Present Perfect

Broadcast

The broadcasts from the beach are finally going well from a technical point of view. I was able to set up the synchronization using our vendor's software by setting up an SMB connection over an SSH tunnel over ADSL, then reoffering those shares on the internal network using samba. This way it provides a more stable connection apparently for the pain inflicted by the synchronisation application from our vendor, which only works with drive letters.

In any case, it seems to be working. So my Boston experience has finally been rounded off OK.

Boston

My pictures of Boston are online. Mostly people shots, not all of them sharp. I need to learn to be an asshole and just use flash regardless of people's opinions.

Car

Finally got round to getting insurance and license plates. GQY-739, that's me. Now mulling over what to get airbrushed on it : a linux penguin, a ximian monkey, or a GStreamer logo ?

Playstation 2

I caved and bought a Playstation 2 yesterday. It's great fun. I also bought a second controller and SSX Tricky, because it was so much fun to play it in Boston, and I was hoping my girlfriend would also like playing it. Well, she did ;) She beat me in the race first time she played, damnit.

It is a nice change of pace to have a game machine that "just works" and plays stuff without having to boot, configure drivers, mess around, and so on. Yes it is closed source and all, but sometimes this is all you need. My last console was a Atari VCS 2600 so I'm entitled to a new one, right ? Right ?

And Spiderman is amazingly cool - webslinging through NYC just looks so nice.

Hope my hacking stuff won't wane too much in the next week.

Funny

Someone from XMMS got an e-mail trying to sell him the oggfiles.com domain. His first and second reaction ;)

Broadcast The broadcasts from the beach are finally going well from a technical point of view. I was able to set up the synchronization using our vendor's software by setting...

Intro

I gotta rush away she said
I've been to Boston before
And anyway this change I've been feeling
Doesn't make the rain fall

Boston

Back from the Gnome summit. It was great. In the end jetlag got the best of me, and I didn't do as much as I would've liked. I found a nice picture of myself on Nat's site. Nat invited Ben, Amy and me over for Crazy Hat Night (you go out wearing a silly hat, apparently the Bostonians aren't used to this). I had a very surreal conversation with Nat on his balcony. I was asking stuff about Ximian and how they were doing and what the goals were, and how GStreamer fit in and how Nat thought GStreamer would be taking over the world if we did it right.

The surreal thing about it was he was wearing a chef's hat while I was wearing a very fetching but large black hat. Imagine taking over the world dressed in hats like that. Hm. Actually, sounds like a plan. James, ready the tank. Meanwhile, Nat asked me if I wanted to go to Istanbul to do talks. Hm...

The next day, Ben and Amy had planned on taking me to the harbor, but the night before we had stayed up too late with the Playstation at the ready. So we ended up quickly going to the Virgin Megastore and a small record store (ended up buying an album by Arab Strap I didn't find yet in Belgium, as well as a Black Box Recorder record). I thought that was OK, I was too tired anyway. And now I have an excuse to go back someday ;)

Left a book under my pillow for my hosts - "Written on the Body" by Jeanette Winterson. Recommended. Ben and Amy then took me to a place with vegetarian food and I got a Cosmic Burrito and a grape - pineapple - lemon juice, because I thought it would taste nice. Amy noted very truely that it was a GPL drink. I wonder if they would have given me the recipe. Oh wait, the name is the recipe.

Plane back sucked. Post-fun depression set in as effects of extensive jetlag took it's toll. Started working a little on a gnome media player app UI though.

Landed this morning around nine, went home and took a shower, then went straight to work. We're broadcasting from the beach for three weeks, today was day one and the server synchronisation still needed to be set up. These are Win2K and NT servers, and the software vendor reckoned we should just "make the drive letter from our office available over ADSL to the location". Uh-uh. I wish I had stood my ground before leaving and insisted on my solution : setting up a Linux machine at the location with samba on it and have it rsync over ssh from the office.

Found no good way to do it securely because of tiredness maybe, so I installed cygwin on it. Pretty nice ! Five minutes of downloading and I had a shell that could do rsync and ssh on a Windows machine. I actually might at times consider using Windows again with this.

Work starts feeling bad and stale at times. More and more I feel I just want to be working on free software, period. Will have to start considering options for that. Have Wavelan, will code.

Wrap-up

And now I'm tired and ready for bed and wondering how all of this experience will sink in and what it is about this sort of thing that can make you feel happy and sad at the same time.

Outro

No big differences these days
Just the same old walkaways
Someday
I'm gonna stay
But not today

Intro I gotta rush away she said I've been to Boston before And anyway this change I've been feeling Doesn't make the rain fall Boston Back from the Gnome summit....

Boston

As water laps my feet
And sharks surround me I sleep
You smile and line up your army

Boston is really nice. It was my first day without jetlag, too bad the summit is actually over. I was hoping to ask Nat for some feedback on my second talk. I discovered he has a site (what a cool url to have ;) ) so I learned he liked my first talk. But I wanted to know about the second - I was soooo tired and I don't really know what people got out of it. I know what I got out of it though - I want to get people together to design the player, and I actually have some ideas for it that might actually work. Let's find out !

Amy and Ben are really really nice people. They didn't know me at all and they just include me in their life while I'm here without reservations. I'm not sure if I see Belgian people do that quite as easily. I hope I can repay the favour someday.

Note to self : list of stuff I need to consider getting when I get back.

--> Playstation 2 with SSX and Metal Gear Solid 2 and GTA3
--> Surround Sound
--> Wavelan

I met Dan, who's a cool Venezuelan guy who also works at Ximian, and he was a great guy to meet. Really funny; we kept going on about this bit in the video of SSX (the snowboarding game) where some of the makers say that every stunt in the game is actually realistic. And when we played it and did some incredibly unbelievable stuff, we'd say : "I could totally do that in real life. In fact, I did yesterday". So I had fun last night just hanging out in a typical American high-tech living room.

Guadec

jdub dragged me into the Guadec prep talk. I'm sooo looking forward to that. I had fun at the last Guadec, and being here at the Gnome summit was an unexpected treat, and I feel I'm getting sucked in more and more into this Gnome thing. So yeah, this sort of thing actually works ;)

I think, actually, that this whole Gnome involvement thing I'm growing in right now is like the perfect grass-roots replacement for my boy scouts life I had given up on last year.

Boston As water laps my feet And sharks surround me I sleep You smile and line up your army Boston is really nice. It was my first day without jetlag,...

Insomnia

Got to sleep at 1, woke up at 4 and unable to sleep anymore. After an hour I gave up and worked on my talk some more. Good thing I did. I'm so sleep-deprived I have a hard time concentrating, so I had to add some stuff I would otherwise forget.

I had promised the Vorbis guys to help out with making RPMs. They're releasing today. They were going to release later this day, after my talk, but they moved the release point sooner, so I started frantically rechecking packages and stuff. I was trying to move libvorbisfile and libvorbisenc to separate packages, so that you could actually get them to parallel-install, but it failed. The reason is very simple : libvorbis now contains libvorbis.so.0, libvorbisfile.so.0, libvorbisenc.so.0. The new release has libvorbis staying at 0, but -file and -enc going up a few. So, since the libvorbis rpm contains all three .0 so's, and a new libvorbis rpm would contain libvorbis.so.0 and two other-numbered .so's, you can't parallel-install them. Splitting off the two latter so's doesn't help either, because you have to upgrade the base libvorbis package anyway, removing the core libvorbis.so.

This might have been different if the libvorbis so version got increased as well, or the original package for libvorbis was split out too, but right now there's no way around it. I made the final RPM's and put them online, hope they work, because I can't test them at this point. I'm due for a talk ;)

Insomnia Got to sleep at 1, woke up at 4 and unable to sleep anymore. After an hour I gave up and worked on my talk some more. Good thing...

Boston

Did my first talk, it went ok considering it's been six years ago since I did a talk, I wrote it yesterday on the plane, I slept too little, and I woke up with an incredible headache. I was probably so over-stressed that all stress left my body. Sort of like diving in very cold shark-infested water from a fourty-meter-high ledge wrapped in barbed wire.

I put up my slides, as well as the xml examples I used, and the template gst-app tarball up on our website at http://gstreamer.net/slides/boston/. Please get the tarball, try it out and start developing apps. We need you.

On to prepare for the second one. This one actually already has some stuff in it, but I need to get a power plug for my laptop really soon so I can work on it.

Boston Did my first talk, it went ok considering it's been six years ago since I did a talk, I wrote it yesterday on the plane, I slept too little,...