Older blog entries for vladimir (starting at number 6)

Had a crazy weekend. Thought Joey would be finally out of there on Saturday, but he left sometime Saturday afternoon and we haven't seen him yet. This is ridiculous; I have no intentions of paying rent for this month. Got a new laptop -- IBM X20, love the thing, except for the annoying turbine fan that comes on every once in a while. (Selling my old one, anyone interested in a loaded VAIO XG19?)

Phil came down for the weekend, was the first time I'd ever met him. He wasn't what I expected from irc ;-) We played powerball 2 and virtua tennis on the DC all weekend (yes, we are lame) and watched a few movies. Completely and utterly unproductive. ARGH. And now I should be sleeping instead of randomly rambling.

Ok, so I'm really pissed. 1 -- Our apartment is a dump. We have not moved in. The contractor is still not finished, even though he promised he would be completely done by this weekend, which, incidentally, is what he promised for last weekend, and the weekend before that. I just filled two large thrash bags with trash. All of mine and joe's boxes are still in the front computer room. The TV (Home Theatre) room still has no furniture, except for itp's chair and the box from my printer. The AVR doesn't work, because it broke after the first 2 hours of usage, it needs to go back to the bastards at Circuit City. I'm tempted to take back the speakers, too. But they do sound good. (But they each have powered subs, not really necessary if you have a separate sub, esp for our small room...) The TV works great, thankfully. And DSL will be installed within a week or so (much better than the 6 weeks initially quoted!)

At least I managed to finish up the debian/arm-on-ipaq howto today, and got quite a bit of interest.. the CRL folks want me to install a changeroot on the skiff clusters, and then possibly use debian as the base for the sharkpool.

This weekend I've decided to polish my own floor, clean out my own closet, and wash and fix my own windows, so that I can start organizing some stuff. Waiting for this mythical 'contractor' is not going to cut it. I wish I could just talk our landlady into selling the place; it would solve lots of problems.

Tomorrow (today) we need to babysit our apartment until the DSL guy comes, which, according to the email, will be "sometime between 8 A.M. and 4 P.M.". Yay.

Mostly a non productive day. More pounding on libgcrypt/gnupg. Lots of email. Still playing with Debian/ARM on the iPAQ. I posted a HOWTO and got some good responses; the CRL folks want to install Debian on some of the machines, at least a changeroot.

Great, I thought. I'll take care of that real quick. Well, I would have, except for NFS locking issues. I just could NOT get nfs to handle fcntl locks right. So I remounted the directory with nolock. Phew, no locking issues. Now, the devices in /dev are showing up as pipes, except for a select few. So, things like /dev/null and /dev/zero are now named pipes, which causes all sorts of programs to fail, as you might imagine. I gave up for a little while.

On the bright side, the debian/arm helix gnome build is going fine, albeit slowly. Can't wait to get a bit more ram in this little box...

Aarrggh. Red Carpet is being a pain. Lots of intricate twisty little issues, all alike. You can go north, east, south, or west. You hear a grue.

The grand vorbisizing project is progressing along nicely; hopefully we'll release the mr toolset sometime later this week. Need to set up the web site first. As federico says, I want 36 hour days. Someone should submit a patch. (Somehow I don't think it would be accepted, unfortunately.)

Federico and I decided to declare not this weekend but the following one as personal-project-hack weekend. I'm looking forward to it, it should be fun. I'm going to try to integrate gdk-pixbuf-yuv into the mainline as one part.

Went to the Boston U&LG meeting tonight; Jim Gettys and the iPAQ CRL folks spoke. Had a brief discussion about trying to shift iPAQ application development to python-gnome -- you'd take a hit having to keep python around, but the individual apps would take up very little space. There was also mention of a 128MB DRAM hack to the iPAQs -- now that would be cool.

It is now 5am and I really need some sleep... hearing the garbage truck outside reminds me that we forgot to take out the garbage. Oh well. Our apartment looks like a dump, no furniture, half finished. :-(

Okay, so I've moved from California to Boston, expecting to find a beautiful apartment and being able to move in and enjoy it. I almost succeeded. Upon arrival, I discovered that the contractor was still not done (even though the work was supposed to be done on Aug 15), and every week he promises that it will be done by the end of the following week. We'll see. I'm at the point where I will declare my room 'finished', clean it up, and then move on to another room.

I'm a bit annoyed, since I haven't had a chance to hack on GnoMotion for about 4 weeks. I have patches to gdk-pixbuf to make it handle YUV images and Do The Right Thing with the XVideo extension, so that you can get really really fast YUV conversion and upsampling. Cool stuff. (I've DV video playback going at 30fps, 1600x1200 through gdk-pixbuf.)

I have to rant about ill-informed people who are going on an anti-GNOME crusade, in this case aaronl. I really wish people would a) get a clue; b) apply that clue before saying things like "The app that has to load all of the gnome libs is much larger than the one that doesn't, because I don't have anything else that uses GNOME." Besides completely misunderstanding the idea of shared memory, he is also PROUD of the fact that he has forked Gnapster and Sawfish -- and plans to fork Pan and a few other projects.

Maciej has a few comments on how to measure real-world app usage, instead of noticing that the numbers in your ps output got bigger and saying "look! bloat!"... similar to the prontomail folks who claim that their app isn't bloated because the perl interpreter isn't "their" bloat.

On the bright side, Red Carpet is coming along nicely. It's definitively a project that has evolved over the past few months.. we're looking forward to the first release Real Soon Now (tm). The RPM and Debian back-ends are working great!

I've also had lots of fun playing with a Compaq iPAQ -- we managed to get some CF sleeves, and one PCMCIA sleeve. I've got Debian/ARM on a nfs-mounted partition, and I just finished building a working distribution of XF4 from source (so that I can make debs). The build was done entirely on the iPAQ, over NFS. It took about 2.5 hours (which isn't bad at all!). I've got lots of interesting ideas for apps for the iPAQ -- it's clear that most existing apps will NOT work on such an environment, even though the major limitation is screen real estate.

So I suppose at some point I'll actually get decent at this. The work here that I'm part of at Helix is coming along nicely; it's going to be a nice product. (Intentionally vague comment ;-) Side note: grip is so damn cool. Making mp3's has never been easier.

It's 3am again, I get a full night's sleep every other night, and that's okay, I guess. Nat "Suck" Friedman decided that it would probably be a good idea if we nuked Quake off people's computers, but then just went down to not playing and especially not dragging him into any Quake games. That's fair enough. He can't seem to resist. :-)

My latest online shopping screwup: I order a camera from mpsuperstore.com. They have a great price. I ordered on monday night, took overnight shipping, expected it here wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon, no camera. I call them. They say, "Oh, did you order on Monday?" "Yes." "Our oder download was corrupted on Monday, we lost all the orders for that day, we're really sorry. I can connect you to a sales associate and you can place your order again." I said OK, since she was being nice and polite. Anyways, I place the order, and I have it firmly in my mind that I will get them to ship it overnight, and I will NOT pay for it. So, I'm talking to the guy, he asks me if I want the 5yr warranty for like $350, I say no, we keep going, and get to shipping. I tell him again what happened, and ask him to get me overnight shipping and waive the shipping charges. He checks with manager. Manager says no, but they will give me the warranty for like $280. I tell him I'll take the warranty if they give it to me for $200. He checks with manager, manager says yes.

So, the events went kind of like this: I order camera on monday for delivery on wednesday, just the camera, still $100 shipping (+insurance). On wednesday I discover order was lost. I order again. I still pay $100 shipping. Plus I pay $200 in warranty. I'm still trying to convince myself I didn't get raped.

Okay, that's it for now.. we'll see if anything else exciting happens.

I could be doing lots of things right now; I could be working on the GVidBox thingy, I could be working on data models, I could be making this world a better place to live in.. instead, what am I doing? I am playing QUAKE. Quake 1. In fact, I had no intensions of playing Quake. I came in yesterday at 6pm (after having slept from 6am to 5pm, having played Diplomacy during that night), and it is now 9am. And I just got done playing Quake.

Plus both this morning and yesterday morning we ate at one of Boston's most seedy diners, and it wasn't even IHOP.

I blame the following people: Jacob Berkman, Ian Peters, and Nat Friedman. In that order. I think.

Anyway, I also came to realize that while an idea like Kozmo.com in Boston is really cool, I've had 2 bad experiences with it so far. Both times, it let me spend time putting stuff in my shopping cart, only to discover that they're broken at the moment. So that sucks.

And my sleep schedule is now completely out of whack. On the bright side, I won a million dollars yesterday. Or, at least, I got a telegram-lookalike thingy saying I did and to call a 1-800 number. I did. They tried to sell me magazines. Then they transferred me and tried to give me magazines for free. Then they transferred and tried to give me free long distance. Then they tried to transfer me and give me free plane tickets, but I hung up. I'm still entered. I hope my checks start arriving soon.