Older blog entries for sh (starting at number 42)

Grrr. The Paris metro drivers are on strike. Since I have no car, there is no way to reach our booth at the Linux Expo. fux0rZ.

Decided to got to OSDEM this weekend, it's not that far and quite a few interesting people are going there as well.

School: Grrr. One of the school's lawyer is a real moron. He wants us to register every available domain (videolan.tm.fr, videolan.com, videolan.net, videolan.com.fr), to buy the trademark, and to register the source code at a notary. He is also considering suing the other videolan trademark owners, and looking for possible patents for our software. Absolute bullshit. I think people like him are really perverting our legal system.

Fuck, fuck, FUCK ! Can't he understand we are doing a research job, that we want to publish it as free software, show it, share it, instead of preventing people from using it or even pronouncing its bloody name ? The craziest of all is that they'd prefer to have the project die in a corner (which is what it's virtually been doing for more than two years) than to take the risk that someone claims property on its name. Just the fucking name ! Next Badvogato plan: kill all lawyers.

Linux Expo: it starts on wednesday and I still haven't seen many people volunteering to stay at the Debian booth at LE-Paris (I won't be able to, since we already have a booth). I have a bad feeling about this...

Geek stuff: got my geek frog yesterday. It's so cool.

I didn't see Antitrust. Really.

Hacking: things are going pretty well for vlc ; the new module stuff works, dynamic libraries get unloaded after a while when unused, and get automagically reopened when any part of the program needs it. Stef works on raw DVD access, Meuuh is coding a new 64bits-compliant bitstream which will also work for these darn Sparc aligned reads, 2nd year students are doing some work as well, and I am still designing the new interface structure.

It seems that many people are doing Gtk/SDL applications with gtk_main() doing calls to SDL, or the contrary (SDL calling gtk functions) in different threads. I wonder if they ever cared about possible unexpected async replies under X. I really don't know how to prevent this.

Humor: someone quoted Linus on IRC today, with his famous "Software is like sex, it's better when it's free", and I found an, erm, interesting follow-up: "If you need it and can't afford it, do it yourself". /me runs :-)

Studies: got an exam on thursday, one on tuesday, and one on next wednesday, and if everything goes well they'll be the last ones of the year.

Been tracking a heap corruption bug for far too long. I'm fed up with this. It's not even my code, but I need this part to work before I may continue what I planned to do.

Personal: Corrected my online CV thanks to dirtyrat's advice. My geek code probably needs some update as well, the current one was done about 3 years ago.

Hacking: still happily hacking on vlc, doing cool stuff, fixing bugs. The whole day.

Something ubercool: the VideoLAN project is going to have a booth at the Linux Expo in Paris, right in front of the FSF, and near the KDE, Debian, OpenBSD and O'Reilly ones. I'm really thrilled, we'll have cool stuff to show.

Wow, snow. Lots of snow.

Leaving Paris for two weeks at my parents in Lorraine.

Hacking: lots and lots of activity in the VideoLAN CVS repository this week. The new Input II layer written by Meuuh makes us gain 2 to 3 fps because we don't have to do this stupid PS->TS translation. Hardware YUV by Bozo using SDL works as well, but I can't use it so my goal is to get the best performances on a small machine. I fixed a few old bugs, and will spend my holidays writing Interface II and probably some on-the-fly generated x86 assembly for arbitrary scaling YUV transformations. Yummy. We are planning a bugfix release for tomorrow, and a stable one before end of January.

Christmas: augh ! Still no presents bought. It's getting rather, erm, urgent.

Hacking: got motivated enough to hack again on vlc. Fixed audio layer 2 mono and another little bug that prevented to properly play mpeg1 files. I can now dump this ugly smpeg-gtv out of my system since vlc performs a bit better for what I need (arbitrary scaling, framebuffer output). Next on the list is XMMS. WTF would an audio MPEG player need GTK ??

Bozo worked on the hardware YUV, and I'm probably going to fix the DVD subtitle code. Then we'll have Interface 2, and life will be nicer and prettier.

Life: argh, time to buy a few presents for Christmas.

Studies: the exam I thought I had failed didn't go that bad, since I won't have to sit for it again.

Someone tried to convince me to go the US for my forthcoming thesis. Unfortunately I'm not that thrilled by her idea (and yes, it's an euphemism).