Present Perfect

Easter Weekend

Over here Good Friday is a holiday too. Great ! Kristien's birthday, so spent all day together. Hope she's happy with the very lowcost present she got, to compensate with the high-cost one from our anniversary that she didn't seem pleased with (the present, not the anniversary.)

In the evening we went out to an absolutely wonderful Thai restaurant. Been quite a while since I had such good food.

Over the course of a few days I've seen a whole bunch of movies: Ghost World (Scarlett, yum), 21 Grams (scary, but good), True Romance (again, I love this movie), Liar Liar (I haven't seen a lot of Jim Carrey films, which means I don't get annoyed, so I liked this one), and Highlander (which is still one of my favourites, even if only for sentimental reasons), and 8 Mile. I must avoid catching hadessitis. And tonight we watched Sixteen Candles, which was ok-ish if only for seeing a really young John Cusack :)

For counterbalance Kristien also made me watch about 10 more episodes of Friends. Well, it was her birthday, she got to choose this weekend.

Had a great barbecue on Sunday too for Easter. Invited some friends over, experimented with roasting peppers to great success, and had a great day out on the terrace. I love the weather here, even though it's been flaky of late.

Dave/Dina

Finally ended up packaging all the bits and pieces for Dave/Dina to make TV/out work again with the new Matrox. That meant rebuilding kernel packages with appropriate patches and options, DirectFB from CVS, and some other stuff.

Played a little with an interesting application from someone that basically rendered a user interface as a filter to MPlayer. It's a big hack, and I'm not sure it's the direction I want to go in eventually, but it does work very well when you don't know how it works. Left me thinking about a lot of things. It's not ideal however because it won't be easy to get output from other applications (say, MAME) into that.

It does make me realize though that it really isn't that easy to get nicely output interlaced video on a TV from a bunch of applications.

GStreamer

Walters asked for new releases in time for Fedora Core 2 Test 3, so I went ahead. Releasing was so much less painful than before. I could easily tweak the spec files to rebuild packages to test, and everything worked out fine. So 0.8.1 of both core and plugins are out the door.

Streaming

Experimented a little with camserv, which gave me some trouble making packages, but after a few patches it agreed to be put in an rpm. I didn't like what I saw from the code though. Now to start thinking how to split up GStreamer pipelines to implement the same thing.

Fluendo

New office is almost ready. I get thrilled even only from seeing our name in sticky letters by the door :) We'll probably move in sometime next week.

Music

I went looking for two bands I have heard stuff off but haven't found CD's for here yet. I came up with their latest albums. The first band is Mew, a Danish band. Their music is sort of like My Bloody Valentine in sound, but more poppy, and with Sigur Ros-like singing, but in English instead of made-up-language. I saw them live once and really liked them, but never found a CD in a store. I must say it's a really good album (with a good Stina Nordenstam duet on it too) and I'll probably order it. The other one was by the Walkmen, which for lack of inspiration I'll describe as a mix of Interpol and the Strokes :)

Easter Weekend Over here Good Friday is a holiday too. Great ! Kristien's birthday, so spent all day together. Hope she's happy with the very lowcost present she got, to...