Present Perfect

Following up on a previous post, I've been writing some code to do useful things with my scrolling LED marquee.

It gave me a chance to try my hand at implementing another protocol in Twisted, and it was a pleasurable experience. I still firmly believe that Twisted's code and design combines so much knowledge about these things that I will now never have to have in my life because I can rely on it being designed properly for the task.

I got it working quite quickly, reusing some activatestate code for a feedparser, and now I have my marquee following a bunch of feeds like StackOverflow's python tags, SlashDot and VRT news.

Here is a link to the video of the marquee showing (old) news from slashdot (using Cortado to watch it), or a link to a playlist to open in a player, or a link to the Ogg file directly.

I had the original version working over the serial port, but these days a serial port is a hassle. The marquee also included a USB plug which has a built-in serial port, and it didn't work out of the box with that. After some fiddling I realized that for some reason, over USB the replies of the device (which sends 'ACK' to acknowledge) come in separate packets (sometimes two, sometimes three, one per letter). It was simple to fix in the protocol implementation, and that's where Twisted's levels of abstraction really shine - a simple fix in one location at exactly the right logical level.

Last night I added a quick and dirty hack to have it also display what song Elisa is playing. I should start worrying about managing the marquee's different pages now so that it can easily mix different information sources.

Oh yeah, the code. Not sure you'd find anything interesting there if you don't actually have a scrolling marquee, but here it is. If you have a similar device, I'd be happy to help you out get this set up and add support for it.

And if any Twisted people want to comment and help me improve my probably poorly implemented protocol, comments appreciated!

Following up on a previous post, I've been writing some code to do useful things with my scrolling LED marquee. It gave me a chance to try my hand at...

For the longest time our internal platform-4 release seemed like a classic code death march gone wrong. I took some comfort recently reading Dreaming in Code, the story of Chandler, and realized that we could have done worse. (That's actually a better book than I expected, but I'll save that for another post).

Anyway, platform-4 has been in production for a while now, but it is hard to create a definite milestone of 'now we did it' on a system that takes a while to deploy fully.

People involved in planning are optimists at heart - making a plan and trying to stick to it just isn't in a pessimist's nature because the pessimist thinks planning is a lost cause to start with. (This is just a personal opinion - obviously schedules fail for a lot of reasons in the real world - but I do believe this to be a fundamental piece of the planning and delay problem.)

platform-4 became the lightning rod for all the frustration the whole company was having. When things go bad people look for something obvious to blame, preferably something that can be named with a simple single word ('Bush' anyone ?) It's just basic human psychology. platform-4 became that thing for us.

So after deploying, I wanted to take back the word platform-4 and turn it into something good for everyone in a simple way. And what better way in a tech company to celebrate something than make a nice t-shirt ?

All the shirts have the same front (spot the 4), but a personalized back with a phrase relating their work to platform-4. Just like platform-4, the actual making of the shirts became a death march on its own. I started with some phrases, asked Arek and Aitor for help, and we spent a few weeks passing spreadsheets back and forth to decide on namings. It took a while to decide on the shirt type, the color, the front design, the fonts, and everything. Eduardo was patiently incorporating our feedback while trying to keep it on the down-low from his manager. In the end it probably took three months to do something as simple as get a few t-shirts made.

Almost all the shirts are in the picture, so I'd say people are happy with the results. Maybe you'll spot some of them at FOSDEM this year, because our whole development team is going, as well as a big chunk of our support team.

Please take a note of Xavier, our Product manager, second from the top left, who for some reason was excited to get on this blog. Sorry ladies, the man's already spoken for.

Big thanks to Arek and Aitor for coming up with phrases, Edu for the great design, and Jean-Noel for providing the funds!

For the longest time our internal platform-4 release seemed like a classic code death march gone wrong. I took some comfort recently reading Dreaming in Code, the story of Chandler,...

when a meeting with our commercial people energizes me more than a meeting with our development people.

Good to swing to the other side - now to find the balance...

when a meeting with our commercial people energizes me more than a meeting with our development people. Good to swing to the other side - now to find the balance...

... out of watching Flumotion's interface for the streamer components when a big event is going on. The platform's launching streamers all over, and as soon as a new one starts, you just see the numbers flying up. Look, another one just started, and in its first minute it went up to 280 connections, and still climbing. For a 500 kbit/sec stream that means it goes from 0 to 140 Mbit/sec on that machine just for this stream.

We jumped up in a few hours to a good 14 Gbit/sec, which is still climbing.

The event in question, of course, is one of hope for the future - Obama's inauguration - streamed with Python, Twisted, and GStreamer.

... out of watching Flumotion's interface for the streamer components when a big event is going on. The platform's launching streamers all over, and as soon as a new one...

I must admit this movie's title didn't exactly fill my heart with anticipation. Sounded like another sappy romcom. But hey, one of my 2008 New Year Resolutions that I kept for this new year is to go out and see movies, so when a friend wanted to go, so did I.

It got better reading the description, which mentioned the still-excellent Clerks as a reference point. And the rest sounded good too.

Well, I must admit I was blown away by the end. And so was the audience - I don't think I've ever heard an audience clap at a regular movie showing. I can see the Clerks reference, being shot in black and white and linking both juvenile and acid-black humor contrasting well with the actual story. The dialogue is excellent, the tempo is high, weird things happen, and you feel the connection they're making. It definitely helps that these are mostly unknown actors and that they went for a realistic style.

The description also mentioned Before Sunset, but I haven't seen that one (out of romcom fear). It did recall both Manhattan (which I didn't like that much) and Chasing Amy (which is still in my top 5). It is a rare movie that can make sex on screen look realistic or tender, and this movie pulls off both.

There's two particular things that grabbed my attention. The first is that at some point they're discussing (without mentioning the name) PostSecret, an awesome project I've been following up on for a while. Last Christmas I got some of his books, a few for me and a few to give away to some friends. PostSecret's idea is so incredibly simple yet powerful, it's one of those rare ideas I wish I had had. As an idea, just as powerful as (but awesomely more artful than) the Million dollar homepage.

The second one was the orphaned shoes bit. If it's true that lost shoes only show up alone, then yeah, taking pictures of abandoned shoes for an art website is an awesome idea. (It also speaks to my particular fascination with shoe separation, for those of you who know me personally)

So, in short, a romantic comedy that is actually funny and appeals to my sense of romance. I'm sure there's people who'll find reasons to hate this movie, but if you've liked any of the aforementioned movies, I'm sure you'll leave the theatre with just as big a grin on your face as I did.

I must admit this movie's title didn't exactly fill my heart with anticipation. Sounded like another sappy romcom. But hey, one of my 2008 New Year Resolutions that I kept...