Present Perfect

Good accidents hide in small corners. A while ago I did something I never did before - I asked a guy on the subway whether he was interested in a job at Fluendo. I know, it sounds weird.

But the guy in question was actually reading a paper on pipeline-based multimedia processing, IIRC. I was dead tired as I had just flown in, and it was late at night. But I was thinking to myself, what kind of a manager am I if I can't even recognize a good candidate sitting in front of me ?

Needless to say, the offer was awkward, the handshake on language took a few tries, and I ended up taking out a business card but I don't even remember if he took it or not. I remember I had to break up the conversation quickly because I was at my stop.

I saw him again on the subway a few days later, and we noticed each other at the same time. I explained I felt silly the day before, and it turned out we had Andy in common. We both said we should get out for some food sometime, but we never got to it. That guy was Pau Arumi.

Last week I was thinking, we really should get together. So I mailed Andy to ask for an address, but the same day Pau mailed Andy and me to remind us of the Jornades de Programari Lliure, which it turns out he helps organize. I knew about it because Jordi told me about it, and Arek, Florian and Aitor are doing a talk.

Pau also invited me to dinner with Paul Davis of Ardour and JACK fame. Of course I couldn't refuse - I'm sure Paul didn't remember, but he was kind enough to help me figure out the kernel modules for the Hammerfall soundcard (which he wrote) when I was setting up Kristien's home recording studio, and I promised him a beverage of choice in return.

This is actually one of my favourite moments in free software - times when I meet people in real life that have helped me in some way or whose software I've used, and being able to invite them to eat or drink. So their bottle of wine in that excellent restaurant Pau selected was on me, and I was happy for it.

It was also a good opportunity to ask his opinion on the future of JACK and PulseAudio. It seems Paul sees the two as complementary, where people that care about the things that JACK cares about would be able to run PulseAudio on top of JACK - with a certain patch, PulseAudio can even run the JACK server in-process so that the PulseAudio and JACK servers become one. People that don't care can just run PulseAudio as usual. If that happens, that means we would have the same Pro Audio capabilities that Mac OSX has out of the box if a distro sets it up.

Talking about it with Paul reminded me about the things I admired in PulseAudio and Lennart's approach to the whole sound server problem. It's amazing to see how Lennart really aimed at solving all the problems. There have been many sound servers or sound solutions in the past, and all of them managed to miss at least one of the important reasons for which various people want a sound server - roughly categorizing into sound events, network transparency, hotpluggable devices, mixing, and a unified API for sound playback.

As an example, IIRC Lennart even implemented a PulseAudio fake OSS driver that implements one specific system call that only Quake III uses - but Lennart (correctly) reasoned that people would complain about PulseAudio if they wouldn't be able to play Quake III and other sounds at the same time.

So, in contrast with Jeffrey Stedfast's opinion (though I respect Jeffrey a lot for his Evolution work), I am very happy that a young and motivated guy like Lennart took the time and did the hard work, and got the details right, and apart from a few bugs that I'm sure will get worked out in the end PulseAudio is rocking my Fedora 9-based world. So I must make sure to thank him in beverages next time around. (And to think, this is a guy with not just one successful project to his name - see Avahi as well).

By coincidence, Christian just thanked me for my work on mach. While mach was probably one of my earliest useful/successful solo projects, in some ways it's also a bitter failure on a social level. mach started out with code using apt-get (before yum existed). As time moved on and yum became more used, I wanted to have mach be able to use both. At some point someone gave me a patch to use yum, but it ripped out the mach bits, which I didn't like - I wanted to be able to use both.

IIRC, I ended up handing that patch to Seth, yum's author telling him that I couldn't figure out how to integrate the patch so that it would work both with apt-get and yum. He ended up using the patch, forked mach, and mock was born. After that some features were stripped, and moch started evolving, and attracted a wider developer base than mach ever did. There's nothing wrong with what Seth did - this is after all what Free Software licenses explicitly allow - but obviously that's not how I think things ought to be done. I don't think I ever really voiced my opinion on this because I don't really know how to word it without admitting some kind of failure about it, but I realized today after Christian's post that a social failure says nothing about the technical merits of mach.

And while I'd never state so in public, and definitely do not want to take much credit for this, part of me is happy to have created something that ended up being a small seed for the technical solution that revolutionized Red Hat's build system and caused the massive social sea change that Fedora ended up being.

But I digress. Thanks, Christian, for saying thanks. Though, nothing says thanks like a trip to my wish lists :)

(Wow, this was an awful lot of people-linking for one post)

Good accidents hide in small corners. A while ago I did something I never did before - I asked a guy on the subway whether he was interested in a...

I'm glad the Eurocup is over. Our pilot informed us twice about the game, and the Aerobus stopped a few blocks before Placa Espanya. The place was packed to the gills, people climbing the monuments, and everyone shooting fireworks.

I had managed to avoid San Joan this year only to come home to this new warzone :)

I was hoping to go to bed early and get a good night's rest. Doesn't sound like that's in the cards.

Congrats to Spain, and now I'm going to enjoy my next two years of no-soccer-craziness. As if.

I'm glad the Eurocup is over. Our pilot informed us twice about the game, and the Aerobus stopped a few blocks before Placa Espanya. The place was packed to the...

that wee kittens have the same farting power as adult cats, and a lot less reservation in using it...

that wee kittens have the same farting power as adult cats, and a lot less reservation in using it...

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when it's the weekend and when I want to relax, and schedules diseases breaking out accordingly. I'd feel guilty about getting ill on working days, I'm sure.

We had a BBQ planned on Sunday with our old sport club - our yearly meeting. A simple flu wouldn't stop me from having it, even though we took over organizing it from the original instigator (and used Doodle to do so - do yourself a favor and use it every time you're planning something with friends to avoid fifteen thousand mails going "I can't on that date, how about that date" - I wish I had thought of that site)

BBQ was excellent, save for the fact that the ten-year-old-but-still-in-a-box-deluxe-barbecook was missing a whole bag of nuts and bolts. Peter to the rescue by going to the hardware store and getting some basics to at least allow us to have the BBQ itself working. And affected as I was by the flu apparently I didn't bring home charcoal but vineyard branches - not a good fit for the barbecook.

But all was well after a short wait and the meat was excellent, as was the company. And we even got some sports done.

Today being San Joan in Barcelona - my least favourite holiday, 6 year old kids running around at night shooting off fireworks without regards for their own or my life - I decided to stay home this week. I'm happy I decided to stay here because it's no fun travelling while ill. This also allows me to focus on setting up our new virtualized development platform at work, because we're working on a near-seamless migration from our old platform code to the new version. Flipping the big red switch just isn't a responsible way of migrating customers anymore.

Kristien took advantage of me staying to work from home this week and went out yesterday to get a new kitten. His name's Tonie (staying with the cat meme we started with Lunya), he's mostly black but with white paws, a white jaw, and a bit of white across his face. As far as kittens go, this is one of the more active I've seen - up and about and trying to break free from his temporary "get-used-to-a-new-place" area in two hours. Usually a kitten takes about a day hiding behind some couch in a corner to adjust. Also, this kitten hardly made a peep while Kristien drove him home - an hour car ride and only six meows. Lunya would wail like a baby the whole drive.

Anyway, I'm sure you all know kittens are cute and heartbreaking. This one's up and about and alternating between discovering this new place and resting on my lap.

In the end I've decided not to go to GUADEC this year, and go to Europython instead. It's not really a very calculated or well-thought out decision - I was hung up on deciding ever since I realized they were on at the same time. I probably would have booked for both months ago if they had been separate.

It's not that I don't want to go to Istanbul - I do, but holy shit, is it expensive - and it's not that I don't want to see all my GNOME friends again. I'm interested in the debate our dear rabble rouser has started, though I doubt people will get anywhere on that.

Maybe it's simply fatigue - I have to agree with some people that there isn't that much variety compared to other years looking at the schedule. Possibly it's also the fact that I haven't contributed much of anything at all to GNOME over the last year. I'm sure that's largely due to my focus having changed a lot. My involvement in GStreamer as well has waned over the last year, for various reasons I'll save for a possible other post.

Europython was fun last year, it's nice to see a different community interact once in a while. Breaks the entrenchment one gets into. It's also more work-related - we're looking for people with Python skills, so it makes more sense to go to Europython.

In the end, it wasn't a single thing that made me decide, it's really just a flip of a coin decision, and I'm sure I'll regret it somewhere down the line. Chosing is losing.

So, with my birthday coming up (and now having decided to have it in Vilnius) I've cleaned up my Amazon wish lists and ordered myself some goodies off of it already. Which leads me to wonder two things related to Amazon.

First of all, why does Amazon even *have* different frontend sites for different regions ? And why do these sites not interact in any way at all ? Every link on the web to an amazon item are always to the US version, so I always end up having a US wish list, though it is weird to order stuff from the US if it's also available on any of their regional sites.

Which leads me to point two - how is it still possible that ordering the same stuff from the US just comes out huge chunks cheaper than ordering it from the .uk or .fr sites ? And that's even when I choose priority air shipping. Shouldn't it be a hell of a lot cheaper to ship from their European warehouses ? Is this just the weak dollar ? Should I delete my UK wish list entirely anyway (which I only started for DVD's because of region coding and PAL vs NTSC) ?

Anyway, enough influenced posting for today. Time to do some non-work work.

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when...

Once in a while I add a new comic of sorts to my BlogLines. It has the huge (dis)advantage of having a big backlog of fun stuff to read through - case in point, a letter to Apple. I'm lucky my lack of drunkenness in general has saved me from being able to relate to this particular post.

Update: or this. Joey Cameau is going to be my new hero.

Update 2: or this one, a more effective anti-RIAA post than anything I've ever seen. 3 in a row - I have to stop reading.

Once in a while I add a new comic of sorts to my BlogLines. It has the huge (dis)advantage of having a big backlog of fun stuff to read through...