Present Perfect

Facts of life in South-America:

• At night a red light is merely a suggestion to slow down a little bit at crossroads
• Houses are surrounded by grills and fences
• Your toilet paper is not supposed to go in the toilet, but in a wastebin

I had noticed this on previous visits, but I was reminded of these things again here.
My GStreamer talk went well - for a talk that early into the conference, there were a fair number of people in attendance. All my demos worked. I was smart enough to test my laptop's CRT output the day before - it seems FC5 has an X.org that no longer allows me to have Fn-F7 (switching output modes) to Just Work on my Thinkpad. Instead I had to fiddle with xorg.conf and convince X that a) I want to have something attached to the CRT and b) that I would really like to use a resolution more standard than 848x400.

People seemed to be impressed with both cortado and Elisa as well - I got a few questions even after my talk outside in the main hall.

Paolo, who's responsible for the streaming here, is using Flumotion. 7 rooms are being captured using 7 flumotion managers who then relay the data to an Icecast server using a component Paolo adapted from a previous implementation that was in our Trac. Everything was working fine the night before the conference. The first day however the Icecast server started dropping sources due to socket timeouts. The network guys of course claimed it was Flumotion's fault. After some simple tracerouting (I discovered mrt, which is *excellent* for this) I noticed that the first hop outside the conference had 30% packet loss. Now, I hadn't actually tested Flumotion in such a lossy situation, but it doesn't surprise me that 30% presents a problem for a live stream. At least it made the network people accept the possibility of there actually being a real network problem.

The next morning, the packet loss to their server was up to 90%. That's when I offered to stream through stream.fluendo.com instead, and though it pained me to set up Icecast there, it was the quickest way to transport their existing configuration. Well, quick - I had to build icecast myself, because the version shipped in Fedora Extras doesn't even do Theora. And I had to rebuild some other things as well, because the server runs RHEL4.

Ever since then, the streams have been rock solid. Ward, a friend of mine who know works at the FSF, set up a mirror on gnu.org because the GNU people want to follow tomorrow's GPLv3 discussions. See, Fluendo is not completely evil after all!

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation on Flumotion in the Babbage hall at 12.00 local time, which is 15.00 UTC. Open http://stream.fluendo.com:8000/babbage.ogg in your Theora-enabled player (hint: try Totem) to tune in.

Facts of life in South-America: At night a red light is merely a suggestion to slow down a little bit at crossroads Houses are surrounded by grills and fences Your...