Present Perfect

Between having a rotten weekend, turning pretty damn ill, and having impromptu meetings about lots of things, I also broke my teeth on trying to somewhat acceptably implementing a reconnection feature in Flumotion. It probably was the biggest "there's another bug at the end of the fix for the last bug" wild goose chase I've ever had. My first couple of approaches failed spectacularly because after trying them I realized the problem was slightly more complex than I thought it was.

Once I had decided on the actual approach to take, I realized it would take me too far off the current course and take too long to implement. So I thought about the next best way to make it work for now, and started off in that direction. Which led me to the wild goose chase. Each time I thought "and now it will work", it didn't, and some careful debugging gave me another clue on what went wrong.

In one of the last problems, I had my streamer (the HTTP streaming element) reconnecting properly to stopped and started production/encoding components. Only, the tcpserversink element ports assigned to those two components had switched around ports, so all of a sudden my HTTP streamer was getting data from the raw video feed.

Anyways, I fixed all those issues, commited, and now I hope our happy customer Matthias tests and approves. After that, I can pick up the pieces, write down my ideas on how it really should work, and start on that.

Hopefully my mood picks up when a) I stop being ill; b) I stop getting into impromptu meetings and conf calls; c) we move office; and d) Andy arrives.

Between having a rotten weekend, turning pretty damn ill, and having impromptu meetings about lots of things, I also broke my teeth on trying to somewhat acceptably implementing a reconnection...

Thursday, we had a day off that I didn't know about before. Cause for celebration, you'd think. I set up a jhbuild on my home machine the night before so I could take a look at some bugs with the GNOME freeze coming up.

In the afternoon, my machine started heating up, as I've mentioned before. Weird stuff started to happen, until the machine stopped dead and did not want to boot anymore. It would start and run for five seconds, turning on lights and fans, then stop. I assume the CPU was shutting down the power supply. Last time I had a problem was with this same computer - the store replaced the motherboard (that was not due to overheating).

Anyways, after some reseating, taking out the whole stack of junk, and putting everything naked on my desk, the machine booted again. It did cost me a good four hours of twiddling though. So I didn't really get round to doing what I wanted to finish.

Today, Saturday, I woke up to my desktop's mounts being read-only. Uh oh, disk errors. Reboot. The machine doesn't want to even boot from the disk anymore. For some reason hardware I get or use here in Spain is about ten times more prone to breaking down than back at home. Last summer I blamed the heat in general, but it's not too hot at the moment, so that's not it.

OK, let's give up and buy a hard disk and thermal paste for the CPU. But let's check our bank account first. Wait a minute. This can't be right, I was sure I had more money than this. Check statements.

Somebody cashed out 3681 euros three weeks ago. It's supposed to be a teller cheque, one you withdraw and sign for personally. Either I'm finally schizophrenic, or someone took money out of my account. Of course, I realized this slightly after 1 PM, which is when the banks close for the weekend.

I should never have gotten up this morning ...

I think I'm going to go to San Andrea for a bit, shoot everything that moves, and find some banks to blow up. Hopefully that gets me through the weekend...

Thursday, we had a day off that I didn't know about before. Cause for celebration, you'd think. I set up a jhbuild on my home machine the night before so...

I like my new shoes. But.

They are a bit rubbery.

No big deal, you say.

Well, since getting them, each time I get in or out the office and grab the door handle I get an electrostatic shock. Pretty harmless, but big enough to be annoying. You'd think that after a month I would have learnt to anticipate, but no. Pavlov would have a field day with me.

Part of me hopes that the problem will go away when we move office next Monday. But it's the same floor, the same kind of door, and the same kind of office.

If you see me coming alive and Frankensteining into your living room, remember: it's the shoes.

I like my new shoes. But. They are a bit rubbery. No big deal, you say. Well, since getting them, each time I get in or out the office and...

Today was an unexpected day off. So I decided to build GNOME 2.9 at home, looking at some stuff I wanted to fix. I also wanted to set up ccache and distcc because I have a 2GHz server and a 3GHz desktop, as well as my laptop, so it'd make sense.

I was betting on the time spent getting distcc working offsetting the time lost not starting jhbuild directly. I'm not sure if that's how it turned out though :)

Going through the build, I noticed/fixed a few things:

• howl's build is crap. with enable-static it fails to build, trying to link in some .o files it should build but doesn't. Workaround is to add an argument for it.
• evolution-data-server crapped out at compile time because of missing nspr.h. I went through the incredibly dense configure.in until I realized the actual problem, fixing a few other things in the process. Patch submitted.
• after having the distcc setup working, I noticed jhbuild was not honoring my makeargs. Spent a few minutes figuring out the problem in jhbuild. jhbuild is very little commented and has no debugging. I'm sure jamesh knows it well enough to not need either, but a hapless hacker like me sure wouldn't mind having them. Each time I think I need to fix something in jhbuild I get scared.
• libgnomecups uses cups-config without actually checking if that binary exists, then failing through the compile. yuck. fixed.

Almost building nautilus, a few more left.

While doing these builds my CPU is rising to about 86C. People tell me that's not good. So I should probably stop the machine and with my feeble hardware skillz try and remedy the problem.

Today was an unexpected day off. So I decided to build GNOME 2.9 at home, looking at some stuff I wanted to fix. I also wanted to set up ccache...

... was spent at Benjamin's place, with Kristien and my sister, Christian, and some other people from the sister company. Way too much food, and that combined with the week of restaurants pretty much made me lose my appetite for two days. Never happened to me like that before.

As for new year's resolutions, let's give this a try. In no particular order:

• finally completely finish learning Spanish by studying two times an hour each week
• clean up financial stuff
• make sure Kristien and I keep doing tango
• start working on my music database plans
• start working on my GStreamer audio apps
• write the best streaming server out there
• keep better contact with friends
• get more physical exercise before I turn into a whale

... was spent at Benjamin's place, with Kristien and my sister, Christian, and some other people from the sister company. Way too much food, and that combined with the week...