Present Perfect

Since we are doing our yearly business planning weekend later this week, I had reserved the weekend to do work - mainly, put together eight (strike that, nine, our CEO added one at the 11th hour Sunday evening) presentations. But I wasn't getting into the groove of things, and procrastination hit.

So I wondered, what's the single most important thing that's been on my mind and that I'd do right now if I didn't have anybody else to answer to ?

And the answer was simple - I started another rewrite of DAD (Digital Audio Database) last year, this time based on CouchDB. I was in the middle of splitting up into a core (defining all base classes and simple implementations without any dependencies; for example, a pickle-based storage of the mixing data), a dadgst module (for a GStreamer-based player, since I will also have a pure web-based player), and a dadcouch module (for a CouchDB storage backend).

Before the split-up it was mostly a hardcoded GStreamer player playing from the pickle file, and a bunch of scripts to analyze files and put them into the pickle. I had not properly finished the CouchDB conversion - mostly, a bunch of methods that previously were synchronous now had to be made asynchronous with deferreds, and that was causing some conceptual issues (like, how to a lot of deferreds together - when chaining doesn't work, and parallellizing brings down your computer).

So, that's what I wanted to do this weekend first - get the couchdb backend to a state where it can select tracks slicing the audiofiles and providing the mixing information, and use the data from the old DAD database of now seven years ago. I want to hear those old songs again, according to my preference, and properly mixed. And with that in place, after a few hours of hacking, I could focus myself completely on the presentation preparing.

Well, completely except for the baby visits, the family lunching, and the pregnant friend visiting.

If you like looking at not-completely-finished-code that probably only I can get running usefully anyway, start here.

Since we are doing our yearly business planning weekend later this week, I had reserved the weekend to do work - mainly, put together eight (strike that, nine, our CEO...