Older blog entries for thomasvs (starting at number 121)

The Difference

When I used to use Windows, I would just write mail and click on send and the mail would go out and that was it.

The last two days, every time I click send to get a mail out, I see those glasses and those curls and that beard and think about how little I know about the guy that makes my computer send the mail.

I've only met Ettore twice or three times, at GUADEC's and in Boston, and I haven't spoken much with him. but it's impossible to send a mail now without thinking about him. For every mail you send with Evolution, God gives Ettore an extra rice grain in his pudding. So never stop sending mail.

I wanted to write at least something today, because I have other stuff to talk about but it feels inappropriate to do so in the same post. Time to get some sleep.

GStreamer

Slowly building up steam. Reinstated the autobuild on an online server that some friends and me have set up. Also tried to set up an autobuild on the company's development server. At first I was annoyed because it runs RedHat 7.3 to match the production servers in use. But Matthias told me to "just use mach" to set up any version I want. Damnit, how can one person be so nice and devious at the same time ?

Silly that I hadn't thought of it myself. I proceeded to set up an RH9 environment, which went quickly enough. It's the first time I used mach on an older platform to install a newer platform, and it seemed to work out fine too. Which isn't what I would have expected.

Running the cvs build script from cron will still be a one-liner, since it's just a matter of prefixing it with the magic mach incantations.

So, after that I need to find some way to get the script to mail gst-devel whenever the build status changes; ie. mail on the first break.

We also hope to be moving to Freedesktop for CVS hosting. The main attraction is being able to manipulate the CVSROOT directly. Secondary attractions are the fact that SF's cvs is still flakey, and freedesktop has some good goals we want to align with.

At the moment I'm collecting developer ssh pubkeys so I don't have to bother the housekeepers at FD too much.

Trying to integrate our FFmpeg cvs slurping with automake, I think I'm going to separate the package entirely sometime soon.

Music

Wanted to try and catch the Strokes here in Barcelona on monday. That is, until I found out they charged 28 euros. For a band that has only two albums out, and is known to play no longer than an hour ! Somebody scream ripoff !

I think I'll wait for Lamb next week, at least their concerts are probably worth the money.

Fantastic news: Twilight Singers are touring Europe soon ! Going to Belgium to see them if my boss will let me. Hope they come through Barcelona too.

On the headphones this morning: Spiritualized - No God Only Religion

Apartment

We spent the first week cleaning and retouching walls and stuff preparing to paint the living room over the weekend. I'm so happy to have Dave/Dina in cases like these: just unpack some boxes, plug in some stuff, start the computer, and use the remote to set it to play songs I've marked with a score on Good between 0.7 and 1, with just three button presses.

Manual labor is so much nicer to do with some sweet music to do it to.

Friday we went out to buy paint for the living room and sleeping room. I was kind of dubious about the quantity of paint he was giving us, it didn't really seem enough, but he assured us we would be fine, even with two layers. He also mixed two different kinds of gray from the same formula, blaming the computer.

It seemed to me like he forgot to check if there was enough yellow coloring paste left, because after he made the second pot he refilled it. But I'm not complaining, he spent fifteen minutes adding yellow until he claimed the colours were the same and I had had enough of my time wasted that I tended to agree with him even though I knew it was not he same.

So, back to the apartment, and on Saturday we started painting the one wall that was going to be in gray. We made it halfway through the second of two cans of paint on the first layer. And with this being a holiday weekend with Monday being some Spanish national holiday you could guess where this was going.

Anyway, we were lucky to have enough white for the rest of the living room, so by Sunday we could at least install the sofa (which I love - it is huge, it can fit four people, and a grown man can sleep in it, even a big man like Uraeus on, say, New Year's Eve.

So Sunday night, I put together the table and installed a TV and the PlayStation 2, and played SSX3 for an hour. This game is so incredibly good, such a nice flow to it, and such a sense of achievement. And I thought I wouldn't like snowboarding games.

ADSL

Friday during lunch break I went home to try and get ADSL configured. Telefonica has some nice features on their website. With my invoice, I was able to log in somewhere, and figure out the status of my ADSL, which was somewhere halfway to completion. It also listed some configuration details, but I wasn't able to find more lowlevel details, like whether it uses PPPoE or PPPoA, VCI/VPI settings, and so on.

The USB kit I received also only works on Windows, so that was pretty useless to me. I tried talking with Telefonica support on the phone, but they couldn't tell me which sort of PPP it was, or what ATM settings I needed, and wouldn't help me once they figured out I wasn't trying to get their USB kit running.

Anyways, after lots of net hunting, I figured out that it was in fact PPPoE, and that I just needed to set VCI 32 and VPI 8 (as opposed to Belgium, where it's 35/8), and after that it Just Worked.

Dolphy said that I was a fucking lucky guy. I'd like to think it was nothing more than talent :)

GStreamer

Had some stuff pending for commit as well. The gnome-audio-profiles stuff I retouched this weekend and sent for approval to rburton and Ted Gould so they can take a look and so I can merge it into gnome-media. After that I need to add some consumers; gnome-sound-recorder and sound-juicer are the first (so God can stop killing kittens on my account). After that, some new simple stuff like nautilus extensions to convert any type of sound to any of the profiles.

It seems my error handling stuff is lost, the hard disk in my desktop seems to have taken offense at the move to Barcelona. I should copy the disk lowlevel first before e2fsck makes more of a mess of it. It should be doable to recreate it from memory though.

As for work, we need to discuss what we want to do the next month. ds has made a nice inventory of what needs to be done for the API freeze. but we need to finish things there. And I also need to get us moved to freedesktop.org sometime soon.

Work

Spent some time getting the GStreamer CVS build back into shape and fixing up the documentation again. Also trying to dust off the old autobuild scripts to get nightly builds going again on various machines. Tinderbox might be overkill, but we need something.

Also tried figuring out why openjade is failing to get the dtd through the transparent squid proxy set up here. It's time to dig out tcpdump or sniffit.

ds has given me access to his debian box, so I can test fixes there regularly as well, or even maybe run nightly builds if he's ok with that.

After that, it's time to rework some documentation and finish the test suite. I also need to set up my home computer because that's the one that contains my error handling code which still needs to go into GStreamer.

dolphy wanted me to install gaim because he keeps in touch with everyone through it. So I gave it a try, again, using my old config from last year.

I still hate instant messengers; the autoconverted smileys make it feel more like teletubbies stuff than Sesame Street. Anyway, I upgraded to the fedora updates-testing 0.74 version, which made MSN work slightly, then registered with ICQ for probably the fourth time in my life, and after some tweaking it worked. I get paid a lot for installing gaim, muhaha.

Home

Two days ago we went to IKEA to get a bed, a table, chairs and a sofa. We managed to find it all for under 1200 euro. Only the sofa was rather big and Tom, Matthias and I carried it up eight flights of stairs. I had a small nervous breakdown when we weren't able to fit it through the L-shaped hallway of our apartment, but after some twiddling we managed to land it in the long part and left it there.

Yesterday we've been told we would be invoiced for paint touchups in the stairwell.

I feel guilty towards Matthias. It seems like every time I try to do something back for him for all of the things he's helped out with, he ends up helping out with something else...

Other than that, we've begun filling holes left by the previous tenants in preparation for the painting work. We're still discussing colors. I think she wants one wall in red or purple and the other three in a broken white. We'll see :)

Life

This morning I got up really early to be first in line at the Police Station to get my identification number. I was there fifteen minutes before opening and I still was only the tenth person in line. After half an hour it was my turn. I thought I had brought everything, but apparently I also need some kind of proof that I have work there. So I'll have to come back in the morning, again. Getting used to Spanish bureaucracy, slowly.

Dave/Dina

salmoni, you're right, I need to touch up the website. It's still waiting on a server move which should be asap. That means, as soon as I have ADSL at home so I can work on it. Which, if the gods are merciful, could be today. It's frustrating - I finished building alpha .ISO images, they're in a box, but I can't upload them yet.

Other than that, yes, I realize I'm lucky to be able to work on what I like working on. Hope it turns out well...

Me

My name is Thomas. I live in Barcelona. I work in Barcelona. I work on GStreamer for a living. And I'm already different from who I was for it.

I got from my front door to my desk in just about thirty minutes. That's about 20 minutes of walking and ten minutes of subway. I am a lucky bastard.

Arriving was interesting. Blocking the sidewalk for two hours to unload stuff. Spaniards can be, contrary to popular belief, impatient. One was so impatient that he tried entering his garage by boarding the sidewalk, then trying a ninety degree turn with about fifteen centimeters to spare. We tried to stop him, but he accelerated, and badly scratched and dented the car.

He even tried to convince us it was our fault for blocking the entrance. I almost started believing him when our friend, who speaks Spanish well, started giving him grief for trying to take advantage of foreigners.

I still can't believe he actually thought he could pull that turn off.

My car is in some parking garage at 15 euro a day until I get the definitive parking spot close to home, and the truck is somewhere in the harbour (I hope it's safe) awaiting its return tomorrow when Tom and Tine, our truck drivers, go back home.

I'm getting ADSL sometime this week apparently, and am now trying to go through the motions of getting stuff arranged (Luckily, Kristien is at home taking care of most of it) to change locks, get a boiler installed so we have warm water, and so on.

But I'm still a lucky bastard.

And now, back to work. Work on GStreamer. Man :)

My name is Thomas

And I'm a collector.

There, I've said it.

Seriously, are there help groups for people like me ? I have way too much stuff, and 30% of it is crap I throw out when I get around to it, and 30% is crap I should throw out but I can't for some reason (It reminds me of that camp/that summer/that concert/that past love/that accident...)

I'd better get old enough to actually enjoy sifting through all these boxes and have them stir up memories. Of course, you'll see that by the time I'm old there is simply no place to put stuff since each elderly person gets about 8 cubic meters of private space alloted...

I packed up 700 of my CD's; listing the numbers per letter after putting them in a box, and keeping track of all of them in text files by just doing

ls /opt/davedina/audio/albums

and deleting the few (heh) albums I don't actually own.

Dave/Dina

So, I was finally at the point where I could build a complete install tree for Dave/Dina. The installer, though hackish beyond belief, was able to install all the necessary packages, keep the grub.conf sane for our purposes, and write inittab correctly.

I was finally ready to reinstall our Dave/Dina machine with the new installer and move over old configuration and files. So I did, installer finished fine, and I boot...

And no TV-OUT. Argh.

I think I spent a few hours hunting for kernel configs before I went back in there old-school - just compile kernels by hand, and tweaking settings until I realized what was going wrong. Seriously, the time difference between rebuilding a kernel after changing one option only and doing the same, but rebuilding the whole kernel rpm from scratch each time for three architectures, is huge. Which is logical. But I had gotten so used to the whole change - package cycle for other packages that I didn't even think about running around it for kernel rebuilds.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I had TV-OUT working again for the G400 card. Of course, we only have two working ones left, and we have two machines in use, with four more to be installed. So I have to get cracking on getting the G550 to work decently, probably with DirectFB and X on that. Hope I can get something done this weekend.

DAD

I had held off importing some albums containing accents, because I knew the upgrade to RH9 would buy me better UTF-8 support. Of course, nothing comes for free. So I had to learn stuff I didn't know about UTF-8, and how it's supported in Perl and MySQL. I now know UTF-8 is the answer to all current accent and language problems, and UTF-8's design is very clever in that it eases the transition between old 128-character ASCII and the full unicode range.

Anyway, due to two very sleepless nights (didn't feel sleepy before 4 AM), and after lots of test applications, and some code scrubbing, our digital audio database now manages to import and display albums with UTF-8 in the filenames properly. So I started importing Beyoncé and Björk albums :)

A week before I leave to Spain, stats are like this:

Statistics for dad
songs : 16109
artists : 1884
albums : 1244

and for disk usage: [root@davedina root]# du --max-depth=0 /opt/davedina/audio/albums/ 85823596 /opt/davedina/audio/albums

I'm getting there ...

Of course, I still haven't gotten to writing a simple GStreamer-based player to replace XMMS. So, with XMMS being GTK 1, UTF-8 files don't display correctly. But due to the genius of UTF-8 (that IS the reason it works, right ?) it can play them properly anyway ...

Only one true problem left to solve in a clean way. I need to convince RH9's apache/php setup to treat .m3u files as php code, in such a way that just dropping a config file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ makes it happen.

If anyone has a good suggestion what the proper way to do this is, let me know (given the constraint that just dropping one config file in that directory should make it work...)

Dave/Dina

In the final throes of getting an .iso out. After a lot of work, the installer is updated to anaconda 9.0, and customization has been done everywhere where it was needed. There are still too many hacks to get where I want. For example, instead of trying to teach anaconda how I want the grub.conf to show the two different boot partitions, I just don't write grub.conf from anaconda and let an rpm install a new grub.conf

But for a first release, these hacks work. I think I eradicated Red Hat from almost any place where it made sense, except maybe for init. I'm still kind of confused by the legalities of this, but the people at Red Hat I know tell me that it really is the purpose of the license to have third parties remove all links to Red Hat from a forked product.

Anyway, some minor tweaking in the install packages should get us finished. And then we have an installer that works, but it's pretty dumb too. I turned off most of the hardware autodetection because I have yet to figure out how to handle it properly in all cases. But I'm happy I'm getting where I want, and I hope to attract some new people once the .iso is out.

Music

I've listened to the Twilight Singers pretty much continuously for the last two weeks straight. It is that good. I hope they get their ass to Europe sometime soon this time around.

As for the move, I've posed myself an interesting problem, the classic desert disc question. I'm going to allow myself to take 20 CD's with me to Barcelona. Of course, I'm cheating like there's no tomorrow, with over 1200 CD's on my Dave/Dina system that I'm taking with me as well. But for general playback, car playback, or falling asleep with the stereo, only 20 CD's. I'll post a list when I'm done fretting over which to take.

mach

Cleaned up a hack I put in for Matthias. Now I need to release something for Fedora Core 1, but I'm having silly perfectionist issues with what names to use for the distros now that fedora means both the old fedora.us stuff as well as the new fedora core stuff. I'll deal with that tomorrow so I can release.

glibc update

A recent glibc update on my RH9 machine caused my immense worries. rpm was completely screwed, I couldn't build install images for Dave/Dina anymore, mach failed, ... It seems the latest glibc update had some issues with custom-built kernels. It seems to be a known issue, and reverting fixed it for me for now. I'll deal with this when I'm done moving.

Life and Moving

Only ten days left. Time to get some stuff in order. Need to order a server for apestaart. Need to go to the dentist one last time. A week ago, I went on a very relaxing weekend with friends. And last Friday, we threw our going away party. For some reason I got a huge and heavy penguin.

As for the move itself, we're leaving next week on Friday morning. The whole house is a mess, boxes everywhere, stuff flying around, tables being broken apart. A sad affair. I'm going to miss this big house of ours, and I'm going to miss living together with a bunch of guys. It's fantastic to always have someone home when you come home, and have people around to do stuff with. I love my girlfriend, and I'm sure we'll have a great time in our new apartment, but it's going to be different... The end of an era.

Growing up is letting go.

For the actual move, we'll rent a small truck and we have two friends who want to drive it there and back again, with some days in Barcelona inbetween...

House

What a day, what a day. This morning I woke up with stress hoping the apartment I chose was still available. I had one more appointment, which was in Calle Taller, which is in my opinion the most pleasant street in all of the centre. It has six CD stores that I could count, so go figure... I walked out of one with a strange Radiohead bootleg double CD, an Arab Strap single and the Pixies Purple Tape.

So, on to the loft. I entered into my dream apartment. A huge loft with the kitchen just the way I like it, open and connected to the rest of the place. And the terrace is huge, 40 square meters. You can play football on it !

It was a bit more expensive though, and the terrace is walled, and it would take work (like pour concrete on the floor on top of the bathroom), and so on. And my girlfriend rightly argued that whatever way we look at it, it would make us count our money more all the time, and it's 2500 euros more per year.

So sense prevailed. The moral of the story is - it's ok to dream, but sometimes it's nicer to just settle down and choose something.

At noon, I opened a bank account. It took me two minutes before I realized that the song currently playing there was "Into The White" by The Pixies. I mean, The Pixies. In a bank. And not just any regular song. One of the better, but unknown B-sides. One of the few sung by Kim Deal. In a bank. I still can't get over it.

I mean, it was a bank. People wear suits. Money is exchanged. Only in Barcelona.

In a stupid bank.

So, I have a spanish bank account. Send me money !

In the evening, I went to the rental agency with two people. They seemed to be very nice; I only have to pay starting december, I can get my keys tomorrow, I can enter the weekend before I start paying, and so on. Great.

Only, they want cash. That means, about 2300 euros of it. Well, I had raised my banking limit on my card to 1500 before I left. But the ATM machine for some reason only allowed me to withdraw 300 euros. Luckily, I have a great boss.

Tomorrow, I go and sign the contract, then I fly back. I get the keys tomorrow. Keys. Tomorrow. Moi. Yes.

Barcelona, I think you and I are going to make the best of friends.

GStreamer

dolphy and I discussed the objectives a bit for my job. Basically, I'll be working on getting GStreamer stable, and then we start building server products on top of it. Too early to say, but it sounds like a dream job for me...

Hearing him talk, how we will tackle stuff, what will happen, it makes me feel like I'm part of the start of something big. I'm not sure yet, but I feel we will bring large doses of rocking things out there. And free to boot...

Barcelona

After three full days of apartment hunting and having seen about 20 apartments, I think we have found something that my girlfriend and me both like. For her, the presence of a huge terrace is the thing that wins her over.

It's on the ninth floor, it has a pretty nice view, the apartment itself needs some work but my girlfriend says she's happy to do some work there, we have some guest space, the living room looks nice, the kitchen is ok, and so on. Tomorrow morning we're calling to see if it's ours.

Funny how the first two days, we didn't really see anything that was ok, and today we only saw five which we found in the newspaper and they were all a lot better than the ones before.

Life

Just got home from a nice dinner with my boss, his wife and Matthias. Had a great evening, and we topped it off by rollerblading home. It was over 10 kilometer, a big tour of the whole city, passing along the great lanes, passing by the sea, passing by the hip food joint where I first learned about the Suse takeover a bunch of weeks ago (Go Novell), hearing the sea crash on the beach... Pure slices of thinly cut heaven washed over me.

I like my boss, I like my collagues, I like the city, I like the pastimes, I like my new laptop, I like my new place, I like my new job even more, I love my girlfriend... I'm not sure I fully realize how certifiably incredibly lucky I really am. It was about time :)

Thank you, whoever out there... I'll be even nicer to small animals and elderly people from now on.

Looking at the map I just realized that my new place is close to two subway stations on different lines, and there are big lanes to my work so I can skate there easily and safely. Let's get going... All of you out there keep your fingers crossed that the place is mine tomorrow...