Present Perfect

Going to Oslo

Got up way too early, got dropped off at the train station and left for Brussels. Got on the Thalys, which had electricity ! I started writing my first Python application, a media test suite for GStreamer. Should be a good exercise to get me started. Having electricity made me feel luxurious so I watched the latest Sopranos episode I brought along on my laptop. I really start to enjoy the freedom of taking my virtual VCR tapes around with me. And watching TV on a laptop is actually very bearable.

Arrived at Charles De Gaulle, Paris, not much more than an hour later, where I was faced with a three hour wait. At check-in time I started worrying to death that I hadn't even considered if I needed my passport or not. Luckily it seemed my regular identity card was enough to get me in, even though later on I saw that it had already expired for two months. I guess they're not expecting any terrorists here.

I borrowed a second battery from one of my co-workers. These Toshiba's generally don't last for more than two hours. Which brings me to a point, if any of you laptop makers are reading this: it would be fantastic if laptops had a small internal battery that could last for a few minutes allowing you to replace the big battery while the laptop is still running.

I generally reboot my laptop only once in a month or something, but taking out the battery when not plugged in forces me to shutdown properly first. I'd love to avoid that.

So, five days ahead of me without having to worry about the incredibly disheartening deadline at work next Tuesday. Hooray for procrastination.

Arriving in Oslo

Got picked up from the airport by Raphael and drove to Uraeus 's apartment. From there, we went on to the parking place where the trail to the cabin starts. A two mile hike through waist-deep snow is a perfect way to start a hackfest. Somehow it felt good to be one of the more sporty types in a group.

Arriving at the cabin, we noticed a bunch of skis outside and apparently the cabin was doublebooked. The other occupants were a class of physical education teacher students. The female ones seemed to catch the attention of some of our hackers pretty quickly.

So we're still missing Wim and Leif, whom we haven't heard of. Hope they make it. It seems that Wim's plan to get in Oslo was to just go to the airport and take the first possible plane.

Lugeing

The next day we went to the centre of Oslo, from where we took the subway to one of the higher points of Oslo. There we rented a couple of luges, which basically are pieces of metal with some sort of flat surface as a seat. The idea is to lay down on them and go downhill as quickly as possible. Sadly the course is pretty bumpy and you end up flying about half a meter high and landing repeatedly. Pretty amusing and spectacular at the same time.

Wim doesn't have his mobile phone with him, so he called Christian from a cell phone. The message was pretty short; all he said was "Hello, this is Wim Taymans. I'm in Helsinki now. I'll call back later." and then some snickering. The snickering is totally justified since Helsinki is about 1000 km away from Oslo.

After that, we got confirmation from the Tourist Centre that there was some sort of mix-up, and we got assigned a new cabin. We went back to the old one, packed, then decided to eat first, so I started cooking. We made the two mile hike back at midnight, with all of our backpacks strapped on. It's a pretty surreal sight to see a bunch of complaining GStreamer hackers make their way through the snow and the dark.

We arrived at the new cabin at about two o'clock, only to find out it was freezing inside (there was some ice in a pot in the kitchen) and that there were no blankets. So I went out with Christian to get a bunch of blankets and sleeping bags from his mother's house for the people who only had sheets. Christian and I finally went to sleep at about 3.30 AM.

Hacking

It's Friday and it's the first day of actual hacking. A bunch of us started doing a code review of some core features. We started out with the scheduler. It's a pretty complex piece of code because it needs to do so much stuff and do it in weird ways.

Since getting on the plane I had started on my first ever Python application. It's a simple app to test handling of media files in GStreamer. Basically, it runs a bunch of pipelines involving md5sink on a bunch of media files and compares the md5sum of the decoding against the known good value. Today I worked on it some more and it's already basically done. It' surprising how easy it is to get started in Python.

I'm reading through Christian's copy of Havoc's GGAD manual, to figure out the basics of GtkObject/GObject from scratch again. I was trying to figure out how recasting actually works for the first time, and it dawned on me that the whole GObject system relies on a pretty cool hack inherent in C. Since each GObject has the parent structure as it's first structure element,the structure at the bottom of the object tree contains all parent classes in it's structure. Since they then all start at the same address, pointed to by the instance pointer, you can cast it to any of the structs in the ancestry tree and dereference it from there. Which is a neat trick. And apparently, it's also the reason why GObject can't do multiple inheritance.

Now, that's all boring stuff. But the real question here is: What would GNOME look like if, for some reason, C didn't have this behaviour at all ? Would there even be GNOME ?

Going to Oslo Got up way too early, got dropped off at the train station and left for Brussels. Got on the Thalys, which had electricity ! I started writing...