Older blog entries for ds (starting at number 8)

My poor car -- the alternator is broken, so if I want to drive anywhere, I have to fully charge the battery and drive really fast before the battery runs out. It's not too bad during the day, but racing around at night with the headlights operating on 9 volts (and decreasing) brings new meaning to "fun". Being inherintly lazy, and only driving my car about twice a month, I'm sure I will procrastinate buying an alternator for another few weeks.

The car comes up, because I used it this weekend to go to the neighborhood BestBuy and purchase a new laptop, an eMachines M5312. Except the ethernet tranceiver didn't work, so I had to return it. I drove to a different store to return it, since the first sold me the last in stock. And then drove to a third, because the second sold their last about 10 minutes before I got there. The car survived.

I, however, was very hungry and went to get a burrito before wiping Windows XP Home Edition.

Being a long-time Debian fan and developer, I decided to test out the new sarge installer. I was very impressed. It was essentially bug free, only confusing in a few places, and installed lots of stuff without any problems.

Well, there was one problem, but nothing that is debian-installer fault -- I needed to install XFree-4.3 to get X working.

What is bothering me currently, though, is that the installer didn't really attempt to get any of my other hardwhere working (or tell me that it couldn't get it working). I have USB, Firewire, wireless, ACPI, and sound that were all left unsupported and the relevant packages uninstalled. I'm now piecing together what exactly is necessary to get these working -- at least for wireless, I can apparently use the NDIS driver and driverloader.

Every once in a while, I think of a potential project to work on and think, "Huh. That looks easy. If it were really that easy, someone would have written it by now." swfdec was one such projects. librfb (and a corresponding GStreamer plugin rfbsrc) is my latest. Eight hours later, I run 'gst-launch-0.7 rfbsrc ! ximagesink', and get a hack that is essentially equivalent to xvncviewer. Give or take a few features. RFB (remote framebuffer) is the name of the protocol that VNC uses.

Behold! Corn!

The head scares me. Normally, I don't have horns and don't keep my mouth open that wide. It could attract flies.

Anyone who follows GStreamer knows that I merged a rewrite of an entire subsystem on 23 December and then disappeared for 5 days. I didn't intend to disappear for 5 days, it's just that my parents don't have a decent network connection.

So aside from major subsystem rewrites, GStreamer seems to be settling down quite nicely. We have a lot of new infrastructure since 0.6, and now we get to update all the plugins to fully utilize the new possibilities. Hopefully we'll get everything filled out, including the documentation in time to surpass everyone's expectations in March. Also, why is it that just when we need to do an API freeze, I keep thinking of API changes that need to be made?

About a month ago, I made a comment that we needed a few more GStreamer hackers. Interestingly, in the last month, a number of new people have been hanging out on IRC and writing code, which is encouraging. Is it just me, or when new regulars show up on IRC, it feels like they've been there forever, just kinda quiet?

The real reason I'm posting a new entry so I can see the head that was apparently assigned to me by thomasvs.

Uraeus: The lesson, I think, is to not drink cheap vodka. Only drink liquor that doesn't give you a hangover.

Snowboarding

Got back from 2 days of snowboarding at Kirkwood, which claims to have the world's deepest snow. I love it because I can take a hard fall and make an indentation so deep I can't see out of the hole. I now have a season pass, a friend that drives up every week, and a boss that is cool with me working on the weekends and taking weekdays off (Skiing on the weekend sucks). Hopefully my GStreamer work won't suffer too much.

GStreamer

Two words about GStreamer developers: Cat Herding. I think it's funnier that the linked movie doesn't play in gst-player.

I gave thomasvs an account on one of my Debian machines in order to fix some doc building problems for GStreamer. However, I forgot to install the necessary packages.

If GStreamer plans to stick to the GNOME-2.5 timeline (we do), in the next week we need to take the hard step of stopping mucking with the API. This hurts when you know specific things in the API that suck, but you have to wait 3 months before touching it. Timelines are hard, let's go shopping.

Go out and buy the Aqua Teen Hunger Force season 1 DVD. You'll do what I say 'cuz I said it.

Last night, I picked up my guitar for the first time in a few months. I seem to play off-and-on with a cycle of about 4 months. The nice thing is that, between cycles, I forget about the new things I learned in the last cycle, but my fingers don't. So I pick up the guitar and play things I wasn't expecting to be able to play. Note that this does not make me a good player, it just makes me feel good.

Hopefully, noodling with the fretboard will not cut into my keyboard time too much. Like it did last time.

Chemistry

Element 110 has recently been named Darmstatium and given the symbol "Ds". Ds has a half-life of 270 microseconds. Hopefully the jokes will be as short-lived.

GStreamer

One of these days, I'm going to hijack GStreamer HEAD and do a 0.7.1 release, since nobody else has. thomasvs is away for the weekend, so now would be a good time.

Moo.