Present Perfect

GUADEC

On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event, because last year and Boston was so much fun and such a great experience. And in the last two months before GUADEC, I started to feel less and less enthusiastic about coming, for various reasons.

But now I'm here, and I just got back from the pub, and I listened in on lots of conversations, and talked to lots of people, and it just dawned on me that GNOME really IS a community and there are real people hidden behind the About box that write the software I have come to use every day.

And I might not always agree with all of them or just generally not have a clue about what it is they are doing, but I tend to notice that on the whole the software I use every day is getting better and better.

And as I walk round the pub, with Nat singing in my ear behind me, and Gman getting a round of applause for his truly EXCELLENT work on organising all of this, and people having a good time and slowly getting slightly drunk, I look around. And I see the person that writes my window manager and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I see the guys that write my file manager, and the guy that employs one of them, and the guy that writes my new software installer, and the guy that is responsible for tying all those releases together, and the guy that uses GStreamer to rip CD's, and so on.

And I see that these are the people that write my desktop, and over time I am becoming one of them, and these are all good people sharing a common goal And I got to know them and trust me when I say that they can be trusted to do the best possible job, whether employed by a company or in their free time. And I look around, and I see that it's all good, and tomorrow there will be more of us, and what we are doing makes sense.

And I'll probably re-read this all tomorrow morning before posting and think that I didn't write anything coherent or useful at all, but since I'm promising myself now to go ahead and post it anyway tomorrow, it'll be out there. It might seem silly or sentimental, but it feels good to be a part of it, and it is just as much relevant to everything being said here as anything.

Having a purpose and feeling good about that purpose and the people you're sharing those purposes with is what makes the difference between working on something once in a while and wanting to be a part of it.

Next day

I'm not even going to bother rereading what I wrote. Felt really sick again this morning, waited for it to pass. Then went into Trinity, bought three CD's (I can hardly pass by record stores without getting something), and then went for the killer: two PlayStation 2 dancemats. They're impossible to get in Belgium, so ...

GUADEC On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event,...

GU4DEC

Had a good two pre-conference days, meeting up with old acquaintances and trying to get my presentation written. Spent some time with most people, really, talking a bit to the Ximian and Red Hat crew as well as all the other non-corporate GNOMErs (like Hallski and the other Swedes, and jdub and Gman, who's organising the whole thing. Also met up with all of the other GStreamer people slowly trickling in.

The one thing I really miss about my job is not being around people that are working on similar things and know about the same things as I do, and I can learn from.

Trying to get my talk written in OpenOffice, but it has a fairly high crash rate. Saving my presentation is impossible, it crashes every single time. Even worse, it then brings up bug-buddy and gdb automatically, and if you kill those you lose your temporary saves.

Luckily, Michael Meeks arrived this morning and now I had my chance to poke at him for crashing software. He always does that to me (though playfully). He tells me I should remove the old .openoffice directory and then everything should be fine. I'm not going to do that just now since I don't actually have my presentation on my disk apart from the temporary files OpenOffice saves and I don't know how to get at those other than starting the application.

So I'll just march on through the regular crashing, do the presentation, then figure out a way to fix this without losing it.

Nobody at Ximian noticed because they mostly tested fresh installs, not upgrades. Makes sense, somehow.

So now I'm stressing out about my talk later on, making slides, and getting into the habit of saving regularly, even though it crashes, in the hopes that I'll have a finished set of slides soon and can test my presentation.

Why on earth did Gman put me in the really big 400 people room ??? I might love him later, but I hate him now :)

GU4DEC Had a good two pre-conference days, meeting up with old acquaintances and trying to get my presentation written. Spent some time with most people, really, talking a bit to...

GU4DEC

Arrived in Dublin this morning, met up with the early arrivers at Trinity. I'm stressed out completely about my talk since I'm still fixing bugs in the editor instead of writing slides.

Ximian Desktop 2

What can I say ? Sweetness all the way. Nice. Responsive. Nice. Sweet. Good job, guys !

Even better that I can thank them personally here :)

Red Hat 9, Ximian Desktop 2, and apt

People might have noticed that apt stops being useful after installing XD2. Apt seems to think the state is inconsistent. I rebuilt Red Hat's db4 so that it doesn't obsoletes: db1. If you have this problem, you might like my temporary workaround.

quark

Found out about this GStreamer-based player program through Freshmeat. The author is in our irc channel but apparently didn't mention it :) Anyway, been playing music with it for the past two days because it would have been really lame to go into GUADEC and use XMMS for music. Rhythmbox will take some time again to set up since I'll have to repackage libmusicbrainz.

GU4DEC Arrived in Dublin this morning, met up with the early arrivers at Trinity. I'm stressed out completely about my talk since I'm still fixing bugs in the editor instead...

Art

The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Hacker Culture would like to confirm their successful acquisition of one pristine and unique set of original nattoons by the reputed artist Mr. Friedman.

Due to massive crowd attendance during the exposition, not everyone was able to fully admire the inspiring work of this budding young sketcher of daily life and the situations it presents. Hence we have been asked to provide photographs of said set and make them available.

• shot 1
• shot 2

Music

Went to see Evan Dando play this week. My ex-girlfriend called me up on the day itself and said her date couldn't go, so she took me along. Had a great time. He opened up with my favourite Lemonheads song, "The Outdoor Type". It was hard to tell if he was in a very good mood or just totally wasted... He played "The Great Big No" while lying down on the ground, pulling the microphone stand towards him, but he played it fantastically. Strange concert. His between-song-banter was funny too.

I lost a few entries due to random APM failures, so It'd be good to note that over the last few weeks

• Tom McRae was nothing short of amazing live
• Ed Harcourt is an incredibly talented live musician
• Interpol, while having released last year's best record, were incredibly disappointing live due to bad vocals and drowned sound
• Nada Surf charmed the crowd immensely while playing a great set, and as if by magic had at least 100 people on-stage during Popular, who all politely stepped back off after the song was done

mach

Close to a 0.4.0 release. It's about time. It really is true that 90 percent of an application gets written in 10 percent of the time. I'm tying up loose ends. Right now I can, from scratch, type

mach -r redhat-9-i386-fedora-stable --sign */*.spec

and it will build packages from each of those spec files, in the right order if packages depend on each other, and then sign the resulting packages as well as md5sums of the files.

Now I need to think about how it will work on the Fedora build server.

Laptop

Fitted it with a new 60 GB hard disk (MORE MUSIC) and 512 MB RAM. On the downside, there still is something incredibly sluggish about the Red Hat 9 kernel. I only really realized something was very wrong when I installed debian on the '98 Powerbook I have, and noticed how it always feels responsive and never skips on playing back music, while this 866 MHz Pentium III skips *all the time* when changing workspaces or other things.

If you know WHY it feels so slow then please drop me a line.

mx

Heh, you're welcome :) Yes, it really is great that it is actually possible to get help and learn from peers, and I'm glad I can sometimes help too.

Also, be advised that my advice is mostly from personal experience, and from the belief that systems should be easily upgradeable and thus /usr is best left to the package management system.

Of course, I break this rule myself for mach development, because mach has an suid binary that has some of the paths hardcoded in it for security, so then it really is faster to configure the source to be installed in /usr. The trick is to know why and when to break the rule.

Fun

A friend of ours had her birthday last weekend and invited us to the beach. A great time was had at all. Strangely nobody took pictures while the five of us were playing sissyball in the sea. Rules of sissyball are very simple : find the shortest distance between five people that allows them to pass the ball without dropping it for 40 passes.

My dad bought a Propcycle. It's an arcade game were you have to ride a bike. The harder you pedal, the higher you can fly across a landscape and catch flying objects. (I am not kidding you).

You probably never heard about it because it wasn't ever successful anyway. My dad saw it on holiday and spent at least two hours in the arcade every day. He didn't have much competition because it wasn't the coolest game around :)

He found someone who sold these units, and it arrived last week. It still needs to be assembled.

I took the opportunity to attach the PlayStation and Dave/Dina to the screen, and having such an incredibly big screen to play and watch on.

Peter thought this picture of me working was cool. Peter is strange. I'll miss him when he goes to South-Asia this year to ride his bike with his girlfriend for half a year.

Meanwhile, I'm considering going to work in Barcelona. Anxiety.

GUADEC

Going to GUADEC in ten days. Psyched to be there, I've been wanting to go there for a whole year. Strangely enough I feel less psyched now that it's clear. It might have to do with me doing a presentation there, and realizing I still have work left to do, when my time might be better spent doing more stuff on GStreamer proper.

Art The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Hacker Culture would like to confirm their successful acquisition of one pristine and unique set of original nattoons by the reputed artist Mr. Friedman....

mx

First off, there are binary packages for epiphany; for example, both mozilla 1.4b and epiphany 0.6.1 are in rawhide. They work fine. Never compile by hand if there are packages out there you can trust to be decent :)

Second, Red Hat didn't move the server directory for bonobo. If you configure without prefix, then it defaults to a /usr/local/prefix, and server files are installed to /usr/local/lib/bonobo.

bonobo on your system is configured with prefix /usr since you installed the RPM, hence bonobo doesn't pick up your Epiphany servers file.

There are ways around this, and these are:

• there is an environment variable for bonobo (I don't remember which) that specifies an alternate dir to use. You should set this in your bash profile, just like you have to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf or your LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and just like you have to add /usr/local/bin to your PATH.
• an other option is configuring epiphany with prefix /usr. This is BAD, you should never ever do this :) /usr is for your package management system, ie rpm in this case. Don't install anything by hand in there, because you run the risk of both overwriting files belonging to rpms (thus robbing you of the chance of verifying your install) and you'll probably lose a lot of stuff when you upgrade your system
• build a bonobo in /usr/local. This is also not very ideal because then it will fail to pick up all of the rpm-installed bonobo servers.

Seriously, the best thing to do is get good packages from someone and fix all issues in one go. In this case, check rawhide. In other cases, help us out over at Fedora, a community-based set of add-on packages for Red Hat Linux. Suggest packages, do Q&A testing, give feedback, and so on. The time you spent compiling stuff by hand could be better spent verifying clean packages and helping out a bigger group of people.

mach

Had a long entry on mach but I lost it due to an X crash :)

Short version of them:

• decided to rewrite mach in python three weeks ago; compared to Makefile syntax it's a joy to code in. It's my first Python app, but I had a basic working version in less than four hours. Python is very easy to pick up, and once you get past the indentation syntax, very very enjoyable to program in. I've since learned though that it's hard to verify your program works in all cases if you don't know how to trigger all conditions. If code paths only get checked at runtime, but your program doesn't run certain blocks of code, it's hard to assure your program is ready for release.
• due to lots of strange interactions between building a non-NPTL system in a non-NPTL host, and various rpm and db3/4 problems and lockups, I almost threw in the towel. My goal was to write software that would allow one to set up a chroot environment for any flavour of rpm-based Linux. At some point it seemed that due to all of the various lock-ups possible, this was impossible.
• After some rest, I realized I could do all package manipulation (through rpm and apt-get) from OUTSIDE the chroot, ie. using the host's apt-get and rpm binaries, but affecting the target root. I quickly added code for doing this, and objectified the root handling in python itself, and it worked !
• The last week was mostly spent on finetuning stuff, and testing it out on various packages.
• mach is now able to set up all supported flavours of RH (7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9) and various spin-offs (for GStreamer, Fedora stable, testing and unstable). It can build from spec file or rebuild source rpm's. It can do multiple builds at once, and figure out a build order for these specs or srpms.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out now. Have to release something very soon so it gets used out there. Some people I respect seem to really like the idea and the program (like Ville Skyttä and Matthias from Freshrpms).

Had longer entries planned, but it's late, we just had a great barbecue, and I want to get some stuff done tomorrow as on Sunday we're going to the beach because a friend of ours has her birthday and she decided we should all go !

mx First off, there are binary packages for epiphany; for example, both mozilla 1.4b and epiphany 0.6.1 are in rawhide. They work fine. Never compile by hand if there are...