Present Perfect

So, after updating the OLPC firmware using 3 USB keys (so that the battery actually charges again), installing a bunch of Twisted stuff (luckily my local mix of FC5 and FC6 packages worked ,because the network is about 9600 baud, I kid you not), and changing a bunch of source code to work with v4l2src, we have the OLPC streaming with Flumotion.

Ryan Lortie and James Henstridge being watched by an OLPC

The OLPC only does video capturing, then throws the raw frames on the wireless Ad-Hoc network of my laptop. My laptop does the encoding and streaming. The network gives up once in a while, but it looks doable enough to demo this at my Flumotion talk at LCA this Friday.

So, after updating the OLPC firmware using 3 USB keys (so that the battery actually charges again), installing a bunch of Twisted stuff (luckily my local mix of FC5 and...

Side effect of being on the other side of the planet: every time I am sitting in an after-lunch session my battery is draining at double speed because a cron job is running updatedb - the laptop thinks it's 4 AM.

In unrelated news, PulseAudio is finally getting a better name - after a long night of love Lennart is renaming it to HorseAudio. I am sure Jono will get a picture up soon enough with more details.

Side effect of being on the other side of the planet: every time I am sitting in an after-lunch session my battery is draining at double speed because a cron...

Resisted the urge to buy a PS3 in Singapore. Lennart from PulseAudio was on our plane. Landed on wednesday evening after a 26 hour plane trip. Got picked up by Shane and Kate, Jan's friends, and taken to their excellent villa where we were forced to play the Wii for the first time. Didn't get to bed in time.

Thursday we got up before seven (yes friends, I can if I'm forced to) and headed off to the first day of FOMS. It was pretty excellent meeting all these people, seeing what they work on, how they are in real life, and so on. Nice to meet James Courtier-Dutton for example, the xine/mplayer hacker responsible for the DVD stuff - good to see his surprisingly refreshing take on those projects. I didn't realize that in a lot of cases mplayer is a quick dumping ground for some feature or codec, and xine is where the feature goes after a bit of design work.

We got Shane's computer in to do recording of FOMS. Sadly, the firewire connector on his box wasn't actually connected to the motherboard. That's where I'm happy I hack on Flumotion - insert a Firewire PCMCIA card in my laptop to use it as a producer (a 1.3 GHz isn't fast enough to do both firewire and Theora), then let the big box take care of encoding.

The most exciting news for me to take away from FOMS is that Shane is hacking on liboggplay and a Firefox plug-in that will play Ogg content, with the Annodex bits, and push this into Firefox 3. It would be excellent to have the whole multiverse around wikipedia/Firefox/Annodex to integrate with each other.

Saturday evening was the Twilight Singers concert. While I was queuing in line I heard a guy speak English with a different accent - turns out he's Flemish and saw a poster while he was travelling. Fancy the odds. Printing my guest list e-mail saved my life as it often happens, but this time it was much easier - you just show the e-mail and everything's fine for Australians. In Europe you always get to argue and wait and call. So, tip for you Australians: next time U2 comes over, just print a fake email from Bono letting you in, adding a few small touches like mentioning Africa and OLPC and you're in. Concert itself was excellent, I think Mike was won over.

We spent the night at Miki's, Jan's best (wo)man. Sunday Jan's dad took us on a trip to Hunter Valley, sampling wines and cheeses. Found a nice dessert wine that I hope to share with Kristien sometime soon, will need to lug them around for a long time though. And then it was back to Sydney for our first night in the dorm. I was dead tired and just hit the sack at 22.

Resisted the urge to buy a PS3 in Singapore. Lennart from PulseAudio was on our plane. Landed on wednesday evening after a 26 hour plane trip. Got picked up by...

Got up way too early after sleeping way too bad. Picked up Jan in a cab. Jan sure knows how to give a date the royal treatment - we are sitting in the BA hospitality lounge sipping our drinks and getting free PC's, courtesy of his Silver card. I hope I have time left for a quick sauna and massage before we pop off to Sydney.

Got up way too early after sleeping way too bad. Picked up Jan in a cab. Jan sure knows how to give a date the royal treatment - we are...

This morning an elderly man at the bus stop commented on my choice of footwear, then got on the bus and high-fived an elderly lady he knew. Maybe life doesn't end at 60 after all.

This morning an elderly man at the bus stop commented on my choice of footwear, then got on the bus and high-fived an elderly lady he knew. Maybe life doesn't...