Present Perfect

Last Friday we went to Mataro to the Canonical conference for the Sound BOF. Nice to see some people again, like Jeff and Thom, or see people in the flesh for the first time, like Daniel. In the evening, got introduced to the cult of Maui, and managed to, as a virgin, finish twice in the first game... I also had two new rules I wanted to introduce, but couldn't figure out how I was supposed to do that. Sadly at the end I found out that my finishing was the key. I'd probably be given a card for explaining the rules here, but I'd bad-call it because we're not in game and if you are a virgin yourself you have no idea what I just said in the first place anyway.

On Saturday, joined in on the PyGTK BOF. Even for a noob like me it was pretty interesting. Nice to see what other people are working on. Fun to see Kiko in action too - all the drive of a Miguel, taking the BOF into his hands and making it actually proceed better than the average BOF. He's done some interesting work with PyGK in his company, I can see why Johan wants to work there :)

The Launchpad and Soyuz stuff that they demoed at the conference was interesting too. If they can pull it off, it would be a nice tool for someone like me working on Fedora packaging as well. Which is more sharing and goodie-two-shoed than any other distro company out there.

I would have liked to go on Sunday as well, but I was dead tired and I had tons of housekeeping I wanted to do. And anyway, I'm still a PyGTK newbie.

Last Friday we went to Mataro to the Canonical conference for the Sound BOF. Nice to see some people again, like Jeff and Thom, or see people in the flesh...

I got a patch from a nice fellow fixing some issues with FC3 (apparently su can now be interactive at any time - the "solution" is a binary called "runuser" that, surprise, behaves exactly like su used to behave. Something tells me making "newsu" was a better solution, but hey. If someone feels like it, please direct me to an explanation of the why and how of this change. Colin tried to explain it to me but there was some cabal knowledge involved that I was not privy to so I failed to grasp the change).

Anyway, the patch also adds yum support. The patch itself is a bit dirty since yax only hacked it enough so he could make it work for himself. But it was the spark that prompted me to revisit mach a little. So a new release is on its way.

Fedora Core 3 itself is pretty nice. Upgrading your distro is like moving into a new apartment though - no lights, no water, no electricity, and you have to bootstrap your way in again. Themes were screwed up, modules need to be rebuilt, and so on.

So I'm going through the motions, tackling item by item. Progress report at the fedora 3 build dir.

GStreamer goodness

I tried totem in FC3 on our streams, and they Just Work. Arguably, the error message when the sound device was blocked was pretty useless, so an upgrade should be done soon. But the streams play back nicely !

Got a poke on IRC yesterday as well:

<someguy_home> dude?
<someguy_home> after not trying it for ~a year, I just wanted to say that nautilus media player rocks
<someguy_home> that is all.
* someguy_home has been using the scanning function to go through a bunch of unknown ogg files
* someguy_home is looking forward to the brave new world of gstreamer goodness

I guess that's why one likes hacking. Even though nautilus-media needs some revisiting, especially now that Bonobo seems to be removed from nautilus.

I got a patch from a nice fellow fixing some issues with FC3 (apparently su can now be interactive at any time - the "solution" is a binary called "runuser"...

Lots of rpms of python software have the wrong "file path" compiled into their byte-compiled versions. So when you get tracbacks, you see stuff like '/usr/src/rpm/BUILD' or similar in the paths of the installed python file. I've run into this for several packages, but was too lazy to look at it.

Today we ran into a similar issue with our server; Johan was doing some magic to transmit code on the fly but it got the path wrong. This is because during a build files get installed in a staging area. It's this location that gets stored during byte-compiling.

Luckily the fix was easy; I added a --destdir option to a custom py-compile, and then override py_compile which luckily worked out fine.

I should probably push this upstream to automake; any packagers/python hackers who are willing to test this and give me some feedback on it ?

Lots of rpms of python software have the wrong "file path" compiled into their byte-compiled versions. So when you get tracbacks, you see stuff like '/usr/src/rpm/BUILD' or similar in the...

Finally. Our 0.1.0 release has arrived. There are bugs, but there are even more cool features. Today we used four machines to create a stream, everything from the GUI wizard. So after some French floating point fixing, we tagged the release and threw out packages.

Here's the tarball. Knock yourself out and start filing issues.

Now excuse me while I go home and have some quality time with my overly neglected girlfriend who I dearly miss.

Finally. Our 0.1.0 release has arrived. There are bugs, but there are even more cool features. Today we used four machines to create a stream, everything from the GUI wizard....

I *hate* doing multiple releases in short succession.

Did a GStreamer 0.8.6 release yesterday, finally, after being stalled by unresponsiveness to revert threats, internet loss at work, and internet loss at home. Ronald pushed me for a new plugins release as well, which is supposed to go into FC3. And then Wim did two simple great fixes to the core, prompting me to release a new core. It's not brown paper bag, it's just that good a fix. But still. I was trying to get some actual WORK done today. Sigh.

In unrelated news, I was happy to make this screenshot this morning. I fixed the code to display "1 week" instead of "1 weeks" after the server was started, and added regression tests for it. In any case, having the server stream rock stable from an SMP machine using threads inside GStreamer to an average of 2500+ clients for over seven days is a pretty big milestone.

There are very few streams that actually manage to attain that number of clients anyway.
We found some "indenpendent" Microsoft-funded studies comparing Windows Media Server and RealServer, and on the same hardware for the same bitrate they manage 900 streams, and Real a few less. Ours is pulling a peak of 3700 at the moment, pushing over 40 Mbit/sec, using 5% CPU and some 5% of 1GB of memory. Pretty good, I'd say.

Of course, after making the screenshot I had to restart the streaming component, since I had made it log to a file through stdout with lots of debugging enabled, and about 98% of the 16 GB disk was taken up. And I couldn't find a way to close stdout for that process, so I was forced to stop the process to actually reclaim the diskspace. You live, you learn.

I *hate* doing multiple releases in short succession. Did a GStreamer 0.8.6 release yesterday, finally, after being stalled by unresponsiveness to revert threats, internet loss at work, and internet loss...