Present Perfect

Haven't said much about work for a while now. Since Andy is shedding, now's as good a time as any.

Today was a bit of an adrenalin rush. Spain has a gambling mentality, and today was the annual Christmas lottery draw. It's affectively called "El Gordo" (the fat one). This year, the total prize money totalled over 2 billion Euros. The whole ticketing system is an elaborate scheme of 180 series of five digit tickets costing 200 euro, but you can buy a "decimo", which is a tenth of the ticket. If your ticket wins, you win one tenth of the prize money for the ticket.

If I follow correctly, it means that there are possible 180 first prize winning tickets, and thus potentially 1800 people getting part of one of those first prizes, worth 3 million euros each.

The lottery is broadcast on national TV - a 5 hour extravaganza of introductions then the drawing of small wooden balls, where the number on each ball is sang out loud by an orphan, while the value is sang out by another orphan (I kid you not. This is serious business).

Normally I would not be watching or even consider partaking, but it just so happens that we were supposed to be streaming this extravaganza. So if I was going to sit through watching it anyway, I might as well just buy me a ticket.

So it started this morning at 8, and traffic to our platform slowly started rising, then quickly ramped up as the streaming link was published. The stream peaked at close to 600 Mbit/sec, with about 2800 people at the time where the first prize was drawn.

Sadly, due to a peering problem between our provider and Telefonica, we were stuck around that limit. So I guess the next thing to work on for us as a company is to start improving our connectivity situation.

But on the software side, we've now set ourselves a new bandwidth record for a single stream. The last time I felt that adrenalin rush of having something you helped make achieve something beyond my expectation was our first public streaming at GUADEC two and a half years ago - where at the last minute we switched out a Python-based byte pushing system to a new GStreamer element, multifdsink, and thus broke away from a maximum limit of 30 concurrent users :)

So, it looks like everything Andy is saying about our next release is ringing true. Flumotion is going Enterprise.

Now, if next year I could actually win the lottery ...

Haven't said much about work for a while now. Since Andy is shedding, now's as good a time as any. Today was a bit of an adrenalin rush. Spain has...