Hard won success is so much sweeter.

After strugling with the threading issues in GStreamer so long it feels very good to finally be able to put them behind me. I have compiled glibc more times than I would ever want to over the last few weeks in an attempt to help solve the threading issue. One of the major headaches with this is that we have felt that our thread code was not the issue, but we hadn’t managed to pinpoint what in glibc was to blame either. Of course the more time went by without a solution the more one starts to question the sanity of our own code. But after submiting a bug report to Red Hat (and getting a reply the same day!) I ended up compiling glibc from Rawhide to use with phoebe. And like magic our threading code started working also on i686 optimized glibc.

Only downside was that I was thinking we could offer the new glibc as an rpm for people on RH80 to use, but it seems the new glibc has some dependency on a newer kernel than the one shipping with RH80. So I guess we just have to tell people to either use i386 glibc with RH80 or wait for RH81.

With the threading issue resolved this weekend I found energy again to do some series media testing and thanks to the help of Wim we managed to get many little issues fixed that had crept into the code over the last few months of thread paralysis :)

Was also shown that GPE has a nice little media player for handheld devices using GStreamer, very cool.

I also saw someone posting about MAS the other day and comparing it to GStreamer. Well we (GStreamer) do not consider MAS to be direct competition even if there are some areas of overlap. In fact we have met up with Mike and Leon on several occassions and are planing on making a MAS plugin as soon as MAS is released. We are also considering to propose MAS as the official sound server for GNOME if it turns out ok.

Only downside is jorn‘s little temporary defection, but I feel confident we can get him back on track after 8.1 comes out :)

Lots of patches for GStreamer submitted to bugzilla and I feel bad for not getting them merged, I have partly held it of since I am unable to build rpms atm and I have used GStreamer CVS through RPMS almost since I joined the project. It is a silly excuse really cause I guess I can do what the others do and just run things uninstalled, but part of me have this notion that by sticking to the RPM strategy I help keep GStreamer buildable and discover disting issues sooner etc.
Guess I better bite the sour fruit tommorow and just use the system uninstalled and get those patches merged :)

We did a API change today based on a suggestion from gnomedesktop.org
, but it was widely discussed. If you are interested in how pros deal with API changes you should read this little log from IRC ;)

I also cleaned my appartment today. It do feel good to sit and feel that it is clean and tidy around you. But I do have to admit that if my cousins little son, (age 12,) wasn’t coming to stay with me for the weekend I probably wouldn’t have found the motivation to clean up the place. But I wouldn’t want him to go home to his mother after the weekend and telling her my appartment is a health hazzard :)

I am taking him to see Lord of the Rings two towers on Saturday so I guess I get to see it twice on the Cinema :)

Speak of the sun and it shines

Had a rather funny experience today. A friend and me was out yesterday to go cross-country skiing. We where thinking of trying the tracks somewhere new, but due to being rather confused about where this new location was we ended up almost on the opposite side of town. Anyway the place we ended up driving through was the place a girl from my past live(d), and I wondered aloud what she was doing these days since I hadn’t seen or heard of her in 3 years. Got a little nostalgic thinking of her.

Funny enough, this morning I meet her by chance on the way to work. She was still very cute. No idea about her current civil status, but I plan to find out. (Not that I think something will come of it, but I live by the policy that you will never regret trying, you only regret not trying.

On the GStreamer front things are looking great. We are currently debugging the new threadless scheduler made by Wim Taymans and it seems to work very well. Heard someone say that with this new scheduler gst-player had better seeking performance than totem (using xine). Considering that xine has been focusing on such issues for a much longer time I think that is quite a feat.

We also had the first success raport of the new scheduler working with Rhythmbox so I feeling more and more confident about it solving our issues.

For my own part I tried debugging the threading issues some more. The current theory has been that we had issues with i686 compiled glibc on Red Hat since they used the -O3 optimisation flag. This turns out to be inncorret afact since I tried making two rpms, one using -O2 and one using -O1 and both gave me the same issue. The i386 glibc packages using these different optimization flags worked like a charm. So my guess is that there is a bug in the i686 threading coding in glibc that we trigger somehow, one that is not related at all to what compile time flags used.

I am also exited about our new ffmpeg based plugin. thomasvs has been working hard on integrating ffmpeg into our build in a nice fashion and Ronald Bultje has been working on ironing out the remaining issues with it. Seems our last headache is the autoplugger, spider, which still needs love or maybe even a full rewrite.

I have also updated all my computers to phoebe, the new Red Hat beta. Some anoying bugs (hey, it is a beta), but not more than I can live with since the updated GNOME and XFree stuff is worth it. Would be happy thought if anyone know how I can fix the power management support so that the system shuts down properly. Have a feeling I need to recompile the kernel, but if thats the case I will not bother.the case I will not bother.the kernel, but if thats the case I will not bother.the case I will not bother.

Once again Christmas is upon us. Personally I be spending it with my family so I probably be offline until 3rd day of Christmas. So I want to wish everyone, who celebrates it in one form or the other, a very happy Christmas!

Finally got my new
digital camera just the other day. Very happy with it so far, worked like a charm under Gtkam, just plug it into the USB port and chose the model, now I only need to get Gnocam to work. Put it to good use yesterday to take photos of the cabin I have rented for the GNOME Multimedia Summit in Oslo, March.

The summit is looking good, we have just started to get participants to sign up, but I think we will easily reach the 20 needed and probably hit close to the 30 we have room for. Going to send out a formal invitation tommorow to the gnome-multimedia mailing list and select other addresses.

Personally I think there is way to few events like this happening in the wider linux community. We often talk about being a community, but I feel that to often the definition of that community is ‘cvs commit’, something which falls way short of a real community in my mind.

Also decided to strenghten my more job related knowledge this week so I bought the O’Reilly book ‘Oracle XML Applications’, so far I like it very much. My boss also told me it would be ok for me to ask for a refund from work for the price of the book, which was nice as I had bought the book on my own initiative.

A bit frustration the last few days. First of all so did a workproject I planned on being done with on Sunday not end for me due to bugs, so now I am still strugling with it.

Secondly I tried mailing ACS once again to see what was happening with my immigration assessment. To my suprise I got a reply almost immediatly. It stated that my request was received and forwarded to the consultant that handled my case, even got the email address of that consultant. After not hearing anything for 5 more days I mailed her directly. Got a autoresponse that she was away and would not return before the 12th and that all mails recieved while away would be deleted, aaargh. 8 to 10 weeks their homepage says, I am getting close to 20 now.

Thirdly I ordered a digital camera last week, to be delivered to my door my a messenger company. Still no camera seen.

On the postive side we managed to get a new GStreamer release out with a big thanks to thomasvs,
secondly I think I have enough material to do a nice summary this weekend.

We are planning a little GNOME Multimedia gathering. It will be here in Norway in a cabin in the forest outside Oslo. The planned time is now the second week of march.

I was out looking at the cabin we can rent today and it was wonderful. There where a full 30 beds in the cabin and the living room was huge so even 40 people would be possible I think. Electricty seemed goods for the laptops and the kitchen
had lots of big pans and things like that.

Everything was well kept in the cabin and things looked clean.
I think this gathering gonna be a lot of fun. Only thing I am curious about is getting everone to the cabin as it is approx a 2 kilometer walk from the nearest road through deep snow and rough terrain, and hackers aren’t exactly known for their sportive habbits :) Hopefully I be able to get snow shoes for everyone

Getting the keys to the cabin was fun. The cabin is owned by an association who works to promote outdoor activities like forest walks and forest skiiing. They do this by marking trails, prepping skitracks and renting out cabins like this.

Anyway to get the key I walked into their office down in Oslo center and said that I would like to borrow the key to take a look. The lady I talked to said, ok, that is a 40 Euro deposit for the key. I paid and got the key. No asking of name, no signing anything. I guess they figure a thief wouldn’t bother trying to get the key anyway :)

Working from home these days is rather pleasant, longer days it tend to foster, but a lot less stressfull.

On the GStreamer front it seems we might be making some progress on the threading issues as Wim threw himself into the battle, they fixed some issues yesterday and hopefully more today. Between him, David Schleef, David I. Lehn and thomasvs
I think they should be able to clear the issues. If I understand it they are currently looking into glib as it might be that our bug is in there.

bg commented on trommey question about relative success of gcj and mono. I doubt it
is the policies of Sun that has hampered gcj, as Microsoft has
much less of a standing in the community.

Personally I believe it has to do with who and how the projects are run. Mono has been running with a high profile, with a very energetic leader (miguel) who is very good at getting other people involved and motivated. Mono has also furthered itself by its association with GNOME and Ximian.

gcj on the other hand has been developed with a much lower profile (do it even have a website/webpage of its own?
It has not assosiated itself to a high mindshare project (yes, I know gcc is what everyone uses, but the number of people checking up on GNOME news on a daily basis is a ‘gazillion’ times higher than those who go looking for gcc news on a daily basis. I have no idea of the style of maintainership on gcj, but I would guess that the maintainer (trommey is it you) do not have that flare of miguel that tend to get people motivated and interested.

I think with the pletora of free software projects struggling for attention these days, then good code is only half the story behind free software success story.

That said I have not written gcj off as a dead project, in my opinion it is more probable to be a sleeping giant.

Starting to get really tired. Work is really eating up my hours these days, I was even working all through the weekend including the full night between Sunday and Monday. Seems to calm down a bit for the rest of this week, but I will be working this weekend too. Urk.

Feel I have done little else than work and sleep the last weeks. Everyone time a customer calls these days I have to fight down the urge to reply: ‘ask me if I care’.

I have three things on my free software agenda atm and that is getting a fresh cvs of GStreamer and see if I can close some bugs, finally get to test the bluetooth stuff from edd and get a new GNOME Summary out. Hope I manage to do at least some of these tings the next few days.

Spent the day upgrading customer system combined with getting some stuff for the sailboat, boring stuff really. Of course wasting the weekend on work is making me a bit annoyed and tired. So with that backdrop I got truly annoyed reading the PortableNet discussion
on Slashdot. Why so many people seem to think it is their job to spread misinformation is beyond me, their posts are cluefull enough to make me belive they know that what they are saying is at best half truths. On days like this I feel the community is being overrun by people whose main interest is spreading disinformation, complaining and maybe everyone else feel as miserable as they themselves are.