Present Perfect

GStreamer

Argh. Spent way too much time on reworking our website. It's full of cruft content and it uses too many different technologies.

For the rework I had too many design goals and it made my head hurt. I wanted to make sure that

• cvs commit on the www module would auto-update the online docs so that people would make an effort to keep the content up-to-data

• all big non-cvs-managed chunks of data (images, packages, source tarballs, media files) were completely in a separate tree

• no mysql was used, but instead xslt transforms on simple custom .xml data files

• our generated documentation was easily integratable into the site

• keep the content directories relatively clean of source material files

After long periods of fretting over it I decided to just go with a basic autoconf/automake/xsltproc setup for the whole site, and use rsync to manage the huge data/ dir.

Using autoconf and automake might seem overkill, but I really really wanted to use nonsrcdir builds so I could keep the actual online content free of build crap (except for Makefiles of course)

Right now I just need to add big bunches of content and scrub the old cruft.

I'm almost done. The reason it's taking so long is that I keep having second thoughts about this being the right way to do it. I still don't know, but I've given up fretting and decided to just plough on and make the content up-to-date, then force the rest to help ...

If someone is really good at XML/XSLT and xsltproc stuff, I'd appreciate it if you looked over

the build setup for the site and gave me some feedback on it.

Too wired again, going home now.

update: On the day that everyone receives .zip files from everyone else through some virus, someone at intel.com sent me a zip file containing a 207-page word document of a GStreamer manual and plugin guide he wrote. Scary stuff. Sadly it contains a lot of cut and paste from our documentation. I wouldn't know what I'd have done though if it was 207 pages of goodness, which would take 207 days of pain to cut and paste to our documentation :)

Still, I wonder - why didn't he propose to work on our docs in the first place ?

Life

So jdahlin found a place. I hope I can visit him soon. He starts monday.

This morning I woke up too early so I played some more Buffy . (The PS2 game - I gave up playing real life Buffy when my lifesize vampire dolls got staked one time too many). Of course since you can only save at the end of levels and the level took 40 minutes I ended up being too late at work again.

Then I overcompensate again by staying way too late and upsetting my girlfriend.

I love my life and the way the only real problems I have is stupid stuff like this.

GStreamer Argh. Spent way too much time on reworking our website. It's full of cruft content and it uses too many different technologies. For the rework I had too many...

Life

Went snowboarding for the weekend in Soldeu, Andorra. The weather started off bad, with heavy gusts of wind, rain, and snow. But around noon things cleared up and we had full sun for the rest of the day.

I'm so proud of my girl - she must have fallen eight or nine times on each track, and one of her legs looks like a map of Andorra in blue and purple. But she never gave up, and in the end she managed to do a whole track without falling.

Am thinking of buying a snowboard now that I know how easy it is to go out for a weekend here. I'd love to have a custom graphic on it, however - am thinking that a GNOME foot, a tux and a GStreamer slug set would look nice... Have to check how much it would cost.

Someone like ross would have it easy: he'd just get a board like this.

Dad

My dad's writing his doctorate thesis in Docbook/XML on Linux. For the last year he's kept writing it without the document ever validating because he hasn't done his bibliography links yet. He kept maintaining it didn't matter, while I try kept trying to get through to him that it's hard to see the real errors between the errors you keep around.

Anyways, he's mailed me six times over the weekend while I was away, trying to make sure he got the right address, phone number, and so on, and stating he really needs me to install RefDB to help him finish his bibliography. He's sort of a procrastinate-then-all-hands-on-deck kind of guy ... I have four days to get it finished for him :)

GStreamer

Spent two days of last week butting my head on a talking wall. There are some people who like to argue for the sake of arguing, even more so than me. Luckily, a weekend in the snow manages to take a lot of that stress away.

Johan

arrived wednesday evening. Today he starts looking for a place to live, I hope he manages to find one. Finding a place here can take quite some time and you definitely need some luck. On the other hand, since he plans on living with other people, it should be fairly easy to find something. Good luck today !

gman

Good luck with the lariam. Everything they say about that stuff is true. I'm glad I never had to use it myself :)

Life Went snowboarding for the weekend in Soldeu, Andorra. The weather started off bad, with heavy gusts of wind, rain, and snow. But around noon things cleared up and we...

GStreamer

Our new hire is arriving tonight. I'm very excited he's coming in. I hope we can help him find his place to settle in soon enough, and that he's motivated to get things done. I know I am.

Finally finished merging the new error handling into GStreamer. I'm pretty happy with it, but it needs some more documenting and cleaning.

Meanwhile, I finally have time again for nautilus-media and friends, and as I had noticed before, but didn't protest loudly enough, there are some things missing from the current core to restore nautilus-media's functionality. This is going to be a tough one because the person who replaced it with a better system didn't really implement everything it needs, and he takes things overly personal. It doesn't help that he thinks nautilus-media is a crap idea.

I've grown beyond caring about personal issues, I just want things to work and make good on the promises GStreamer delivers in general. We could be doing so much awesome stuff if we were all pointing our heads in the same direction ...

Fedora

I was very excited six months ago when I first learned that Red Hat wanted to open up and wanted to use our project's name for the new project.

Today, I feel that Red Hat doesn't have or want to invest enough resources to really open up development. You can sort of feel it on a number of levels, but just looking at some of the facts out there probably says enough already.

We're six months further and there's still no way to influence/submit/codevelop packages. The fedora.us QA queue is still completely full, and packages aren't really moving much to the new Fedora.

Worse, we have no idea what Red Hat wants to do with the public submission servers, what to use as the build system, and so on. Enrico Scholz has been doing marvelous work on the fedora.us build system based on top of mach and vserver. This guy is incredibly smart and talented, but Red Hat engineers haven't commented on it yet AFAICT. It is very frustrating, because there are some very talented guys willing to work on this together with Red Hat. To me it seems like the basis of getting this community project infrastructure into place, and all we get to see from Red Hat is them being busy on just working on Fedora Core 2.

The irony of it all only really sunk in when I was going through my backlog of fedora mail and came across this mail asking to make sure to have your packages built for Fedora Core 2. I thought I had missed some mails that detailed the submission had been opened up. Took me some time to figure out this really was just an internal mail to Red Hat employees that we happen to have the chance to see :)

I'm not really sure what can be done about all this. I'm sure it's not the intent of the Red Hat engineers to have it happen this way. I just think that Red Hat currently doesn't have the resources to pull off opening the whole distribution to outside contributors.

The extra cost they have to invest at this point to make sure people that have the ability to contribute - talented people that have proven they are dedicated to helping out, like Enrico, Matthias, me, Panu, Seth, Ville, and so many others - seems to be too high for them to actually do it. (Warren, I'm not mentioning you since you don't seem to get ignored :) But let's not go into that here)

Anyways, I'm not sure if the Red Hat people we know understand our concerns and frustrations. I do hope they do something about it sometime soon, though, because we're getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed to the point of losing interest.

Concerts

The first one in Brussel was quite alright. I didn't get to see Greg afterwards because he ... fell asleep. Totally ruined my image of him. Amsterdam was incredible. They were in very good form, tore all the way through the songs. The only drawback was the set was pretty much the same.

Best quote of the evening - "You don't pay a hooker for sex. You pay her to leave after sex." I tried taking some pictures, but they didn't turn out too well. With flash, the nice show colours are completely gone. Without it, the colors are right but the pictures aren't sharp. If anyone knows how to do this right, let me know.

Belgium

On the one hand it felt good to be back in Belgium again. I had a great time, and I realized how much I love Gent as a city. On the other hand, things had already changed; a department store was rebuilt, a delicacy shop in the street were I lived as a student had changed, and so on... I was getting homesick not for living there, but for living there as a student. I walked by my old apartment, and felt it wash over me. Silly, but true.

I am also starting to acquire traits some would describe as being feminine - I drowned my emotional distress in a shopping spree. I got home with 7 CD's, the Art of UNIX Programming, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer PS/2 game. As well as some presents for my girlfriend.

On the topic of her, she did the cutest thing before I left. She was still asleep, and she was flirting with someone in her sleep : pouting her lips, nodding agreeingly, grunting approvals, and so on. I just hope she was flirting with me in her dreams ... :)

You teach your children some fashion senseThey fashion some of their own GStreamer Our new hire is arriving tonight. I'm very excited he's coming in. I hope we can help...

Life

Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me back to the old world.

I mailed my favourite singer yesterday, who used to front The Afghan Whigs but now forked his own band with The Twilight Singers on the off chance of asking for entrance at the Amsterdam show. The guy got back to me in no time telling me I had passes waiting for me both in Brussels and Amsterdam. As someone on the mailing list once said - That guy has style by the mile.

GStreamer

Two thirds of the way through converting the old error method to the new. I've gotten a good view of the kinds of errors we currently throw, and I think I have them catalogued pretty well. The actual conversion work is just plain boring in a way, but on the other hand it seems very necessary work and just another step in getting GStreamer where GNOME and possibly KDE wants it to be.

Last weekend Julien added DVD support in gst-player and Totem. People will say "so what, other players did that years ago". True, very true. The wonder of it though is that Julien didn't really need to do anything special beyond telling the player to use the dvd source element.

After some people, like thaytan, had worked on fixing up some of the interactivity stuff which they only tested using gst-launch pipelines, and trying to make sure that clicks were sent through from one of the video sinks to the rest of the elements in the pipeline, it just worked in the player like magic just by using the right element. Now that's class. GStreamer is number two on the style-by-the-mile-list today.

I was sort of down on GStreamer for the last month. but Uraeus's relentless energy while staying here for New Year's, combined with things turning out for the better, Ximian having a good hacker working on GStreamer/GNOME integration, us hiring a great hacker arriving next week, Christian's article on OSNews and Slashdot, and exciting plans in the pipeline, I'm totally on the upswing again.

There was one vitriolic comment on SlashDot I had to reply to. It mentioned that gstreamer-universe wasn't apt-gettable for over a year. I don't think I ever got more than two comments on that, all on IRC, no mails or anything, so I guess I lost the motivation to keep it in sync. Anyway, I totally not get people who get their self-motivation or their delusional sense of self-cool from always being down on whatever project for whatever reason. If you think it's cool to diss anything or anyone for no reason at all, you're a moron and showing your lack of self-confidence as clearly as a piece of corn walking through a chicken barn.

Number three on the style-by-the-mile list is stevebaker, doing a presentation on GStreamer right now in Australia at linux.conf.au

I hear the talk went over well, congrats Steve. I really sort of miss his presence, and I wish he would blog a little, and I'm wondering how Bronya and the new kid on the block are doing ... He was a great guy to have met if only for a short period, before he went back down under.

Theora

I should start taking a look at where we are in GStreamer wrt. Theora. We have some exciting plans for it in the near future, and I want us to be ready for it.

Life Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me...

GStreamer

A few weeks ago I thought I had discovered the worst bug ever in GStreamer and I was wondering how come nobody ever ran into it. I was listening to RhythmBox on my laptop on the way to work, and it just started skipping like mad.

At work I tried to figure out what was wrong but couldn't reproduce it. It took me a few days to realize the skipping was in sync with my footsteps, and after some physical experimentation involving jumping up and down and walking around with my body at various angles I had to conclude it was a physical problem.

Somehow the weight of what was in my backpack pressed against the laptop in such a way that the cursor keys got pressed by accident, causing RhythmBox to skip madly. I was both incredibly annoyed and very relieved when I realized the bug was not in GStreamer, but since it's a bit harder to get rid of it still sucks.

If you're wondering why I have time to make an entry like this, it's simply because I just added working i18n to GStreamer and am waiting for make distcheck to finish. After that, I continue working on the error stuff.

Life

Going back to Belgium on thursday for a Twilight Singers concert. I am so incredibly looking forward to that. Will stop by my old job to grab something to eat with ex-collagues and see what the hell they did to my network cabling and other things...

GStreamer A few weeks ago I thought I had discovered the worst bug ever in GStreamer and I was wondering how come nobody ever ran into it. I was listening...