Present Perfect

FOSDEM

It's been over for more than a week already but I hadn't yet written anything about it. And now, a week later, everything seems a blur. So the blur I see is this :

• Living in Nerd house central, with six foreigners arriving and opening up their laptop, yet still managing to make it cozy
• Having Gman, Uraeus, andersca, hallski, rhult, kris and sxpert stay over in my house
• Meeting Julien, Noelle (his wife) and Matthias (from Freshrpms). If you meet people in real life, it's so much easier to relate how they come across on IRC. And, we also invited ourselves at Julien's house in Spain for a Fall GStreamer multimedia gettogether.
• Going to good talks, enjoying Michael's, Havoc's and Guenter's.
• Having my housemate demonstrate Dave/Dina, with a lot of interested people asking questions and being impressed with the whole setup
• Talking to Havoc and Owen about when and how and why they got into programming on Linux
• Hearing Michael get silly about unrequited love issues and joining in the fun
• Jamming with Gman at three o'clock in the morning and having my other housemate wake up at the noise
• Doing an OK presentation generating a lot of interest afterwards, as well as getting me a whole bunch of questions on GStreamer issues and lots of people interested in giving it a try
• Having the author of Juk, a KDE jukebox program, switch over to GStreamer partly. This is very important to us, because we want to work with KDE as well to get GStreamer in.
• Having Noelle ask me if I could "show us tango" as a totally irrelevant question during my talk :-) So I showed her later; Julien, take her dancing.
• Putting together a Gnome Gazette and having some guy freak out over the blatant sexism in it (according to him)

All in all, I had a great time. And I have Pictures online of it as well.

Snow

And right now I'm in France having a great time snowboarding. Right now I'm too tired from yesterday's going out, so I'm sitting here at these nifty windowmaker/Linux terminals, typing in mozilla, and it Just Works. I wonder how many people use these things and actually realize they're not using Windows. They probably feel something eerie but can't put their finger on it... That's great though. These things just work.

FOSDEM It's been over for more than a week already but I hadn't yet written anything about it. And now, a week later, everything seems a blur. So the blur...

FOSDEM

FOSDEM is great. I'm seeing lots people I got to know in GNOME again. Went to some good talks; Havoc Pennington on freedesktop.org, and Michael Meeks going at break-neck speed through all of Gnome 2.2.

The funny thing about Michael is that he has a really dry sort of English sense of humour, and at the speed is going you don't always get the joke until it is too late. I really appreciate someone being able to spice up his talk like that...

Anyway, my talk is tomorrow so I should get some sleep. I'll upload some pictures for those who care.

FOSDEM FOSDEM is great. I'm seeing lots people I got to know in GNOME again. Went to some good talks; Havoc Pennington on freedesktop.org, and Michael Meeks going at break-neck...

GStreamer

It's incredible ! We got it out of the door, our 0.6.0 release. This is the one going into Gnome 2.2, and hopefully Red Hat 8.1. I'm psyched, I hope we didn't drop the ball on any part.

I'm glad we got this far. There were some last-minute problems, as always; Wim snuck in an ABI change which he felt needed to be made now, but in doing so introduced a few sneaky bugs. We've worked them out, but it came in handy that Gnome 2.2 had been pushed back one week as well.

I should also start preparing my FOSDEM talk. Some people I don't even know have mailed me saying they're going to attend, which is nice... I'll also be having some guests over for the weekend, I need to figure out where to take them during the weekend :)

GStreamer got selected in this month's Linux Format (the print version). I bought it especially to see that. They were very keen on the editor.

Fedora

Warren has gotten the server together and installed some vserver thingies. I tried out mach on it and it worked after some tweaking to not make it use bind mounts.

Last Thursday, I had to work late because we were having a planned power outage. A perfect opportunity to create GPG keys for Fedora and sign each other's keys.

We ended up calling each other, putting up signature files on various servers, reading out public code, and so on... I felt like a little boy in a treehouse writing secret code messages to fool the girls.

But, on the plus side, I know have validated and signed GPG keys. On to the packages !

Red Shoe Tea Party

Last weekend a few friends of ours threw a tea party. Seeing as they had just laid new carpet, they asked everyone to wear red socks and take off their shoes. We had a really good time, which prompted me to reconsider my division of free time :) I should really make effort to hang out with friends more than I used to in the past. I always am happy when I do.

Bought a great game to play there, too. It's a German game, and apparently it's all the rage too. The Catan Colonists, it's called.

De Nachten

Went to De Nachten festival to see Arab Strap play, finally. Pretty good, though as a two-piece the bad singing tends to get in the way of a good performance. It's the first time I saw them, and I had pictured the singer totally different. Aidain striked me as a cross between Hadess and Michael Meeks.

There is something wrong though with my world view if I start comparing my rock stars to hackers I know. I'm pretty sure I should be doing it the other way around.

Work

Well, I got promoted. I guess this means I'm something akin to CTO now. This sounds better than it is I think. For example, yesterday all of Belgium was miraculously snowed under. I drove for an hour and a half to work, while normally it only takes half an hour. And when I arrived, I found out I had to return to the exact same place I came from because the radio antenna was out of commission due to snow covering up the dish.

And today, I had to do the same in another town, and when I arrived, it had just started raining gently, so the snow had already melted from the dish. Got out on a perfectly good saturday night for no good reason.

GStreamer It's incredible ! We got it out of the door, our 0.6.0 release. This is the one going into Gnome 2.2, and hopefully Red Hat 8.1. I'm psyched, I...

Phoebe

I installed Red Hat's beta on my home machine yesterday. For some reason it was thrilling to see the installer install packages like gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins and nautilus-media. Nautilus-media apparently made it into the base packages. That was pretty cool to see. Also, it just worked out of the box. Terrific ! Exciting times are ahead.

Started Rhythmbox as well, it failed parsing my GConf audiosink pipeline. I remember having made a patch for it in the past, made a note to myself to discuss it with jorn and have it integrated. That mental note lasted for about half a day because, on coming home, I read his mail about GStreamer's "stability".

It's his decision, but it's still sad, after trying out Phoebe, to know that given his decision Rhythmbox probably won't end up in Red Hat 8.1

I sent a mail about it, replying to his mail and using "Reply to all", and the mail got bounced back to me because gst-devel@lists.sourceforge.net doesn't exist. Of course, it's gstreamer-lists. The bittersweet irony of life : the mail I sent pointing out communication problems and there not being enough, and it bounced because Jorn used a wrong address for the GStreamer list :)

GStreamer

As for GStreamer, exciting times are ahead. Wim is pretty much done with the cothreadless scheduler. I still want to add two small bits to the plugins that would help nautilus-media along. I hope we can release 0.6.0 about a week before Gnome 2 final. We did an important API change (but this time, with a compatibility header, yay !) that will help along API bindings and which was long overdue. Good to know that after all this time, stuff still keeps moving along.

libuecp

At work, I'm laying the finishing touch on the library I wrote to speak binary to our RDS encoders. I don't think it matters much but I'm going to get it open-sourced anyway. Not sure if people will be able to use it, but you never know. I also wrapped it with SWIG so I can use it from the application I've already written. Now I just need to test it.

Tango

Got the two books and the "Tango Lesson" DVD I ordered from Amazon. My best friend's girlfriend asked if I wanted to teach her some bits, and she's actually pretty good at it. I hope she takes classes, gives me more people to dance with :)

Food

On Saturday, we got invited by Jeroen, our first Dave/Dina customer. We had a good time, discussed ideas for starting up a company, and talked well into the night. I had forgotten how good it is to just hang out with friends. I should be doing more of that.

Then yesterday, we did the same somewhere else; a dinner meeting that had been postponed too many times to count. For some reason we actually started talking about Linux because they were interested in what it was about. I got carried away talking about it and explaining stuff, and for some reason they didn't mind at all. The times they are changing indeed.

Hearts

that are broken can argue about the silliest of things without either really wanting to. But if they don't want to, how can they avoid it happening in the first place ? I'm sorry.

Phoebe I installed Red Hat's beta on my home machine yesterday. For some reason it was thrilling to see the installer install packages like gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins and nautilus-media. Nautilus-media apparently...

complaints

I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring.

alsa

While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used alsa as an example for a special-case numbering. I probably got the idea from dobey I think. To avoid silly names in versions, like "rc", "alpha", "beta", we'll subvert the spec file release number to indicate part of the version.

For example, alsa 0.9.0 rc6 would be specced as alsa-libs-0.9.0-0.18.fedora.1, where 0.9.0 is alsa's version, the 0 means it's not a final release, and 18 is the number of release iterations made up to that point. Why 18 ? 12 beta's and 6 rc's up to now. If your project goes through 12 beta's and 6 rc's over the course of almost two years, maybe you shouldn't have jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 in the first place. I don't know why people would ever think this is a good idea. The same thing, more or less, happened to xine. They jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 quite some time ago as well, "because we're almost ready".

So I check the xine download page today, and what do I see ? xine-lib-1.beta2.tar.gz, and it works with xine-ui-0.9.17.tar.gz Sigh :-)

cvs

I was trying to integrate ffmpeg's cvs into gst-plugins' build. The FFmpeg guys told me that they thought it was better to cut'n'paste code for libavcodec for now instead of linking to the .so

So I wrote an .m4 to check out/update ffmpeg code at configure time if gst-plugins is in cvs mode. So my idea went something like this :

• choose a date tag to indicate what version of FFmpeg cvs to use
• create a Tag file in the dir where ffmpeg is checked out under
• if this Tag file differs from the Tag file in ffmpeg/CVS, the code needs an update, so update to the base Tag file.

Now, the Tag file contains one line like this: D2002.12.14.12.00.00 So, I thought, cvs takes just about any sort of argument to -D, including a lot I would never use, like "tea time", "a fortnight ago", "last year". So you would expect cvs to be able to take -`cat Tag` and parse it's own format, no ?

Of course, sadly, cvs doesn't parse it's own Tag date format:

 [thomas@thocra ffmpeg]$ cvs update -D2002.12.14.12.00.00 cvs [update aborted]: Can't parse date/time: 2002.12.14.12.00.00 

So I'm stuck specifying the same date twice: once in the Tag file, and once in the .m4 macro.

life

I never seem to be able to do right by people I want to do right by.

sit on a plane, reading a book
same damn planet every time I look
all I am is a body floating downwind

complaints I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring. alsa While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used...