Present Perfect

Barcelona

After three full days of apartment hunting and having seen about 20 apartments, I think we have found something that my girlfriend and me both like. For her, the presence of a huge terrace is the thing that wins her over.

It's on the ninth floor, it has a pretty nice view, the apartment itself needs some work but my girlfriend says she's happy to do some work there, we have some guest space, the living room looks nice, the kitchen is ok, and so on. Tomorrow morning we're calling to see if it's ours.

Funny how the first two days, we didn't really see anything that was ok, and today we only saw five which we found in the newspaper and they were all a lot better than the ones before.

Life

Just got home from a nice dinner with my boss, his wife and Matthias. Had a great evening, and we topped it off by rollerblading home. It was over 10 kilometer, a big tour of the whole city, passing along the great lanes, passing by the sea, passing by the hip food joint where I first learned about the Suse takeover a bunch of weeks ago (Go Novell), hearing the sea crash on the beach... Pure slices of thinly cut heaven washed over me.

I like my boss, I like my collagues, I like the city, I like the pastimes, I like my new laptop, I like my new place, I like my new job even more, I love my girlfriend... I'm not sure I fully realize how certifiably incredibly lucky I really am. It was about time :)

Thank you, whoever out there... I'll be even nicer to small animals and elderly people from now on.

Looking at the map I just realized that my new place is close to two subway stations on different lines, and there are big lanes to my work so I can skate there easily and safely. Let's get going... All of you out there keep your fingers crossed that the place is mine tomorrow...

Barcelona After three full days of apartment hunting and having seen about 20 apartments, I think we have found something that my girlfriend and me both like. For her, the...

Barcelona

Arrived today. Went blading with Matthias, he tried to teach me the basics. I didn't fall at all, that's a good start. It being 17 degrees out here, and me skating in my t-shirt, I can definitely see how I would like living here. Tomorrow I start Hunt For The Great Apartment.

Laptop

Got my new laptop today. IBM T-40. Most stuff seems to work fine. XVideo and opengl worked out of the box. Sound works. The only thing that doesn't seem to work is the internal wireless. I even managed to insert my previous big laptop drive instead of the 40 GB IBM drive. My music is back as well.

Peter, this shot is for you. I especially spent some time fixing the gallery setup on the temporary server for you. Well, that and for my girlfriend - I need a way to send pictures of the apartments I visit to her.

Music

For those that realized that The Afghan Whigs where the best band in the world, or for those that at least can see how one would think that: Greg Dulli has a new Twilight Singers album out, called Blackberry Belle. I've been listening to it for six days straight and it's awesome. I've even uploaded the album to my temp server so I could get it here in Barcelona for these few days without it.

Apparently they come to Belgium January 2nd. That sucks - we're having a new year's eve party here in Barcelona with a bunch of friends. Hope I can make it back for that show...

Barcelona Arrived today. Went blading with Matthias, he tried to teach me the basics. I didn't fall at all, that's a good start. It being 17 degrees out here, and...

Dave/Dina

Spent last week reworking my set of anaconda patches for Dave/Dina going from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9, then touching up the other bits. It's a lot less painful now that I use quilt. ncm, it was me who plugged it here. If you were looking for the site, it's at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt/

Anyway, Thursday night the unthinkable happened. After a quick reboot of my main machine it failed to boot up. And this was just as I was about to go to sleep. Blind panic ensued. Started swapping out components, and it seems the Matrox G400 has died. A bit of a pain, since this really still is the best card to do TV/OUT with.

I went and collected my friend's Dave/Dina box, swapped out the cards, compared with another spare one I had, and so on, until it worked. The three cards are all different in board layout, interestingly enough. They also all get detected by kudzu differently, but get the same name. Strange.

Anyway, it's probably time to move to DirectFB on newer matrox cards and start experimenting. But Friday was a huge waste of time trying to get things to work again, just as I was pretty much finished with setting up the whole Dave/Dina install tree.

So all I have to show for last week is this screenshot. Hope to do better this week.

Work

Still enjoying being unemployed. On the other hand, looking forward to my new job more and more. It's funny how I really don't miss my old job. I miss some of the people sometimes, but I made the right decision overall. Next week I'm going to Barcelona for a whole week to hunt for an apartment. Rent is pretty expensive there by European standards, but I hope to find something for the two of us that's under 800 euro.

Will also bring my new rollerblades to go out skating with Matthias.

Meanwhile, my new boss already ordered my new laptop. Things are going well, I feel taken care of.

Music

Had an interesting Sunday accompanying my girlfriend. There was this pop festival where she had to do interviews. So I got to meet Liberty-X (I've always thought Jessica looked yummy, and she does :) ) and Melanie C. Mel had her leg in a cast, and she was at least a head smaller than me. She's actually very petite in real life.

I'm not really starstruck at this sort of thing since it's not my kind of music. Meeting people like Thom Yorke or Thurston Moore or Greg Dulli in the past was a lot more awe-inspiring. But it's weird how on the one hand some people really act superhyper when meeting "famous" people, and on the other hand those "famous" people seem to be very down-to-earth and friendly.

For the guys who care: Mel C is taken, and she seemed to be very much in love with her pretty hunky guy.

Dave/Dina Spent last week reworking my set of anaconda patches for Dave/Dina going from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9, then touching up the other bits. It's a lot...

mach

Tested and released a new version for mach, 0.4.2, which has stuff for the third Severn beta. Nice to be able to sometimes just do a simple release that only does one thing.

Well, I did muck about in the config file as well, but ...

quilt

For Dave/Dina, last time around I hacked on anaconda. I did simple things, like changing install paths and binary names to DD-anaconda so I could still install both, and changing RedHat to DaveDina everywhere.

That was on the 7.3 anaconda, and now I wanted to move on to the 9.0 anaconda. Last time I just put the sources in CVS and patched directly in it, because I had no clue how to maintain different patch sets... This time, I looked at a few suggestions people had sent me for this kind of problem.

I got quilt and packaged it up for Fedora, and then decided to try it out. The docs are crappy (because quilt is a reworking of a set of tools by Andrew Morton, and the docs point you to his readme, which works with the old commands) so I should send a patch for the docs now that I know how to use it.

But as for using it, it's pretty much what I was hoping to get. You can define patch sets, add source files to them, and push and pop patches to and from the stack. So, as I was working on the patch that replaces the prefix to DD-anaconda, I noticed one more RedHat that hadn't turned into DaveDina. So then I just went "quilt refresh" to store the current patch, "quilt pop" until I was at the bottom of the stack, fixed this mistake in the same source file I was editing before, saved, "quilt refresh", and then "quilt push" until I was back at the patch I was working on.

Compared to the patch extraction by hand, this was decidedly more easy to use. So based on a patch from my version to the original source code, I was able to split out the big patch into four smaller ones that are logically grouped.

I made packages for Fedora on RH80 and RH9, so give it a try if you're interested.

Work and Life

So, I'm moving to Barcelona at the end of next month. I'll be working there for a company of dolphy. Details will follow, but it looks like I'll be spending some time on stabilizing GStreamer, which sounds awesome.

In two weeks, I hope to find an apartment. I've given myself one week over there to find something. Fingers crossed.

ask a dick

Peter and I made it on one of our favourite sites ! Here's our story. And some good advice gotten too ! :) For a touch of class, you can count on Dick.

mach Tested and released a new version for mach, 0.4.2, which has stuff for the third Severn beta. Nice to be able to sometimes just do a simple release that...

Crap

I sort of have vague recollections and feverish nightmares of what sort of crap avifile was from a packaging perspective.

Today I wanted to try out a new version of vcr that has come out and works with avifile 0.7.37 and tried updating my spec for avifile again.

Here's a snippet of the list of tarballs they currently have up for download:

• avifile-0.7-0.7.38.tar.gz
• avifile-0.7.37-20030522.tgz
• avifile-0.7.34-20030319.tgz
• avifile-0.6.0-20011220admin.tgz
• avifile-0.53.5.tar.gz

Apparently, they're STILL doing the same sort of silly things from back then.

People, if you want your project taken seriously, then:

• settle on one or two formats for your source distribution. Have them have sane suffixes. I suggest .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 If you settled on tar.gz, then choose either .tgz or tar.gz, but don't use both
• settle on one version naming scheme. I count four among the five tarballs I just listed. I see no good reason for changing to have an extra 0.7 at all in the last release.

It's no wonder just about any packager for Red Hat I know has decided not ever to package avifile again.

Crap I sort of have vague recollections and feverish nightmares of what sort of crap avifile was from a packaging perspective. Today I wanted to try out a new version...