Present Perfect

Weekend

Steve Baker came to Gent with his wife, Bronya. It's the first time I tried showing people around the city. It went ok, apart from me not really knowing all of the touristy bits well. For example, our famous castle is way to expensive for foreigners. For people living in Gent, entrance is actually free.

We went to a few bars, had some very good Mexican food, and went on a boat cruise through the old town on Sunday.

Steve's going back to New Zealand in about two weeks. That's too bad, he's a great developer, and it'll get lonelier on irc in the morning. If Uraeus is actually going to Australia as well, I'll end up being all alone there.

Friday

Went to the thank-you get-together from the couple that got married. wardv was there as well - he should be on his way to Brighton as I write this. Sometimes I envy him for being able to leave stuff behind and go somewhere else. I've been thinking about changing jobs and getting a different one or even get a doctorate on something I can do with GStreamer. Hey, wouldn't it be nice to spend one year of that in Boston at MIT ? One can dream.

GStreamer

Wim is finally back from his one-month trip. He made his re-entrance by starting work on an optimal scheduler which is both faster and removes some constraints on applications (like having an upper limit on the number of plug-ins in one thread due to stack space limitations). Very good work ! Hope it settles down quickly, because this is just what we need. And it's nice that someone can actually work on something very internal to GStreamer and have it be instantly useful for all of the other things as well.

If things go well, we might do a release this weekend. I've been gently prodding my Ximian contact for the GStreamer Red Carpet channel. It just needs one more change for it to be totally functional.

To be fair, I still miss Erik. I wish he'd find some time to work on GStreamer some more. We need to make some big decisions real soon now.

Damien asked me to do a presentation at FOSDEM, a Belgian open-source conference, next February. I'm definitely going to do that if I'm not gone skiing. I hope to be able to do a Dave/Dina presentation as well.

Work

Had huge trouble last week. On Tuesday, a hard disk crashed in one of the two broadcast computers. I was working at home and got a call around noon saying there was trouble. I told them to run a disk check, and if necessary go out and get a replacement drive. They brought in our outside Windows expert, and he looked at it as well. At seven o'clock they rang me again, saying they couldn't do much about it, and if I would buy a hard disk and come over. At seven in the evening ! They didn't even follow the simplest advice.

This time around my boss actually offered himself to compensate with a free day off if I did come down for the evening and fix it.

Well, luckily I knew a shop that would probably help me out, so I bought it and went on my way to Brussels. I started out by trying to salvage the two main partitions with Ghost and PartitionMagic. Ghost wouldn't even start copying because of disk errors, and PartitionMagic had the "copy partition" option greyed out.

So I ditched those two, booted with a linux rescue disk, partitioned the second disk to have the same size partitions as the original one, and transfered the C: and D: partition.

Linux - Windows : 1 - 0

After that, booting wouldn't work, since I didn't transfer the MBR. I thought Windows 2000 would have a repair mode, so I used the Windows CD to try and restore it. It had some command-line tools to fix the MBR, but those didn't work. I tried various Repair options from the boot CD, but none of those worked either. Rats. Does anyone ever check those cases at Microsoft ?

So I gave up again, booted up with grub, and typed in the right commands manually. Windows 2000 booted, and that did the trick to fix the MBR, because after that it booted flawlessly.

Linux - Windows : 2 - 0

I thought I'd have a lot of work reinstalling the broadcasting software we use, but I just copied the programs from the other broadcast client and changed some configuration data. After that, everything seemed to work.

So I solved an important problem in about six hours without any stress and with a lot of waiting. That made me feel good about my job and my role in it.

After that, I got my boss and my collague to go out for ice cream.

Of course, during the week we had some major problems due to a very silly preference setting that didn't get carried over which caused the software to move around audio files when you access them in one application, which causes all of the other apps not to find them. Duh. That taught me a lesson about the cost of changing preferences. Something I'll need to remember in GStreamer and other projects as well.

libhnj

Also for work, I needed to find a way to hyphenate sentences to send them out over RDS (the text thingy in your car radio).

I was surprised to not find much open-source stuff related to it. aspell didn't seem to have anything for it. I looked around and found Python bindings to libhnj. After some digging, I found that code, and it was written by ... raph ! Nice to see my world getting smaller ;) The code looked unmaintained, and I couldn't get it to work. It's not even mentioned anymore on his web page. I dug into OpenOffice as well, and it seems the code that does the hyphenation is based on libhnj as well !

So that convinced me to put in some more work to understand it and get it to work, and after some time I was able to hyphenate dutch words.

I didn't get a reply from raph yet on my first mail. So now I'm thinking of taking the original code, cleaning it up a bit, making Perl bindings for it and releasing it again. Raph, what do you think ?

URGent

In my spare time, I also work for a college radio station in Belgium, URGent. We're starting live broadcasts again next month. There was some discussion as to a new programming format they want to be using, which made me realize we don't even have any automatic programming system anymore.

The previous one was one I wrote for my thesis and, by current day's standards (both general and mine), it's pretty brittle. The last time we tried to fix it we just kicked it over real hard and decided to scrap it. We just forgot we were actually planning on making something new to use six months later . So we went in panic mode. Sweaty fixed some more DAD stuff and wrote a show scheduler.

And I started working on gstreamix, a back-end mixer using GStreamer and xml. The first bit is already done: it reads it's configuration data from XML, and you can create any given set of output channels. Currently, I have

• sound card (to actually play it out on-air)
• store to disk (in ogg format)
• stream to icecast (in two qualities)

and I hope to add streaming to icecast2 soon as well.

Now I just need a lot of work on the input stage, which would actually do the mixing. But it's just a lot of fun to code with GStreamer.

Dave/Dina work week

I made some excellent progress on the Dave/Dina project during my half-week off. I now have test .iso's that seem to install OK. I also updated everything to Red Hat 7.3 and the 2.4.18 kernel. Now it's time to start going over all of the packages again, fixing small stuff, and actually completely installing Jeroen's box (he's our first "customer"). I've seen chakie mention his media project, so Chakie: check us out as well, let's see if we can work on something together.

On the content management system - I was going to switch over to PostNuke, but the latest rumblings in the community have thrown me off for now. Not sure what I should do about it now. Should I switch to Project X ? Or will that take months to complete still ?

Pukkelpop

Pukkelpop was good. A few pictures of it are online. And yes, Guns 'n' Roses actually showed up.

Bands and people I need to check out are Maximilian Heckler, Leaves and Trust Company. The next monday I bought seven CD's, including the very good Sparta CD.

Weekend Steve Baker came to Gent with his wife, Bronya. It's the first time I tried showing people around the city. It went ok, apart from me not really knowing...