Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 84)

Living with a German Trekkie:

As many of us know that ensonic has recently moved to Finland and is staying with me. It's really fun living with him and his craze about Star Trek is far more elevated than mine. I have been borrowing DVDs of TNG from a colleague and we both watch at least two episodes everyday. Since i have all the episode of enterprise, i recently introduced him to it and he seems to like it.

Moreover, he seems to be a very good cook which is a very big +. I have started to envy his girl-friend. :)

From Movial to Cardinal:

I resigned from Movial 3 days ago to join Cardinal. The pay is good and AFAIK, the work will also be quite fun (DVB). I might even write the much awaited DVB plugin(s) for GStreamer after knowing how DVB works.

A Confession:

Alright, alright! i take back every word i said about vlc and mplayer projects. Now everyone should be happy. Although not all of it was wrong but i must confess that the rant as a whole in the previous blog was just stupid.

Visa problems again:

Who wouldn't want to visit Russia if he gets an invitation from a beautiful girl living in St. Petersburg? At least I won't miss this chance so i thought I'll visit st. Petersburg in the coming easter holidays. I thought getting the visa wouldn't be a big problem but it turned out that it is. They require my Finnish visa to expire after 6 months of my visit to Russia and my visa expires in august. I then thought that I'll get my visa extended before then but it turned out that the Finnish authorities will take 4 months in the process. 4 months? Can you believe that? So I explained the situation to Tania but she says that it wont be possible for her to visit Helsinki before May. :(

The Lion and the Jackal:

The user hears that VLC player is a very nice media player that is available for all his favorite OS's, he gets excited, boots into his favorite OS, downloads and installs VLC player and plays his favorite DVD or AVI file into it. Oh cool! The interface is more pleasing to the eye than that of the crappy gst-based totem.. wait.. There is a pause.. no! nothing to worry, thats just OS taking some time to read some crappy bits off the DVD so a few seconds pause in a 1.5 hour movie isn't something big. OK the pause is over now i can see the rest of the movie without any stupid jerks and pauses.. but wait! its didn't play from where it paused.. the user seeks back to watch those seconds he missed. The true greatness of the VLC player is unveiled. Now what caused this 'skip'? I am quite sure the VLC guys are using the system-clock since if they were intelligent people they would know that they must use GStreamer instead of re-inventing wheels for no good reason at all.

Back in the days when we were busy making the video-wall, i had to keep fighting with my boss that we should be using gstreamer and not VLC. Although VLC players had a lot of capabilities that Gstreamer didn't have but in the end it was me who won and not my boss. The reason? simple, VLC is a player while gstreamer is designed to be a generic multimedia framework so people can built anything they want on top of it. The only argument a videolan guy i know provided me for not using gstreamer was: "We don't like the unportability of gstreamer". Now:

1. Which platform people have not ported gstreamer for? One of my colleague told me the other day that he got gstreamer working on windows even.

2. Still there will be plenty of platforms for which gstreamer might not have been ported to but does that imply that you should start to write framework from scratch and then port that to all platforms? Is Gstreamer something carved on a rock, gstreamer's code is not available to public or gstreamer devels don't encourage any contribution?

"A day's life of a Lion is better than a 100 day's life of a jackal" is something i had heard/read a lot in my childhood. So videolan and mplayer guys, the thing is that your ignorance is hurting the whole unix multimedia development community and in the long run it will (mark my words) hurt the users too in the long run. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. :)

Google's interview:

A few days ago, i went through google's interview. I was being asked questions as if i was fresh out of the school and would remember everything i read there and never got to use in the real life. Anyway, they failed me and i don't feel bad about it at all since i would had been subjected to some more non-sense stupid tests if it had continued. I think an employer/company can quite easily get to know if he/she/it should be hiring a particular person or not by looking at his past experience and some simple interview. There is no need for real-time evaluation. If an employer/company doesn't know that, I doubt it's someone/somewhere i belong in/with.

cat < /dev/random > /dev/thoughts:

Ever since I left believing in religion, I had been defending the west and it's ways in every circle I had been part of. Many times, I used to be a victim of laughters and accusations. In the moments of dispair I used to tell myself that I don't belong here and one day I'll live my life happily and freely where i truely belong. Now that i have lived a few months in a 'free country', I find myself in new problems. I never thought life in Finland shall be so lonely and it would be so difficult to make friends and never ever imagined that people calling themselves your friend one day shall not even care to reply to any of your hails the next day and the last but the most painful that people will be scared of you.

I think I better surrender all hopes of making humans better. The only thing that can get better is the overall knowledge and skills of an average human. An average humans shall always remain an average human, his mind shall always remain traped in whatever his society teaches him and he shall not question the status-quo unless he is desperate.

Oh well! Somebody please invent the warp-drive, perhaps i'll have better luck with vulcans, andorians or klingons.

The foolish friend:

"A foolish friend is far more dangerous than wise enemy" is a famous saying in urdu (don't know if the same exists in english or not) that i never doubted upon. The recent events in the islamic world reveals the extreme ignorance of the muslims at large. Wouldn't it had been better if Soviets were able to capture Pakistan and Communism (Marxism to be exact) had become a religion of these people? I would imagine that would had been much better, since Communism have a very sound scientific bases behind it unlike the traditional religion which have nothing but blind faith to offer.

As part of their large-scale sponsorshipt of religious extremism to fight their war against Communist war machines, the filthy capitalists bastards also elevate the image of Muhammad in the islamic world well above that of God (no one will want to kill you if you curse God in pk but many would want to kill you if you curse Muhammad), e.g "The 100", wow! what a book. Muhammad's name tops all. No wait! the author explain, "I am talking about the most _influential_ people not the greatest ones". Bull shit!

Anyway! now that the west chose the foolish friend over the wise enemy and the wise enemy is long dead, who is going to deal with this foolish friend and how?

Life:

Salla did prove to be different since she kept her promise and is in contact. When we met her the first time, she said Paul should meet her sister (Vehka) as she thinks they have a lot in common. So this week i asked Salla for a meetup and to bring her sister with her so she can meet Paul. We met in a bar for a beer and it turned out that Vehka really had atleast a few things in common with Paul (they cycle a lot, are vegetarians and don't like McDonalds etc). It was fun meeting with these cute/nice girls, though it was Paul who was mostly talking in that meeeting, since when Paul starts to talk, there is no end to it. Paul went back home this saturday and now i am living alone again. Nothing to worry about, i am getting used to it now.

This saturday I finally joined the Capoeira club. As I expected, it requires a lot of energy. I think I really need to be in such an activity as my body is going extremely out of shape because of sitting on a chair all day. There is also an oppertunity of meeting beautiful girls. :) Today my whole body is in pain.

Airport extreme and Me

Since paul is no more here, i really need a machine to access the Internet through the ethernet-bridge on my laptop . The most straight forward way was to make the airport extreme of my mac mini working in Linux. First I tried to get the exact branch of Linux (netdev-2.6) through git and as everyone is well aware getting git to work is nothing very straight-forward. After some more hard-work, it turned out that the dscape patch does some i386-specific magic so the kernel won't compile for PPC with the dscape patch included. Great!

Another option (that i wont be very happy about) is to boot into OS X but I failed to make an ad-hoc network between the mac mini and my laptop for some weird reason.

If nothing else works, i think i should just buy a USB wlan adaptor for the mac mini.

Wow! it had been quite a while since i last blogged. Anyway better late then never.

Life:

Still adapting to the finnish life-style. For the last one week i haven't been living alone since a crazy british developer, named Paul Sladen has been living at my house. On friday night, I took him to Onnela with me and I was happy to see him enjoying his time there rather than getting bored. Seems finns, both men and women find him quite attractive since he was first approached by very beautiful blonde who wanted him to dance with him and then a gay guy asked him the same. Later we met a very sweat girl named Salla and her friend, Laura. Salla promised me that she is going to be not only remain in contact but also be a good friend of mine but because of my past experience with finnish women I won't believe that untill it actually happens.

Regarding ENAS:

Two years ago, I wrote a complete ethernet bandwidth control system based on Linux for North West Research. I didn't open-source the project as both my boses didn't think it's possible to sell anything that is open-source. At that time i didn't have any choice but to keep the source secret, although i never had any real contract with them about the lisence of that code. Now it had been three years but they never got successfull in selling a single box.

Now i want to turn all that hard-work i did into an open-source project but that won't be as simple as it sounds because of two reasons:

1. The core of the project was a kernel module and that module was using the kernel 2.4 API. Some parts of that API doesn't have a straight-forward replacement in 2.6, e.g not only the rx_hook field has been removed from net_device structure but there is a comment above the definition of this structure now, which says that this whole structure is a mistake..

2. The applications i wrote for that project are not generic enough as they were not be distributed as software but as part of the box itself. Anyway, most of that code must be re-written or discarded.

The most obvious way of doing it now is to use the ethernet bridging and netfilters. I have setup an ethernet bridge between my eth0 and ra0 and Paul uses that all the time to access the Internet from my appartment. For some unkown reason, we are getting 9 duplicate for each packet. We both are tottaly clueless about it. Anyone?

Got a broken heart already

This Friday, I met a very cute girl at Onnela. After a little chat, I offered her a drink which she accepted. After some introductory chat, it was quite obvious to me that she was as much attracted towards me as i was towards her. Soon we were kissing each other. We spent the whole night together at the club. It seemed so perfect to me and i thought the big gap of my life is about to be filled. When i asked her if we'll meet again, she said she was too tired to think about it. It's been two days that i am calling her, but she won't pick up the phone. I tried to convince myself things like "these things happen" and "it's nothing so big" but i think my heart has taken this very seriously and it won't listen to me. I also found it hard to concentrate on my work the whole day. I hope I'll be able to forget her in a few days.

Mac Mini and Me

Some guy at our office was selling his Mac Mini and was ready to take the payment in parts, so i thought i should also become part of the elite. Sooner i realized that I might be paying a big price for being a part of 'elite'. I consulted some docs. on the Internet regarding how to get a dual-boot working, but seems they were old (at least compared to the newest version of Ubuntu). I also went through a lot of trouble to get DVDs to play on the Ubuntu. I tried both totem (with both backends) and mplayer but only got successful in getting it to play in totem-gstreamer (no Ronald, don't get happy yet :)) but seems totem is unable to handle the in-movie menus. I do wonder how these menus inside the movies work and how a media-player supports them.

War Of The Worlds (WOTW)

When i heard of WOTW, the image i got in mind was of the famous film-series that I was really crazy about in my childhood. Since the movie is also based on the same novel as that film-series, I thought seeing it would bring-up many good memories of my childhood. But to my despair, it was a total crap (TM). I wonder what made Spielberg make such a ridiculous movie.

Life is changing, I am changing

When i arrived at Finland, I was getting quite bored because no one liked to talk about politics and philosophies, if they talked at all. But then i realized that there are no real big problems with these people, so it's natural for them to be like this. The problem was that i wasn't habitual of such a society. After almost 3 months in Helsinki, now i have started to be involved in the life i have and to improve it, rather than the life i can only imagine. although I still feel very lonely most of the time, especially at my home. Got to get a GF soon! :) The problem in achieving this goal is that i don't get to meet a lot of girls and the few i meet are already booked. Otherwise, I would have got a lot of girls, i am sure. :)

Regarding Monogamy

I was wondering about the rationale for Monogamy but I couldn't find any. I realized that it's just a method to satisfy feelings of insecurity and jealousy. With this realization, I got more curious regarding this as it's taken for-granted even in (relatively) free countries, such as Finland. So I asked two Finns separately of what they think of Monogamy. Their immediate reaction was the suspicion that I am interested in their partners. After i told them that thats not the case and it's just pure curiosity, they could only say 'Well.. it works', but that is certainly not a satisfactory answer. They told me that it's just a choice and you can just not follow it if you want, but I don't agree with that since that requires the potential partners to also not follow it.

I think we really need to learn much from our distant relatives, chimps. In a chimp tribe, children don't know who their father is. This is because every male in the tribe have sex with almost every female in his tribe. The result is that every child is treated as a son/daughter by every male member of the society. This reminds me of Plato's "Republic". Plato was no doubt a great genius.

Moreover, through an unreliable source, I have come to know that medical sciences declares polygamy as better than monogamy. Can anyone confirm?

Understanding the Finnish women

Last night I was at famous night club in Helsinki, called onella (AKA 'mating place'). It was quite fun as I was able to find some new friends even though i went there alone. I met a guy who could predict if the woman is interested in him or not, very accurately. Then i met his friend, who was with his GF. Since many of the woman didn't even bother to have a chat with me, I ask his GF if the Finnish woman don't like Asian-looking man like me. In reply to that she did something unexpected: she hugged me and said what if say that i am all yours and kissed me just to prove that Finnish girls like me. After a few hours, when the club was to get closed, another blonde told me to watch her drink while she is away and when i said 'yes, of course', she started to kiss me. While kissing she another unexpected thing: she bit me really hard on my tongue.. ughh..

The next morning, my conclusion was that Finnish women are quite unpredictable. But when I told Anna what happened, she said that it was just that they were quite drunk. I am so silly, I didn't consider that.

Gstreamer's RTP plugins

I have been working on the Gstreamer's RTP plugins and it seems that we are soon going to have a very working RTP implementation for gstreamer ready. I am working together with the farsight and tapioca-voip teams on this. Although, much of the work on this front has lately been done by a crazy canadian student, Philipe Khalaf of the farsight project.

Putting N770 to 'real' use

I was getting fed-up of seeing people around trying desperately to put N770 devices to some 'totally useless' (TM) tasks so i decided to change the scenario and put the device to some 'real use' (TM). Here is the result of my hard-work. Millions of thanks to Tommi Leino for helping me out. No no no! the cut on the finger was not caused by the device. In fact that is not my hand but tommi's and he got this cut while teaching me how to cook.

No blue eyes :(

After two weeks, when my time for the appointment with the eye-specialist came, she told me that a colored lenses won't have any effect because of the very dark color of my eyes. I doubt that this is completely true since i have a cousin in pk who have more darker eyes than me, wears grey-colored lenses and it works. Maybe there are some special kind of lenses for us Asians that these Finns don't know about. :)

Self-Cooking:

As many people suggested me to cook my own food to lower my cost of living, I thought of giving it a try. Bought the most necessary stuff that i could think of and then took Tommi's help to buy some more stuff that i had no clue of (e.g spices). So today, Tommi was here in the noon and he taught me how to cook some nice vegetable-mix along with rice. It was quite a nice meal and i was astonished to know how cost-effective it is compared to eating out (2:10). He also took a picture of me while eating, which i put here.

Later in the evening, i brought some minced meat and cooked it with some spaghetti. It wasn't very nice but still good enough.

Gst's Flx Plugin:

I made the gstreamer's flx plugin working for 0.9 last week or so but I thought of not committing it before implementing some events, especially seek. Turns out that it wasn't a good idea. :(