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Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:07

2003-12-31
13:07

Dave/Dina

Kristof has done some cool work on the VCR parsing side. I just scheduled a recording of Dark Angel for tomorrow, and it looks like it'll work ok. I packaged about 10 perl modules that it needs to RPM's, will drop them online as well too. Jeroen will be pleased to see the vcr thingy.

As for CD's, we now have about 400 in the system. I've gone through pretty much of all of my own CD's now. What next ?

nautilus-media

made it into Phoebe, the new Red Hat beta. That is pretty cool but pretty scary as well. Need to work on it some more very soon. Going to install Phoebe soon on my home machine to test if it works well.

people

mglazer : yes it could. It could happen to you.

ankh : Tango doesn't allow barefoot dancing. After reading your answer I realized that you were the person sitting next to me barefooted during one of the talks at GUAD3C :) Are you always barefooted ?

coding

At work I'm now working on a code-only project : a library to implement the SBU-490 UECP protocol, which is a binary communication protocol for RDS encoders. It is great to put everything I've learned in practice on a well-written spec and have code come out looking pretty... It's not overly hard, and it ends up looking like really nice code, with the right set of abstractions.

If you do radio work and you're interested, drop me a line.

family

My mother is weird. She needed to rack up expenses for her tax deduction. So she wanted my advice on a laptop, and she took me into town to buy one. We ended up getting an Acer Travelmate for her (which is a tablet pc, and it only comes with a QWERTY keyboard but we use AZERTY over here. She selected it solely on the property that it fit into her bag), a Compaq Presario for my sister (which means I probably get her old one, which was my fourth PC, and will be nice in our kitchen :)), two radio CD players (for her and for my sister), a VCR (for my sister), and a small TV (for her kitchen).

Then she went out to get a new mobile for my sister as well, and I jokingly said that mine was old, and she got another one for me. I was stupefied. Then after seeing the holes in my coat, she took me to the clothes shop, and asked me to pick a coat. I picked one, she liked it, I did too, but it didn't have a hood, so she told me to pick another one with a hood, and she bought both. While waiting in line at the checkout queue she also asked me to get a shirt and a sweater. I think we were in there for all of 3 minutes.

I think I know where I got my bouts of compulsive consumerism from.

Sadly, when going home my car broke down. After two hours of wrestling with it I dumped it somewhere on a parking lot, need to figure out what to do next.

holidays

I'm not particularly fond of them. I like the opportunity to see my family once in a while though. My cousin, who now lives in London, asked if I or any friends of mine had good business ideas, because his hobby is now "hunting for VC capital". Maybe I should take him up on it :) If you have good ideas, let him know.

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:06

13:06

Dave/Dina

It's incredible - Jeroen likes his Dave/Dina system. He's sending mails every few days about suggestions and problems and so on. That rocks. Making stuff can be fun; making stuff that gets used is rewarding. There's a pretty big difference between the two and I like it.

The things we make
they have no use
but they have the most beautiful shape

Kristof worked on the video recording backend some more. It's starting to look really good. In the screenshot, you see descriptions of the show, plus icons to schedule recording this show once, every week, or daily.

Needs some polish, but Jeroen is going to love it ...

GStreamer

The 0.5.0 release was actually rather good, even without as much testing. It's funny how much people resist change - people get all confused about having a "development" and a "stable" version even though it's been talked about for months. I see the same behaviour in myself, though it's more of a mechanism to not have to put time and effort in things that can be avoided.

When I started out with Linux everything was new to me and things went by quickly. After some years you come to realize how much time things take regardless of what it is you do.

Work

Busy designing our i-mode website. i-mode seems to be the replacement for wap and has taken over Japan by storm, I've been told. Not sure if it's going to work over here, but it's fun doing something different for a while.

On the other hand, i-mode websites are like websites halfway through the nineties. 256 color at the moment (but of course with a different color palette than websafe colors, duh), no tables, and so on. I feel old-school.

Apparently a health inspector stopped by yesterday. The first thing he noticed was a Destiny's Child poster attached to my network cabinet. He seems to have said the poster might be deemed "offensive". Somehow I think this is very funny ;) I work at a radio station, the poster promotes their latest album, and Kristien from right across me has pictures of A1 and perfume commercials portraying men, but my very work-related poster is offensive and might induce sexual intimidation.

I asked our secretary to arrange his next visit on a day when I am at work so I can discuss his concerns. That ought to be fun.

Playstation

Funny how I haven't played any major game over the last three years (except for Metal Gear Solid, bought on a whim when it came out), and now I find myself playing quite a bit on the Playstation. What is striking is that it shows that the world does progress, technically speaking. If you leave any technology alone and don't see it for a few years, you're bound to be surprised when you pick it up again.

For example, the faces in the Getaway look really good. This was one of my major gripes with Metal Gear Solid - it all looked really good but the faces were ugly bumpmapped affairs that stuck on. It was as if everyone was wearing mountain-scape masks.

I haven't even finished GTA: Vice City yet, and Kristof is already on to the next game. He seems to like being unemployed a lot. I'm partly jealous. As for GTA, got to Vigilante level 93 using a tank. I got busted when I got cornered by three other tanks. I must have tried doing Vigilante with a regular police car a hundred of times, only getting to level 10. Should've realized this earlier...

Music

Had four consecutive nights of concerts. It would have been five if I hadn't forgotten to wind my watch's day dial at the end of November, so I missed JJ72. I'm too unorganized.
Thursday, I went to see Mambo Kurt. He's an oldish German guy who plays old classics and current pop tunes on his Hammond organ, and mainly making a fool of himself in a good way. Did an amazing version of both The Cure's Killing an Arab (you have to imagine it with a techno-y chorus) and Faithless's Insomnia.
Friday was Arid, a band from Gent. I've seen them over ten times, and each time they amaze me at how well they play and how good Jasper's voice is. Other than that no, big surprises, except at the very end when they played "Last Goodbye". That's probably the closest I'll ever come to having a Buckley experience.
Saturday I went to see The Gotan Project. Good concert, too short though, and no place for dancing, sadly. Before the concert we cooked some great rice tortillas with red cauliflower from the Mexican cookbook. It was wonderful. One of the best things about cooking is the day after: great food, zero effort.
And on sunday, it was Richard Ashcroft from the Verve. Started the concert with my second favourite, Sonnet. Liked the concert for it's craftmanship. I only have his new album and I already lost it so I wasn't able to listen to it beforehand.

Life

Got a haircut, not sure if I like it. It's weird having to go back to a barber's after such a long time. Got new shoes, not sure if I'll like them. I'm walking them in today. The funny thing is I wanted shoes that were better for dancing, but at the store I realized I didn't really know what that meant. And it's not like you can ask the girl in the store to dance to try out the new shoes, can you ?
Tried doing Christmas shopping over the weekend, failed spectacularly. Started reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Why I never picked up on it before is beyond me. I wonder what it'll be like. Right now it feels like I'm a Rebel pilot reading Stormtrooper diaries.

Xander and Anya not getting married ? Boo ! I need TV to tell me the world is a safe and romantic place. I feel cheated.

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:05

13:05

GStreamer

Released 0.5.0 yesterday. From now on we'll try to stick to the "odd minor = development" schedule. I took apart the build last weekend to make GStreamer fully parallel-installable, librarywise. Looks like I succeeded because I managed to install both core RPM's at the same time.

We're still having some scheduler issues that are thread-related, and Wim and David were working on those a little more over the last week. It was really frustrating to notice that, after a whole weekend of breaking stuff install-wise, I couldn't even play anything in nautilus-media. So I started going back to old code to try and figure out where it went wrong.

I had hoped to release on monday, the due date for Gnome tarballs, but we missed that. Luckily, David figured out that the change was due to one innocent-looking line in a source file I missed. I spent some time yesterday on working that out, then fixing some other issues due to fixes, until nautilus-media behaved sanely again.

Some more sanity-checking, build checking, and we finally got it out. And then a nautilus-media to follow.

When I wanted to release the tarballs, I noticed I didn't actually have access to GNOME's release machine. So I set them up a Nigerian scam offer they hopefully won't be able to refuse. So sad when you spend so much time preparing a release but you are unable to press the big red button yourself ;)

Funny how some people at Red Hat all of a sudden have taken an interest in GStreamer issues. We had some questions from them, mostly concerning 64bit stuff. They got some of the tools guys to look at our cothread code. Apparently they say we are crazy. I can't tell - I don't understand that stuff well enough, I can only guess and offer suggestions.

In any case, some of the fixes got in, but I'm not even sure stuff will run. So, Red Hat, how about a developer-accessible compiler farm ?. You know it makes sense. I do wonder what Red Hat are up to though. There has to be a reason.

Dave/Dina

And an amazing time was had by all... Last weekend, we installed the first user's Dave/Dina box ! Jeroen is our first happy customer. The look on his face when he inserted his Lord Of The Rings Special DVD collector's edition DVD's, chose to play DVD's, and then saw the menu and opening credits was priceless. He seemed genuinely happy and impressed.

It's going to be a scary time, having to deal with actual user feedback. But exciting nonetheless. One thing I noticed is that TV's tend to listen to remotes from the same brand. So our perfect remote is slightly less perfect now that going left in the menu also lowers the volume on the TV, and going down switches the channel. Ho hum. What's even more irritating is that it does this regardless of the fact that the remote has SEPARATE buttons for volume up/down and program up/down.

And I thought I had found the perfect remote, but alas ... Yesterday I noticed it didn't even have a PAUSE button. Pretty irritating when you want to get something to eat.

Meanwhile, Kristof has taken to writing stuff to download TV listings from eurotv.com. He tried using XMLTV at first, but came out with the same impression as me - it was none too well written and very hard to get going. He started writing his own scripts to handle tv listings. I haven't looked at his code, but he got it working in about a day and the end results looked very good. Somehow though we have to figure out a way to not implement everything ourselves.

TV

My acting career is going down the drain. I started as a soccer hooligan and my last appearance, last week, was as a gigolo ;) It was for a video clip reworking of Tina Turner's Private Dancer. Funnily enough, Uraeus chose that release name for GStreamer without knowing about this.

GTA: Vice City

What an amazing game. It has the right mix of reward and frustration, and lots of neat little touches all over the place. I love it. I've been trying to extract the audio from the disc so that I can play it in the car ;) So far no luck.

Sadly, it also has some bugs that cause it to lock up after extended periods of play. This mostly coincides with loss of solid graphics and loss of actual speech audio in cutscenes.

Break-ups

are hard. I miss and I wonder. I hope you're doing ok.

it holds my arms down sits upon my chest
it waves it's finger at me every night and day
and it don't rest

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:04

13:04

chakie

Show us your Makefile.am file. The compile line looks ok, since setup.cpp probably is only one of the many files in your project, and it's compiling the one file into an executable.

Basically, your Makefile.am should look roughly like this

 bin_PROGRAMS = myapp

myapp_SOURCES = setup.cpp (other cpp files)

Replace "myapp" with whatever the name of your app is and add other cpp files.

You should use automake over standard Makefile. The syntax for Makefile.am is a lot easier than syntax for Makefile. automake has a better manual than make (see autobook on Red Hat's site). It generates more portable Makefiles than you could do by hand. And it adds in a lot of nifty stuff (everyone should run make distcheck before a release) that you will never do by hand.

Feel free to ask more questions if it doesn't work right away.

Dave/Dina

Made some good progress through the last week. Fixed up cd playback through a different application, hcd. There's nothing special about it except that it works. Really, I found more than ten console cd players, and most of them had "issues".

The default one, with Red Hat, is nice to look at, but unable to tell you if the disc in the drive is not a CD. When you try it on a DVD, for example, it just hangs. That's pretty unacceptable for our user interface.

I also found libcdaudio, but that had flaws too. I liked the way the reference application worked, but strangely enough it showed some obvious flaws in the program. For one thing, a part of the app (probably an externally spawned process) segfaults when you ask for CDDB information. I traced it down to

 fprintf(stdout, "%*s
", index, index, inbuffer);

That was something new to me - I had never seen the %*s before. In any case I browsed around, and noticed that there was one "index" too many. I can't really imagine how the author let that slip during testing.

In any case, it taught me that knowledge can come from fixing bugs. It's a heartening thing to know that sometimes finding and solving bugs brings you more than just another bug solved ;)

After this bug however, I found that gathering CDDB information was flakey at best - each time I asked for info, I either got the right information, or partially right information preceded by a random number of white lines. So something was not working very well. I decided to leave it at that and just not bother. Pity, I would have rather liked a simple library to code something on top of.

But I have to learn how to stabilize before adding features.

I also repackaged xawtv to work with lirc. For some reason totally lost on me, Gerd Knorr added another mechanism to handle lirc support. I think he wanted to channel all incoming "events" (key presses, mouse presses, midi events, lirc events) and act on them, but it doesn't look like it gains anything for the user.

I tried to figure out the most annoying thing in xawtv: when you switch channels the audio pops every time. Incredibly irritating, and what one would call a showstopper bug to actually use xawtv over a regular tv. I started jumping around the code. Man, xawtv is complicated - besides reinventing the wheel a few times too many. The mechanism to mute audio jumps through a few hoops, managing to actually be implemented in plug-ins (or maybe not, I couldn't figure out where the accessors were set in the code), and eventually totally obfuscating what mechanism it actually uses to mute audio.

A dead simple and dead ugly hack with system("aumix -l0"); before switching channels, and waiting a bit longer after switching, removed the annoying pop. But that's a very ugly hack, so I hope to replace that soon.

Someone stated an obvious fact about xawtv to me : it is a badly written program that everyone uses regardless anyway. There are more like these. The reasons seem simple : it is badly written because it tries to avoid using any other library as much as possible and thus ends up reimplementing lots of things that are already done better in other libraries. And the reason everyone uses it regardless anyway is precisely the same reason - because it's so easy to get running, since it doesn't depend on a bunch of other libraries.

Personally, I have been totally won over for the argument of having libraries do as much as possible.

Kristof fixed some more bugs in DAD related to Internet Explorer. Good stuff, time for another release.

Also finding out some issues with the SBLive card, not sure if it's my failure to understand how it works or other things. But currently I can't figure out how to record from the line in without having it actually *play* the line-in channel (so that I don't get live tv audio when recording in the background at the same time music is playing). And for some reason, the overall volume setting doesn't have any effect.

GStreamer

Figuring out some complex threading issues. Well, mostly providing debug info and trying to get GThreads to work in GTK when they use GStreamer. dschleef does most of the fixing work, bless him. He even went as far as install Red Hat 8.0 inside a chroot on his debian machine to test the bugs that seem to only come up with RH's glibc i686 optimizations.

bitches

Decided on a new name that hopefully is less offensive - mach, for Make A CHroot. I know there is a kernel with that name, but I don't care. I checked on SF, and there is already a project there with that name. Luckily, the project seems abandoned, it has been registered two years ago and it hasn't had a single CVS commit to it's name. Just like the three other projects registered by that developer. So I asked for a tekeover, hopefully that'll go through.

I also realized that it's trivial to use this for more than just package building. For example, you can build an image file for use with User-mode Linux, set up a chroot on a server to work in, and so on.

Movies

Went to see Insomnia last week. Pretty damn good. By the book, totally different from Memento, but still good. I'd like to see the original movie though to see how it's changed and how much of the goodness is due to the director or the script/story.

GTA: Vice City

I saw it at the store and couldn't resist buying it. It is amazing. I'm not really the 3D visceral type of person when playing games, and before getting a PS/2 I hadn't played any computer game in about a year or two, but GTA is absolutely wonderful.

It is 100% immoral, vicious, and incredible fun. When you're bored or stuck on missions, you can do silly stuff, like pester police officers, try to get six stars worth of police attention, go to the mall and shoot people, steal motorbikes and practice jumps, go fire truck/vigilante/taxi/paramedic driving, and so on. I still find silly stuff inside the game every few hours.

The music is just incredibly good. The game has about eight in-game radio stations, and they all contain really good music, with tongue-in-cheek presenters and commercials. I could go on for hours about what I like in this game.

It just throws out political correctness out of the window and I love it.

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:03

13:03

Gnome Foundation

I got accepted into the foundation a few weeks ago. It took a while, but I'm happy about it. It's nice to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Fedora

Someone is starting up a community of packagers much like Debian's system to provide decent add-ons to Red Hat. As I've been packaging more and more lately, the idea appeals a lot to me, so I decided to join the mailing list and see what happens. I hope I can convince people to work with bitches so I can put it into wider use and work out kinks.

bitches

ct has added Yellowdog Linux support and succesfully built rpms for GStreamer, so it's starting to prove it's merits. I pushed out a 0.2.9 release today after some testing and cleaning. It includes the Yellow Dog Linux stuff, so if you want to give that a try, please do. Going to install YDL on an old powerbook sometime soon.

Tried feeling good about doing a release but that failed. I think I have other stuff to worry about but stuff is dragging me down.

life

The good thing about ironing clothes yourself is that you become a lot more responsible in actually putting the ironed and folded clothes where they belong immediately. It also makes you respect all of the people in your life who ever ironed clothes for you.

The bad thing about ironing clothes yourself is ironing clothes.

My dad actually *likes* ironing. Guess it's not something encoded in our genetic material. Or, I am adopted. Gives a whole new meaning to the word irony. My dad is irony, I seem to be not so much so.

Today is sunday and for some reason the world around me decided to suck. It's making me very pissed off. I'm going to clean up some of the mess around me today I think - instead of trying to get work done. Today is a lost day already anyway.

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