Present Perfect

Why I stick with Red Hat/Fedora

It's pretty simple. A bunch of their engineers go out to see a movie. Three of them blog about it.

And not a single one of them manages to mention the utterly delectable Kate Beckinsale.

These guys are just impossible to distract from whatever their goal was. And that's why, kids, Red Hat/Fedora will always be a top notch distro.

Movies

Whilst on the subject... Went to see Intermission because we were too late for Big Fish. Quite ok. Saw Bully over the weekend. Alrightish, but man, are those kids stupid in the movie. Based on a true story, but I hope they were slightly brighter in real life.

Saw "Varsity Blues" yesterday. I can honestly say it was the best movie I've seen all yesterday.

gnome-media

So Ronald and I took over maintainership from Ted. I've started by applying all the patches that were still applicable to the 2.6 branch, then tried to branch, but failed because Ted apparently had already branched for 2.6.

Updated my local GNOME Maintainer's Guide with all the steps I'm taking while I go along.

After sorting out the branch mess, I started to work on some of the bugs in 2.7.

I wrote a command-line CDDB client for the CDDB slave so I could reproduce some of the bugs more easily, which caused some segfaults when run together with gnome-cd. It was like an itch you're trying to scratch that keeps running away from your nails - I spent quite some time figuring out exactly what was going wrong. The setup is quite complicated, with clients requesting a slave client, which is instantiated through CORBA, which causes the CDDB slave component to create a slave object to handle the requests, and then signal the slave clients.

One of the problems was that each slave client got notified of every lookup from every slave client, so my command-line client forced gnome-cd to believe the disc had changed :)

Anyways, after restructuring the code, adding comments and hacking notes, and adding some code to set the CDDB server to protocol level 6 so it gets UTF-8 responses, things are starting to come along quite nicely.

I also added error checking to the CFLAGS, and then spent some time fixing all the warnings/errors that generated. Seriously, everyone who is against -Wall -Werror is probably just writing sloppy code. That doesn't mean I write good code; but I know I write better code with -Wall -Werror, and I know ANYONE writes better code with it.

It's actually quite nice to work on someone else's code as a new maintainer; 90% of the work is already done, and you can refactor code more easily since you have a reference version that works.

So you just start learning the code by tackling some of the simpler bugs, adding comments to functions as you go, and taking notes on how you work, until you've seen and changed the whole code.

Fluendo

The basic setup to replace camserv works fine. Monkeys are being spanked at an alarming rate. I hope we get our server soon so we can make a continuous stream available to the outside world.

Today we're going to try and stream Ogg/Theora.

Why I stick with Red Hat/Fedora It's pretty simple. A bunch of their engineers go out to see a movie. Three of them blog about it. And not a single...