Present Perfect

Woah, it's good to know people care about Fluendo. It didn't take much time after Christian's announcement on his blog for people to deluge me with questions. So let's save me some time by replying publically.

Yes - Christian, Wim and Edward are leaving as full-time employees of Fluendo. The reasons for these are many and varied, as is always the case, and I'm sure you could extract some of them with sufficient application of free beers at GUADEC :) Same goes for us. But beyond that it's between us and them. We wish them the best of luck with striking out on their own. Tim, the GStreamer bugmaster, is joining them - he was contracting part-time for us before.

Are we dropping GStreamer ? No, GStreamer 0.10 has been a success on all accounts from both sides of the fence. I think this is obvious, given that today you can go to Fluendo, Collabora, Opened Hand, and tomorrow a new company, to get consulting done on GStreamer. A lot of big companies don't even tell us anymore that they use GStreamer and want help - they just Do It (which amusingly is the result of your project being Free Software in the first place... The more consulting you do, the smaller the percentage of businesses that need consulting. The hope is that the absolute pie gets bigger because of the success of your project though. But I digress)

GStreamer is not going to suffer because of this. If anything, you should expect to see the community evolve, because sadly it is just too damn easy to not communicate enough with your community if a lot of the core developers are sitting next to each other holding hands all day. Maybe we can finally shut up the conspiracy theorists that claim Fluendo have stolen GStreamer :)

So what about Fluendo ? Our plans haven't changed. We still work on GStreamer to make it better. We still make products on top of it, like our codecs and our DVD player, which we hope to sell to you guys to solve legal issues, and obviously also to get filthily rich in the process. And we're still working on Flumotion and Elisa, and the parts that are free will be as free as they have ever been.

And what about our current customers ? They needn't worry either. Business goes on as usual. Contracts will be completed. We're a serious company and we respect our customers.

Is there anyone left ? This is the funniest question - somehow people think that we're still this small five person company. And admittedly I sometimes have trouble coping with the changes over the last year. But today, Fluendo is a group of three companies, with around 25 people spread across, some of whom you'll probably never get to know (because they're not community people - our office manager keeps complaining about this crap called Linux) and all of us sharing the same office space.

So, what about me ? Well, I'm glad two of you care. On a personal level, it is sad to see friends leave the company. I've been working on GStreamer for almost as long as Christian and Wim - must be seven years now - and any hacker out there knows that this creates a bond. I still have my GStreamer shirt, one of the many high-quality shirts with actual embroidery, that Christian sprung for out of his own pocket, for everyone who wanted one. And one of my best GStreamer moments was still the GStreamer weekend in the Norwegian cabin, shared with a class of physical education students, only reachable after an hour of wading through waist-deep snow.

Before Fluendo, I would introduce myself at conferences hunching my back and saying, with a meek voice, "I hack on GStreamer, I'm sorry, don't hurt me". Now, any of us can proudly say "you're welcome" when people thank us for our work, as we used to thank the hundreds of other hackers whose hard work we use every day.

And for me, learning the difficulties of starting and growing a company as I go, having a group of people leave for the first time is a coming-of-age thing. It is something you never want to happen but cannot avoid at the same time - making the business that you make one step further on the way to being a real business, and no longer a small group of friends working together.

And before I get too sentimental, it should be obvious by now that Fluendo is hiring! If you want to step into the footsteps of giants, help us fix bugs in GStreamer and GStreamer-using applications, help us write plugins for more codecs, help us support and package plugins, drop me a line at the usual place.

And for Flumotion, we are also going to be hiring the next two months - we're looking for Flumotion developers, web developers, and a sysadmin to help manage our platform, as well as a customer support engineer and a QA engineer. (It is probably time to put stuff like this on our website, but until we have time to do so, it doesn't hurt to put this out there and have you contact us directly.)

If you have more questions or are still worried feel free to mail any of us (at Fluendo, or the "leavers") directly.  And best of luck to our three musketeers in the next venture.

Go home; find a wench. Raise fat babies, and live a good, long life.

Woah, it's good to know people care about Fluendo. It didn't take much time after Christian's announcement on his blog for people to deluge me with questions. So let's save...

Things that suck: getting woken up by an alarm at 7:30, a machine running out of disk space, and realizing that the cron job to clean up MPEG transport streams didn't run correctly because the crond service wasn't reloaded to take the cron job changes into account.

So, doing general maintenance, reading LogWatch:

 pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user harrypotter : 1 time(s)

Are there actually people that create a harrypotter account on their server ? Or do crackers have a sense of humour these days ?

Things that suck: getting woken up by an alarm at 7:30, a machine running out of disk space, and realizing that the cron job to clean up MPEG transport streams...

Pure comedy gold when Spike tries to bite Willow but fails, and a blindingly obvious sexually laden conversation follows, driven to its natural climax.  Someone said season 4 is the worst of them all, but even if that would be true, it's still heaps of goodful.

Pure comedy gold when Spike tries to bite Willow but fails, and a blindingly obvious sexually laden conversation follows, driven to its natural climax.  Someone said season 4 is the...

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap

An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features got added.

There is now a Bzr and a Git backend, bringing the number of supported VCS systems up to 5 - better than any copy I of prepare-ChangeLog.pl that I know of.

I also added a Bugzilla bug querying backend.  And Stefan is working on a SourceForge tracker backend.

One of the nicer things I've added recently is a way of being helpful to users when a dependency is missing.   For example, if you don't have Genshi installed, it will tell you that you're missing Genshi, and where you can find Genshi.  If moap knows about your distribution, it will even tell you how to install it if it knows.

If moap doesn't know about your distribution, or about how to get this dependency for your distribution, it will give you a link to file a ticket with the summary filled in for you already.  All you need to do is enter some information on how to detect your distro or install the dependency for your distro.  If this works out well, I can see myself adding this sort of thing to other projects.

Anyway, that brings me again one step closer to my talk at GUADEC, "Practical Project Maintenance".  The talk will also discuss moap, but the idea of the talk is mostly to draw on some of my experiences - as well as others' - in doing project maintenance work.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for this talk, or things you think I should cover, feel free to comment.

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features...

The number one irritation I had when editing zone files was having to update the serial number.

After googling for a while, I found some ideas on how to make vim help there. And then I tweaked it a little for my Fedora Core setup, and made it automatic so that it does it when I open the file. That's fine, since only if you save the file (which means, you made a change you want) does it actually update the serial on disk.

Now it's edit - save - reload.

.vimrc snippet:

" define command to increment the SOA in zone files
function! UPDSERIAL(date, num)
if (strftime("%Y%m%d") == a:date)
return a:date . a:num+1
endif
return strftime("%Y%m%d") . '01'
endfunction

command Soa :%s/(2[0-9]{7})([0-9]{2})(s*; serial)/=UPDSERIAL(submatch(1), submatch(2)) . submatch(3)/g

" executed the command when you edit the zone file
autocmd BufRead /var/named/*zone Soa

The number one irritation I had when editing zone files was having to update the serial number. After googling for a while, I found some ideas on how to make...