Month: July 2007

Limpley Stroked

We’ve arrived safely in Lower Limpley Stoke safely. We didn’t see any of the trouble on the M5 that we feared, and the Avon river is no more than picturesquely swollen 2 streets from here.

We’re staying in a lovely hotel built out of a giant old house.

I was amused to notice that the railway bridge is mislabelled as belonging to “Limpley Stroke”, hence the title.

At Guadec, I enjoyed the LugRadio beers night, especially the part where several people actively tried to create a new EBay account in the pub for the sole purpose of trying to put Jono’s bag on auction and raise some cash to buy more beer.

I didn’t enjoy the part where 25 euro mysteriously disappeared from within a pile of papers on the desk in our hotel room. Nothing else was taken, including the n800 that was also sitting in the room, thankfully.

Tomorrow we’re exploring Bath, going to see Glastonbury Tor and Abbey, and hopefully getting to glimpse Stonehenge.

I closed another bug today, this one with prejudice. For the record, GStreamer developers do not support running the gst-ffmpeg wrapper against the system installed FFmpeg – you can do it, but if it breaks because FFmpeg changed something (as they do), you get to keep both pieces.

Update: Fixed the bug number.

Killing some wakeups

Hacking

I committed Marc-Andre‘s patch for bug #152864 today, and closed the bug, which has been open since September 2004.

It adds the required GStreamer parts to close Bug 370937 – Exessive CPU Utilisation and fix 10 wakeups per second in the volume control applet – at least when an ALSA mixer device is chosen. Other mixers still require polling, so they’ll wake up. Hopefully that will stop too as we implement poll-based notifications in the other mixer elements in GStreamer, where we can.

Does anyone know if OSS provides a select/poll based way to know when someone changes the mixer settings? Google searches haven’t been helpful. aumix at least seems to be using SIGALRM, which isn’t promising.

The Sun Audio mixerctl mentions being able to get a SIGPOLL signal sent when someone changes the mixer settings. That’s not a good interface for GStreamer (or anyone, really) to use though – anyone know if we can achieve the same thing using poll()?

Flooding

Our original plan was to drive down to Bath tomorrow and stay there for 2 nights exploring the area. With all the flooding, we’re probably not going to have much fun with that. Uraeus told me on the phone that they had a rough time on the M5, but made it to Bristol today.

At this stage, I’m inclined to try the drive anyway, but I might change my mind in the morning.

Update

I’m looking forward to Guadec next week – it should be great fun 🙂

Jaime & I are flying into BHX just after midnight Monday night. We’ll miss the Sunday/Monday warm up sessions, but be there for the core and after-hours activities. See you all there!

In other news, after 2 years in Spain, Jaime & I have decided that it’s time to move on. On September 1st, we’re moving to Dublin.

Along with that, we’re both leaving our jobs at Fluendo. I’m continuing until the end of August when we go. Jaime already finished up yesterday. Once we get to Ireland, I’m taking up a new job at Sun Microsystems where I’ll be working in the Sun Ray group. I’m going to be working on the same floor as the JDS team there, which will be fun.

We’ve had a great time here, with some great friends that we’ll miss a lot, and some wonderful adventures. It’s been a hard decision to leave, and it’ll be painful to leave the close-knit group we’ve formed here, we’ll miss them a lot.