Thu, 03 May 2012
Debconf
... is drawing closer again, and today I've booked my flights. I'll be arriving in the early evening on the 1st, and leaving again on the 15th. The flights will be Brussels->London->Miami->Managua, which unfortunately means I'll have to deal with US border control, but hey.
Also, in order to avoid having to get up at early-o-clock on the morning of the 1st, I'll be flying from Brussels to London on an afternoon flight on the 30th, which means I'll have an evening to spare in London. While I've been there a few times before, it's not a city that I've ever actually visited; my previous three visits were limited to Heathrow, King's Cross (IIRC; could be another train station) and driving through the city on my way from (and to) Steve's barbecue last summer.
If anyone will be there as well that night and would like to meet for beer and/or keysigning, I'd be interested.
Mon, 16 Apr 2012
DPL vote, 2012
So, the vote is over, and Stefano won.
During many past DPL elections, I've made my vote public, and this one is no different:
V: 1223 597c362e6156ec7e37b334837161da26
That's me, in this list. Obviously I wouldn't run if I'm not serious about it, so I voted myself first. As to the other part: I thought long and hard about that, but eventually came to the conclusion that both Stefano and Gergely had properties as a candidate that I liked, and properties that I didn't like, and that therefore I couldn't prefer either of them over the other. I found Gergely's platform to be fairly similar to my own, which is a good thing; but there were a few details that made me have some pause about his candidacy. And while I stand by the things I said during campaigning about Stefano as a DPL, the truth is that the project could be far worse off than to have him re-elected.
As to the outcome... I can't say it's entirely unexpected. I knew it was a long shot even before I started, and then campaigning didn't excactly go as I would have hoped. I expected to lose, but not by such a margin—what Stefano did wasn't winning, it's called 'trashing the opposition'. Congratulations, zack, for a truly exceptional performance; and thanks, also to Gergely, for being a worthy opponent.
In closing, I'll say that I don't think I'll run again. I've gone through the process three times now, and have never gotten very close to winning; this probably means that what I feel about the position of DPL is somewhat removed from what the project as a whole thinks about it. So, absent some radical changes in either the project itself or in the way I look upon it, another candidacy from me is highly unlikely.
I guess I'll have to find other ways to spend my time...
Sun, 11 Mar 2012
New jobs
Last saturday, I took an exam. Today, I noticed that I passed it (dutch): I am now a tennis official. Spooky.
The exam itself wasn't all that difficult. There was a course two weeks ago in which the relevant rules were explained, and there was some preparation material on the vtv website that we were told to go through.
In other news, I'm also running for DPL again. While that isn't a new job yet, it may become one. After having gone through the whole thing three times now, I must say that getting my platform written was never this difficult; I've been working at the text for quite some time now.
Here's for hoping third time's a charm...
Tue, 07 Feb 2012
Video at FOSDEM 2012
A year ago, during FOSDEM 2011, I walked up to the NamurLUG folks who'd been doing video coverage of FOSDEM for years, and suggested that this year, maybe they should consider using dvswitch for video coverage. While they seemed agreeable to this idea, they simply had not had the time to look at it in detail, and were therefore not using it. Since I've used dvswitch in the past, both as part of the DebConf video team and for my own concert recordings, I reasoned this a problem that could be solved by joining the video team.
However, when it came to be time to start preparing for FOSDEM 2012, we found that many of the NamurLUG people were not going to have as much time to prepare for video coverage as they had during past years, and therefore responsibility of FOSDEM video coverage fell entirely to me. This was fairly unexpected, though not too daunting.
For those of you who don't know dvswitch very well: a typical dvswitch installation for coverage of a talk requires:
- Two cameras; one to capture the speaker, one to capture audience members asking questions.
- A twinpact 100, used to convert a VGA output into a DV stream that we can load into dvswitch
- Three laptops: one for the audience camera, one for the twinpact, and one for the speaker camera and the dvswitch installation
- A GigE network between the three laptops, with an uplink to do streaming
- A large amount of diskspace to store the recordings on. Since dvswitch records in raw DV, you require approximately 13GB per hour of recorded video.
- Some powerful systems to do transcoding from DV to a streaming format such as Ogg Theora or WebM
- A fairly extensive audio setup: one wireless headset microphone for the speaker, one or two wireless handheld microphones for people in the audience, and a number of microphones at select positions in the room to pick up ambient noise (which for obvious reasons you don't want to overdo on, but which if done well makes the audio on your recording sound much more natural). This also requires a mixing console.
- And last but not least a (network of) streaming server(s) to do the streaming to people watching from home.
This is a rather large amount of work, and therefore it is not too unexpected that for DebConf, the DebConf video team takes a week to properly set up two rooms so that they can be used for recording. However, for FOSDEM we only have less than a day on-site to set up things, and we were going to cover five rooms. So, I tried to cut corners as much as possible:
- We were going to work with one camera per room, rather than two. Not only would this reduce the number of required volunteers (of which I wasn't sure yet at that point how I'd find them), it would also reduce the amount of preparation needing to be done, and it would reduce the number of things that could go wrong.
- We were going to have the network team do our network, rather than try to do it ourselves. The result was that we were not going to have to lay out cables, cut them, crimp connectors on them, test them, etc, and would only need to worry about using the network, instead of building it.
- Since I'd read Thomas' announcement about an ''offer I cannot refuse'', I contacted him to see about that offer and get it all set up for FOSDEM. This way, I wouldn't have to worry about streaming servers etc, instead just about getting a stream on the network, into a flumotion server running somewhere; and after that, it would no longer be my problem.
- I decided to simplify the audio setup somewhat, and not use ambient mics. These are nice, but not essential, so we could do without them, and that would be (at least) two microphones per room that the team wouldn't have to rent, place, wire up, and tune.
So in the end, I would need to take care of ten firewire-capable laptops, five cameras, five mixing consoles, several microphones, a number of transcoding machines, and shitloads of cabling (power, firewire, and audio). And about a week or two before the conference, as the massiveness of what we were about to do started to sink in, I was starting to have bad dreams of what would happen, wondering what I'd gotten myself into this time.
Now, one day after FOSDEM, I have to say it all turned out okay, but there are some things where there's still room for improvement. So that I don't forget, I thought I'd make a list of things that went well, and one of things that didn't go well. And since that might be interesting for other people, I thought I'd do it here, rather than in a private file.
First, things that did not go so well:
- Set-up for some rooms took more time than we had, and as such some rooms did not get properly streamed or recorded for their first few talks. This was due to the fact that there was some confused communication between some members of the team, which meant that we lost a day that we'd planned for preparation, and as such we couldn't test as much as we'd hoped. We need to improve on that next year. Ideally, we should run the full set-up somewhere, with all cameras and all laptops running, and making sure that everything is ready to be set up and that we have every cable we need, before dividing everything over a number of boxes (one per room) and bringing it to the conference.
- While some of our cameras were semi-professional Panasonic cameras that had a balanced XLR audio input, others were much lower-level camcorder-style cameras that did not have such a thing. When a camera has a good audio input, it's fairly easy to set up a link from the mixing console to the camera and get the audio into the stream that way. When a camera does not have such a thing, the set-up gets much more complex. Since we had so much to worry about, we did not notice that in one room, on saturday, something went wrong with audio. To combat this, we should improve on our audio set-up for next year, and also verify the streams every once in a while (I did the latter on sunday, so everything should be fine there).
- Inherent to an ad-hoc network, there were some network-related
issues. For instance, on sunday evening, during the last session in that
room, Ben informed me
that the link to room H.1301 had gone down. As we were investigating, we
easily found the source of the problem:
The cable had been put under a door, and had been 'protected' with loads and loads of duct tape, but apparently that wasn't enough. This wasn't something we wanted to fix anymore, at that point; instead, we just let the cable be and focused on other things. - Storage. None of the systems used for the recordings were my own; instead, some were owned by IRILL and some were rented. If I want to do anything with my recordings, that means I have to copy the data off. The system I chose was to bring a USB3 hard disk and copy everything over; but for saturday, this took an hour and thirty minutes. On sunday, my USB3 disk was fairly full, so I had to revert to a USB2 one, which increased the time by much. In the end, we had to abort copying files, and we'll now have to be a bit creative to get them.
- Volunteer management. I originally set up a wiki page to allow people to sign up for talks that they wanted to help out with. Unfortunately, that didn't work so well as it did for DebConf; there were several talks that did not have enough people, resulting in the volunteers from the previous talk remaining on post and finishing their talk. Also, there were some people that signed up without contacting me, or without telling me what name they used on the wiki page, which made it somewhat harder to know who to talk to. I lost count of who had signed up to help out. On Sunday, I decided to set up an IRC channel instead, through which volunteers could communicate more directly and just ask for people to take over, instead of registering for a talk first and then hoping nobody would forget. Also, since I'm terribly bad with faces and video volunteers did not have anything that made them stand out from the rest, I couldn't just walk around until I would see someone involved with video work and ask them to take over in a room. Having a separate 'video team' t-shirt could help there.
After the bad news, here's the list of things that did go well:
- Streaming. Even though choosing flumotion rather than icecast (as we'd done for streaming in the past) involved extra work for me before the conference (I had to write some code so that I could stream from dvswitch into flumotion, which wasn't possible out of the box), the guys at Flumotion decided to send over one of their support engineers. As such, I simply did not have to worry about streaming servers crashing or failing to do what they were supposed to do. While I have no reason to think any of the Flumotion servers were having issues, even if they were I wouldn't have known about it, since Francesc took care of it all and never ever required my involvement about something on the flumotion side. This was extremely valuable.
- Training right before the welcome talk. Explaining to people in a few words how dvswitch works, and then immediately following that up with a live demonstration, isn't a bad way for them to understand.
- Despite all the problems we did have, once everything had been set up and all the gear was more or less manned, actually recording and streaming did go fairly well. The feedback I received so far was mostly positive, which makes me very happy.
In the end, while there certainly is still room for improvement and things did not go as smoothly as I'd hoped, they have gone much better than my worst fears. There's still some work to do, which I'll be doing with the NamurLUG people this week, but all in all, it's gone pretty good.
As to the usage of the streams, I asked Flumotion for some statistics. Since I was fairly late in asking, they could only provide me with statistics about sunday:
- Number of clients connecting:
- Traffic:
Thu, 15 Dec 2011
On beards and politics.
I'd almost forget...
Before:
During:
After:
They finally made it.
Fri, 02 Sep 2011
Mind reading
As a spectator to sporting events, there are times when the ability to read a sport(wo)man's mind would be... interesting.
For instance.
Yesterday's woman's 1500m final at the world athletics championships in Daegu was won by Jennifer Simpson. This was a surprise to many, including (apparently) Jennifer herself, as evidenced by the look on her face after the finish. See, for instance, this youtube clip (interesting bits around the 4 minute mark)
Alternatively, I'd love to know what went through Carlos Berlocq when he won his first game in the match against Novak Djokovic in the third set. I mean, obviously nobody expected the world number one to lose from a relatively unknown 74-ranked argentine player, but that doesn't make it less painful.
Sun, 28 Aug 2011
At Steve's, again
for the second time, I'm at Steve's for his yearly barbecue.
After I'd done my waffles back at Banja Luka, I off-hand suggested to do them again at the barbecue, which people replied to with an enthousiastic 'oh yes!' from multiple mouths. So that's what happened.
I did overdo it on the amounts, though since after I'd baked 750g flour worth of dough, everyone still awake had already had a waffle; and I still had 500g flour worth to go. Since the dough can't be conserved overnight, I had to finish all of them. Which meant that I was still making waffles at 2AM, and no-one was eating them anymore. Bummer. Oh well, some people (including myself) had waffles this morning instead.
Speaking of waffles, and by popular demand: A few years ago I blogged the recipe of my waffles (hidden in a blog post about a large number of other things).
The rest of the barbecue was fairly nice, too. I mean, obviously it is: good food, good beer, good people to talk to, what more would you want? Exactly.
Right now I'm waiting for food that is being prepared, after which I'll probably get in my car and start driving home again. But that's not for now just yet.
Sat, 30 Jul 2011
Food
if you're not at DebConf11 and don't get the joke, don't worry; that's expected
Thu, 21 Jul 2011
On the beard, again...
It looks like I might actually lose it sooner than I was thinking in my previous blog post, a few days ago.
On the 18th, Formateur Elio di Rupo had written a proposed document on which to start negotiations. Most parties agreed to that, except for N-VA and CD&V. Unfortunately, that was enough to make further negotiations useless, so di Rupo had offered his resignation as formateur to the King, who kept his response "under advisement". I thought I was going to end up like Andrew.
Since he wasn't formally ex-formateur yet, however, he continued working. And today, merely a few days later, with an extra proposal—and perhaps also partly due to the King's angry speech for today's national holiday—CD&V has now been persuaded to join the negotiations. It's been over fourhundred days, and far too many weirdos, but they're actually sitting down to talk. Like, right now.
I'll hold off on buying those razor blades for now, but we might yet get there.
Mon, 18 Jul 2011
About the beard...
I'm someone who sometimes has a beard, and sometimes doesn't. Today, I'm someone with a fairly long beard, although it's not (yet?) one of the likes of andrew or maddog. I don't think it looks very well on me, but you can blame the government (or lack thereof) in Belgium. How?! What?! Yes, the government.
A while back, a movie critic working for the RTL (a Francophone Belgian TV station) decided to keep his beard until the Belgian government took the oath of office. He was quickly joined by an actor, and then by a Flemish radio presenter (dutch, with pictures). And then by a whole bunch of people.
I didn't join them, initially. But after a while, when my beard was starting to get long again, people started asking me, 'is that for the government?' And initially I said no. But people kept asking. Since it seemed like a good excuse for not having shaven that long, after a while I just decided to say 'yes' for the heck of it. And now, after having said so for quite a while, I've kindof grown to the idea.
Which, I guess, means that if the impossible happens, and someone back home manages to form a government that will take the oath while I'm still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I'll have to go out and buy some razor equipment.
But I don't expect that to happen. Today, exactly 400 days after the previous election (yes, it's really been that long), it still doesn't look as if there's going to be an agreement on anything.
I wish there was something positive or funny that I could report on in this whole thing, but it doesn't look like it.
Sigh.
Some mail is welcome in /dev/null. Real mail, however, is welcome at my email address
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