Present Perfect

Boston

As water laps my feet
And sharks surround me I sleep
You smile and line up your army

Boston is really nice. It was my first day without jetlag, too bad the summit is actually over. I was hoping to ask Nat for some feedback on my second talk. I discovered he has a site (what a cool url to have ;) ) so I learned he liked my first talk. But I wanted to know about the second - I was soooo tired and I don't really know what people got out of it. I know what I got out of it though - I want to get people together to design the player, and I actually have some ideas for it that might actually work. Let's find out !

Amy and Ben are really really nice people. They didn't know me at all and they just include me in their life while I'm here without reservations. I'm not sure if I see Belgian people do that quite as easily. I hope I can repay the favour someday.

Note to self : list of stuff I need to consider getting when I get back.

--> Playstation 2 with SSX and Metal Gear Solid 2 and GTA3
--> Surround Sound
--> Wavelan

I met Dan, who's a cool Venezuelan guy who also works at Ximian, and he was a great guy to meet. Really funny; we kept going on about this bit in the video of SSX (the snowboarding game) where some of the makers say that every stunt in the game is actually realistic. And when we played it and did some incredibly unbelievable stuff, we'd say : "I could totally do that in real life. In fact, I did yesterday". So I had fun last night just hanging out in a typical American high-tech living room.

Guadec

jdub dragged me into the Guadec prep talk. I'm sooo looking forward to that. I had fun at the last Guadec, and being here at the Gnome summit was an unexpected treat, and I feel I'm getting sucked in more and more into this Gnome thing. So yeah, this sort of thing actually works ;)

I think, actually, that this whole Gnome involvement thing I'm growing in right now is like the perfect grass-roots replacement for my boy scouts life I had given up on last year.

Boston As water laps my feet And sharks surround me I sleep You smile and line up your army Boston is really nice. It was my first day without jetlag,...

Insomnia

Got to sleep at 1, woke up at 4 and unable to sleep anymore. After an hour I gave up and worked on my talk some more. Good thing I did. I'm so sleep-deprived I have a hard time concentrating, so I had to add some stuff I would otherwise forget.

I had promised the Vorbis guys to help out with making RPMs. They're releasing today. They were going to release later this day, after my talk, but they moved the release point sooner, so I started frantically rechecking packages and stuff. I was trying to move libvorbisfile and libvorbisenc to separate packages, so that you could actually get them to parallel-install, but it failed. The reason is very simple : libvorbis now contains libvorbis.so.0, libvorbisfile.so.0, libvorbisenc.so.0. The new release has libvorbis staying at 0, but -file and -enc going up a few. So, since the libvorbis rpm contains all three .0 so's, and a new libvorbis rpm would contain libvorbis.so.0 and two other-numbered .so's, you can't parallel-install them. Splitting off the two latter so's doesn't help either, because you have to upgrade the base libvorbis package anyway, removing the core libvorbis.so.

This might have been different if the libvorbis so version got increased as well, or the original package for libvorbis was split out too, but right now there's no way around it. I made the final RPM's and put them online, hope they work, because I can't test them at this point. I'm due for a talk ;)

Insomnia Got to sleep at 1, woke up at 4 and unable to sleep anymore. After an hour I gave up and worked on my talk some more. Good thing...

Boston

Did my first talk, it went ok considering it's been six years ago since I did a talk, I wrote it yesterday on the plane, I slept too little, and I woke up with an incredible headache. I was probably so over-stressed that all stress left my body. Sort of like diving in very cold shark-infested water from a fourty-meter-high ledge wrapped in barbed wire.

I put up my slides, as well as the xml examples I used, and the template gst-app tarball up on our website at http://gstreamer.net/slides/boston/. Please get the tarball, try it out and start developing apps. We need you.

On to prepare for the second one. This one actually already has some stuff in it, but I need to get a power plug for my laptop really soon so I can work on it.

Boston Did my first talk, it went ok considering it's been six years ago since I did a talk, I wrote it yesterday on the plane, I slept too little,...

The Good

I'm in Boston. Boston is great. I'm in a fantastic apartment with two very friendly people. Thank you Benjamin and Amy. And I'm typing this from my bed, for the first time I've been able to make use of the wavelan card in my laptop.

The Bad

It's 7 AM. I woke up at 4 AM with an amazingly brutal headache. Luckily I was smart enough to bring something with me to take. Now I'm just a bit dulled out, half-sleepy (my clock thinks it's 1 PM), and with a light buzz. I should probably take something again.

The Ugly

My talk is due at noon today. I still need to finish the last bit. I won't be able to rehearse it, so I'll just fly into it with my eyes closed.

It's great to be here :-)

The Good I'm in Boston. Boston is great. I'm in a fantastic apartment with two very friendly people. Thank you Benjamin and Amy. And I'm typing this from my bed,...

Ogg/Vorbis

Someone from Vorbis who also hangs out in #gstreamer asked me if I could do RPM's for the 1.0 release. So I spent this weekend massaging the builds and trying to get good packages that are easy to install.

It's not entirely possible to get right. First of all, Vorbis used the naming scheme for release candidates that I dislike. Second, Red Hat used that name in the version, which I consider a mistake. The packages are named as follows: libvorbis-1.0rc3-1.*.rpm. This means that you cannot convince rpm that the new libvorbis-1.0-1.*.rpm RPMS are newer, unless you use the dirtiest trick in the rpm book : Epochs. And Ximian followed their example (it probably wasn't easy anyway to do it differently).

So if you use Epochs, your specs are always forced to use them, since any package with an Epoch is considered newer than one without.

So now they upgrade from the previous ones. But - there are RPM's out there that specifically state they require libvorbis >= 1.0rc3, which is an even bigger problem. At GStreamer we made the same mistake, and xmms from Ximian also depends on it this way. The thing is that rpm at that point doesn't know that libvorbis-1.0 has an Epoch: that is bigger than the libvorbis-1.0rc3 one in the case where that second one isn't installed.

So then you pull some dirty tricks (that are supposed to work, and seemed to, for me), to make rpm believe that this new RPM actually provides libvorbis = 1.0rc3, and the same for the betas.

Then I ran into the kicker problem - since libvorbisfile and libvorbisenc had their CURRENT lib version increased, but libvorbis hasn't, my Ximian xmms package complains about libvorbisfile.so.0 being needed when I want to upgrade. There's no easy way around this at all.

The packages could have been parallel-installable, if libvorbis.so had also had a CURRENT version increase, but it hasn't. So installing both packages will have conflicts.

So I'm currently wondering about asking the vorbis guys to also increase the CURRENT version, or putting vorbisfile and vorbisenc in a separate package. For that I had better ask what the debian maintainer is doing.

Luckily, the 1.0 release has been delayed a little due to last-minute spec additions. That's a good thing - the 1.0 release will come with full specs !

So, hat off to the excellent Ogg Vorbis developers, especially to Monty !

Boston

I still can't believe this is actually for real. I'm going to Boston tomorrow !The Gnome guys wanted some people from GStreamer at the Boston Summit. Originally, Nat Friedman asked for Erik, since it's his project. Erik can't make it, so he recommended me. And now Ximian is flying me over to do a presentation on developing with GStreamer, and a workshop on building a Gnome Media Player.

I'm not entirely sure I'm the right man for the job, and it's such short notice that I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the presentation done properly, but I'll sure give it my best. It's exciting, since I haven't been to the US before. And I sure want to see MIT and Ximian.

It was hell getting it all arranged - confirmation from Nat, getting airplane tickets (The funny thing is that Belgium has a new private airliner, which flies only to NY, Boston and LA, and the flights are pretty cheap at 280 EURO round-trip, but the kicker is they don't fly on Wednesday, which is when I'm going), getting my international passport arranged (I should be able to collect it tomorrow morning, if not then I can't leave), arranging work stuff, and so on.

But everything is set, and the only possible problem is my passport. Hope it works out ;)

gst-editor

wingo has done some very nice work on the editor. It's actually usable again and I'm considering shoehorning it into the talk. You can now save and load pipelines, connect and disconnect, and stuff just plays. Really sweet.

Wingo is also coming to the Gnome summit, so I get to meet him for real. I'm also going to see dobey, meet lots of other Ximian people I've heard about, and see some people again from Guadec, like jdub (with pants), and Luis, the bugmeister.

Ellen

Happy birthday to my girlfriend. I hope she likes the presents I got her, since I liked hers for my birthday.

Ogg/Vorbis Someone from Vorbis who also hangs out in #gstreamer asked me if I could do RPM's for the 1.0 release. So I spent this weekend massaging the builds and...