sex (which rates an undeserved 4.9 at this point). It was hilarious and very whacky.

My girlfriend made excellent burrito's (she's the best cook), and all day long everyone was playing SSX Tricky on the Playstation, yelling and shouting and just having a good time. See, you can play these games with a lot of people without ending up in arguments...

Life It's been three days of highs and lows. The sort of stuff that makes life worth living. Work I got treated like a kid by my boss at work....

Broadcast

The broadcasts from the beach are finally going well from a technical point of view. I was able to set up the synchronization using our vendor's software by setting up an SMB connection over an SSH tunnel over ADSL, then reoffering those shares on the internal network using samba. This way it provides a more stable connection apparently for the pain inflicted by the synchronisation application from our vendor, which only works with drive letters.

In any case, it seems to be working. So my Boston experience has finally been rounded off OK.

Boston

My pictures of Boston are online. Mostly people shots, not all of them sharp. I need to learn to be an asshole and just use flash regardless of people's opinions.

Car

Finally got round to getting insurance and license plates. GQY-739, that's me. Now mulling over what to get airbrushed on it : a linux penguin, a ximian monkey, or a GStreamer logo ?

Playstation 2

I caved and bought a Playstation 2 yesterday. It's great fun. I also bought a second controller and SSX Tricky, because it was so much fun to play it in Boston, and I was hoping my girlfriend would also like playing it. Well, she did ;) She beat me in the race first time she played, damnit.

It is a nice change of pace to have a game machine that "just works" and plays stuff without having to boot, configure drivers, mess around, and so on. Yes it is closed source and all, but sometimes this is all you need. My last console was a Atari VCS 2600 so I'm entitled to a new one, right ? Right ?

And Spiderman is amazingly cool - webslinging through NYC just looks so nice.

Hope my hacking stuff won't wane too much in the next week.

Funny

Someone from XMMS got an e-mail trying to sell him the oggfiles.com domain. His first and second reaction ;)

Broadcast The broadcasts from the beach are finally going well from a technical point of view. I was able to set up the synchronization using our vendor's software by setting...

Intro

I gotta rush away she said
I've been to Boston before
And anyway this change I've been feeling
Doesn't make the rain fall

Boston

Back from the Gnome summit. It was great. In the end jetlag got the best of me, and I didn't do as much as I would've liked. I found a nice picture of myself on Nat's site. Nat invited Ben, Amy and me over for Crazy Hat Night (you go out wearing a silly hat, apparently the Bostonians aren't used to this). I had a very surreal conversation with Nat on his balcony. I was asking stuff about Ximian and how they were doing and what the goals were, and how GStreamer fit in and how Nat thought GStreamer would be taking over the world if we did it right.

The surreal thing about it was he was wearing a chef's hat while I was wearing a very fetching but large black hat. Imagine taking over the world dressed in hats like that. Hm. Actually, sounds like a plan. James, ready the tank. Meanwhile, Nat asked me if I wanted to go to Istanbul to do talks. Hm...

The next day, Ben and Amy had planned on taking me to the harbor, but the night before we had stayed up too late with the Playstation at the ready. So we ended up quickly going to the Virgin Megastore and a small record store (ended up buying an album by Arab Strap I didn't find yet in Belgium, as well as a Black Box Recorder record). I thought that was OK, I was too tired anyway. And now I have an excuse to go back someday ;)

Left a book under my pillow for my hosts - "Written on the Body" by Jeanette Winterson. Recommended. Ben and Amy then took me to a place with vegetarian food and I got a Cosmic Burrito and a grape - pineapple - lemon juice, because I thought it would taste nice. Amy noted very truely that it was a GPL drink. I wonder if they would have given me the recipe. Oh wait, the name is the recipe.

Plane back sucked. Post-fun depression set in as effects of extensive jetlag took it's toll. Started working a little on a gnome media player app UI though.

Landed this morning around nine, went home and took a shower, then went straight to work. We're broadcasting from the beach for three weeks, today was day one and the server synchronisation still needed to be set up. These are Win2K and NT servers, and the software vendor reckoned we should just "make the drive letter from our office available over ADSL to the location". Uh-uh. I wish I had stood my ground before leaving and insisted on my solution : setting up a Linux machine at the location with samba on it and have it rsync over ssh from the office.

Found no good way to do it securely because of tiredness maybe, so I installed cygwin on it. Pretty nice ! Five minutes of downloading and I had a shell that could do rsync and ssh on a Windows machine. I actually might at times consider using Windows again with this.

Work starts feeling bad and stale at times. More and more I feel I just want to be working on free software, period. Will have to start considering options for that. Have Wavelan, will code.

Wrap-up

And now I'm tired and ready for bed and wondering how all of this experience will sink in and what it is about this sort of thing that can make you feel happy and sad at the same time.

Outro

No big differences these days
Just the same old walkaways
Someday
I'm gonna stay
But not today

Intro I gotta rush away she said I've been to Boston before And anyway this change I've been feeling Doesn't make the rain fall Boston Back from the Gnome summit....