Present Perfect

GStreamer

Watching long compile sessions gives me some time to update the log. Not sure yet if that's a good or a bad thing.

This morning I wanted to try some new plugins and I ran gst-register and it segfaulted, leaving me no idea of what went wrong. So, back out with the debug log and so on, and gdb, and I realized that for some reason the xvid plugin was segfaulting upon load.

That hadn't happened to me in a long time. Normally I would just delete the plugin for now and move on with what I wanted to do. But I got fed up with the fact that the one application that just isn't supposed to segfault, segfaults.

So I spent a bit of time installing and removing segfault trappers around the plugin loader functions. It's probably not reentrant and threadsafe and all that, but when a segfault happens, does that matter much ? At least now it prints out a message about what was wrong and what to do about it:

 ERROR:Caught a segmentation fault while loading plugin file: /home/thomas/gst/cvs/gst-plugins/gst-plugins-0.7.2.1/_build/ext/xvid/.libs/libgstxvid.so   Please either: - remove it and restart. - run with --gst-enable-segfault and debug. 

That seems fine for now.

I got everything to distcheck nicely again, so I'm going to try and release before ds merges his huge caps rewrite. He just keeps going at it, nice to see all the action.

Time to get back to work on the media test suite.

Also need to keep moving on Fluendo.

Life

A short update for the friends out there that read this to get news on how we're doing here in Barcelona. The rest of you can stop reading here :)

The pictures are online, start browsing in the personal gallery.

A short recap of the last two weeks by picture.

Most of my stuff that I don't really need for now is in the basement at my grandmother's. Feel free to bid on items you like.

It ain't a real road trip until the socked feet hit the dashboard.

First sighting of Barcelona road signs resulting in a weird effect composition.

The flat doesn't look too good when we arrive. Which gives us all the more motivation to clean it up and redo it.

Here's how to paint like a poet. And here's how girls paint when they're in love.

We bought an excellent couch that can fit four easily, or even two sleepers.

On the first weekend, I finally got round to installing TV and PlayStation. Playing SSX3 is really all I need at times.

It took us thirteen days to finally get a boiler installed. Here's my first hot bath in two weeks time !. You just can't imagine how nice that felt.

So, the living room is painted now. We need a TV cabinet. I don't think Kristien will let me keep this setup like this for very long.

In the meantime, we also got our dishwasher connected (finally), we went out and bought a laundry machine which was installed today (hurray ! clean socks !), and our bedroom now has a bed and a nice red color.

And last friday, we had a wonderful company dinner in which I ate a fourth of Kristien's food as well since it was too much for her. After that, every drink you would want and a tad bit of dancing.

Barcelona is treating us really really well. It's turned out better than I expected.

GStreamer Watching long compile sessions gives me some time to update the log. Not sure yet if that's a good or a bad thing. This morning I wanted to try...

The Difference

When I used to use Windows, I would just write mail and click on send and the mail would go out and that was it.

The last two days, every time I click send to get a mail out, I see those glasses and those curls and that beard and think about how little I know about the guy that makes my computer send the mail.

I've only met Ettore twice or three times, at GUADEC's and in Boston, and I haven't spoken much with him. but it's impossible to send a mail now without thinking about him. For every mail you send with Evolution, God gives Ettore an extra rice grain in his pudding. So never stop sending mail.

I wanted to write at least something today, because I have other stuff to talk about but it feels inappropriate to do so in the same post. Time to get some sleep.

The Difference When I used to use Windows, I would just write mail and click on send and the mail would go out and that was it. The last two...

GStreamer

Slowly building up steam. Reinstated the autobuild on an online server that some friends and me have set up. Also tried to set up an autobuild on the company's development server. At first I was annoyed because it runs RedHat 7.3 to match the production servers in use. But Matthias told me to "just use mach" to set up any version I want. Damnit, how can one person be so nice and devious at the same time ?

Silly that I hadn't thought of it myself. I proceeded to set up an RH9 environment, which went quickly enough. It's the first time I used mach on an older platform to install a newer platform, and it seemed to work out fine too. Which isn't what I would have expected.

Running the cvs build script from cron will still be a one-liner, since it's just a matter of prefixing it with the magic mach incantations.

So, after that I need to find some way to get the script to mail gst-devel whenever the build status changes; ie. mail on the first break.

We also hope to be moving to Freedesktop for CVS hosting. The main attraction is being able to manipulate the CVSROOT directly. Secondary attractions are the fact that SF's cvs is still flakey, and freedesktop has some good goals we want to align with.

At the moment I'm collecting developer ssh pubkeys so I don't have to bother the housekeepers at FD too much.

Trying to integrate our FFmpeg cvs slurping with automake, I think I'm going to separate the package entirely sometime soon.

Music

Wanted to try and catch the Strokes here in Barcelona on monday. That is, until I found out they charged 28 euros. For a band that has only two albums out, and is known to play no longer than an hour ! Somebody scream ripoff !

I think I'll wait for Lamb next week, at least their concerts are probably worth the money.

Fantastic news: Twilight Singers are touring Europe soon ! Going to Belgium to see them if my boss will let me. Hope they come through Barcelona too.

On the headphones this morning: Spiritualized - No God Only Religion

GStreamer Slowly building up steam. Reinstated the autobuild on an online server that some friends and me have set up. Also tried to set up an autobuild on the company's...

Apartment

We spent the first week cleaning and retouching walls and stuff preparing to paint the living room over the weekend. I'm so happy to have Dave/Dina in cases like these: just unpack some boxes, plug in some stuff, start the computer, and use the remote to set it to play songs I've marked with a score on Good between 0.7 and 1, with just three button presses.

Manual labor is so much nicer to do with some sweet music to do it to.

Friday we went out to buy paint for the living room and sleeping room. I was kind of dubious about the quantity of paint he was giving us, it didn't really seem enough, but he assured us we would be fine, even with two layers. He also mixed two different kinds of gray from the same formula, blaming the computer.

It seemed to me like he forgot to check if there was enough yellow coloring paste left, because after he made the second pot he refilled it. But I'm not complaining, he spent fifteen minutes adding yellow until he claimed the colours were the same and I had had enough of my time wasted that I tended to agree with him even though I knew it was not he same.

So, back to the apartment, and on Saturday we started painting the one wall that was going to be in gray. We made it halfway through the second of two cans of paint on the first layer. And with this being a holiday weekend with Monday being some Spanish national holiday you could guess where this was going.

Anyway, we were lucky to have enough white for the rest of the living room, so by Sunday we could at least install the sofa (which I love - it is huge, it can fit four people, and a grown man can sleep in it, even a big man like Uraeus on, say, New Year's Eve.

So Sunday night, I put together the table and installed a TV and the PlayStation 2, and played SSX3 for an hour. This game is so incredibly good, such a nice flow to it, and such a sense of achievement. And I thought I wouldn't like snowboarding games.

ADSL

Friday during lunch break I went home to try and get ADSL configured. Telefonica has some nice features on their website. With my invoice, I was able to log in somewhere, and figure out the status of my ADSL, which was somewhere halfway to completion. It also listed some configuration details, but I wasn't able to find more lowlevel details, like whether it uses PPPoE or PPPoA, VCI/VPI settings, and so on.

The USB kit I received also only works on Windows, so that was pretty useless to me. I tried talking with Telefonica support on the phone, but they couldn't tell me which sort of PPP it was, or what ATM settings I needed, and wouldn't help me once they figured out I wasn't trying to get their USB kit running.

Anyways, after lots of net hunting, I figured out that it was in fact PPPoE, and that I just needed to set VCI 32 and VPI 8 (as opposed to Belgium, where it's 35/8), and after that it Just Worked.

Dolphy said that I was a fucking lucky guy. I'd like to think it was nothing more than talent :)

GStreamer

Had some stuff pending for commit as well. The gnome-audio-profiles stuff I retouched this weekend and sent for approval to rburton and Ted Gould so they can take a look and so I can merge it into gnome-media. After that I need to add some consumers; gnome-sound-recorder and sound-juicer are the first (so God can stop killing kittens on my account). After that, some new simple stuff like nautilus extensions to convert any type of sound to any of the profiles.

It seems my error handling stuff is lost, the hard disk in my desktop seems to have taken offense at the move to Barcelona. I should copy the disk lowlevel first before e2fsck makes more of a mess of it. It should be doable to recreate it from memory though.

As for work, we need to discuss what we want to do the next month. ds has made a nice inventory of what needs to be done for the API freeze. but we need to finish things there. And I also need to get us moved to freedesktop.org sometime soon.

Apartment We spent the first week cleaning and retouching walls and stuff preparing to paint the living room over the weekend. I'm so happy to have Dave/Dina in cases like...

Work

Spent some time getting the GStreamer CVS build back into shape and fixing up the documentation again. Also trying to dust off the old autobuild scripts to get nightly builds going again on various machines. Tinderbox might be overkill, but we need something.

Also tried figuring out why openjade is failing to get the dtd through the transparent squid proxy set up here. It's time to dig out tcpdump or sniffit.

ds has given me access to his debian box, so I can test fixes there regularly as well, or even maybe run nightly builds if he's ok with that.

After that, it's time to rework some documentation and finish the test suite. I also need to set up my home computer because that's the one that contains my error handling code which still needs to go into GStreamer.

dolphy wanted me to install gaim because he keeps in touch with everyone through it. So I gave it a try, again, using my old config from last year.

I still hate instant messengers; the autoconverted smileys make it feel more like teletubbies stuff than Sesame Street. Anyway, I upgraded to the fedora updates-testing 0.74 version, which made MSN work slightly, then registered with ICQ for probably the fourth time in my life, and after some tweaking it worked. I get paid a lot for installing gaim, muhaha.

Home

Two days ago we went to IKEA to get a bed, a table, chairs and a sofa. We managed to find it all for under 1200 euro. Only the sofa was rather big and Tom, Matthias and I carried it up eight flights of stairs. I had a small nervous breakdown when we weren't able to fit it through the L-shaped hallway of our apartment, but after some twiddling we managed to land it in the long part and left it there.

Yesterday we've been told we would be invoiced for paint touchups in the stairwell.

I feel guilty towards Matthias. It seems like every time I try to do something back for him for all of the things he's helped out with, he ends up helping out with something else...

Other than that, we've begun filling holes left by the previous tenants in preparation for the painting work. We're still discussing colors. I think she wants one wall in red or purple and the other three in a broken white. We'll see :)

Life

This morning I got up really early to be first in line at the Police Station to get my identification number. I was there fifteen minutes before opening and I still was only the tenth person in line. After half an hour it was my turn. I thought I had brought everything, but apparently I also need some kind of proof that I have work there. So I'll have to come back in the morning, again. Getting used to Spanish bureaucracy, slowly.

Dave/Dina

salmoni, you're right, I need to touch up the website. It's still waiting on a server move which should be asap. That means, as soon as I have ADSL at home so I can work on it. Which, if the gods are merciful, could be today. It's frustrating - I finished building alpha .ISO images, they're in a box, but I can't upload them yet.

Other than that, yes, I realize I'm lucky to be able to work on what I like working on. Hope it turns out well...

Work Spent some time getting the GStreamer CVS build back into shape and fixing up the documentation again. Also trying to dust off the old autobuild scripts to get nightly...