Its been a crazy month for me… but I am getting into a flow with it. Mostly the crazyness has been caused by work, which I have to say I’m really enjoying and feel like I’m able to bring a lot of the skills I’ve acquired to use everyday. As a continuation of that little bit of crazyness, I’m going to Germany for business. Doesn’t this sound familar? I’ll be there from Monday til Friday. So I’ll be semi MIA during that time.

With Gentoo, my production has dropped in most regards however I’m still active and responding to queries and helping people out that way. X86 continues to plug along working quite well as a team. Probably the most success I’d have to say I’ve personally had in Gentoo. This is due in large part to the Arch Tester program, who it seems to turn out some of the better developers as far as just getting stuff done goes. Many of which have remained on the x86 team after becoming full developers. A few remain arch testers and that’s as far as they want to go and its great to have them as the ranks shrink when we have one become a developer.

Lately, I’ve seen quite a few people come to me asking about joining the x86 team and marking stuff stable. Its a nice sign that people want to join the project/group. With a solid core it continues to in my biased opinion be one of the best archs for stability in the general. Its been a long road but one that I think everyone has received benefit from it. Although, I don’t visit the forums much but I remember when I first joined as a developer. Stable was more or less a joke. There were so many threads about it breaking. Now I at least hope there are few and those are far between. Its one of the things that I can hold onto as a positive influence that I’ve been part of in the organization as a whole.

See everyone in a week.

Well some might not of realized but I’ve been trying to get XvMC to work for my little via server for about a week or two now with mplayer. I have to say that its been a real pain in the ass. Mostly due to the fact that XvMC support that comes with mplayer, only works for nvidia. Yes I’ll say that again. The support for X video motion capabities….the nice ability to offload from the processor to the video card for mpeg2 rendering (which my little via has a nice chip for) doesn’t work with the default XvMC. Searching off and on for a week. I find that patches are outdated for mplayer to allow the via to use XvMC from openchrome. Mostly due to the fact that upstream mplayer, doesn’t seem to want to accept them accordingly to the openchrome people. Yet another example of confusion over the reasons behind the lack of seemingly cooperation in the open source community.

Manually went about creating a patch based off what I saw was needed and miraculously (thanks to the openchrome developers work on the patching initially) it works. I have on the little C3 1ghz gone from 50-60% cpu load to play a dvd..down to less then 5%. This is a huge change and allows for smooth playback which is great.

Well, rants over..I’m going to go watch some video’s etc with the use of a chip designed to allow it. Imagine that!