Present Perfect

gettext

Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will need for GStreamer. I had looked at David's i18n stuff in GStreamer, but it looks to be a half-finished job so I'm assuming he gave up.

My goals were

• integrate it with autogen.sh like the other autotools

• do a minimum amount of tweaking, and clearly separate the tweaking from the generated files

• figure out how to update all of the stuff in po/

I made a sample tarball that works out well. I learnt about autopoint too, which treats me a lot better than gettextize has. The sample is in CVS, in autostars CVS. It'll take some days to show up, what with SF's bad anoncvs lag.

I'm starting to wonder about the necessity of glib-gettextize though. Maybe it's time to kill it off.

Also, it's wonderful when you mail someone you think will never mail you back (In this case, Bruno Haible, the gettext maintainer) and you get a reply back in two hours. That's a lot quicker than I myself tend to reply to things.

Linux

Talking to Matthias a few days ago made me remember how I got into Linux. I used to program C in DOS using the trusty Microsoft C 6.0. I think I had a copy that came on 6 1.2 MB disks, and I had it installed on my 20 MB HD. The second disk contained the IDE, but it had a data error on it, so it was a very crashy affair for me. So I never had much else than EDIT.com as the editor and the DOS prompt to compile stuff :)

Anyway, when it was time to do my graduation thesis, I wanted to do a programming one again, but I didn't feel like learning Windows-based programming. I was still stuck in the DOS age. So at the university we had gotten used to the Solaris servers for programming tasks, and then someone told me about Linux and how it was similar.

So I installed Linux just to have something that looked like a DOS box :)

When today I look at my purty GUI GNOME desktop, programming a lot better and easier than back in those days, I'm very happy I made the right decision for the wrongest of reasons...

Now Playing

Been listening to The Blue Nile *all day* and still don't get tired of it. This album took about four years to grow on me, but its simplicity and mastery stands out.

gettext Spent the whole day getting very familiar with gettext. I wanted to make a sample module that used it all the way down in all the ways we will...

Life

Bastien finally got some mail. I hope he realizes there are more types of mail than just electronic ones :)

I was so damn tired yesterday. Spent ten minutes trying to figure out why some module wasn't building as a module, when I realized that in the Makefile I had put -DKNORENEKL instead of the NOKERNEL it needed. That's three typing errors in one word.

GStreamer

Spent a few hours today trying to figure out why nothing in the core was being i18n-ized. Then I started doubting if it worked at all, and realized nothing was actually being translated. Also, our Makefile.in.in in po seemed horribly outdated. So I gave up for the day.

Tomorrow I go through gettext again and make a skeleton module. Also, I need to figure out whether it's smarter to run gettextize once and commit stuff, or have it run from autogen.sh all the time.

Kernel module packaging

After polishing some of the macros for inclusion in autostars, I applied them to qc-usb, which has drivers for the webcams at work. The Makefile was again some ugly custom job, so I just threw it out and autotooled the whole thing in fifteen minutes.

Then I ran configure (with a kernel config thrown at it), make, and the module insmodded fine !

Tonight I try to write a small test kernel module, try to build it for a bunch of archs and types, and test them on the other machine. I'll install some smp and 586 kernels on it to make sure the versioning is right.

Then I need to reply a mail from someone who asked about it. I'm getting back to you soon, honest ! :)

Life Bastien finally got some mail. I hope he realizes there are more types of mail than just electronic ones :) I was so damn tired yesterday. Spent ten minutes...

Life

Yesterday I spent half of my day trying to get my NIE: the little number I need identifying me as a foreigner living in Spain. I need it to get an actual contract.

Anyway, I spent close to 90 minutes in a 30 people queue at the police office to receive the number I had applied to get more than a month ago. When I got to see a human being dealing cards, I noticed a guy next to me who didn't seem to get his number. It quickly dawned on me that he had applied for his NIE on the same day in the same police station as me, and I smelled trouble.

A woman behind us had the same problem. The three of us didn't seem to exist in the computer, and the office where we got our number from had a broken telephone line. We spent a good half hour awaiting our fate. Then we were told we had to go back to the first office, somehow they didn't send on the forms.

One taxi ride later, after three hours, we finally had our magic number.

On the way out, I saw some nice graffiti text:

Reminds me of how I used to feel way back when.

gnome-blog

Joined the crowd in testing this thing. Why it is important enough to be an applet is beyond me. It's just an app to me. Anyway, I packaged it for fedora.us.

Here's the Fedora 1 fedora.us package, RH80 and RH9 packages live close by as well. Follow its path through fedora.us.

Seth's original spec had a copy of the Rhythmbox changelog in it, hehe :) As well as some other unnecessary things. So if you are able to read this, Seth: thanks for the little program.

Life Yesterday I spent half of my day trying to get my NIE: the little number I need identifying me as a foreigner living in Spain. I need it to...

New Year

Had about eighteen people over at our apartment. One of them was our Norwegian friend Uraeus. He had a lot of fun mingling with all the Belgians :) Pictures are online.

Sven shows off multitasking. Jeroen and I start off Silly Snorrekes Season. Norwegian in the mist.

Spanish tradition says you eat 12 grapes at midnight, one on each strike of the clock. Yes, we can party on the balcony.

Anyway, food was excellent, Dave/Dina took care of the party music, I put some speakers outside on the terrace, and with all those people and two barbecues close together, we were more than warm enough in the brisk Barcelona air.

A lot of fun was had by all, and some simple suggestions on my part led to the money shot. Jeroen and I have a great set of gals. And a nice new wallpaper as well.

At around two, we managed to convince everyone to turn off the music and get out and walk around the city.

Friends, thanks for coming over. We'll miss you...

Dave/Dina

I had some silly idea that releasing on the last day of the year would be a good idea since surely everyone would be at home or at work with their mind on partying, and not have time to download and install a distribution ? So I hadn't actually prepared anything for the release in the way of torrenting or mirroring. I submitted the story at noon and just waited a bit.

To my surprise, the story got on SlashDot, and soon after the server was starting to crumble. The bandwidth on that server was high enough, but it quickly got up to a load of over 90.

So there really are people out there who have time to try out stuff on a day like this. So, thanks to all of them, and next time, never underestimate the power of SlashDot.

On the bad side, I spent too much time on New Year's Eve watching in disbelief at what was going on and scrambling to set up mirrors. On the good side, I got some people who tested Dave/Dina, and it seemed to install fine.

It also pointed me on some urgent TODO's. Most of the testers got it running, booted the machine, then looked at Dina, and the panel for two seconds, and then they wondered what to do. Apparently I didn't make it clear that this is meant as an entertainment box, and is meant to be controlled using a remote.

The fact that it's currently not obvious how to configure the remote doesn't help either. So, my next quest, together with DirectFB integration, is to write some sort of GUI for lirc configuration, together with some way of launching it when the remote isn't set up yet.

Work

Hope we can announce Fluendo soon. Our second hire is a lot quicker than me to make up his mind and jump ship. He's arriving in twelve days !

packaging kernel modules

I've tried a few times to make clean kernel modules of external projects. Examples include alsa, lirc, thinkpad stuff, audigy drivers, and quickcam drivers.

Each time it's been very painful, and it always left me with a feeling I didn't really understand the whole process. So today being a holiday here (Epiphany), I decided to spend a lot of time on it so I could figure out a good way of getting reproducable out-of-kernel-source module builds going and package stuff for all possible kernels on Red Hat/Fedora.

ds set me off in the right direction with an .m4 he uses in comedi, his data acquisition framework. (Boy, I wish I had that around when I was in university, but I digress).

He wanted Red Hat supported in anyway, so I set out to add that and figure out stuff along the way, using the builds from my previous attempts at packaging.

I managed to figure out some of the RedHat-isms (like rhconfig.h and /boot/kernel.h) and how to adapt it so that you can specify a config file used for kernel configuration, and autodetect for the current kernel config. Then the .m4 just substitutes a bunch of variables used in kernel building. I tried this on lirc, which I want to repackage for Dave/Dina (since a bunch of users complained they had LIRC but with different drivers), and it worked out fine. I wrote a simple patch for their make stuff, and all I need to do now after using the one macro in configure.in is put this in Makefile.am:

        $(CC) $(LINUX_CFLAGS) $(LINUX_MODFLAGS) $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) -c -o $@ $< 

to generate the module. The proper modflags get stored by the macro, including specific RedHat flags like -D__BOOT_KERNEL_SMP=0 which normally get collected from /boot/kernel.h, and it Just Works.

Now, I'm going to try and pimp these macros to projects mentioned above, and package all those external kernel modules up for fedora.us so stuff like my webcam Just Works and is easily rebuildable.

Some comment by Robert Love somewhere made me curious about what his plans are for kernel modules in the near future. Hopefully he'll obsolete all this malarkey, even though that will decrease the value of my newly learnt knowledge :)

Life

Ordered plane tickets to go back to Belgium for the two Twilight Singers shows, rock !

A week ago a timely slashdot thread made its way to me on the subject of backpacks. I was looking for one to use on the way to work, so that I don't have to worry about my laptop. I ended up going with a booqbag system. Paypal was incredibly annoying since it forced me to CLOSE MY ACCOUNT just to change my country of residence and delivery.

Anyway, with the dollar being very low against the euro, it only turned out at like 150 euro with shipping included. Waiting patiently now ...

Wonder if hadess checks his mail regularly.

Time to go blading again !

New Year Had about eighteen people over at our apartment. One of them was our Norwegian friend Uraeus. He had a lot of fun mingling with all the Belgians :)...

Dave/Dina

Incredible. After all this time, I finally got round to doing a release of Dave/Dina.

Dave/Dina 0.0, "Elisabeth", our first alpha release, is finally out the door.

I promised myself I would release before the end of 2003, and I did. Here's for time-based releases ! :)

So I guess I'll spend New Year's Eve on a constant buzz, see if somebody picks up the news, hopefully someone tries it and wants to help out.

I predict the buzz will last until the first person saying, "This sucks"/"Use MythTV"/... But until then, I'll enjoy the nice buzz of having accomplished something I have loved doing.

A short rest before we move on to bigger and better: DirectFB stuff, getcontrol, voice menus, lirc configuration GUI's, Fedora Core 2, and more...

Rock. This feels great.

GNOME

Followed up my gnome-media distcheck fixing with a new CVS module in gnome: toolchain-tests. I added two tests for make distcheck in intltool, and then proceeded to completely fix the bugs I had and other people had with the recent changes. Now waiting on Kenneth for comments.

I hope to keep up this tradition for any build issue I run into with our toolchain. Also, I got me thinking again about the GNOME maintainer guide I was planning on getting rolling.

Hope I find some time for that soon.

New Year

Spending tonight in our great new apartment, with about fifteen friends, barbecueing on the terrace, and having a great time.

Life Is Good.

See you all next year !

Dave/Dina Incredible. After all this time, I finally got round to doing a release of Dave/Dina. Dave/Dina 0.0, "Elisabeth", our first alpha release, is finally out the door. I promised...