Present Perfect

8 years ago I had a lot of fun at, I think, Hacking in Progress. This year it's
Hacking At Random, again in Holland. I was actually planning to go there (for one thing, I really want to learn how to pick locks), but with all my travel plans for this summer already it was just getting too much. Since this is a 4-year event, I'll probably regret not going two years from now...

I still remember the first time I was lying in my sleeping bag in a tent, with an ethernet cable running to it, and being in the bag and online with the laptop.

Anyway, it's a small consolation that there are
live streams up and running from over there using Flumotion, set up by Raphaël.

8 years ago I had a lot of fun at, I think, Hacking in Progress. This year it's Hacking At Random, again in Holland. I was actually planning to go...

If your mind is wandering a little at work, if you're a big fan of Flumotion, or you like our company or really any company with firm roots in open source, you could do worse than take out 2 minutes of your day and vote for us in the Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards 2009!

Here's what you do:

• Go to: http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Readerschoiceeurope/
• Enter your name, email and company info
• Vote in 5 categories (3rd, 4th, 6th category on the left column; 1st and 4th on the right):
  Online Video Platform, Best Streaming Innovation of 2009, Streaming Services Provider, Transcoding solution, Video Advert Platform.

Feel free to vote in some of the others too, I picked Spotify in the Music & Audio delivery section for example.

Feel free as well to drop a comment if you voted so I know who to thank if we win!

If your mind is wandering a little at work, if you're a big fan of Flumotion, or you like our company or really any company with firm roots in open...

Defcon 17 wrapped up last week. Apparently, we had three of our people in the contest, and they scored very well!

Sergi from Fluendo, being an oldtimer going for the third time, ended up in 5th position with his 'Sexy Pwndas' team.

Javier and Guillem, from the Flumotion support team, went for the first time, and landed in 7th position with their 'Sapheads' team, a particularly impressive feat for first-timers.

Check ddtek for the final ranking.

Congratulations guys! Maybe we should have you guys do an audit of our platform ?

Defcon 17 wrapped up last week. Apparently, we had three of our people in the contest, and they scored very well! Sergi from Fluendo, being an oldtimer going for the...

Recently I've been looking at Buildbot again. It's been a while, bu it's nice to poke at it again. There's various things I want to do (like maybe finally finish my IRC praise/blame patch ?), but for starters I wanted to get some buildbots set up for pychecker, moap and morituri.

So that involved finding my old buildbot hacking notes so I can jumpstart a little better. And I started thinking about documentation.

I've always felt I'd like to write more documentation because it's a critical piece of success for a project. But at the same time, there's a simple problem when I want to write documentation: you need the mindset of a beginner to write good documentation. So it becomes a chicken-and-egg problem: in the beginning you don't know the project well enough to write the documentation; and as soon as you learn more about the project, you lose the capacity to ask the right questions the documentation needs to answer.

It is a special kind of skill to get into that mindset and be able to write from that perspective of a beginner. I don't think I have it.

But today I realized that I am now in the perfect situation when it comes to Buildbot. I know enough of how buildbot works conceptually from the past when I hacked on it, but it's been changed enough and I've forgotten enough that I actually need to go through the motions again to get my knowledge back. So, from a user point of view, I'm back to being a newbie.

So, I decided I'd take advantage of the situation and write some tutorials on how to use Buildbot. I've got two sections written up now and I'm ready to have people give me feedback.
The first tutorial focuses on the quickest 'this works' experience you can have, without touching the default configuration at all.
The second tutorial gives a quick tour of some of the features of buildbot by customizing the configuration, but without writing any code.

I plan to write further chunks that show how to set up a real build master for a project and integrate with the change notification, how to set up depending builds, and how to do some actual coding for specific build steps.

If you have some spare time and you're interested in continuous integration, you could do worse than provide me some feedback on these tutorials.

Recently I've been looking at Buildbot again. It's been a while, bu it's nice to poke at it again. There's various things I want to do (like maybe finally finish...