Lots of fun tonight actually. I got a few bugs done, and still managed to do a few things for myself even. Its downright scary when that happens. One of the things that I got around to fixing was my temperature and LTD graphs for my hard drives. As I added three drives recently I had to go about adding their data to the graph…however in doing so I somehow managed to wipe out all the data I had on the single drive previously….whoops! I could grab the backup from my backup…however its too much of a eh to be bothered with. However you do get to see the results..and subsequently..kill my bandwidth.

As one friend has said I’m a graph whore. I just do really like to be able to see in a easily digestible method, what exactly is going on with my system. Certain things I don’t tend to monitor like storage space, as that doesn’t change radically very often..minus currently with the rapidly increasing usage of the raid 5 array.

Ripping has been progressing better since the last check, I only have three dvd’s I’ll have to rip via alternative methods so far, and I’m close to 35 ripped currently, taking up about 130-140 gig of space. Its also made me realize…that I have a lot more dvd’s then I thought I did. I’m quite surprised that I actually do have as many as I do…its certainly not a one week project, especially when I start getting to ripping tv series and all that.

My little raid 5 is currently running through a bad block exam, which if I recall has been happening since yesterday..the joys of having a large ass volume..you spend many hours waiting to see what gets returned or waiting for it to rebuild and run slowly…

Getting back to Gentoo, good old Seemant seems to be having fun with a discussion about overlays. Personally, I’ll admit I’ve not participated or talked with anyone who’s been working in association with a developer or submitted stuff to sunrise so do take what I say with a grain of salt. In that way I’m somewhat of a bad User Relations member. Its a segment of the community that I just don’t really know well or at all. I do however believe that it has helped get a few of the people who wanted to help out but didn’t have the time, motivation or other factors to get involved in another way. This in my opinion continues to be a good thing..as really the vast majority of us are really just in truth handling a overlay. I’ll get flamed for the fact that a herd isn’t a overlay..but really isn’t it? A overlay is a particular area of packages that a group of people happen to be updating and maintaining. What is a herd if not that as well..just by a different name and people having had to go through testing to make sure that they don’t go ruin everyone’s system because everyone gets these packages. Of course there is concern for further fragmentation that I abhor as we already have that due to the size of the tree. So in essence the overlays idea is just a attempt to come up with a solution to solve the fragmentation, and allow the developers to develop the tools that people want instead of having to deal with fixing xlog or rufus because there’s a issue and we all feel the responsibility to make sure the packages work as well as possible.

I’ll just go and continue to contemplate where we are going as a whole and help to direct it in a positive direction.

I’ve probably posted more this month then I have in the previous year, and I don’t think I’ll slow done soon, as it actually does get people to visit and hopefully find some interesting details with various Linux related stuff.

Tonight, we have the continuing trials of tsunam ripping all his dvd’s. As always I’m a minimalist and want to do it with as few packages as needed. So what are my first choices? Vobcopy naturally. Positives…well it kills css and gives me a single vob that I can then play. First couple of problems I have with it is the Sony ArccOs which fills the ifo’s with false data that dvd backup applications under Linux panic with and nearly kills the machine. The next thing I run into…is that my audio track on 8 of 19 dvd’s I’ve ripped were done with the french audio! Dvdbackup, well doesn’t seem to be able to backup to a single vob and is much much slower to backup just the main feature. Lxdvdrip is overkill for what I need and it doesn’t seem to do anything different from appearances with vobcopy if it can use it. Xdvdshrink transcodes which is unacceptable for what I’m doing…and we continue to work our way down…

What am I doing for french subtitled movies? mplayer -dumpstream -alang en -channels 6 dvd://. Yep good old mplayer, assuming it doesn’t skip I’ll have one movie tonight…yeah this is a great solution =/. I could get lazy, boot up windows and  probably be done with it a whole lot quicker but I’d rather avoid that…so has anyone else ran into french/Spanish/ etc audiotracks with vobcopy instead of the English tracks? As well, if there’s another tool that will do the very simple riping of the main feature, in English,  surround sound, as a single vob or heck even a few vobs that I can then just merge somehow? Please let me know.

As with most people I’ve amassed a fairly sizable collection of cd’s and dvd’s over the years, not nearly as impressive as some of my friends who’ve spent great oodles more then I have to amass 600 cd or 300 dvd’s but enough to take up a fairly sizable chunk of space. With my mythtv box more or less up and running ( I still have not hooked up to output to the tv and I get a plain black screen when I try it in a remote window ^.^), I’ve started the long fun process of ripping the main feature to hard drives. Imagine that I just want to watch the movie and don’t really care about any of the extras. Imagine that I just want to have the movie without all the added crap I don’t generally watch anyways. Yes, probably like most people…we don’t actually care about the added fluff that you include to keep the prices high. I’m sure if you were to actually talk to most dvd owners, we just want a cheap movie.

For now however, I shall burn my movies without the css protection, yes I also dislike your protection/extortion schemes as well. Especially considering they are designed for one platform in mind and attempts to leave everyone else out in the rain. Oh and for further information, I have no intention of buying a movie or song for services like itunes. For one I like physical ownership of something, and even if its said that I can redownload a media if the hard drive should crash…I’m still left with limited options, where owning a physical piece of media, allows me to exercise my fair use ability for my own devices. Course by the definition that is wanted…I’m a pirate of wanting to watch any movie I want without having to insert a dvd…wonderful isn’t it?

Well, backing away from ranting incoherently like I always do. The seven movies I’ve ripped ( Pump up the Volume, American Pie, Se7en, Reservoir Dogs, The Italian Job (new one), Love Actually, and Topgun) are taking up about 36 gigs of space. With 917G of space to play with. I think I can finish up all the movies I own and have quite a few hours of tv recording capability left over. Amazing how much space digitizing aspects of your life can take. In some ways, it makes you wonder how much space your life would actually take if it was all done digitally and stored. While [ remembered != 0]; do echo “keeping your life around because someone still remembers you”; done; echo “No one remembers you so you’ve poofed out of existence”.

In some ways it’d be interesting if life was just a program in a computer simulation, and in fact we were all stored as digital files. How big would your’s be?

Note to self: Should make a list of dvd’s to order in a list of priority and just work my way down it slowly….music well, its getting harder to find stuff that peeks my interest..and that’s mostly gone to germany instead of the states for something decent.

Well it seems like Gentoo has one again landed on the front page news for a perceived negative action. The vast majority of the reason behind us is that Gentoo has always been very open about the development process, so you should grow to expect that there will be a lot of bad press with the good. However, it always seems to blindside a lot of people that we are this open about the process.

The first thing I’d like to cover is the supposedly anonymous developer who decided that he would take his issues public without taking the proper procedure in doing it. That’s the kind of maturity that we have in the developer community of Gentoo. This isn’t the first time that this has happened and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Ultimately, its these kinds of actions that I believe are ultimately killing us. It shows that there is a segment of the developers who don’t know how to act in a appropriate manner. Although this is a community project that we all volunteer on, I would expect that we all look at it as a workplace environment. I at least hope that we all know the type of attitude that we should show in a workplace and would bring that kind of professional respect to the table. Now I’ve been guilty of flying off the handle to try and get people to behave in the past but it certainly didn’t last long, as it just wasn’t me, and trying to out ass the ass’s would just give me a greater headache then it was worth.

As we can see though, a lot of us don’t bring that workplace mentality to the project and causes a lot of the problems that we have. Far be it that I’m suggesting a corporate suit and tie setup for us in Gentoo, however I do expect people to act in a manner accordingly. I also know that even in a work environment people goof off around the water cooler and talk about other things. I enjoy talking about random things, and in fact I’m sure I’m the start of quite a few of the stranger ones we have in -dev. Without any real management there’s no reason for people to behave and act like adults instead of spoiled children who want things their way, but won’t listen to the other side because it doesn’t fit in with what you want. Again, many developers are guilty of this, and I’ve walked away from many of you because you simply will not at least attempt to listen to the other side. As well, we’ve had developers walk away from the project for this exact reason. Simply put, we need to take the actual people who deal with the Administration side of things; those who wade through the political bullshit to try and act as mediators and the true leaders of the project and make them the council. I don’t care if these people haven’t developed or maintained anything really in four years or they just committed something in the last five minutes. The council should be the power to stop things like what just happened in their tracts at the moment they need to be.

Instead we have something that should have been nipped in the bud get out of control yet again, because no matter who we have on the council..they don’t have the power or the ability to stand up, be unpopular and tell everyone to shut up, and go sit in a corner. At this current moment in time, I’m sure that a timeout that you all remember as children would put you in the place that many of us have been acting like. Don’t even bother going, but its not me. You are just making an excuse for yourself to not feel guilty, when you know you are. Accept that you are part of the problem and take your timeout in the corner to think about how we all should act.

I’m not doing the call to act polite, I’m doing a call to get the people who should be the ones leading the project in the position to actually do what the council should be about. They never were just a guide for the technical direction for the project and electing people who are only there for the technical knowhow is not going to solve the problems that they are expected to deal with, but have no intention of dealing with. There is also the fact that really, what kind of punishment can we give to someone who is misbehaving? Suspend their access to cvs and its more or less a vacation, so we need to get creative about how we punish bad behavior. We’ve never had a really good system to handle that part of the problem, and is something I hope developer relations thinks about, as I don’t have any ideas of how we can punish for bad behavior.

I would suspect that most people know of ciaranm, as he is a person who is very hard to avoid, and I believe has mastered the ability to get to being the center of attention. He recently filed yet another conflict bug against another person. As he is a former dev I’ve mentioned to him multiple times that he should know better then most users the process for going about getting a resolution to a personal conflict and continues to file bugs to get attention, as its the only reason I can think of that he would avoid a proper process. I believe part of why its done the way its done, because there is no punishment for his behavior or actions as well. While on the bug he had a good reason for getting in contact with the user relations group, he was not innocent in the action as well, and was warned as well. I know a few people who would not mind not to see or hear from him again, as he is considered by many to be a common troll. One who seems to define a lot based on Gentoo I’m sure he’ll be replying to this and calling me a great grand list of 4 letter words and filing a developer relations bug against me. However, I’ve just had it up to here with his antics. Users, no matter who they are should be expected to behave as civilized adults who can hold a two way conversation as well. I don’t believe I’ve ever had one of those with him. I know that no one will stand up and agree with me, as is the way with Gentoo now. People will pm you and go yeah, right on good job ++. When you actually need them to stand up and back you up, the spines suddenly disappear, or simply never existed.

Having a spine is always a good thing, if you are wrong, admit it and move on. We all are human and make mistakes, if we didn’t you’d never learn anything.

Gentoo “making mistakes in the open to prove we are just like you”

One thing that I’ve not missed in quite a while is vendor lock-in. Now as many in the open source community know, you get that lock in from windows, as well from software like quicken that makes older versions obsolete with something for this new tax year. Thus you end up in a continual cycle of upgrading. Needless to say I don’t think many of miss that, oh wait I’m on Gentoo….I’m continually upgrading for minor changes * bonks self *. Hey at least you can be happy knowing that OpenOffice rarely gets updated so the longest package to compile in the entire tree (and without a doubt largest) won’t happen but once a year if you are lucky. I would call that restraint.

Oddly enough though I found a application that has some of the same kind of features in Linux. Overall its actually a great set of utilities but the lock in of how to do certain things is nagging at me. In this case its some of the utilities of Mythtv. I’ve been using it for a little while now, and find it great to record a program that will be viewed at a later time or say while the parents are traveling to record it for them and let them view it when they get back, which they will get the chance to do in about a week. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy the experience, as from watching the video’s on my laptop the quality from the hauppauge pvr-350 card is great. I’ve not actually hooked it up to a tv yet, some minor complications with that like figuring out what room to put it in and figuring out the running of a Ethernet cable for it. Course I will be moving fairly soon, so those points might be moot. It did take me a year to get Mythtv setup in the first place, so you can see where that goes with a time frame.

Getting back to Mythtv, recording has been great and extremely simple. Playing from myth has not, and of course because of that tagging commercials properly hasn’t either. Unfortunately, my experience thus far with the tagging has left much to be desired, but really if you think about it figuring out where a commercial is automatically is not an easy task to even begin thinking about. Why bring it up if it ultimately isn’t a problem, well mostly because it leads into the first one. The Lock in begins with the transcoding you have to do to remove commercials. You can’t create a easy job to take the flagged commercial times and use transcode or mencoder to take them out quite easily. That’d be silly and some might say logical. Instead for the easy automated way, you get to use the transcoder that was written for Mythtv Now you might say its easier to do it with myths, however it removes a choice you have in the process, and as many have said, Gentoo is about choice.

If during your setup you choose to recode to mpeg4, you then have to deal with a custom .nuv format that you need avidemux or nuvexport to handle it to a bit more of a generic format. We thus have a very long drawn out process for what happens after the recording unfortunately at the expense of choice and in some ways I feel the ease of use. I transcode manually currently to other formats in part because I used to be a encoder and I’m picky about how things will turn out. Especially if its something I plan on keeping. However, once I have a good generic setting I’m sure I can automate the two step process to encode. Which is another annoyance for me. I’m used to running a single command that would do the first pass and then the second pass of encoding, however I learned the hard way that in fact you have to do both manually. I just wonder how common it is for people to run the first pass without the second fairly soon if not right after.

Now, there are many reasons that they could, did and would do the things that they did which still have solid reasons behind them. I just however wish that there was some ways around some of the annoyances. I guess I should prepare for the well you can do this and this and this and work around it.

Unlike many of my contemporaries I’m not going to discuss the recent death of, Rob Levin and wish my condolences. This might and probably does sound harsh, however death is just another of the cycles of life, one that can come unexpectedly but should not be a time of morning, it should be a celebration of a person’s life. As such, we should be celebrating the thing which this person helped to create that many of us use as a primary form of communication for development. For that he has my thanks, as with most things we are not truly appreciative of these things til something of this nature happens.

When talking about development, I’d love to say that the new council for Gentoo will have a great effect on the way we do things, however I have a feeling that the council will again be a body that has no actual power. The past group could make decisions but had no power to enforce the rulings that they made, as no one was willing to stand up be to the one to say no to what someone else wanted to do. It worked mostly because no one actually pushed those buttons and went ahead and did what the council told them not to. Mostly because they knew that they’d end up with developer relations on their behind to stop them.

What good is a governing body that has no power perceived or actually ramified? Absolutely none, it’d be better overall to have it disappear as its just another thing to take up a person’s time that could be spent doing other things. I’d like to think of this as the swift kick in the ass that will get this to change, but I don’t expect it to change. We’ll see if we have people with backbones in this organization who use the backbones for constructive technical discussions instead of using it to assault another person, course one could argue that really doesn’t need a backbone to do.

I’m another year older, and realized that from the time I started becoming a developer (note: I’ve only been a developer for 9 months ^.^;; seems longer), It’s been a little over a year now. So its kind of a twofer of things to celebrate. ^.^;; I need to smack Saleem (compnerd) around a bit for filing the bug that got me to become a developer.

Rufus is masked if you haven’t noticed, if you want it to stay around…better grab the ebuild and take it over to sunrise fairly soon. You have til next month but its just a general warning.

Its been a bit of an odd week for me, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Including apparently being a tool to the spinmasters, or perhaps being a spinmaster myself. Unfortunately, its not a turntable mastery that was being talked about. When I started this particular site up, and figured I’d finally hop on the bandwagon of the blog. I made it a express point to try and avoid being yet another overly emotional person and writing horrible poetry that makes you want to gag.

I’ve succeeded mostly I hope in keeping it mostly on the topic of Gentoo, and what is somewhat going on in the inner sanctum of the developer community. It is of course shaded with my own personal history as everyone’s views will be. The reason I tend to be so open about what is happening with us is that I wanted to know the good and the bad while I was a user and found it amazingly hard to get that information, even while following certain lists and knowing some developers. For some people knowing all that is worthless and I’m sure they skip the details, however I love to see the reactions people have and get their insight into what they feel about the way things are. This is also why I love to see responses to things I say. I wouldn’t care if you replied that you agreed with the guy above you, because you are actually a voice that is letting me know what you want to see and where you want to go.

In the end not a single person can direct the way that the Gentoo project will progress in a way that changes a huge direction it will take. I hope that we all realize that, however we can start the pebble rolling down the hill that could dislodge the bolder from its resting place. Ultimately, that’s what I hope to accomplish. However, I don’t expect that it’ll ever actually happen.

In some positive notes, I’ve been spending a lot of time with a few people helping them to understand some things that we commonly do around the project. Some people would say that the time that I spend helping to teach others things that they should possibly know already, and is why they don’t get approached for this kind of help. I’ve avoided as much as possible giving out the answer and dropping the matter at that because I believe the person will get the answer they need this time, but when they need it again they’ll be searching and frustrated because they should of remembered it last time.

Thus I’ll sit with the person and go over it as many times as needed to make sure they understand it. I know some consider it a waste of time, but its something that I can do to help out in ways that others don’t want to, or simply don’t have time to do.

Which reminds me that I’ve not be great with my mentee, as we really only get to spend time on the weekends around each other. His weekday job keeps him away from the computer and the weekends I’m generally catching up on all the things I need to do. I shall have to correct that.

Hopefully this weekend as well I’ll sit down for a few minutes and reply to a couple of very interesting replies I’ve gotten to things I’ve said in the past .

Well, it was a productive night tonight and not just for getting bugs closed. I managed to get the mythtv portion of my 1u web server/file server/print server and now mythtv box going. It actually works well and is fairly impressive. I’ve tested it out by recording a episode of That 70’s show and I was impressed with the quality. It however made me realize that oh shit, I’m going to need to figure out settings so that I don’t have 1.1 gig for ever 30 minutes of files… That’ll quickly eat up a lot of storage. Most likely it’ll be transcoding/mencoding the files over into another format and its a perfect excuse to go experimenting with x264, or h264 for you windows users. All one of you that visit me from windows machines * stares at you scornfully *, joking aside I’m happy now that its running. Course knowing my luck once the new version that I’ve more or less been running for a while will break it entirely for me and I’ll have to repair it :(.

It’ll be interesting (read: scary) working and seeing how mencoder xor (oh god I did xor I’m a geek!) transcode work…as I’ve been so used to avisynth and virtualdub that it’ll be a rough change for me. I’ve been following avisynth 3.0 development since I found about it and its cross platform ability, however progress has been slower then I was hoping..which always ends up the case when you are really excited about something. I’ll just continue to hope that turns out as well as I hope it will.

How many people actually use Rufus for their bittorrent needs. Its actually a valid question as its one package I maintain and upstream appears to be dead, and have been dead for over nine months now. As such I’m considering booting it from the tree. Yes I’m one of those people who don’t like to leave things rotting (as I don’t have time to do more then maintain the package. I’d suggest that if I do plan to remove it, someone add it to sunrise in the place of it being in the official tree taking up space and bandwidth for other clients that are actively developed.