Present Perfect

nautilus-media

Spun a new tarball yesterday because a translation got added. This also allowed me to try and put in a patch I had received for the thumbnailer but for which I didn't have time or inclination to push it in before going on holidays. Having to respin the tarball anyway made me submit the patch to the release team together with some good arguments on why this patch makes sense. Nice to see that good arguments help make good decisions.

Then I made an RPM to test and got extremely puzzled by the fact that nautilus crashed as soon as I checked a property page on an audio file. After reading a bunch of bonobo, then ORBit code, which scared me senseless, I figured out the right way to run nautilus from gdb (remove nautilus from the session), and then the problem became readily apparent. It was not finding glade files, and it was not doing so because I forgot a "make" command in the spec file. So the actual build was done from %makeinstall, which overrides datadir and friends, causing the wrong - install-time - location for the UI files to be put in the binary.

So now I firsthand experienced the difference between running or not running make before make install.

ssh

With the recent break-in on GNOME servers I wanted to do my part in making sure I'm doing things correctly. I got told that using passphraseless ssh keys is worse than doing password-based ssh access, so I started looking into how it ought to be done instead. Some people asked me to let them know if I figured out the right set of things to do, so here it is.

Basically, I did the following:

• mv .ssh ssh in my homedir
• generate a completely new ssh-dsa key, with passphrase
• replace the old public key in authorized_keys on all the servers I use this key on (for this step, ssh -i ssh/id_dsa is useful, since you want to get on the servers using your old key to install your new pubkey)

It is possible to add a passphrase to your current key, but since that doesn't really change the public key it doesn't help at all if someone might have gotten your old private key. So, don't :)

After this, you want to set up your session so that you only get asked for your passphrase once, and ssh-agent takes care of authenticating when you move around. If you run Red Hat/Fedora, you can do the following:

• run switchdesk, and choose the same type of session you are running. This will generate .Xclients and .Xclients-default
• edit .Xclients and replace each "exec" instance with "exec ssh-agent". This step makes sure that your session is run under ssh-agent.
• edit .Xclients-default and add "ssh-add < /dev/null" BEFORE the exec gnome-session line. This step makes sure that before your gnome-session is loaded, a GUI window will pop up to ask you for your passphrase.

Now log out and back in, fill in your passphrase, and try logging into a server where you copied your new public key to. It should just let you in.

If I made an important security boo-boo, let me know please.

Nuts

There's this incredibly nut roasting store in Barcelona. If you're ever around, go over and buy some almonds or hazel nuts. They taste so much better than the ones you buy anywhere else. I feel an addiction coming up.

nautilus-media Spun a new tarball yesterday because a translation got added. This also allowed me to try and put in a patch I had received for the thumbnailer but for...

Holiday

Had a good holiday, was good to see some Belgian friends back. It made me realize though that even though I love my new life, I do miss my old friends. There's probably no good solution anyway, since even when going back I'd probably not just have my old friends back. People change.

As for snowboarding, I had a great time. One day our teacher got us to jump off a cliff without us being able to see what was down there. She asked us to trust her and go straight ahead. The first two took a turn right at the edge though, which made her really angry. So I decided to switch off my brain and go straight ahead. A very nice drop of at least five meters awaited me beyond the cliff, which was both scary and very exhilarating at the same time.

We had three days of continuous snow fall and fog. The penultimate day, it started clearing up, so our teacher took us off-piste again. Only, one of the others smashed his knee into a rock, so I stayed with him to make sure he was ok, and at that point the fog set in as quickly as I ever saw it rise. Our teacher urged us to get back to the track, and I followed a trail that took me further down instead of back to the track by accident.

I had spent about ten minutes trying to listen for sounds telling me where to go, and had pretty much resigned myself to making an iglo and waiting for the next day, when I finally heard our teacher yelling back at me, trying to guide me back to the track. Pretty scary moment, all in all :)

We also played the Werewolf game again, which reminded me of how much I like playing games, and how good this particular game really is. Just when you think you have pretty much figured out all the strategies, you get surprised by another twist in how the game evolves. And as soon as the people around you realize some new trick, the rules change since you have to take into account the fact that they now realize new things. You can play this game either completely on an emotional level, or completely on a tactical level, or combine bits, or only look at what happens between start and end of night, and so on.

For people that don't know the game, apparently it's a variant on a game called Mafia. Well recommended.

Back

Getting home was a strange feeling. Skiing holidays always meant going back to Belgium, and now we drove the 800 kilometers back to Barcelona. I was glad to be back home anyway. I also got the card game I ordered in the mail, Chez Geek. Looks like fun, now I need to find people to play it with :)

Didn't touch the laptop during the weekend. We had a good meal, and watched Made afterwards. Vince Vaughn is so magnificently annoying in that movie, you keep wanting to grab him and yell some sense into the guy.

And now, Kristien's parents are over for the weekend. Had some good spaghetti, hope they enjoy themselves out here even though the weather is pretty bad.

GStreamer

Trying to get back into the swing of things. Commited some of the translations that we got submitted, ran into a weird bug where the player wouldn't play anything. Traced it down to return values not being checked causing the program not to say anything about not wanting to do anything. Fixed that so it pops up dialogs; now need to trace back what's actually going wrong underneath.

Started to make libtheora packages for Fedora now that alpha3 is out, and checking how well our support is at this point. Had to package libogg and libvorbis as well, and noticed some oopses in the release of those packages too. Tried checking out their new SVN code setup, but couldn't make sense of the error messages svn threw at me. Will try again later.

Work

Sifted through tons of mail, still going. SPAM in general has come to the point of being completely ridiculous. You know, sometimes people on two sides of a fence just keep inventing workarounds to things the people on the other side do, and at some point it has grown to the point of complete and utter ridiculousness and both sides have lost track of the actual goal.

I mean, seriously, who is going to buy a product spelled v|aGR@ from some guy mailing you with the body containing text like

 Get Your Meds Here programmer eastwood churchwomen abet  turnpike You too can now enjoy the same deep discounts offered to US  residents 

where the text is probably chosen to lower scores on spam filters (churchwomen selling v|aGR@).

This whole spam thing is getting ridiculous - do these completely senseless mails still cause people to buy stuff ? There must be a point where the message is so crippled that it's no longer economical to send them, no ?

Miguel

At some point in the holiday (there was WIFI access you could pay for in the ski resort, but apparently some holes were still open since I was able to get on the net fairly easily) I read some blog entry by Miguel about media playback.

One point he raised was I would love to see a standardized C-based interface that every one of them exposed and allow people to pick one over the other. Well, I'm fairly sure people don't care and don't want to pick, they just want one that works. The people that care about which framework to pick are the distributors and the people working on said frameworks.

The REAL problem with media playback on Linux is very very simple. People expect to be able to play formats that, because of patent/legal issues, are not as easy to provide code for.

In general, there are two approaches to that problem, and they present a significant split in methodology for distributors. On the one hand, people who install and use Linux themselves are fine with installing some packages providing "questionable" codecs, in whatever way. These people really don't care that xine or mplayer is not distributable as is.

On the other hand, there are large desktop rollouts where people expect stuff to just work, and where distributors can't afford to walk the grey areas. In these cases, licenses need to be bought to allow the framework to legally play back these formats. On top of that, there is code that needs to be written, because the code playing back this format CANNOT be GPL.

So, bottom line: the people running Linux in a corporate desktop rollout will be running different code than the hacker/player community out there. As far as I know, this is about the only area that really causes such a wide chasm between the two sets of Linux users we currently have or are aiming to grab. The only thing I can think of that came close was Ximian's Exchange Connector, and even that is fairly limited in scope. Feel free to correct me with other examples, I haven't thought it through that much yet.

Given this pretty big problem, my personal feeling is that the only right solution is a framework that is pluggable, LGPL, and enforces an architecture of its plugins in such a way that it is possible for companies to write closed plugins, and for the hackers out there to write open but possibly questionable plugins. This is in my opinion the only way the opposing goals of both the hacker community and the corporate desktop rollout can be married, instead of having to wildly diverge codebases due to legal issues.

The other remark that puzzled me in Miguel's log was I for one am not excited about requiring 160 megs of GStreamer code on my machine to essentially play mp3s and CDs. With tarballs for core and plugin coming in at 1.5 and 3 MB, I'm really curious who is going to have to write the remaining 150+ MB of GStreamer code. Miguel, can you give us a ring when you're done with those ? If all you want is mp3 (boo ! Use Ogg !) and cd playback, I can give you a GStreamer binary that does just that in under 300K easily. But I'll be asking you in three years' time if playing mp3's and CD's is really the only thing you want to do in the multimedia arena... There's really not one .avi movie or DVD you want to play ? Not even, say, Antitrust ?

Holiday Had a good holiday, was good to see some Belgian friends back. It made me realize though that even though I love my new life, I do miss my...

GStreamer

Phew. 0.8.0 out the window. Made releases of core, plugins, and ffmpeg. Rebuilding Fedora packages, seems to work fine. Thank god for all the work I have done in the past on mach. It was almost as simple as just changing the base names I inflicted upon myself, and rebuild. Mach took all the other pain of package building away.

Need to update the site to announce the packages, too. Now I have to submit all the depencendy packages, and the actual packages, to rpm.livna.org and www.fedora.us.

The good news is, installing gstreamer-universe on Fedora Core 1 does the right thing, pulling in the "old" 0.6.x series packages, so RhythmBox, gnome-media, sound-juicer and nautilus-media keep working fine. Exactly as planned, sigh.

A mail from Jeff about GStreamer not sticking to release processes. I'm not the person who needs to be convinced in this case. There are other people on our team that seem to either not think the GNOME policies apply to us, or think we can get away with not following them.

People seem to think GStreamer lacking one clear maintainer is a problem. On the one hand, they might be right. On the other, sharing maintainership is IMO both possible and preferable. It's just not something that is done much. In our case, there seems to be a fairly natural distribution of maintainer-related tasks. I think that's fine, personally. If there is no clear natural maintainer candidate, it's better to split up responsibilities than shed them all.

On the whole, I think we're doing a good job of putting processes in place, slowly but surely. We've successfully moved to using ChangeLog's, we're trying to enforce a common coding style on the .c files now (I never thought we'd "agree" on one), we're doing more regular releases, a lot of work has gone into making the release process itself more streamlined, the website is easier to manage...

Also, a lot of the things that were requested from us have happened - more formats supported, internationalization infrastructure in place, decent error messages with translations work now... I think we're doing good. Still enough room for improvement not to get bored though.

As for packaging, Matthias and I seem to agree on the packaging. Now it's a matter of getting them to QA at www.fedora.us and rpm.livna.org as quickly as possible.

Life

Went back to IKEA to buy new parts of life. Recursive coffee table and a bunch of plants, all of which made Kristien happy. She has her first real tours today, I hope everything turns out well.

Dave/Dina

With the right combination of CVS versions of stuff and recompiles, I finally managed to get a DirectFB stack running that allows me to execute stuff from XDirectFB and not mess up the framebuffer after stopping. So, now it needs some clear packaging, and some twiddling, and then I can finally go back to actually watching stuff on the TV by using the remote. I hate video cards that just stop working one day :)

Snowboarding

Off soon. Looking very much forward to it. Skating has seemed to exercised my leg muscles a lot, so I should be ready. OTOH, my left middlefinger hurts a bit from RSI. Hope I can get rid of that over the course of a week.

GStreamer Phew. 0.8.0 out the window. Made releases of core, plugins, and ffmpeg. Rebuilding Fedora packages, seems to work fine. Thank god for all the work I have done in...

Music

(Warning: if you don't care about music, skip this entry)

So, when I set off to Spain I thought it would be interesting to bring only a small set of CD's to see which CD's matter to me. I had told myself to choose only 20, but after three hours I realized that was impossible, and settled on 30.

Here's the list:

Afghan Whigs - Congregation

This is probably their only flawless disc, even though other discs have better songs at times. But this one flows from beginning to end, hinting at their later potential.

Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen

If you've ever been in a broken/unhealthy relationship, this is the soundtrack to it. My favourite band, and this disc shows why.

Arab Strap - Philophobia

drunken Scotsman songs mumbled over a beatbox and sparse instrumentation, but with ever so subtle and stinging lyrics

Arid - Little Things Of Venom

Have to both bring and plug some Belgian artists too, no ?

The Blue Nile - Peace At Last

They make about one album every ten years, but manage to make it result into crystallized beauty

Buffalo Tom - Let Me Come Over

Another one of those era-defining discs, where not a song is bad. Excellent guitar sound all through the album.

Catherine Wheel - Adam And Eve

One of those vastly overlooked bands that managed to perform consistently with each album, changing their sound as they go. This one has a huge atmospheric soaring sound.

Counting Crows - August And Everything After

Later albums never quite managed to capture the raw emotion and naive but perfect musicianship from this album. Today he's huge and looks like a pineapple, but he feels a lot better. An argument for the case that torn-up artists make the best records.

dEUS - In a bar, under the sea

A lot more variety than on their first album, but still as exciting as that first one. Selected only because of the bigger song selection.

Elbow - Cast of Thousands

Within the confines of modern rock music, Elbow manages to sound quite like they're the only band who does what they do. With the simplest of guitar figures, using silence as an instrument, with a gifted singer and some splendid songwriting craftsmanship, something to discover.

Embrace - Drawn from good will

My personal selection of their first two CD's, because it was too hard to choose between the two

Gorky - Gorky

My first ever CD, and still containing my favourite song ever. The only disc I brought that's in Dutch

Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump

Proving that you can have a beard in music without being ZZ-Top, these guys manage to express fear of technology and progress with recycled instruments, mix it in with guitars, and pull out the nicest tunes. With album artwork appealing to the hacker in me.

Grant Lee Buffalo - Fuzzy

I can still remember the day when I first heard the title track. One of those discs I still play today even though the CD is so badly scratched these days that I should buy a new one.

Interpol - Turn on the bright lights

Lots of people who find this boring or a Joy Division ripoff. But if you let yourself get swayed by the washing guitar sounds and the hypnotising vocals, you'll soon find that musically they're completely the opposite of JD in aural density.

Jeff Buckley - Grace

Every time I hear one of his songs I am sad for all the songs we'll never hear. A truely tragic loss.

Lift To Experience - The Texas/Jerusalem Crossroads

The hardest band to explain to people. Sonically touching Jeff Buckley's guitar style, but with the sound of Texas canyons echoing. A concept album about the Apocalypse and proclaiming the USA to be the centre of Jerusalem. With a lead singer who sounds like a repenting preacherman in sin, reigning fire over God's land. Still not sure whether to take them seriously, but the music is incredible.

Mansun - Six

Hard to tell if they were egomaniacal or just plain crazy. It took me more than a year to even start liking this album. It sounds like each CD track was cut in the middle of the actual songs, and each song sounds like a patchwork that only after repeated listening manages to sound like a coherent whole. But once you have made a mental map of this album, you are hooked, and there's no denying the incredible thrill it ends up giving you.

Muse - Origin of Symmetry

Sometimes there is nothing wrong with teenage angst, hard rock guitars, screeching vocals, and opera-like delivery. Each song on this album manages to surprise and entertain.

Pixies - Surfer Rosa

How to describe the first band that managed to excite you and open up your eyes to a completely different world of music ? I couldn't stand this album at first, and I laughed at a friend who came crying to school when the Pixies broke up. He retaliated by giving me this disc and soon I was crying along with him. To think they are touring again this year, yay !

Radiohead - The Bends

Hard to choose a disc from a band that's actually been three bands already in their lifetime. While my favourite songs are on the first album, and while everyone seems to applaud them for all of the albums from the third one, as a complete album none of theirs can top the Bends.

Six By Seven - The Closer You Get

A perfect rock album from beginning to end. One of the songs proves that the only reason drum'n'bass is so BORING is because it's played by computers - by having a human drummer play the dnb rhythms, and making the perfect rock version of such a song.

Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

Another seminal 90's record. Dreamy guitar figures alternate with edgier alternative guitars, and the songs actually are good all the way through, in contrast with later albums.

Spiritualized - Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space

Coming in a package making it look like medication, with a booklet written like a medicine leaflet, and a perfect flow from beginning to end. Defying traditions of rock/jazz/gospel/blues, and mixing them all together, adding a drugged-out soundscape to all the songs, there is no easy explaining what this album sounds like.

Tindersticks - II

Their finest album by far; sparse instrumentation leaving room for each of the accents, the graveyard vocals, and their best songs. This disc is only better because it was accompanied by a 70-minute live set with a complete orchestra.

Tom McRae

Stunning debut album; not consistent in quality because it contains some spectacularly beautiful songs.

Tool - Aenima

An album showing that metal can also be intelligent, well-played, and that it's ok to have variety. Songs easily passing the 8-minute mark, but keeping listeners on their toes all the way through. One of those rare albums that can be listened to from beginning to end and back again.

Twilight Singers - Blackberry Belle

Afghan Whigs frontman going solo and teaming up with a whole bunch of guests, including Mark Lanegan. While the music is different, this disc manages to catch some of the essence that the Afghan Whigs left behind.

Weezer - Pinkerton

A completely personal and emotional album from beginning to end, which they caught a lot of flack for. After that they went back to writing the regular catchy surfpop tunes with bubblegum contents, and apparently the singer doesn't want to hear about his "failure" disc anymore. Incredible, this is easily their finest, coupling their catchiness to lyrics that matter.

Much ado about nothing

A two-disc set mixing audio excerpts from the Kenneth Brannagh movie adaptation of the Shakespeare play with some of my favourite songs from that time. One of those stupid projects you have time for as a student and that you end up doing when you're madly in love with someone and want to show them you are without saying so :)

Of course, to be fair, I have to admit that my Dave/Dina box holds about 1500 CD's, so it's not like I don't have any music here. And I already bought a few CD's since coming here, of which Sophia's "People are Like Seasons" and Explosions In The Sky's "The earth is not a cold dead place" deserve honorable mentioning.

Hm, I pulled a jfleck-y diary entry, sweet.

Music (Warning: if you don't care about music, skip this entry) So, when I set off to Spain I thought it would be interesting to bring only a small set...

Madrid

All in all, pretty scary that this is still possible today. Eerie too how it was exactly 30 months after the WTC buildings collapsing. Doesn't say much however...

I called the one person I know in Madrid to check if she was alright. She was.

Today in the building where we work (which is Barcelona's own WTC), there was a fifteen minute silence gathering outside on the square. Seeing more than a thousand adults trying to be quiet for fifteen minutes makes you think.

There's not much I can say - my heart is with all those people who were there.

Mach

Released a new version yesterday, with a bunch of nice fixes for a lot of issues. Already put in two new fixes today. One was a bug report from Matthias from last night; the other was to add --promoteepoch when supported so that with the recent epoch changes, it's again possible to build packages that were unable to install their deps due to this.

Am now thinking of splitting up the distro files, and after that it's time to start thinking about a reworking with everything abstracted nicely into classes.

GStreamer

Everything is getting pretty much ready for the 0.8.0 release on Monday. Tweaked the packaging some more, sent out a mail to interested packagers about how we would like to see it packaged. Decided to drop the gstreamer08 set of packages obsoleting the 07 ones, since apt didn't handle it nicely.

Decided not to implement release-device, even though I think Benjamin is wrong about the importance of the bug or the way he chooses to express his opinion :) But OTOH, I think it's bad for our internal community if I keep complaining about stuff I think is important on behalf of other people who for some reason don't really take part in the discussion. Even though they're our primary users. I need to figure out first how I can make the community around GStreamer a bit more vocal.

I think I found the correct way to do gst-ffmpeg, so that we can be a good community player and send patches upstream where it makes sense, but also make it perfectly easy for users to build it from CVS. I think I found the right mix of procedures to do this correctly. Let's see how it goes; if it turns out well, I can write something up about it as a general solution to the "how to pull in other people's CVS and use it in a project" problem.

Open Carpet

I'd like to have some of the big repos use Open Carpet themselves, instead of the completely crack umbrella repository set up at the OC site. It's completely wrong to make people believe that all these repositories can be freely mixed :)

Anyway, since all these people build their packages themselves, not having the sources readily available to all the red carpet components is kind of a problem. What's more, I tried to convince snorp that this really is an issue, but for some reason he thinks it's not a problem and "they should just use build-buddy to build the packages". Apparently he doesn't understand what these guys' life mission is...

Anyway, buildbuddy is nice, but solves a completely different problem. It's aimed at "how can I make packages for all different distros from one control file". Unsurprisingly, it generates very ugly spec files. The repos out there are, at the most, concerned with getting it to run on only Red Hat/Fedora. Some of them even explicitly limit themselves to a subset of this. And they want clean spec files. And src.rpms that can be rebuilt without problems on the target platform. Something that's very much not possible with the red-carpet stuff.

So, I'm going to take a stab at trying to figure out how to do it correctly. To warm up, I made ximian-artwork rpms, where I actually use their .src.rpm as the Source: in the spec file. Neat trick. Probably be necessary for the red-carpet components too.

I was really happy to have Industrial again, it's so much prettier than Bluecurve. I had missed it ever since moving from my RH9 install to Fedora Core 1. For some reason metacity failed to change the window decorations though, which a quick metacity-message restart fixed.

Going home

Coming to work on blades is starting to work out fine. Going back home is slightly harder since there is no easy bladable route going home. I guess I'll have to do some searching.

Madrid All in all, pretty scary that this is still possible today. Eerie too how it was exactly 30 months after the WTC buildings collapsing. Doesn't say much however... I...