Present Perfect

James, I stopped using drive-mount applet because of this. Granted, there are some more exotic things in there - a few bind mounts, a bunch of nfs mounts that get mounted automatically (for which I have no need for an unmount option, since it will fail anyway), some "conditional" nfs mounts, ...

For me, that was ok - I could do without it. For my dad's computer at home, I was using the old drive mount applet to help him make it easy to unmount floppies after writing to them. It was the only drive mount applet on there. I also had mounts for two nfs shares (used for backup). After upgrading to FC4, the drive mount applet now had a bunch more icons, and it was confusing for him to have two that he couldn't unmount anyway, and the floppy one did not stand out from the others.

Looking at my own screenshot right now, I'm a little confused myself. Some mounts show up as a drive icon, and others as a folder. The difference is probably that drive == not mounted - so that would mean the icons give no indication whatsoever about the type of device/mount they represent.

I agree that it has become very simple to configure, and probably works in the most basic of cases. But even in the basic case, it doesn't seem very usable in its current state. Of course, I am no expert :) I was just too frustrated back when I found this out that I never got round to reporting bugs, because I didn't know where to start. I have very little advice to offer, because I can't come up with an easy solution that doesn't clutter a new preferences dialog.

Maybe some things are detectable from fstab. Some heuristics would be ok - /dev/fd* is probably a floppy, so show a floppy icon. /media/cd* is probably some CD-like device. bind mounts should probably be ignored completely ? NFS mounts for hosts you can't get a ping from should probably not be shown. Distinction between mounted or unmounted should probably be with an emblem, or a color difference (gray vs color ?)

But that's it. The easy way out would be a preference dialog allowing you to pick which to hide. But that would probably make it bigger than the old one was. Thinking about usability is hard...

Anyway, good luck, I hope something comes out of it for the next iteration.

James, I stopped using drive-mount applet because of this. Granted, there are some more exotic things in there - a few bind mounts, a bunch of nfs mounts that get...

Been a while since I mentioned anything interesting about work, so here's a quick rundown.

codecs

[thomas@thomas gstreamer]$ ls
gst-fluendo-ac3dec     gst-fluendo-isofile     gst-fluendo-realdec  releases
gst-fluendo-alsaspdif  gst-fluendo-mp3         gst-fluendo-wmadec
gst-fluendo-asf        gst-fluendo-mpeg2video  gst-fluendo-wmaenc
gst-fluendo-asfmux     gst-fluendo-mpegdemux   gst-fluendo-wmvdec

It'll be nice to get some of these out to a wider audience. If you're interested in being on some form of a beta program for any of this in the near future, let Uraeus know.

JST

Wim has gone back to JST hacking this week. JST is pretty much an implementation of the 0.10 GStreamer design in Java. It's used for the new version of the Cortado applet. It takes a lot less code than the C version.

Interestingly, Wim found a race yesterday in GStreamer because he ran into the equivalent race in JST. The rac in GStreamer never got triggered in practice, but it does get hit in Java because it's a little slower there.

All of this is publically availabe in svn. I haven't tried building it recently, but will probably get back to it when I have some time so we can finally integrate it in Flumotion.

Looper

Edward, our Pitivi hacker, has put together a looper component for Flumotion. Basically, it's an audio/video producer that takes an ogg file and loops it forever. He added a simple UI for it - here's a peek. Looking through his code is a source of ideas for me to finish the flumotion-template and howto on writing components.

RTP

Mike started putting together a Flumotion component for RTP streaming this week based on the code I had written before. It took him less than three days to get the streamer done, with minimal changes to my modules, so that's good. It was exciting to see the stream produced by Edward's looper on the mobile phones. It looks much like in the screenshot above (which has the lowest possible bitrate set for video - hence the quality).

Synchronization

Andy finished his synchronization hacking this week. GStreamer clocks can now be exported over the network, allowing flumotion components to synchronize to one of the other components. Now, it seems, some more fixes are needed in GStreamer elements (for example, correct ALSA timestamping), but the basics are there now.

more to come

Jan is working on something cool as well that I can't say much about right now. But I'm sure some people will be happy with what he's doing. He's almost done and then we can throw something out.

All in all, an exciting week of finalizing bits and pieces at Fluendo HQ...

Been a while since I mentioned anything interesting about work, so here's a quick rundown. codecs [thomas@thomas gstreamer]$ ls gst-fluendo-ac3dec gst-fluendo-isofile gst-fluendo-realdec releases gst-fluendo-alsaspdif gst-fluendo-mp3 gst-fluendo-wmadec gst-fluendo-asf gst-fluendo-mpeg2video gst-fluendo-wmaenc gst-fluendo-asfmux...

Lock your sons and daughters in this week. GStreamer 0.10.0 has just been released !

While working on the prerelease, I IM'd in a song request on WXYC, the radio that was first on the net (it seems that we in Europe were pretty soon after, not bad). Here's the snippet from that request. Notice him saying zero point one, not zero point ten. I guess when you think about it normal people would indeed say 0.1 and not 0.10
You can get requests on yourself, I just IM'd wxycrequests through gaim and the guy responded immediately and was very gracious.

Also, hearing the guy first leave his previous track play out completely, have a pause, have the intro of the next track on the first CD play, then interrupt it, then pause for a while, then do a completely dry presentation, then have some more radio silence, then play the second track, but fade it in way after the drums have started rolling, takes me back to those good old days way back when from 94 to 99. Getting 30 soon, anyone ?

We're having a cheese lunch on Wednesday in celebration, drop us a line if you're thinking of passing by to sample Edward's selection. Hints available in the release notes.

I'll be glad to turn down the heat a little on my GStreamer hacking and get back to Flumotion now. We've been under the radar for too long with the 0.9 conversion, and now it's time to turn ship again. Onwards !

Lock your sons and daughters in this week. GStreamer 0.10.0 has just been released ! While working on the prerelease, I IM'd in a song request on WXYC, the radio...

On our floor at work there are two toilet cubicles in the restroom. A few months ago some new light switches were installed with timers that were way too short, forcing you to press the damn button every minute when you're taking a dump while reading a copy of Hacker's Delight or the RTP book or whatever was lying around when I decided to take one. Of course the damn button is placed such that you really do have to lift your ass a little to be able to push it.

So taking a dump had gone from an enjoyable pastime and an opportunity for learning to a nerve-wrecking ass-lifting button-pushing hell.

Luckily I wasn't the only one who tried raising a tiny fist cursing "the system" by putting bits of paper and assorted desk items into the button mechanism to keep the button depressed. One day I even had the whole button pressed with a ball of paper and a few layers of gaffa tape - the really sticky kind used at concerts and festivals to keep cables in their place even though 60000 people walk over it all the time.

But I digress.

For the last few weeks, cubicle one has had its light switch continuously depressed through some way I have yet to figure out (but I applaud the mysterious Robin Hood who did this), while the other one had the regular button. So toilet A has the light burning all the time, while toilet B doesn't. Mysteriously, toilet A also always has the toilet seat *up*. toilet B has the seat *down*.

What is *up* with that ? If you were to use a toilet only for stand-up peeing, would it matter much if the light stayed on for less than a minute ? Yet the one that is comfortably set up for a long session of dump-n-read has the seat *up*.

By the way, I should mention that there are two normal standing toilets (for peeing) right next to the two cubicles. So there's no reason someone should go into the cubicle with light, put the seat up, and pee, and leave the seat up.

Can somebody with a passing knowledge of antropology, sociology, psychology or urology please explain this to me ? Thank you.

An entry on my actual anal fixations will follow later.

A tip for budding Belgian bands

On our floor at work there are two toilet cubicles in the restroom. A few months ago some new light switches were installed with timers that were way too short,...

So, Peter en Tinneke dropped by. It's always nice to have friends pay you a visit, bringing a piece of home to your home. Among other things, we dropped by the Razzmatazz on Friday evening to see Soulwax - the Nite versions. We had to queue for an hour even though we had tickets. It made Peter even more happy though than before, go figure !

Soulwax was disappointing. I had read rave reviews about their rebuilt remixed album and their live performances based on them. I hardly recognized anything except for a few shards of lyrics, there was almost no singing, everything sounded the same... I guess I'm just destined to be a regular rock kid.

Saturday, among other things, Peter and I went window-shopping for hardware. I wanted to show him the block that has all the computer stores. I think he liked it - we went to more than ten stores. I realized I hadn't been to more than three or four myself, not realizing the difference between the stores. I guess I don't have a hardware buddy round here the way Peter was back in Belgium :) Each store seems to have taken up some specialty. We were especially hunting for an acceptable case, but it seems a lot of stores specialize in butt-ugly cases to attract gamers. We only found one reasonably acceptable Asus case at first. When we had decided to finally give up and go back to meet the girls, we passed by a store that had cases from brands we found on the internet. We spent another half hour looking over the store, they specialized in HTPC components, and were willing to order whatever we found on the internet that they weren't selling.

The weekend after that, I played around with an old Epia board I had lying around. It was one of the first out there, it has a 500 Mhz Samuel CPU. After quite a bit of fiddling, I got it to net-boot various distros, and a very optimized MPlayer seems to almost be able to keep a constant framerate going for playback. One of the nice things about this board is that TV-out just works right from the start - even the BIOS shows up. Another nice thing is that it can operate completely fanless and driveless. So I'm seriously considering redoing my home setup with a server stashed somewhere, and one or more clients netbooting off the server. While the noise in the living room wasn't terrible, it was noticeable, even from the bedroom.

So I am now browsing for nice cases that I would consider using in either setup.

Some of the cases I've been looking at:

• Ahanix MCE302 - VfD has linux drivers
• Ahanix D5
• Silverstone LC16M (VfD again with Linux drivers, plus Infrared Receiver)
• Silverstone LC14M (different design)
• Silverstone LC09 (for an EPIA board)

If anyone knows about more decent HTPC case producers, or has any first-hand experience, feel free to share and drop me a line at thomas at apestaart dot org

So, Peter en Tinneke dropped by. It's always nice to have friends pay you a visit, bringing a piece of home to your home. Among other things, we dropped by...