Present Perfect

GStreamer

GStreamer is such a cool project to be a part of. This week I discovered EffecTV on Freshmeat. This guy has a project he uses himself as a VJ, where he applies video effects onto an incoming video feed from a V4L device which he then outputs again. He has a picture of his booth and it looks pretty cool... Anyway, while the effects are cool, the scope is limited. He explains how to chain effects using v4l-loopback devices.

So this is where GStreamer shines : take the core algorithms, wrap them into a plugin and you can apply the effect to any video pipeline. You can now also easily chain effects. A few samples of the result can be seen in the news blurb on the GStreamer web site. Wim Taymans coded the basic infrastructure for porting effecTV effects into the element in a few hours, and porting an effect is a matter of minutes ;) I particulary like the agingTV effect, which adds dust, noise and scratch lines to any video, making it look old. I can already imagine jerking friends around when watching TV or movies and pushing the secret "age" button and then pretending I don't see what they're seeing ... So all we need for that to happen is to write a simple TV watching application using GStreamer.

Next on the list is to discuss with the effecTV guys how we can make their effects into a shared library that can be used by anyone. GStreamer is a project that takes the usefulness of the GPL to new levels, IMO ...

The only sad thing about GStreamer is that not enough people realize it's potential. We'll have to bring out some of the basic applications ourselves to make people realize just how far-reaching the consequences can be.

I keep saying "we", and I suppose that's a good thing. GStreamer makes me feel part of a team, even though I don't do as much coding as I should. I hope the others don't mind when I gloss over that sometimes, I don't intend to take credit for stuff they do, in any case.

apt-rpm

Since looking at Connectiva's apt port for RPM for the first time, I find myself more and more drawn to it. I'm setting up RPM mirrors at home and at work for Red Hat and Ximian, and using apt-rpm for upgrades is on the whole a lot quicker and more satisfying than using Red Carpet. This is not meant to diss Red Carpet - it's just that I might just probably not be the ideal end user of it. I can see my sister using it to great advantage though. Me, I like to go below the hood a little. GStreamer and Red-Carpet

We're currently setting up a GStreamer Red-Carpet Preview channel. It is really cool of Ximian to invite us to do this. At the moment, everything is in a private channel, where we're testing our packaging. The goal is to use this channel to offer (unsupported) GStreamer-based software. The first really good example of this is RhythmBox. It's a really nice-looking project. The goal is to have end users click on rhythmbox and have everything installed.

This is not as easy as it sounds, since GStreamer by nature consists of lots of small packages, of which a lot depend on one other supporting package. So we find ourselves rethinking our packaging strategy. Together with dobey and Uraeus, we have over the last months improved a lot of the build and packaging issues.

Now I want to take this to the next step, and build all of GStreamer's packages in a true build root, together with the supporting libraries. Taking some inspiration from the GAR system (which is used for jdub's excellent Garnome), I wanted to build a system using make to easily set up a build root environment in which you can chroot and build packages. The first part is pretty much done. You use it by doing :

 cd dist/redhat-72-i386 make root 

and off it goes. It clears the root if it can, installs a base system, installs apt for rpm, and from then on apt can do the job of installing whatever's necessary for building. Part two is how to define how to actually build packages. The nice thing will be when you use the spec file to figure out the BuildRequires and have apt-get install those for you. This is an application where apt really shines - but I suppose you debian users already knew that...

The build system itself will be available if people care to use it (drop me a line). It can be easily adapted to any RPM-based distribution with little work. So this build system will be used by us to generate clean RPM packages for all distributions we care about (it is really easy to add other distributions to this build system). It is a little ironic to be using apt-rpm to generate packages for Red-Carpet.

Music

Went to see a terrific concert last week : Grant Lee Phillips, lead singer of Grant Lee Buffalo gone solo. I wasn't sure if I would go - I used to love Grant Lee Buffalo, but I'm not sure I really like his solo work. In any case, I went, and was rewarded with a gem of a concert. It was him, his guitar, and an extra violin player. The strange thing is, he played almost all of the second album of GLB, lots of the first, and only a handful of new songs. For me, this was a treat - it made me realize how much I used to love the "Fuzzy" and "Mighty Joe Moon" albums. And the acoustic solo treatment was a very nice touch. He is such a gifted singer and guitar player - go check him out !

And in the nearby future, lots of good concerts : Six by Seven (great new album), And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (great new album), Arid ... Thinking of going to Ozzfest as well because of Tool. And looking forward to new work from Belgian bands Arid and Gorki.

GStreamer GStreamer is such a cool project to be a part of. This week I discovered EffecTV on Freshmeat. This guy has a project he uses himself as a VJ,...

GStreamer

As we agreed on at GUADEC, I set forth to make a new GStreamer release this weekend, this time without the help of Uraeus and Omega.

Overall, it went quite well, but it was very painful. GStreamer is a beast to compile. Luckily I've been forcing myself as of late to formalize the release process and that practice has been bearing fruit. The only really painful stuff left is things like

• GStreamer is big, takes long to compile
• I try to test everything : RPM installs, garnome installs, concurrent with old installs, ...
• SourceForge is pretty SLOW to work with overall when doing quick fixes
• learning how to branch properly in CVS
• People not testing prerelease tarballs, causing me to re-release already released final tarballs, which I know will bite me in the ass later.

My goal was to make a release that worked well with RhythmBox as it is at the moment, and I think I did pretty well overall. Got louie from Ximian to install it from RPM's, and it seems to work, though with some errors.

RhythmBox looks really sexy, and I have high hopes for it. It's also the best app using GStreamer at the moment. I hope it will do well.

Now that Uraeus has returned and Erik will get back soon as well we can concentrate on some of the tasks at hand, and I hope I never have to release on my own again !

Next focus points for GStreamer : setting up a Red Carpet channel, cleaning the docs, bringing the plug-ins in line with the core, and hopefully start working on decent clocking and event systems.

GStreamer As we agreed on at GUADEC, I set forth to make a new GStreamer release this weekend, this time without the help of Uraeus and Omega. Overall, it went...

Guadec

Well, I got back from GUADEC yesterday late. I hope to read some comments of other people here as well. What can I say ? I was a bit unsure of going the week before. I'm not really the kind of person to meet people I met on IRC. Hell, I never used IRC before helping out on GStreamer. Figured it was just a waste of time(°1).

You know, when I was young I used to wonder if people out there really existed, or if they were just some puppets played by a higher power just to amuse me. As soon as one of them would turn around the corner, they'd be gone and someone else would "walk by". I figured there was no way for me to tell if other people actually existed or not.

Well, being on IRC was kinda like that, and it's weird to meet people in the flesh, and see for yourself they actually do exist, in the same reality.

GUADEC itself was pretty good, overall. I heard some really good talks. Uraeus is a great guy, every project should have someone like him. He is truly wonderful at people skills and each time he gets people to do stuff in a friendly manner. He got us some great embroided GStreamer t-shirts as well, paid for out of his own pocket. He said they actually cost him more than his own trip.

Some of the other GStreamer guys were there too, and I all met them for the first time. Omega, BBB, Sienap, Wtay, hadess the french cockney (who took up ornithology). It is kind of funny though how some people you meet in real life end up being EXACTLY as you expected, and some totally opposite. Weird.

Special mention for jorn, who does stuff on Galeon and even more on Rhythmbox. I knew he was young, him still being in school, but I figured something like 18. He's 15 ! Amazing. At his age and his current level, he's got so much potential ...

My so-called anti-aliased fonts had been sucking for ages ! I went to Keith Packard's fontconfig talk (he's someone old and experienced enough to have worked on X <g>) and afterwards I asked him if I could do anything about it. And he fixed it in under half a minute ;) I have very pretty looking fonts now !. Now I just need to move over all of my favourite apps to use gnome2.

Got to meet damien, the belgian hacker who does FOSDEM and GnomeMeeting. He seems to be a really great guy. His girlfriend has an interesting taste in clothes.

Nights were spent in pool bars (where we got 3-camera footage of Uraeus trying to hit even the white ball, failing four times in a row) and Irish Pubs (out of which we got thrown at closing time). Even being there with more than fourteen people I seemed to be the only one with a basic grasp of Spanish (picked up by going to see an ex-girlfriend in Venezuela a few years ago). So I got to order all the food and stuff all the time, and talk to cab drivers.

Who else did I meet ? Kjartan, Kenneth, Hannah, chrisime, Gman the wacky Sun engineer, Martin Baulig, the black hole of all known beer in the universe, and my personal favourite : jdub, the zany australian dude who made garnome which enabled me to actually run Gnome 2 before going to GUADEC. Pants off, dude ! It is rare to meet someone with a complicated sense of humour while still having all of the bits in the right place and doing some great stuff for GNOME as well. Keep up the good work there.

I hope to meet some of all of these people again. It's kinda funny, now that I see people type things on IRC, I can actually hear them saying the words. I hope Martin will stop buy and type "zont vaste ze beer" soon.

The day after GUADEC we hooked up with the MAS guys (who are looking to write the perfect audio server, and I hope they succeed) and they listened in our code review. I realized it was actually the first time I ever talked about code with someone else. Scary thought. It was really helpful though, at the very least. We were kind of embarassed (and I would have been more so if I'd actually written bits of the code) to have to confess to a bunch of bugs while reviewing stuff. Sometimes it's surprising it works as well as it does considering ;)

Good stuff for GStreamer as well. We'll move to bugzilla, yay ! Also, Ximian is interested in having a GStreamer red-carpet channel, so we'll do that real soon as well.

So, lots of highlights (pants off, bork, picking up lonely girls in irish pubs and placing bets on who they won't be lonely with, meeting lots of people, laughing at the general silliness, and so on...) It was sad to go - I had the feeling the conference ended weird. Not really well-done, actually, it was just done and that was it. On the way back I almost missed my plane because of bad directions at the airport and the plane leaving from a different terminal then they should have.

I came home with a fresh taste for hacking though, and even though a year ago I didn't even really use Gnome much, right now I even want to try and fix some of the simpler things in my Gnome2 desktop. Hope I'll do well.

Coming back home, I started realizing how much I have come to like Linux and Gnome, to the point where I really don't want to use Windows at all anymore. I wouldn't mind doing an all-Linux job, even though my job at the radio station is great. But sometimes you need to focus instead of doing lots of stuff at once...

The best thing about coming home : sleeping, waking up, putting my feet on the couch, grabbing the remote, starting Dave/Dina, and selecting the recorded Temptation Island show. It's great that your hobby project is actually also usable. Dave/Dina is starting to work out really well. I need help on it, so join in !

°1 : it is, actually <g>

Guadec Well, I got back from GUADEC yesterday late. I hope to read some comments of other people here as well. What can I say ? I was a bit...

Just got back from GUADEC, it was my first time and it was a great one. So sad to be at home now ;)

I was going to post some more on it tomorrow, but seeing Gman's list brought a proverbial tear to my eye and it makes me wonder why he forgot to mention our sight of a Sun engineer doing releases on a roof. Pants off and bork !

Just got back from GUADEC, it was my first time and it was a great one. So sad to be at home now ;) I was going to post some...

I had the shittiest day at work ever and I don't even want to talk about it right now.

The only reason I'm writing anything is because I want to try out this new advodiary python script everyone seems to be using.

So if you're reading this I guess it worked.

I had the shittiest day at work ever and I don't even want to talk about it right now. The only reason I'm writing anything is because I want to...