Present Perfect

GStreamer dependencies

I'm on a packaging roll - dependencies for GStreamer are being repackaged one by one at this point. Bitches(1) is a great tool to be able to do this, I'm glad I took the time to work on it before trying to do this, because it allows me to do the right thing from a packaging point of view.

I started working on LADSPA packages. There are a few for Mandrake out there - they always seem to be very up-to-date, which is good for them. Now, ladspa_sdk and cmt_src are two very misbehaving packages from a packaging point of view. The tarballs don't have versions ! It took me some digging through the documentation to find the version. I think that's a bad way of packaging stuff. Now, people on the LAD mailing list tell me that "it's just the ladspa.h header, you don't need anything more". Hm, I think that's poor packaging strategy - ladspa_sdk also includes a few simple apps and some sample plug-ins, and I packaged these too. Also, our code in GStreamer uses some copied source from those examples to load plug-ins and stuff that should've gone into a lib.

So, if you're writing software, make a tarball that unpacks in a dir with the same base name, and make it so the base name contains the version number. While you're at it, it would also be nice if you use a dash to separate between name and version, and maybe even consider not using letters in the version (I've seen anything from a, b, rc, pre, rel, ...). It's totally unnecessary. It looks even worse if you release 4 release candidates with rc in the name, then not make a release for a whole year to follow up on that release candidate.

It doesn't hurt to take some time to learn about autotools. Lots of people think they are evil, but I tend to disagree. It's a matter of learning how to use the tools. It'll save you a lot of headache later on.

GStreamer plug-ins

I wanted to experience first-hand how easy or hard it is to write a GStreamer plug-in for video, even though I have almost no video experience at all. I chose the FAME MPEG 1/4 encoder. I spent about two hours working out the API, copying plug-in code, and adding a few basic arguments, and I managed to encode video. At first it was a bit too greenish (which funnily enough I didn't notice at first since the Matrix trailer I used actually starts with the movie company's logo being green), but a few miscast pointers where the cause of that.

Wim cleaned it up some more and added more stuff, but I seemed to have done a pretty good job of the basics. So, yes, it is easy to wrap a library into a GStreamer plug-in.

GStreamer packages

Still waiting for an answer from the Ximian guys. Meanwhile, I'm setting up apt repositories for Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 for the GStreamer dependencies. I hope I can get stuff into Red-Carpet before these apt repositories are done, otherwise it would be ironic.

Advogato

This site is quickly replacing my daily SlashDot fix. What I think is wonderful is that people sometimes take the time to answer questions or solve problems you haphazardly ask. I forget who it was who tipped me off to the Toshiba problem I had, but it's good to know, so whoever you were, thanks ! Too bad I can't read more through all the entries to see who it was. Imagine I went on holiday for a week ! How many entries would I miss ???

(1): Still haven't decided whether I should change the name.

GStreamer dependencies I'm on a packaging roll - dependencies for GStreamer are being repackaged one by one at this point. Bitches(1) is a great tool to be able to do...

Powershot

I finally caved in to my desires. I still had lots of gift coupons from work, and for the last two weeks I was thinking of bying a digital camera with it. After some research I went ahead and bought a Canon G2 Powershot. It's a great little camera, it takes pictures at 4 megapixels, and it can even record video. I went to a concert yesterday and had hoped to use it but of course I had to charge the battery first. Dumb me.

Spent some time downloading sources for gphoto2, gtkam and others. After trying that and being glad I could easily get at pictures, I decided on getting rpms for Red Hat 7.2. Dependencies went up all the way to Xconfigurator, so I then gave up and decided it was high time to install Red Hat 7.3 on the laptop.

Red Hat 7.3

Over the past year I have done something new when installing new machines. I now always create TWO partitions that can be used as root, and call them alpha and omega. I usually copy over the one to the other when I'm satisfied with the installation. The idea is that I can easily install a new distribution on the other partition without screwing up my working setup. So that's what I did. My Toshiba Tecra 8200 didn't boot from the RH72 cd, and it still doesn't boot with RH73. It's not the disc, they boot fine on other machines, and it's not the CD-rom, it can boot from other OS CD's just fine.

apt-get

After doing this, I tweaked some small stuff, installed apt from freshrpms and changed the sources.list file to point to my local mirror of both Red Hat and Ximian stuff. It felt really perverse doing apt-get install red-carpet. That worked. Jumped into red-carpet just to see what sort of stuff I should be getting. Yikes, 180 MB ! Dropped out of red-carpet and decided to be brave by doing apt-get dist-upgrade. After installing over 150 RPM's, it was done. Pretty amazing. Had lots of errors from scrollkeeper though, but I ignore them since I use Garnome Gnome 2.0 anyway.

As a side note, am busy setting up apt repositories for GStreamer too. I hope to get it into Red Carpet really soon as well but I wish the Ximian guys would get back to us on it. I suppose they must be really busy, which I can imagine.

Camera

Tried to get GnoCam to work, but couldn't manage it. It had a few issues all around and am feeling to lazy to work on it much. For one thing, it insisted on linking to unexisting .la files in /usr/lib - libesd.la, libaudiofile.la, and so on.

I know that libtool .la archives are a big discussion point in the Gnome community, but I don't really understand what the problem is or what the best fix is. I tried linking manually by taking out libtool out of the compile lines, and even though that works, I couldn't seem to get the resulting binaries to work. I probably shouldn't even be getting binaries ;)

Powershot I finally caved in to my desires. I still had lots of gift coupons from work, and for the last two weeks I was thinking of bying a digital...

bitches

Two people whose opinion I value have told me that they think bitches is a bad name for a project. It might be found offensive.
Hm, I don't know what to do about it. First of all, I like the name. Second, it fits the acronym I came up with ok : Build In True CHroot Environment System. It says what it is. I tried coming up with a few different names, but most weren't very good and others (like PCP, Pristine Chroot Packaging) are already taken.

I also tried variations with itches in it, and one of the two persons even suggested itches, which I might be able to live with, but still ... It feels silly to rename a project just because some people don't like the name, when I really like it.

The stupid thing is that I wanted to do some really good work on it and with it today. And know I can't be bothered because I'm thinking about the name issue. How sad can I get ?

Personally I don't find it offensive at all. You could interpret it that way if you want to, but it's just as much a biological term for the female dog. Maybe I should give Miles Davis a ring and ask him to rename his landmark record, Bitches Brew, because it could be found offensive ? Maybe I'm too late for that one.

So, let me know if you feel bitches is an offensive name.

Games

I haven't played any real computer games for a long time. Took up Grand Theft Auto again over the weekend. I had forgotten how much fun it was. Somebody should clone it on Linux.

bitches Two people whose opinion I value have told me that they think bitches is a bad name for a project. It might be found offensive. Hm, I don't know...

Open source Work

Sometimes it is really nice to be able to delve in and fix things to work for you. My main gripe with grip was that there's no way to use different configurations. I wanted to use a few different profiles. One for grabbing an entire album and putting it in a separate dir with an .m3u for it, one for grabbing individual tracks to throw into the pool at hiqh quality, and one at low quality.

I first considered writing shell scripts to copy config files, but then decided to take a look into the source and see if I could manage it. After an hour, that was done, and I submitted a patch for it too. Grip's code is not really very clean but it does the job well. I also wrote a new spec file for it and threw it into bitches to test bitches some more, and now I have nice patched RPM's and three launcher icons on my gnome panel.

Then I noticed that oggenc made 450 Kbit sound files even though I specified 192. After some questioning of various people I learned that this is a known issue when using the rc3 libraries with the rc2 tools.

Red Hat packages caught some flack from one of the xiph people, and there aren't any official rc3 Red Hat packages for 7.2 anyway, so I started to rebuild the SRPMS in bitches.

This made me see that a few BuildRequires: where missing from it, so I submitted a patch for that as well. I also offered to go over some of the other Ogg/Vorbis packages and see if my build cleaning skills could help.

Stuff like that gives you a good feeling, even though these are simple actions. Sometimes fighting entropy is great.

bitches

Bitches is getting pretty usable. I added it to Freshmeat today, and the main thing I still need to add is to build and install goals before other goals. Not entirely sure how I'm going to do it, but I'll find a way. When that is done, nothing is holding me from building the full set of GStreamer and dependency RPMS for inclusion into Red Carpet.

We're still

waiting for an answer about the Red Carpet upload process. It's a pretty nice web interface, but when you want to upload 40+ packages it's pretty painful. I'd much rather just prepare the set of rpms, dump them on an ftp server and generate the channel xml file myself.

Music

I was going to rant about protected music CD's here last week after finding out that the new Arid CD (a Belgian band) had protection. I even have ideas on how to fight it. I'll save it for when I'm more in a ranting mood ;)

Open source Work Sometimes it is really nice to be able to delve in and fix things to work for you. My main gripe with grip was that there's no...

Gnome 2

I'm starting to love Gnome. I used to not care either way, but Gnome is a really good project, with lots of interesting people and a pretty good spirit overall. Fate might have tripped me over the other way but it didn't. Everyone seems to be going into bug fixing frenzy, and it's good that some people are trying to keep the big picture. One of those is gman, and I just love the way he uses his entries to spotlight some of the Gnome hackers doing great work. It's a simple way to recognize people doing hard work. So here's my turn : Glynn, you rock for motivating all these hackers into making Gnome the best it has ever been.

And I finally did a worthy contribution to it too : I added configuration options for the tasklist widget, setting a minimum and maximum size. This fixed a bug in it for me (I love sliding panels and the tasklist didn't show up because the sliding panels shrink automatically to fit) and it also implemented a feature others have requested. It took a few sends across to Alex, the panel author, but in the end got polished enough to be generally useful. Now just need to fix it up for vertical panels too. So all of you planning to use Gnome 2, be afraid : You'll end up using some of my code !

It actually feels good having done a worthwhile contribution. Have to think about doing this some more. It's also nice to read through good solid code (libwnck) - or at least from my point of view good and solid ;) - and be able to work from that. Funny though how hp uses 2-space indented code. Personally I prefer that as well - the argument that if you use 8-space indented code, it will show up a lot quicker that your code is badly structured, doesn't ring true very well to me. Especially when, in this time of using other people's libs a lot (A Good Thing), you end up having pretty long function names and a lot of code in Gnome ends up going over 80 chars wide. That's a lot more important to me in any case. Keep your code under 80 chars wide.

GStreamer

The democratic process sometimes takes its toll. We are all relatively friendly towards each other at any time. This might be holding back the events changes we all know we need to make. Events is what will allow us to do all sorts of cool and necessary stuff, like seeking, metadata, stream information, ... It seems the new hackers working on it have lost steam and interest in it because the decision process is so slow, while the older hackers probably have seen this all before and just slowly work on their implementation. At least Wim tells us that his seeking starts to work better and better for more media types. I guess we will just have to trust their good judgment ;)

Music

Well, I'm happy people certify me because of mentioning the Breeders, and that Baud remembered to get tickets for them because of me, but I'm bummed because it was sold out in Belgium before I even knew they were coming ! I want to see Kim Deal damnit !

On the plus side, saw a great concert last week by Six. By Seven ! This is one of the few bands in current music that is still able to spark my intrest. They opened up with "Another Love Song", a song proving that the reason drum'n bass tends to suck so much for me is that the instruments do not have a live feel. Just listen to this track, and how it is drummed, and you know how drum'n bass is supposed to sound to be any good. Only two drawbacks : the set was too damn short, and in spite of the list manager's promise they didn't bring any lovely I O U (heart) t-shirts ! So I harassed Chris, the singer, about it, and he felt bad and gave me his e-mail addy so I could mail him my address and he was going to send me one. I hope he follows through - anyone want to bet on it ?

Star Wars

One of Belgium's TV stations has broadcasted the Special Editions of Episodes IV to VI for the last three Sundays in preparation for the Attack of the Clones release. It was good to see them all again. Empire strikes back is still the best. And I don't care much for the added scenes - the new graphics just don't flow well with the old ones at all. It did look though like the last scene in Return of the Jedi, with the fireworks in an old city, was added to fit in with Episode II. It looks like the same city anyway. Here's hoping that the new movie will approach some of the first three's level.

My girlfriend and I had a few really big arguments over the weekend and she had hoped to talk about it during Star Wars. Hm, not a good way to get a guy to talk ;) Afterwards I was able to lighten the mood though by convincing her to do a Darth Vader imitation - I pinched her nose and cupped her mouth, asked her to breathe in and out heavily and say either "Luke ... I am your father" or "You do not know the power of the dark side." It took her at least seven minutes before she stopped giggling and was finally able to say the second sentence. I tried to convince her I was heavily turned on by it, but she didn't believe me (and rightly so, in case you were wondering). It's not because we managed to have a laugh that the arguments are settled though. I'm saying that because someone pointed out to her that I posted stuff here and she started reading it and we actually had an argument because I didn't mention her here at all ! So there you go girl. Anyone else here had arguments because of that ?

Life

jdub: my girlfriend solves the underwear conundrum pretty well by just wearing my underwear most of the time when she wakes up after sleeping over. It blends in really well with my underwear lying about for obvious reasons.

Gnome 2 I'm starting to love Gnome. I used to not care either way, but Gnome is a really good project, with lots of interesting people and a pretty good...