Present Perfect

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when it's the weekend and when I want to relax, and schedules diseases breaking out accordingly. I'd feel guilty about getting ill on working days, I'm sure.

We had a BBQ planned on Sunday with our old sport club - our yearly meeting. A simple flu wouldn't stop me from having it, even though we took over organizing it from the original instigator (and used Doodle to do so - do yourself a favor and use it every time you're planning something with friends to avoid fifteen thousand mails going "I can't on that date, how about that date" - I wish I had thought of that site)

BBQ was excellent, save for the fact that the ten-year-old-but-still-in-a-box-deluxe-barbecook was missing a whole bag of nuts and bolts. Peter to the rescue by going to the hardware store and getting some basics to at least allow us to have the BBQ itself working. And affected as I was by the flu apparently I didn't bring home charcoal but vineyard branches - not a good fit for the barbecook.

But all was well after a short wait and the meat was excellent, as was the company. And we even got some sports done.

Today being San Joan in Barcelona - my least favourite holiday, 6 year old kids running around at night shooting off fireworks without regards for their own or my life - I decided to stay home this week. I'm happy I decided to stay here because it's no fun travelling while ill. This also allows me to focus on setting up our new virtualized development platform at work, because we're working on a near-seamless migration from our old platform code to the new version. Flipping the big red switch just isn't a responsible way of migrating customers anymore.

Kristien took advantage of me staying to work from home this week and went out yesterday to get a new kitten. His name's Tonie (staying with the cat meme we started with Lunya), he's mostly black but with white paws, a white jaw, and a bit of white across his face. As far as kittens go, this is one of the more active I've seen - up and about and trying to break free from his temporary "get-used-to-a-new-place" area in two hours. Usually a kitten takes about a day hiding behind some couch in a corner to adjust. Also, this kitten hardly made a peep while Kristien drove him home - an hour car ride and only six meows. Lunya would wail like a baby the whole drive.

Anyway, I'm sure you all know kittens are cute and heartbreaking. This one's up and about and alternating between discovering this new place and resting on my lap.

In the end I've decided not to go to GUADEC this year, and go to Europython instead. It's not really a very calculated or well-thought out decision - I was hung up on deciding ever since I realized they were on at the same time. I probably would have booked for both months ago if they had been separate.

It's not that I don't want to go to Istanbul - I do, but holy shit, is it expensive - and it's not that I don't want to see all my GNOME friends again. I'm interested in the debate our dear rabble rouser has started, though I doubt people will get anywhere on that.

Maybe it's simply fatigue - I have to agree with some people that there isn't that much variety compared to other years looking at the schedule. Possibly it's also the fact that I haven't contributed much of anything at all to GNOME over the last year. I'm sure that's largely due to my focus having changed a lot. My involvement in GStreamer as well has waned over the last year, for various reasons I'll save for a possible other post.

Europython was fun last year, it's nice to see a different community interact once in a while. Breaks the entrenchment one gets into. It's also more work-related - we're looking for people with Python skills, so it makes more sense to go to Europython.

In the end, it wasn't a single thing that made me decide, it's really just a flip of a coin decision, and I'm sure I'll regret it somewhere down the line. Chosing is losing.

So, with my birthday coming up (and now having decided to have it in Vilnius) I've cleaned up my Amazon wish lists and ordered myself some goodies off of it already. Which leads me to wonder two things related to Amazon.

First of all, why does Amazon even *have* different frontend sites for different regions ? And why do these sites not interact in any way at all ? Every link on the web to an amazon item are always to the US version, so I always end up having a US wish list, though it is weird to order stuff from the US if it's also available on any of their regional sites.

Which leads me to point two - how is it still possible that ordering the same stuff from the US just comes out huge chunks cheaper than ordering it from the .uk or .fr sites ? And that's even when I choose priority air shipping. Shouldn't it be a hell of a lot cheaper to ship from their European warehouses ? Is this just the weak dollar ? Should I delete my UK wish list entirely anyway (which I only started for DVD's because of region coding and PAL vs NTSC) ?

Anyway, enough influenced posting for today. Time to do some non-work work.

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when...

Sometimes I buy like a depressed woman. Today I went out to buy Spiritualized's highly anticipated (at least, in this body) "Songs in A&E". I came back home with 7 CD's and 2 DVD's:

• A tribute to Spacemen 3: It was relatively cheap and it has Arab Strap, Mogwai and Low on it
• Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs: as Seth said, don't knock the Death Cab
• Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost: hey, it was less than 6 euros!
• Spiritualized - Songs in A&E: I ended up finding it at the FNAC
• Sloan - Never Hear The End Of It: 30 songs for 6.95!!!
• Pet Shop Boys - Discography: I've always liked a few of their tunes, and this was less than 6 euros again
• Coldplay - X&Y: I never bought it when it came out because it was copy-protected - this version doesn't seem to be thus encumbered, and I cannot resist songs like Fix You and Talk
• Radiohead - The Best Of (DVD): Radiohead has some truly excellent videos, it's worth getting this
• Pixies - Live at the Paradise in Boston: The Paradise is such a legendary place to me, even though I've never been there. This DVD was now 12 euros instead of 25 when it came out, so I couldn't let it just lie there

The jury is still out on whether this is a disease that needs curing... In addition, I got a dual festival ticket (Daydream - with Radiohead - this Thursday, and Summercase in July - 20% discount!)

Sometimes I buy like a depressed woman. Today I went out to buy Spiritualized's highly anticipated (at least, in this body) "Songs in A&E". I came back home with 7...

Being able to put on a Live DVD of a band you like (in this case, Mew from Copenhagen) and crank up the volume. It creates an excellent head space and atmosphere to get work done.

Next up - Jeff Buckley at the Metro in Chicago.

Funny - when the font chosen for the credits is so big that assistant grip gets shortened to "ass. grip" I don't know if it's the Danish sense of humour or just a funny accident.

Being able to put on a Live DVD of a band you like (in this case, Mew from Copenhagen) and crank up the volume. It creates an excellent head space...

"It takes fewer steps to set up multi-media on Mandriva. Applications that need codecs, such as Totem, now pop up a dialog allowing a choice between GStreamer codecs or commercial codecs via Fluendo. I kept choosing GStreamer, and managed to get nearly everything running except DVD playback. In the end I turned (as always) to VLC and and libdvdcss2."

At least the codeina part of that sentence is exactly what we are aiming for - making it easy for people to install the codecs, and giving them a choice between our Fluendo codecs and the possibly more dubious but Free Software versions. Too bad of course that the user had to resort to VLC for dvd playback, but hey, that's a problem to solve some other day.

Codeina was first integrated in a distribution in Fedora 8 (to much rejoice from users who wanted MP3 playback), and now Mandriva has picked up the latest release that integrates, among other things, external repository files.

Kudos to Mandriva on their new release! Any other distribution that wants to integrate codeina and needs help, feel free to contact us or drop by in #codeina on freenode.

P.S.: Anyone referring to this project with the inane name of "CodecBuddy" will still receive the cold shoulder as before.

UPDATE: Reinout asked for the original post.

"It takes fewer steps to set up multi-media on Mandriva. Applications that need codecs, such as Totem, now pop up a dialog allowing a choice between GStreamer codecs or commercial...

Woah, it's good to know people care about Fluendo. It didn't take much time after Christian's announcement on his blog for people to deluge me with questions. So let's save me some time by replying publically.

Yes - Christian, Wim and Edward are leaving as full-time employees of Fluendo. The reasons for these are many and varied, as is always the case, and I'm sure you could extract some of them with sufficient application of free beers at GUADEC :) Same goes for us. But beyond that it's between us and them. We wish them the best of luck with striking out on their own. Tim, the GStreamer bugmaster, is joining them - he was contracting part-time for us before.

Are we dropping GStreamer ? No, GStreamer 0.10 has been a success on all accounts from both sides of the fence. I think this is obvious, given that today you can go to Fluendo, Collabora, Opened Hand, and tomorrow a new company, to get consulting done on GStreamer. A lot of big companies don't even tell us anymore that they use GStreamer and want help - they just Do It (which amusingly is the result of your project being Free Software in the first place... The more consulting you do, the smaller the percentage of businesses that need consulting. The hope is that the absolute pie gets bigger because of the success of your project though. But I digress)

GStreamer is not going to suffer because of this. If anything, you should expect to see the community evolve, because sadly it is just too damn easy to not communicate enough with your community if a lot of the core developers are sitting next to each other holding hands all day. Maybe we can finally shut up the conspiracy theorists that claim Fluendo have stolen GStreamer :)

So what about Fluendo ? Our plans haven't changed. We still work on GStreamer to make it better. We still make products on top of it, like our codecs and our DVD player, which we hope to sell to you guys to solve legal issues, and obviously also to get filthily rich in the process. And we're still working on Flumotion and Elisa, and the parts that are free will be as free as they have ever been.

And what about our current customers ? They needn't worry either. Business goes on as usual. Contracts will be completed. We're a serious company and we respect our customers.

Is there anyone left ? This is the funniest question - somehow people think that we're still this small five person company. And admittedly I sometimes have trouble coping with the changes over the last year. But today, Fluendo is a group of three companies, with around 25 people spread across, some of whom you'll probably never get to know (because they're not community people - our office manager keeps complaining about this crap called Linux) and all of us sharing the same office space.

So, what about me ? Well, I'm glad two of you care. On a personal level, it is sad to see friends leave the company. I've been working on GStreamer for almost as long as Christian and Wim - must be seven years now - and any hacker out there knows that this creates a bond. I still have my GStreamer shirt, one of the many high-quality shirts with actual embroidery, that Christian sprung for out of his own pocket, for everyone who wanted one. And one of my best GStreamer moments was still the GStreamer weekend in the Norwegian cabin, shared with a class of physical education students, only reachable after an hour of wading through waist-deep snow.

Before Fluendo, I would introduce myself at conferences hunching my back and saying, with a meek voice, "I hack on GStreamer, I'm sorry, don't hurt me". Now, any of us can proudly say "you're welcome" when people thank us for our work, as we used to thank the hundreds of other hackers whose hard work we use every day.

And for me, learning the difficulties of starting and growing a company as I go, having a group of people leave for the first time is a coming-of-age thing. It is something you never want to happen but cannot avoid at the same time - making the business that you make one step further on the way to being a real business, and no longer a small group of friends working together.

And before I get too sentimental, it should be obvious by now that Fluendo is hiring! If you want to step into the footsteps of giants, help us fix bugs in GStreamer and GStreamer-using applications, help us write plugins for more codecs, help us support and package plugins, drop me a line at the usual place.

And for Flumotion, we are also going to be hiring the next two months - we're looking for Flumotion developers, web developers, and a sysadmin to help manage our platform, as well as a customer support engineer and a QA engineer. (It is probably time to put stuff like this on our website, but until we have time to do so, it doesn't hurt to put this out there and have you contact us directly.)

If you have more questions or are still worried feel free to mail any of us (at Fluendo, or the "leavers") directly.  And best of luck to our three musketeers in the next venture.

Go home; find a wench. Raise fat babies, and live a good, long life.

Woah, it's good to know people care about Fluendo. It didn't take much time after Christian's announcement on his blog for people to deluge me with questions. So let's save...