Present Perfect

For some unfathomable reason it's been a rather productive two weeks of short ##morituri hacking sessions.

I was wondering why I wasn't getting any feedback or trac tickets, until I found out that a) I had five month old patches lying around in my trac and b) I forgot to configure the ticket mails properly.

That, spurred with actual bug reports from blizzard who seems to have ripped 600 CD's with this piece of code already (more than me, in any case), kept me going towards a new release.

So, this new release adds, among other things:

• 'rip image encode' to encode a lossless image to a lossy one (vorbis, mp3, ...)
• tagging tracks with MusicBrainz id's
• 'rip image retag' to apply up-to-date musicbrainz info (including id's) to existing rips. I did this one specifically for Chris when he found out none of his rips had the MusicBrainz id's and I felt guilty.
• added an auto-generated man page.
• Generate a complete list of known drive offsets to try with 'rip offset find' based on the AccurateRip database.
• improved the basic Task code I wrote for abstracting asynchronous operations that can be hooked into a GLib mainloop or Twisted reactor. Exception information is now more useful.

A bunch of bugs were fixed too, and I especially want to thank Peter Oliver who provided me with three patches that I sadly overlooked. I hope he comes back.

In any case, enjoy the code and start ripping!

As for the next release, I've already started on ripping the data track (which ended up being easier than I thought, using dd and wrapping it in a Task parsing the output). However, I haven't yet been able to write a full image back to a CD, for various reasons. First of all, the .cue files I generate have multiple FILE statements, which doesn't seem to be supported by wodim, and only recently was added to cdrecord. Second, actually writing the data track so far has given me only errors.

It has been possible to rewrite the .iso file into one that can be mounted, and I might have to actually do the writing of discs by first decoding to a single file then writing from that. We'll see.

On the other hand, with tag reading and writing tasks now written, I might start using those in a separate application to finally start managing my music across my different machines.

For some unfathomable reason it's been a rather productive two weeks of short ##morituri hacking sessions. I was wondering why I wasn't getting any feedback or trac tickets, until I...

Had a migraine attack this weekend so I took it relatively easy on the hacking side. I finally finished setting up some new buildbots, and as part of that I rebuilt some packages for CentOS/RHEL 5.

So I also updated my package page that now has direct download links for release packages for my repo, to make it easier for you guys to install stuff from there if you're interested.

I use these repositories for prereleases and releases of the projects I work on, as well as packages that I have submitted to Fedora or otherwise needed and haven't had time to submit properly yet. You can still browse the repositories to take a peek.

Had a migraine attack this weekend so I took it relatively easy on the hacking side. I finally finished setting up some new buildbots, and as part of that I...

Last week Jan Urbanski, one of our developers, released a new stable series of Flumotion. This release comes two years and a few months after the previous stable series' last release, so you can imagine a lot of changes have gone into this new series! Basically, this release contains all the changes that two years of platform customers and a year of box/product testers have made us make.

This is Jan's second release. We've had some discussions before the release because we didn't necessarily agree on the strategies for releasing and branching, but in the end I managed to get mostly out of the way and Jan's strategy survived more or less.

With Jan's release strategy some things are now different:

• Jan does not want to add new features to this stable series; you will get only bug fixes
• To balance that, Jan's made a solemn oath to do a new stable series within the next nine months, instead of the two years we managed this time.

My suspicion is that Jan wants to increase the frequency of stable series because of our Flumotion release tradition: new major/minor releases are named after a restaurant, and we go celebrate the release at that restaurant! Maybe Jan is just a hungry guy. (On the other hand, maybe he wasn't thinking about restaurants after all - he had actually forgotten to plan for a release name until the last minute...)

This will be an interesting release dinner; I think last time we were maybe 8 people, now we'll be probably double...

From my point of view this was the smoothest stable release ever, so smooth that I woke up one day and checked my mail and bang, the release was there!

Listing all new features would be a bit excessive, but let me cherrypick a few highlights (or, failing that, less important bits that I just happened to have a hand in myself):

• A 200 page (at least last time I printed it) manual, mostly (re)written by Murray Cumming of Openismus. Murray did an excellent job of entering our little microverse, biting his tongue on the idiosyncracies in our concepts and distilling it all down to a useful manual that has found its way, ring-bounded and plastified, onto desks of our technical people without any prodding on my part! Ok, so what if half of it is auto-generated ? We still had to write the text that goes into those pages too!
• A bunch of new producer components, like screencast, ivtv and rtsp, and a favorite called playlist-producer, which uses GNonLin to create a fake live stream out of an .XML file of ondemand files. See, using GStreamer was a good idea after all!
• A consumer that lets you stream to an Icecast2 server. Yes, we're friendly to our open source competitors! Contributed by - please come back! - Gergely Nagy.
• a flumotion-nagios command that makes it easy to integrate Flumotion checks into Nagios and similar systems (Guess which monitoring system we use on our platform)
• A switcher component, switching between different inputs, based on a manual trigger, the master going away (watchdog scenarios), or based on an iCalendar file; mostly massaged into shape by the firm but soft-spoken Zaheer Merali
• aliased feeds, allowing multiple components to provide the same feed to downstream components, so that if one of the feeders fails the other one takes over. If memory serves me right this was done by the unshaveable Andrew Patrick Wingo back in the day!
• Support for Dirac, the BBC's open HD codec! Sadly it seems while this feature was added during 0.5 (by yours truly), it broke somewhere between GStreamer and Flumotion along the way. Go fix it team, so we can once again be a multi-open-format streaming server!
• Support for Python 2.6!
• A rewritten wizard/assistant, started by Johan Dahlin (the only person to have been hired by the Fluendo Group twice), and handed off to the unstoppable Xavier Queralt when Johan left to join LITL. As part of our box project, they have been completely reworking the wizard, and adding spiffy features like easy ondemand setup and addition of encoding formats to existing flows.
• Rate control for ondemand serving, added by Michael Smith (possibly the only person who's maintained two open source streaming servers at the same time) before he left for Songbird
• More under the hood tools and debug options, process management, and daft things like 'ssh into a python shell on the manager', all safely tucked away behind a debug toggle
• Tons and tons of fixes, optimizations, memory reductions, tweaks, by the whole team

Some thanks are in order too to Andrew Wingo and Arek Korbik for plodding ahead with the decidedly unsexy work of doing unstable releases over the last two years. Jan's been standing on the shoulder of giants.

Last week Jan Urbanski, one of our developers, released a new stable series of Flumotion. This release comes two years and a few months after the previous stable series' last...

Yesterday was cause for celebration. We got together to celebrate five years of the Fluendo Group!

71092

The picture quality is bad, and not everyone is in it, but I just took it on a whim after marveling how many people were there. I didn't even know all of them - yes it's gotten to that point. 67 months ago I arrived in Barcelona without the company even being created...

We celebrated with mountains of cheese and rivers of wine which in the first year would have lasted us a few weeks and now only lasted an hour.

As magical accidents sometimes happen, today is also the day Fluendo received the certification confirmation from Dolby for our DVD player. It didn't take long to land in the webshop, so finally our DVD player is up for sale! So you know what to get us for our birthday - a shop checkout with the dvd player in your cart.

Good timing - that means that at this year's GUADEC/Desktop Summit I know what the answer will be to one of the most asked questions I get.

This is the first GUADEC I'm going to with Kristien in tow, I hope she can manage. I'll be there from Monday through Friday, because the week is bookended by two weddings. Looking forward to a GStreamer summit on Thursday discussing 1.0...

Yesterday was cause for celebration. We got together to celebrate five years of the Fluendo Group! 71092 The picture quality is bad, and not everyone is in it, but I...

mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution or distribution variation supported.

This release of mach contains fixes for Python 2.6, and adds Fedora 10 and 11, while fixing the archived Fedora locations.

Get it from the mach project page.

mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution or distribution variation supported. This release of mach contains fixes for Python 2.6, and adds Fedora 10...