Present Perfect

Another fun week in hacking ...

Red Hat 8.0

I had managed to get some packages before the actual release, which allowed me to fix up bitches to support it. That in turn allowed me to rebuild GStreamer for Red Hat 8.0, which worked out surprisingly well. The C++ plug-ins didn't get built properly, however, and a week later I managed to figure out why : -lstdc++ wasn't added to the plug-in library flags. If someone knows why the plug-ins did manage to get built properly with previous Red hat gcc's, let me know, I'm curious.

All packages have been put in the GStreamer apt repository. It's great that a GStreamer build and set of RPMs can once again depend on a clean Red Hat install.

Send us bug reports, people !

Radio

This week, the college radio I work for started broadcasting again. The weekend before that, I had started working on a mixer program using GStreamer to replace my four year old thesis project, mpegmix. Someone led us to believe that the past week was just the test week, so I stopped working on that program during the weekend, concentrating on Red Hat 8.0 instead. Bad mistake - seems we were due to start broadcasting that Monday after all ;)

Problem was, the mixer wasn't ready at all, and we had about eight hours left to get everything ready. Everything means, in this case, software, testing of the copper line feed to the antenna, testing of the studio, and so on.

It was close, but we hacked up a simple automatic system that plays the hourly tune and commercials on time, and switches between computer and live feed. The more interesting stuff will have to wait a bit.

GStreamer

Things are progressing fairly well. wingo is going to Africa for two years, though. I'm happy for him, but for GStreamer it's too bad. He did some amazing work on the editor, I hope someone can pick that up and continue where he left off.

It's time we start discussing how to get GStreamer into Gnome. I've done some thinking on the subject, I hope my ideas go into the right direction. I should start mailing people and discussing them.

Dave/Dina

I have made some excellent progress over the last week. Due to the reasons mentioned above, however, my week off from work wasn't as productive as I had hoped it would be. For one thing, due to the installer graphics still not being finished, I couldn't work more on the installation part.

So I concentrated on going over all of the current packages, and finishing up some loose ends on the integration part. On Sunday, I re-installed the main Dave/Dina machine from scratch, then proceeded to weed out the apt tree and installing the packages one by one, working out small kinks.

It is a great feeling when you have made a system that you're able to re-install from scratch relatively painlessly. That's probably one of the bigger advantages of doing it the hard way like I am now. At least now I have a prayer of getting it to work for other people, like our very first customer who's anxious to get it to work.

On that note, a silly story - our first customer has just returned from Indonesia. He bought 30 DVD's down there, none of which looked entirely legal. So I asked him, "are you sure these DVD's play on PAL systems ?" "What's PAL ?" Oops. "They played on every TV there, and those TV's looked exactly the same as the ones over here."

Well, we tried a few in the Playstation 2, and they all turned out black and white and grainy. And yes, they were NTSC. That depressed him a little. But sure enough, playing them on Dave/Dina was alright, just like you would expect from a DVD. So now he's happy he's actually getting a Dave/Dina system.

Work

I'm at the point where I'll soon be able to do some cleanups in some of the systems I've set up. That's always good - you find problems before they happen that way, because you actually have to ask yourself - What should I do today ?. I'm not at that point yet though, so I'm anxious to get there ;)

Today, I'll just clean up all of the packages I've written that make up our radio RDS system, polish them a little, and document them, in the (probably vain) hope that someone will be able to make sense of it when I don't work there anymore.

Music

Got to see Idlewild play last week, great ! I love their new album, decent rock with good harmonies. Been playing Interpol's debut album to death lately : Turn on the bright lights. Yes, the voice and some of the music are reminiscent of Joy Division and might be derivative, but I wouldn't know since I don't know all that much about Joy Division. The music is great, dark and broody, and it really draws you in. A cathartic experience, well recommended.

Tonight, I'm going to an angel music concert : Sigur Ros. Been a long time since I saw them play, looking forward to it. I invited my favourite partner in music, Willeke.

Another fun week in hacking ... Red Hat 8.0 I had managed to get some packages before the actual release, which allowed me to fix up bitches to support it....