Proof that GIT is more difficult to use

Proof that GIT is more difficult to use than other alternatives:

1. Instructions to checkout the stable branch of freeradius:

"""
 $ git clone git://git.freeradius.org/freeradius-server.git radiusd
$ git fetch origin stable:stable
$ git checkout stable
"""

2. Instructions to get the 6.0 branch of mysql:

"""
Get this branch: bzr branch lp:mysql-server/6.0
"""

Why most GNOME developers chose to use GIT instead of bazaar or mercurial is beyond me... *sigh*

Books, reading

I finished reading David Palmer's "Emergence". Interesting and original writing style, intelligent writing, but all too familiar post-apocalyptic, and save-the-world plot themes.

Now reading Jack McDevit's "Seeker". More space archeology, searching for lost civilizations through the galaxy. I love the Alex Benedict character. Both "A Talent For War" and "Polaris" were excellent novels.

Yesterday I mail ordered four new books: William Gibson's "Neuromancer", Juliet Marillier's "Wolfskin", Stephen King's "It", and Isaac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves". So, mostly SciFi, with a sprinkle of fantasy (Marillier) and horror (King). It's good to vary reading style slightly, once in a while ;-)

Interactive Python Shell in NS-3 PyViz

With ns-3-pyviz, one of my patterns of debugging simulations was to run "ipython -gthread myscript.py". This would run the gtk main loop in a thread and allow me to interact with the IPython shell and inspect a live simulation, to find out what is going on.

Since ipython -gthread stopped working in recent versions, I decided to just follow a recipe for embedding an IPython shell into an existing pygtk program. It has been pretty easy to do, thanks to reusing the work of others (Eitan Isaacson, in this case); thank you, open source! :-)

WAF 1.5.x

WAF 1.5 has been out for a long time already. However, it changes so much of the API that did not have time yet to port any of projects to it. Additionally, it had more bugs and less portability testing when it came out, compared to WAF 1.4.x.

With the holiday season I finally found a bit of time to pick up on WAF development. First with testing the portability of WAF on non-linux platforms. I have tested, and fixed bugs, on Win32 (both cygwin and mingw, but not msvc unfortunately), and Mac OS X.

Next I started porting some projects. I have created experimental branches using the new WAF for PyBindgen, GnomePython, and GnomePythonDesktop. NS-3 will be harder, but hopefully I should get to it too, eventually. More WAF bug fixing ensued.

There's a catch. I have found some limitations in standard WAF trunk, namely the lack of a good system-command/makefile-rule system. Since I do not wish to continually clash with Thomas Nagy over my "vision" for WAF, I simply created a new waf bazaar branch, thanks to launchpad vcs imports. The projects I have been porting all use this modified WAF version. Thankfully, merging with bazaar is a breeze, so keeping my branch in sync with WAF trunk is very painless.

Antimatter Concert

I went to an Antimatter concert, in Braga. I only have a phone with crappy camera, so here's the only photo I have:

In the photo, Duncan Patterson (in black) and Mick Moss (in white), getting ready for the Antimatter performance. It was all acoustic, and it was fantastic. Also it was much more crowded than I was expecting.

Dark Tower

Today I finished reading the last of the 7 books in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It has been a wonderful journey and I loved the ending (I read it even though the writer tried to shy me away from reading the ending).

Overall I found the books very well written, with very enjoyable story telling. I loved most of the Mid World parts; they are full of the right mixture of fantasy (The Lord Of The Rings style) and science fiction (references to Asimov robot stories). Yes, I know it's weird mix of fantasy and scifi, but he manages to pull it off. I did not like so much the overly long and predictable Wolves of the Calla, nor did I enjoy so much the frequent switches to current New York city and the latter books, as it kind of breaks the rhythm and mood.

Next on my list is book two of Bridei Chronicles. More fantasy, but this time with no scifi and with more realism (it is inspired by historic events from ancient Celtic Scotland). After that, who knows, I'll need to do more online shopping to find out...

Transcoding media files for the PS3 from Linux

While there are some good tools in Windows world for transcoding video files so that they can be played on a PS3 (optionally adding subtitles), in Linux I could not find any good instructions, after much googling. It turns out that 'mencoder' can do the trick wonderfully well (easier than the Windows GUI-based tools mkv2vob and VirtualDub), but you have to know the options to use, through some experimentation.

In case anyone else has the same problem, here's the script I am using. Besides converting to a PS3 playable format, it optionally prints subtitles into the video if a .srt file is found with the same base name as the input video file.