Present Perfect

I'm in Prague right now for the second GStreamer conference. Prague is as pretty as I remember it from eighteen years ago when I was still in high school and we had our yearly school trip.

It's great to see a mix of familiar and new faces again. 11 years ago GStreamer was made public, and I joined a year later around the 0.1.1 release if I recall. And now it's this huge living breathing thing.

Tomorrow I will be giving a talk about Flumotion here, at 12.00 in the main room. If you're interested in GStreamer beyond mere playback, this talk is for you. The only sad part is that my good friend Jan Schmidt will be talking about Bluray at the same time, but I'm relying on Ubicast to record it properly so I can see it later!

I'm in Prague right now for the second GStreamer conference. Prague is as pretty as I remember it from eighteen years ago when I was still in high school and...

Last week one of our developers said goodbye to another developer, including the following advice:

Make sure you self.setMood(moods.happy) and enjoy Paris as your virt_base and errrm it improves your self.uiState of mind.

See, I find that amusing.

Last week one of our developers said goodbye to another developer, including the following advice: Make sure you self.setMood(moods.happy) and enjoy Paris as your virt_base and errrm it improves your...

After ripping over a 1000 CD's perfectly, and having problems on a few (bad discs, weird audio, a few small niggles to fix), I ran into a fun failure.

Apparently, the file name in u'morituri/Sufjan Stevens - Illinois/02. Sufjan Stevens - The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You\'re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, "I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!".flac' is too long for my NAS.

Thank you Mister Sufjan. In your honour, I added a function to morituri to shrink the filename to a power of two minus one, below either the given length or 128 characters, whichever is less. For now the algorithm splits on spaces and changed the file name to morituri/Sufjan Stevens - Illinois/02. Sufjan Stevens - The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself.flac

That is good enough for me... I was worried I had to teach this one tiny function about keeping quoted pieces together, or how comma's work, or how 'or, ' works, and so on, just to satisfy my crazy sense of aesthetics.

After ripping over a 1000 CD's perfectly, and having problems on a few (bad discs, weird audio, a few small niggles to fix), I ran into a fun failure. Apparently,...

One day we got a call from one of our customers across the globe who stream a wildlife channel. They told us that, instead of a broadcast of their channel, which was embedded on their home page, there was now an adult channel in its place. A very different kind of wildlife channel... Could we fix it as soon as possible?

I was pretty worried, because if it were our mistake that would be pretty embarassing. So I asked Zaheer, our resident DVB expert at the time, to investigate.

After a lot of debugging and head scratching he told me that there was nothing wrong on our side - the channel that was configured to capture was in fact an adult channel. In the end, we looked up the satellite channel names again, and then we noticed that our customer's channel was not in the place where it used to be. Apparently it had changed PID.

When we told them what happened, they told us, 'Oh yes, you are right. We got a notice from our satellite provider a few months ago that the number would change but we forgot all about it...' They didn't think to warn us.

I was just happy it wasn't our fault after all!

One day we got a call from one of our customers across the globe who stream a wildlife channel. They told us that, instead of a broadcast of their channel,...

Our data center has some satellite dishes on it allowing us to encode any of the signals for our customers. One day we had a problem with one of our dishes, and soon after a customer called to one of our sales people. Her answer ?

"We're sorry, one of the satellites fell down. But don't worry, tomorrow we're launching a new one!"

The customer was so impressed that he thanked her for our dedication and hung up.

We never had the balls to tell this customer we don't actually run a space agency.

Our data center has some satellite dishes on it allowing us to encode any of the signals for our customers. One day we had a problem with one of our...