Present Perfect

Seems I only make time for roundup posts these days. Need to fix that. Anyway, on with the show.

Ubuntu
My violent love affair is now on hiatus. Last weekend I noticed that my music share, which has UTF-8 file naming, didn't get picked up correctly by Ubuntu. Well, at first I thought something terrible had gone wrong, but luckily it was "just" Ubuntu. After trying to debug and fix it for a few hours with the help of some people, I realized a few things:

• I don't think that the text console can actually DO UTF-8 correctly. (IIRC this is because of the lack of console font size). This means, I could not enter or see a bunch of UTF-8 characters at the same time, and the console got wonky when they were there in files and stuff.
• I couldn't figure out how to do this properly in Debian for the graphical desktop either (note to debheads: no, reconfiguring locale and chosing only utf-8 and setting that to default and rebooting didn't work)
• I have no idea how this works in the underlying parts. All those tools and layers implementing utf-8 for me are alien to me.
• I don't ever want to go back to a distro that doesn't have full UTF-8 support out of the box.

I'm sure I'll revisit Ubuntu often enough, and follow everything, and I hope someone helps me figure this one silly thing out, but for now our little casa has switched back to Fedora Core 3.

Whilst on the
subject ... There is *some* progress on the Extras front. At the same time, there is an incredibly painful situation developing. It was decided that fedora.us would not get updated for FC3 for now, pending a Fedora Extras launch. While this would be a *great* idea if it meant that Extras would launch, say, this week, nobody realistically knows when it's going to launch. Meanwhile users are dropping fedora.us in droves. I just hope Fedora Extras is not the nail in the coffin of decent packaging...

Kernel module packaging
I'm happy with what I have for this - it was a snap getting all my kernel modules updated for FC3. Each time I update packages, I also look at some new functionality. For the webcam modules, I installed the user-space header, and now I can work on some functionality in say, GStreamer. At work we bought the Logitech Sphere webcam which has motor controls. Now I have a gst-launch pwcsrc ! xvimagesink, and if I press left or right the camera rotates :) Soon in a CVS near you.

Java stuff
Had some pains trying to figure out how to build our java applet nicely using only free tools. The stuff available for FC is confusing. It doesn't help that there is no good "getting started" documentation. It also doesn't help that stuff that is in FC2 is not available in FC3 (like, say, ant). And the whole GNU classpath confusion is confusing too.

Anyways, with some help from Tom Tromey (much appreciated) I made some headway and I could finally compile the applet correctly. After that, I started fixing up methods that are not in Java 1.1 to make the applet work again on Explorer. So I made my first steps into the Java programming world. Don't worry, just visiting, not staying long.

Grand Theft Auto
How sad am I ? I bought GTA San Andreas 3 weeks ago, and I think I have logged about 2 hours of play time in total, if it is that much.

Tango
Kristien and I are taking tango classes with some Argentinan guy. The first two classes were private, and apart from the occasional misunderstanding (I only realised that his ¨sjo" is our "yo" or "I" after the twentieth time he said it) that went great. But in his public class I feel like a complete beginner. He has me dancing with everyone else in the class, including the men. And he has me doing the women steps. Which is quite interesting, but makes me start from scratch. Anyway, I hope Kristien holds on for this bumpy ride so we can get somewhere...

GStreamer
One week forced stop due to freedesktop being cracked. Need to pick up slack tomorrow and do a final prerelease...

Libcolorspace
Wim finally extracted his latest working copy of his colorspace conversion library. It's looking good, structure-wise. Took a look at python bindings for it. Hope to have it released soon so I can use it in my own new pet project and in Flumotion's wizard to do device previewing.

More updates later, after dinner.

Seems I only make time for roundup posts these days. Need to fix that. Anyway, on with the show. Ubuntu My violent love affair is now on hiatus. Last weekend...