Present Perfect

Some filler content.

Wedding pictures from my best friend's wedding two weeks ago.

I look sharp.

My friend Ward living in Boston should have started as an FSF sysadmin by now. Go Ward ! I should check up on how he's doing.

Had the in-laws over for the last three days. I didn't get to spend that much time with them since I was working, but that's ok - Kristien had a good share of activity with them :)

Wim en Christian are on a business mission and they ran into some familiar hackers while they were there. Well, they probably weren't there for the nice weather.

Hacking

While getting fed up over the week again with the state of device probing in general and in GStreamer, I started thinking about what I could do about it. Wim and I had discussed some ideas with David Zeuthen at the last GUADEC, and I wanted to start doing something in that direction that we could use as well.

The first task was writing a header parser to figure out the values of macros from videodev.h, which is trickier than it seems.
In general macros can expand to strings, ints, function calls, function calls with values already filled in, ...
Johan used Linus's sparse and hacked a bit on that code to get what we wanted, while I used a brute-force approach of trying to compile a set of apps where a define is printf'd with a list of formats, one by one. The first program to compile with -Wall and -Werror and return a result on execution is the winner.

We were done at about the same time (though I managed to delete my program on the first try by running

python defines.py /usr/include/linux/videodev.h > defines.py

, pretty stupid), but Johan's was obviously faster and less hacky.

After that, I started writing object wrappers for the structs, and expanding and cleaning up the API as I went. This will be a nice debugging tool in general, and I hope to also be able to use it in Flumotion to give you a snapshot image of the device
based on the current settings.

I'm also thinking of writing a collection of "fake" kernel modules that implement API's like this. And maybe even fake modules that implement the exact same functionality as a set of webcams, so they can be used for GStreamer plugins regression tests and the like.

I also looked at wrapping the pwc-specific stuff. While doing so I noticed that the pwc driver actually supports the Logitech Spire, which is a webcam mounted on a spire and can be controlled to rotate and climb automatically.

Bikes

Finally figured out if it is ok to ride with no lights on your bike at night. I got stopped by a police car telling me to "respect the traffic light" because I ran the red light. But that was their only quibble.

Some filler content. Wedding pictures from my best friend's wedding two weeks ago. I look sharp. My friend Ward living in Boston should have started as an FSF sysadmin by...

We've been here for almost a year now. I had a long period where I didn't wonder about the fact that we live somewhere else for the last few months, but now the sense of wonder is back.

Yesterday we went to some Mexican restaurant to celebrate David's birthday. While riding my bike to the meeting point, someone called out to me on the street. Being called out to is something that hasn't happened to me for a year, and that's something you don't realize or think about until it happens. Pretty damn cool to actually know some people here that try to stop you in the streets :)

The Mexican food was great, and since some of the gang had their birthday coming up as well, we agreed to have a party at our place in two weeks with the Mexican guy cooking. And I already reserved my place in the kitchen to watch and help...

Today while driving home I got run into by a girl on a moped who was of course speeding through the red light as soon as the green pedestrian light started blinking. She turned right while looking left for oncoming cars and crashed straight into me. Spanish people have a weird sense of traficness. Having this happen is another confirmation that I really do live here though.

We went to a bar where we had arranged to meet with an Argentinan giving tango classes. Kristien has never had classes, so we decided to take a few private lessons and then jump into a real class. He was quite a good teacher, even though his accent is hard to understand. And it's disorienting for me to do exercises as the woman, but it's good practice for my general understanding.

After that we went to an intercambio in a Belgian bar which was nice as well. Meet some new people, marvel at all the Belgianness, and feel at home. So, basically, after a year of cocooning and adapting to the idea that we're here, we're now sculpting our place in the city. It's like learning to walk all over again, and it's great.

We've been here for almost a year now. I had a long period where I didn't wonder about the fact that we live somewhere else for the last few months,...

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again...

Weekend

Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the mountains, climbed a bunch of trees, jumped off some platforms, swung from cables, and did all sorts of safe adventury stuff. Lunch was in a typical Catalan restaurant, with wine being served from the special caraffs which have a second neck to drink from. You're supposed to tilt the bottle, getting a very fine flow of wine, and direct it in your mouth, then extend the arm as far as possible without spilling any wine. When you're done, you get the bottle back to your face then stop tilting.

Needless to say, lots of variations on the theme were tried, with the climax being a couple pouring for one another without spilling a drop.

We were happy to have chosen the quad riding for the afternoon. On a quad, no one can tell when you're drunk (Well, except for the poor woman who managed to land her quad off the road TWICE). The other half was not so lucky apparently - one guy managed to fall of a platform during the drunk tree climbing, straight into a bush. And some other guy managed to run fullspeed into a rope he managed to not see, and got catapulted back some ten meters.

Anyways, it was a good preparation for the very same activity at the same place for this weekend, which for obvious reasons (to the parties involved at least) I am not at liberty to discuss any further...

New employee

Fluendo wants to welcome their newest employee. Zoë weighs a good 3.2 kilos and is in perfect health. I'm sure she'll be an excellent asset to the team. Congratulations to the happy mom and dad !

Telefonica

As other inhabitants of Spain can attest, sometimes dealing with Telefonica can be really frustrating. Both phone and ADSL went dead last wednesday. Called on Thursday. They called me back on Friday, saying it was probably a problem in the central switching station. By Saturday, the telephone was fixed, but the ADSL wasn't. Tried to get into the help line for ADSL (since of course that's a different line), keyed in my number, got disconnected with the message that there was no one available to take my call. Called again, keyed in number, got some waiting music and a message saying that everyone was busy. After eight minutes another voice said no one could take my call, and I got disconnected. Sigh.

Apparently Kristien had called as well, since when I got in the lady told me that she called. I was going to get a call back in the next 48 hours from a technician. Tuesday morning, I get a call. What kind of router I use ? A Nokia one. Yes, I'm sure it works. No, it's not one of yours. No, it isn't the fault of the router - it's the third time this year you managed to turn off my phone and ADSL at the same time, so I'm pretty sure it's not our fault. Yes, the phone works again.

Then the guy tells me that the telephone guy turned off ADSL completely in the central station. Why on earth did he want to grill me on the router then ? Anyway, he would have it fixed. During the day Kristien lets me know that it works again. And when I check, I realize that I understand WHY they messed it up in the central station - I had double the download speed as before. So it was all part of Telefonica's cunning plan to give you double the speed in one week and no speed at all the next.

Anyway, I'm happy for this week.

Music

I had been impatiently pining for the new Interpol disc, "Antics". When I finally got it the day it was released, I had two quick cursory listenings to it and was hugely disappointed. Nothing seemed to grab me.

This weekend I gave it another go, and I haven't listened to anything else ever since. There is not a single bad song on this CD. And the emotion I thought lacking at first listen is all there under the surface. I love to be suckerpunched by music that way. Highly recommended.

Food

We finally managed to cook tartiflette, a typical Savoie dish which I love eating on skiing trips. It came out great, we were very impressed with ourselves. So were our guests, Jochen en Kristien. It was better than on ski holidays, though it made me long to have my feet stuck to a snowboard on a white mountain. Jochen made the dessert, impressing me with a stunning pineapple carpaccio with mint and sugar.

On days like this life just feels right.

Disclaimer: this is a week-old entry blocked by my use of umlauts. Flushing it again... Weekend Had a great saturday with people from the other company. We went into the...

Tim, you obviously got the number one reason not to be at the GNOME summit completely wrong. If airhead celebrities like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Janet Jackson are going to be there, what better reason do I need not to show up ??

Now, if famous superstarts like Havoc, Dave, Owen, Miguel, Jeff, ... would have been there, but maybe. But those girls ? No way will the make my GNOME desktop more sexy.

Jennifer Lopez on the other hand I wouldn't mind having met.

Tim, you obviously got the number one reason not to be at the GNOME summit completely wrong. If airhead celebrities like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Janet Jackson...

So the crew invited themselves to a barbeque at my place. They sure know the way to my yes is through the stomach. Since by that time we had made a certain news site with our applet, it turned into a celebration dinner. We managed to get Wim to go through some of his design ideas for GStreamer, and it looked like Ronald seemed to like them.

Each time I read or hear about them I understand more and more of it. It also makes me realize that a good design for anything doesn't have to be hard. In fact, it's the opposite - as long as the design is still hard, convoluted, fuzzy and difficult to understand, it's probably the design's fault, and not mine. Seeing how we manage to simplify and crystallize the design of our server, for example, makes me even more sure of that.

Hope we can do something about that. Basically, if we can't answer basic questions to newcomers that try to program with GStreamer, it means we don't have decent design yet.

All of us had managed to forget that it was Catalunya's "national" holiday. I had asked Christian to find the best possible meat at the Boqueria, and he called me to say that it was completely closed. Which, you know, would normally be impossible. Luckily, Johan managed to find one store that had some meat. Though I still have suspicions that part of the meat was meant for soup.

We sent Miguel a mail to invite him, and he came over, calling Duncan in the US to tell us he was there on IRC. Modern communication just gets better and better.

It started to rain about the time we wanted to go to eat, so we were forced inside. The plus side was that Kristien called to say that she was coming home early because the tent had been flooded.

Interesting discussions on various subjects. I seized the moment to ask Miguel about some comment he made some time ago about GStreamer's "bloat", because I was seriously interested in his opinion on it. He made some good points, and some comparisons to bonobo. But as always, the hard part on any project is convincing the people that are completely on the inside that people on the outside have a different opinion and also might be right. In other words, it's not automatically OK to pretend that they're wrong just because they don't know the subject well enough. The "I know more" defense is always a bad one, basically.

After the topic switched to relationships (but my collague forbids me to talk about the subject in public), Miguel promised his servitude to one of ours under a certain nigh impossible condition. We wish the possible new master good luck with fulfilling it. Then it was time for Kristien to make her much awaited re-appearance. Our night got cruelly ended by the neighbourly woman who wanted to sleep for some reason.

So my plan for getting to bed early today was yet again foiled. Drats ! And sunday, which had been reserved for hacking on some bugs, was also torpedoed by Kristien, but I didn't mind. Welcome back my dearest...

So the crew invited themselves to a barbeque at my place. They sure know the way to my yes is through the stomach. Since by that time we had made...