Present Perfect

Me

My name is Thomas. I live in Barcelona. I work in Barcelona. I work on GStreamer for a living. And I'm already different from who I was for it.

I got from my front door to my desk in just about thirty minutes. That's about 20 minutes of walking and ten minutes of subway. I am a lucky bastard.

Arriving was interesting. Blocking the sidewalk for two hours to unload stuff. Spaniards can be, contrary to popular belief, impatient. One was so impatient that he tried entering his garage by boarding the sidewalk, then trying a ninety degree turn with about fifteen centimeters to spare. We tried to stop him, but he accelerated, and badly scratched and dented the car.

He even tried to convince us it was our fault for blocking the entrance. I almost started believing him when our friend, who speaks Spanish well, started giving him grief for trying to take advantage of foreigners.

I still can't believe he actually thought he could pull that turn off.

My car is in some parking garage at 15 euro a day until I get the definitive parking spot close to home, and the truck is somewhere in the harbour (I hope it's safe) awaiting its return tomorrow when Tom and Tine, our truck drivers, go back home.

I'm getting ADSL sometime this week apparently, and am now trying to go through the motions of getting stuff arranged (Luckily, Kristien is at home taking care of most of it) to change locks, get a boiler installed so we have warm water, and so on.

But I'm still a lucky bastard.

And now, back to work. Work on GStreamer. Man :)

Me My name is Thomas. I live in Barcelona. I work in Barcelona. I work on GStreamer for a living. And I'm already different from who I was for it....

My name is Thomas

And I'm a collector.

There, I've said it.

Seriously, are there help groups for people like me ? I have way too much stuff, and 30% of it is crap I throw out when I get around to it, and 30% is crap I should throw out but I can't for some reason (It reminds me of that camp/that summer/that concert/that past love/that accident...)

I'd better get old enough to actually enjoy sifting through all these boxes and have them stir up memories. Of course, you'll see that by the time I'm old there is simply no place to put stuff since each elderly person gets about 8 cubic meters of private space alloted...

I packed up 700 of my CD's; listing the numbers per letter after putting them in a box, and keeping track of all of them in text files by just doing

 ls /opt/davedina/audio/albums 

and deleting the few (heh) albums I don't actually own.

My name is Thomas And I'm a collector. There, I've said it. Seriously, are there help groups for people like me ? I have way too much stuff, and 30%...

Dave/Dina

So, I was finally at the point where I could build a complete install tree for Dave/Dina. The installer, though hackish beyond belief, was able to install all the necessary packages, keep the grub.conf sane for our purposes, and write inittab correctly.

I was finally ready to reinstall our Dave/Dina machine with the new installer and move over old configuration and files. So I did, installer finished fine, and I boot...

And no TV-OUT. Argh.

I think I spent a few hours hunting for kernel configs before I went back in there old-school - just compile kernels by hand, and tweaking settings until I realized what was going wrong. Seriously, the time difference between rebuilding a kernel after changing one option only and doing the same, but rebuilding the whole kernel rpm from scratch each time for three architectures, is huge. Which is logical. But I had gotten so used to the whole change - package cycle for other packages that I didn't even think about running around it for kernel rebuilds.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I had TV-OUT working again for the G400 card. Of course, we only have two working ones left, and we have two machines in use, with four more to be installed. So I have to get cracking on getting the G550 to work decently, probably with DirectFB and X on that. Hope I can get something done this weekend.

DAD

I had held off importing some albums containing accents, because I knew the upgrade to RH9 would buy me better UTF-8 support. Of course, nothing comes for free. So I had to learn stuff I didn't know about UTF-8, and how it's supported in Perl and MySQL. I now know UTF-8 is the answer to all current accent and language problems, and UTF-8's design is very clever in that it eases the transition between old 128-character ASCII and the full unicode range.

Anyway, due to two very sleepless nights (didn't feel sleepy before 4 AM), and after lots of test applications, and some code scrubbing, our digital audio database now manages to import and display albums with UTF-8 in the filenames properly. So I started importing Beyoncé and Björk albums :)

A week before I leave to Spain, stats are like this:

 Statistics for dad songs : 16109 artists : 1884 albums : 1244 

and for disk usage: [root@davedina root]# du --max-depth=0 /opt/davedina/audio/albums/ 85823596 /opt/davedina/audio/albums

I'm getting there ...

Of course, I still haven't gotten to writing a simple GStreamer-based player to replace XMMS. So, with XMMS being GTK 1, UTF-8 files don't display correctly. But due to the genius of UTF-8 (that IS the reason it works, right ?) it can play them properly anyway ...

Only one true problem left to solve in a clean way. I need to convince RH9's apache/php setup to treat .m3u files as php code, in such a way that just dropping a config file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ makes it happen.

If anyone has a good suggestion what the proper way to do this is, let me know (given the constraint that just dropping one config file in that directory should make it work...)

Dave/Dina So, I was finally at the point where I could build a complete install tree for Dave/Dina. The installer, though hackish beyond belief, was able to install all the...

Dave/Dina

In the final throes of getting an .iso out. After a lot of work, the installer is updated to anaconda 9.0, and customization has been done everywhere where it was needed. There are still too many hacks to get where I want. For example, instead of trying to teach anaconda how I want the grub.conf to show the two different boot partitions, I just don't write grub.conf from anaconda and let an rpm install a new grub.conf

But for a first release, these hacks work. I think I eradicated Red Hat from almost any place where it made sense, except maybe for init. I'm still kind of confused by the legalities of this, but the people at Red Hat I know tell me that it really is the purpose of the license to have third parties remove all links to Red Hat from a forked product.

Anyway, some minor tweaking in the install packages should get us finished. And then we have an installer that works, but it's pretty dumb too. I turned off most of the hardware autodetection because I have yet to figure out how to handle it properly in all cases. But I'm happy I'm getting where I want, and I hope to attract some new people once the .iso is out.

Music

I've listened to the Twilight Singers pretty much continuously for the last two weeks straight. It is that good. I hope they get their ass to Europe sometime soon this time around.

As for the move, I've posed myself an interesting problem, the classic desert disc question. I'm going to allow myself to take 20 CD's with me to Barcelona. Of course, I'm cheating like there's no tomorrow, with over 1200 CD's on my Dave/Dina system that I'm taking with me as well. But for general playback, car playback, or falling asleep with the stereo, only 20 CD's. I'll post a list when I'm done fretting over which to take.

mach

Cleaned up a hack I put in for Matthias. Now I need to release something for Fedora Core 1, but I'm having silly perfectionist issues with what names to use for the distros now that fedora means both the old fedora.us stuff as well as the new fedora core stuff. I'll deal with that tomorrow so I can release.

glibc update

A recent glibc update on my RH9 machine caused my immense worries. rpm was completely screwed, I couldn't build install images for Dave/Dina anymore, mach failed, ... It seems the latest glibc update had some issues with custom-built kernels. It seems to be a known issue, and reverting fixed it for me for now. I'll deal with this when I'm done moving.

Life and Moving

Only ten days left. Time to get some stuff in order. Need to order a server for apestaart. Need to go to the dentist one last time. A week ago, I went on a very relaxing weekend with friends. And last Friday, we threw our going away party. For some reason I got a huge and heavy penguin.

As for the move itself, we're leaving next week on Friday morning. The whole house is a mess, boxes everywhere, stuff flying around, tables being broken apart. A sad affair. I'm going to miss this big house of ours, and I'm going to miss living together with a bunch of guys. It's fantastic to always have someone home when you come home, and have people around to do stuff with. I love my girlfriend, and I'm sure we'll have a great time in our new apartment, but it's going to be different... The end of an era.

Growing up is letting go.

For the actual move, we'll rent a small truck and we have two friends who want to drive it there and back again, with some days in Barcelona inbetween...

Dave/Dina In the final throes of getting an .iso out. After a lot of work, the installer is updated to anaconda 9.0, and customization has been done everywhere where it...

House

What a day, what a day. This morning I woke up with stress hoping the apartment I chose was still available. I had one more appointment, which was in Calle Taller, which is in my opinion the most pleasant street in all of the centre. It has six CD stores that I could count, so go figure... I walked out of one with a strange Radiohead bootleg double CD, an Arab Strap single and the Pixies Purple Tape.

So, on to the loft. I entered into my dream apartment. A huge loft with the kitchen just the way I like it, open and connected to the rest of the place. And the terrace is huge, 40 square meters. You can play football on it !

It was a bit more expensive though, and the terrace is walled, and it would take work (like pour concrete on the floor on top of the bathroom), and so on. And my girlfriend rightly argued that whatever way we look at it, it would make us count our money more all the time, and it's 2500 euros more per year.

So sense prevailed. The moral of the story is - it's ok to dream, but sometimes it's nicer to just settle down and choose something.

At noon, I opened a bank account. It took me two minutes before I realized that the song currently playing there was "Into The White" by The Pixies. I mean, The Pixies. In a bank. And not just any regular song. One of the better, but unknown B-sides. One of the few sung by Kim Deal. In a bank. I still can't get over it.

I mean, it was a bank. People wear suits. Money is exchanged. Only in Barcelona.

In a stupid bank.

So, I have a spanish bank account. Send me money !

In the evening, I went to the rental agency with two people. They seemed to be very nice; I only have to pay starting december, I can get my keys tomorrow, I can enter the weekend before I start paying, and so on. Great.

Only, they want cash. That means, about 2300 euros of it. Well, I had raised my banking limit on my card to 1500 before I left. But the ATM machine for some reason only allowed me to withdraw 300 euros. Luckily, I have a great boss.

Tomorrow, I go and sign the contract, then I fly back. I get the keys tomorrow. Keys. Tomorrow. Moi. Yes.

Barcelona, I think you and I are going to make the best of friends.

GStreamer

dolphy and I discussed the objectives a bit for my job. Basically, I'll be working on getting GStreamer stable, and then we start building server products on top of it. Too early to say, but it sounds like a dream job for me...

Hearing him talk, how we will tackle stuff, what will happen, it makes me feel like I'm part of the start of something big. I'm not sure yet, but I feel we will bring large doses of rocking things out there. And free to boot...

House What a day, what a day. This morning I woke up with stress hoping the apartment I chose was still available. I had one more appointment, which was in...