Recent blog entries for company

3 months

I’ve been in my new job for 90 days now, as some internal software reminded me recently. It suggested I’d reminisce about it.

I have to say it was a very interesting experience and I like it a lot. I have yet to get more involved in Fedora processes, but I guess that will come after having met more Fedora people at my first FudCon. I’m also slowly getting back into GStreamer development, which works quite well so far. The hardest part is convincing various people inside the company that GStreamer is not “a buggy piece of crap”, which is kinda hard when they show up with weird gst-launch pipelines that expose bugs in 5 or more different elements. On the one hand the flexibility of gst-launch is great, on the other hand it sucks if it doesn’t work once you try something out of the ordinary. Wonder how to solve that…
And I didn’t manage to get the Cairo guys to release Cairo 1.10. If somebody knows how to fix that, please do it.

I also wanted to point out two things that surprised me about my job, one of them very positively, the other not so much.

the great thing

Red Hat engineers are great at working together across communities. If a kernel guy has a problem with GStreamer, they poke me and if I have a problem with building rpms, I can poke its maintainers. I feel that in the “upstream” world, developers often stay in their own community and don’t reach out to others. This leads to ugly workarounds in code and bad blood between people when they blame each other for bugs. I think Red Hat is a model for this and they should go out into the world and give talks about how we achieve this.

the not so great thing

We envy Ubuntu’s fame. I often see people post links to news sites or blogs where Ubuntu gets praised for a new feature that was written by Red Hat people (and of course it was in Fedora so much earlier). And then everybody makes nasty jokes about Ubuntu just stealing all the fame and giving no credit.
It would be a lot nicer if we could be happy that the Ubuntu community likes the software we write. We would be happier and feel better about helping Ubuntu people. Of course, it would be nice if the Ubuntu world would credit us a bit more for our work, but then we probably need to market the stuff we do more.

Syndicated 2010-04-10 00:03:11 from Swfblag

Can I say this?

Diversity is not a good thing.

Everybody complains when there’s more than one Open Source project for a given purpose – GNOME vs KDE, Swfdec vs Gnash, … And we all agree that the Internet is fine with IP and doesn’t need support for Appletalk or IPX. So why is diversity suddenly a good idea for i18n and l10n?

We don’t need more women in Open Source.

See question above. Also, I’ve never seen any studies on this. Is gender equality something important for progress in Open Source? All the papers I know only point out that there’s too little women. I’ve never seen questioned if that’s maybe a good thing.
After all, we know that proprietary software is worse than Open Source. And more women work on that.

The current ways Open Source attract women are a failure.

There are lots of very vocal groups about women in Open Source. But I’ve not seen them make a difference. There’s still way too little women. How come?

Syndicated 2010-02-14 17:45:27 from Swfblag

equality

It’s accepted wisdom that all men are created equal. A lot of people derive from this the idea that all people should be treated equally and have the same rights. It’s the basis for democracy after all. As such, many communities strive to achieve equality and even set it as their explicit goal.

However, in recent times there were two cases that made me doubt in equality as a good goal for any community. The first was the discussion about Fedora’s target audience, in particular defining the target as someone who “is likely to collaborate [...] with Fedora” which excludes a whole lot of lazy or uninterested people. The other is Lefty’s surveys where nobody wondered that the surveys assume everyone’s opinion is equally important.

Then there are a lot of places where not having equality is normal and everybody would look at you funny if you were to advocate it. Meritocracy is a very positive world in the open source development communities for example. It’s a known fact that the maintainer decides which patches go in and which don’t. (Luis Villa gave a talk about this at GUADEC 2003. Slides don’t seem to exist anymore.) So what’s the right way here?

I had a discussion about this with my girlfriend and we found a lot of similar places in the real world where groups wanted to appeal to everyone and ended up being unrecognizable from everyone surrounding them: The Greens for example became just another party without any differences. Apple is in the process of losing it’s style – you’re not special anymore if you have an iPhone or an iPod – everybody has one. And Google does evil these days. All of them saw an increase in “market share” in the process though.

So it seems that in the end it all comes down to this: Is it worth giving up one’s values for more market share?

I personally think everybody who tries to be inclusive is betraying his foundations and original goals. I’m not goint to call it “sells their soul”, because it sounds cheesy, but that’s how it feels to me. So GNOME, please do not give up requesting Freedom. And Fedora, please continue to target the people involved in being bleeding edge. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Syndicated 2010-01-17 13:02:23 from Swfblag

Happy New Year

First of all, I need to excuse to my fellow blog readers for never posting a link to the video hackfest conclusions. The page still looks spot-on, maybe apart from the timeline. I’d add half a year to it.

I’ve also just started my new job in Red Hat’s desktop team. The job description so far just involves hacking on the same old stuff: world domination. I haven’t heard Flash or browsers mentioned, but I think I’ve heard the words video editing and video conferencing. Exciting times ahead for me!

PS: I would have linked my new work email address, but I’m not going to mention it anywhere. These people already had enough Schadenfreude trying to invent connotations for it.

Syndicated 2010-01-04 18:55:32 from Swfblag

Video Hackfest day 2

Carl stayed true to his awesomeness from yesterday: He updated the hackfest notes with the things we did today. In particular, it includes “hacking ideas” that we’d like to work on.

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the ideas of my gst-plugins-cairo design with all people. And I have to say I’m happy to say that the general approach has seen excitement from all sides and there doesn’t seem to be any big issues with it. THe best way to summarize it is probably an event from today: Edward ran a gst-launch pipeline as a benchmark for gst-plugins-cairo and it completed in 0.2 seconds.

Syndicated 2009-11-21 00:41:40 from Swfblag

Video Hackfest day 1

The Video hackfest is on!
I originally wanted to summarize the happenings of the day, but Carl took notes: Go read them. I just want to add that I’m very happy with how it’s turning out: Lots of discussions happening all around, the weather is great and the hostel is awesome. Off to bed so I don’t miss any discussions tomorrow…

Syndicated 2009-11-20 00:11:18 from Swfblag

I do it my way

While preparing the video hackfest I realized Google maps is still not the best guide for walking: “Please stay clear of pedestrian precincts“.
 
Google’s suggested way from the accomodation to the venue on the left, my suggestion on the right. I guess I’ll do it my way.

Also, for everyone living behind a rock: The video hackfest is officially announced, lots of video goodness for everyone ahead.

Syndicated 2009-10-26 21:55:12 from Swfblag

video hackfest

This is the result of applying my recent gstreamer-cairo hacking to a real-world application – Webkit. It’s very fast here and could record that video you see there while playing it without breaking a sweat. If you want to run the demo yourself, try http://people.freedesktop.org/~company/stuff/video-demo.html. (Be warned: That link downloads roughly 200MB of movie data. And it’ll likely only run in recent Epiphany or Safari releases.)

Also, thanks to the X foundation funding and Collabora hosting, we will be doing a video hackfest in Barcelona from 19th to 22nd next months. GStreamer, Cairo, X, GL and driver hackers will focus on stabilizing these features so that movies will be first class citizens in the future of your desktop, no matter what you intend to do with them, including doing video browsing lowfat style.
I’m both excited and anxious about this hackfest, I’m not used to being in charge when ots of awesome hackers meet in one place.

Syndicated 2009-10-14 21:22:41 from Swfblag

Cairo is slow

Here’s the pipeline:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=/home/lvs/The\ Matrix\ -\ Theatrical\ Trailer.avi ! decodebin ! queue ! cairomixer sink_0::xx=0.5 sink_0::xy=0.273151 sink_0::yx=-0.273151 sink0::yy=0.5 sink_0::alpha=0.6 sink_0::xpos=72 sink_0::ypos=48 sink_2:xx=1.38582 sink_2::xy=-0.574025 sink_2::yx=0.574025 sink2::yy=1.38582 sink_2::alpha=0.7 sink_2::xpos=20 sink_2::ypos=150 sink_2::zorder=10 sink_1::xpos=300 sink_1::ypos=100 ! video/x-cairo,width=800,height=500 ! pangotimeoverlay ! cairoxsink filesrc location=/home/lvs/the_incredibles-tlr_m480.mov ! decodebin ! cairocolorspace ! video/x-cairo ! queue ! cairomixer0. filesrc location=/home/lvs/transformers.trailer.480.mov ! decodebin ! cairocolorspace ! video/x-cairo ! queue ! cairomixer0.

Here’s the result:

CPU utilization when playing this is roughly 30%, which I attribute mostly to the video decoding. The Intel 945 GPU takes 25% doing this. If I use the sync=false property, the video is done after 59s. It’s also completely backwards compatible when no hardware acceleration is available. In fact I used the same pipeline to record the video, just replacing the sink with a theoraenc.

Implementation details are here and here. Total amount of code written is roughly 10.000 lines, put into the right spots in gstreamer, cairo, pixman and the xserver. Of course, the code is not limited to GStreamer. I expect Webkit and Mozilla will use it too, once it’s properly integrated. And then we can do these effects in Javascript.

Syndicated 2009-10-05 10:53:11 from Swfblag

Byzanz 0.2.0

I wanted to do something “easy”. And with that I mean hack on code that doesn’t need reviews by other people or tests or API/ABI stability. But I wanted to do something useful. And I found something: I dug out Byzanz, the desktop to GIF recorder tool I wrote almost 4 years ago.

The first thing that stood out to me was the ugly functions this code uses. Functions like gdk_drawable_copy_to_image() or gnome_vfs_xfer_uri() are really not to be used if you want maintainable code. So I replaced GDK with Cairo functions and gnome-vfs with gvfs. It looks much nicer now and is more powerful, too. So if you still have code that uses outdated libraries, make the code use modern ones. It’s worth it.
This whole process comes at a bit of a cost though: Byzanz absolutely requires bugfixes that are only in the (so far) unreleased git master trees of Cairo, Gtk and GStreamer. So for now Byzanz is the most demanding application available on the GNOME desktop!

Next I realised that I learned a lot about coding in the last 4 years. My code looked really ugly back then. So I made it not use bad things like nesting main loops (do NOT ever use gtk_dialog_run()), follows conventions (like gio async functions handling) and refactored it to have a sane structure. While doing that I easily got rid of all the bugs people complained about. That was fun.

Then I made sure to document the goals that guided my design of Byzanz. From the README:

  • purpose

    Byzanz records animations for presentation in a web browser. If something doesn’t fit this goal, it should not be part of Byzanz.
  • correctness

    When Byzanz provides a feature, it does this correctly. In particular, it does not crash or corrupt data.
  • simplicity

    The user interface and programming code are simple and easy to understand and don’t contain any unecessary features.

    Byzanz does not attempt to do be smarter than you are.
  • unobtrusiveness

    Byzanz does not interfere with the task you are recording, neither by keeping a large settings window around nor by consuming all your CPU during a recording.

Those goals are a really useful thing, because they ensured I didn’t add features, just because I could. For example, I’d really like to add visual clues about key presses or mouse clicks. But I couldn’t find a way to make this work simple and unobtrusive. And making people fiddle with settings before a recording to enable or disable the feature is bad.

But I added a feature: Byzanz can now not only record GIF images, but also to Theora or Flash video. The web has changed in the last 5 years and supports video formats now, so it’s only following Byzanz’s design goals to add these formats. Fwiw, I only added Flash video because it’s the only lossless format. So if you wanna do post-processing in Pitivi (like add text bubbles), you wanna use the Flash format.

I also updated the UI: It asks for the filename before starting the recording, so it can save animations to your FTP while you record. And I added a bunch of niceties like remembering the last filename. Repeating a recording that doesn’t look quite right is 3 clicks: Click record button in panel, return (to select the same file), return (to confirm overwriting). Nifty that.

So, if you have a jhbuild: Get the shiny new Byzanz 0.2.0.

Syndicated 2009-08-30 21:54:10 from Swfblag

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