Present Perfect

Stupidity

Sometimes you need to do something you know might be stupid. I had been pissed all May for only finding out about The Breeders concert when it had sold out. The day of the concert I was trying to decide to go without a ticket and take my chances, which I eventually did. There was no one selling tickets and some guy a lot bigger than me holding a sign saying "I need tickets".

After some hanging around though, I noticed someone selling a ticket to someone else, and I asked her if she had any left. She said, sure, and I asked her how much it cost. She just asked the regular price ! I said, "You sure that's all you want ?" "It's for the music, no ?" she said. You have to love some people ...

The concert itself was great - it's as if it was only last week they released their former album, Last Splash. I can't believe that was in 1993, incredible. Kim still oozes sexiness (although you have to see her in motion, it's hard to tell from a static picture).

When the show was over, instead of leaving the stage, she just started reaching out to people, shaking hands, talking a little, and so on. Strange. They're coming to Pukkelpop in Belgium so I'm going to try and apply for an interview.

Another stupid thing I've done is send off an article of release clothing all across the world to someone who might be in need for them soon. I hope they arrive in time. I wish I could've gone out and gotten a better article than I did though, but it'll do.

Compaq IA1

I'm working on getting some sort of build system going using the GAR system from BBC Linux to create an image for the Compaq IA1 machines we bought over the internet. They're sweet little things, not bloody useful for actual work but they make a good choice for things like music boxes, watching videos, picture frames, ... I want to put DirectFB on it, as well as GStreamer, and hopefully combine the two.

It's really hard to make a system image for this. It's a non-trivial feedback cycle, to start with (compile, make image, copy to network drive, write to flash disk on a Windows machine, boot up machine with flash disk, write under DOS to internal SAN disk, reboot, see if the system works). The popular Midori build kit mostly used for this comes with a 2.1 glibc, and since I build on RH73 I have a 2.2 glibc, causing my compiles of DirectFB and GStreamer to not work on the target system. I did the stupid thing and copied my glibc libraries onto the images, but of course that makes the init not work when the kernel loads. So at the moment my choices are to either compile glibc 2.2 for it or build in a glibc 2.1 environment.

Unfortunately, my builds of glibc keep failing. I'm not really sure whatsort of things I'm doing wrong, but I guess glibc is really special in that you probably need to muck with all of the ld pre-load options since you're actually compiling what those loaders use. Or something. If you have a clue about glibc building, drop me a line please.

In any case, it'll be really sweet when gst-register just works on it, because that means I can get going with The Good Stuff.

libtool

Libtool .la files are considered to be a pain in the ass, but I've had precious little input as to why this is. What has been irritating me to no end lately is that all sorts of builds that used to work of GStreamer started failing because of .la files gone missing in packages.

Apparently, Red Hat and Ximian are removing .la files from every -devel package, but they haven't done it for all of them yet. So, if you get a .la file error while compiling, people mostly tell you to "just delete all .la files". To me that is an unacceptable answer.

So here's a clue for those who have these sorts of errors : if something complains about a missing .la file, chances are really good that some of the other libs you are linking in (with a -l option) on that gcc line does have an .la file, in which the missing .la file is referenced. It's actually that .la file that causes the build to fail. Removing the .la file is an option, but you could also just change it.

The .la file is just a shell script that sets some vars so that you can get at the actual .so or .a file; just check one.

In any case, I have started to remove all .la files in -devel packages for all of the dependencies we're packaging for GStreamer, as well as all the GStreamer packages. I'm doing this not necessarily because I think this is the right thing (I still don't know exactly WHY Red Hat and Ximian are removing .la files instead of fixing whatever's wrong with libtool that they don't agree with), but because it is what makes sense on the platform I'm packaging for.

I'm just happy to get this sort of issue fixed before doing a release of GStreamer again.

GStreamer

The current thing holding us back to release is an issue with one of the schedulers. For some people, in some cases, the scheduler seems to lock up. The problem is that the issues don't seem to spring up on the machines of people who understand that code and know how to fix it. Sigh ;) Wingo, it's good to have you around on Advogato too, so I can publically thank you for your work on the editor, and try to pressure you into getting together what is needed to solve this scheduler issue so we can release.

GStreamer itself is starting to become fantastic. People always complain about the lack of a decent player, and while they have a point, we never bothered much about it. The whole point is that the player should be very easy to code without much knowledge about multimedia issues, and it basically holds water. We knew that the architecture was solid enough to make writing a player really easy.

This weekend, we were proven right by the fact that, when Steve made some changes to the player code, and reworked things, the player suddenly "just worked" and was able to play quite a few formats that other players can't. Wim played some DV video and a few .sid and .flac tunes, and seeking just worked in all of them !

It's incredible when you add a simple thing and stuff just falls into place.

The apt repository is pretty much into place. I'm going to rebuild all of the packages with the .la files removed, and then put up the links in support of our upcoming 0.4.0 release. This should make it a lot easier for new users to get it running.

Still waiting for Ximian to get back to us on the Red Carpet channel.

Movies

My favourite film happens to be Los Amantes Del Circulo Polar by Julio Medem. It's a great story, incredibly well-told, filled with good ideas, and great acting. It's a romantic, but not clasically romantic, story. And I guess I just like listening to Spanish dialogue.

So now that his latest movie, Lucia y el sexo, is out, I went to see it. Not as good, but still very fantastic. Someone should've warned me though that there was going to be so much sex in it. My girlfriend liked it as well. We were lucky the movie theatre was cool enough to remain seated for two hours.

I dropped her off at her place afterwards, and she seemed really unhappy for some reason. Sometimes she has such bitterness inside of her and I don't really know how to deal with that. Sometimes it's a problem that we're two different persons.

Stupidity Sometimes you need to do something you know might be stupid. I had been pissed all May for only finding out about The Breeders concert when it had sold...