Category Archives: psico

Detachment

During these last days I went to my parents house to grab the rest of my things and head up to the unknown (well, for the next couple of months I kind of know where I’ll be at).

I was amazed at the amount of stuff that I’ve long forgotten. Books, tools, clothes, even toys… I gave away most of them. If I haven’t used a thing in ten years or more, even to the point of not remembering they were in the house there is little sense in keeping them. And some feel like an anchor tying me to the past, so out to the door it is.

The first day I hauled boxes to the street I felt terrible, sad and empty. Then it became more natural, like a relief.

The other Monday (it was a holiday here) I organized my clothes and kept only what I need and use. Some are so worn out that barely hold together. I’ve found some that I used when I was a teen (that is, about 13 years ago). Some fit me and some don’t, so in a sense at least I grew up.

I’m still childish in a lot of ways and honestly looking at how so many of the adults behave I’m positive that I don’t want to end up like that. Curiously enough, some people told me that trait is charming.

I’m still a long way from Nekkhamma but it’s a tiny step forward.

Next on my list: killing the Buddha.

(clothes)

(clothes)

 

Learning again

I got into computers at the age of 8 (1994), when a very weird lady came to our school and offered to teach us. A week after that she was back with a bunch of friends and unloaded a stack of XT’s and AT’s on an empty room.

We spent two months doing exercises on paper and then she introduced us to QBasic (and DOS).

After that I continued with Visual Basic (and stopped at 6, I made a couple of programs for a very good amount of money), assembler for PIC micros. I also used C with TurboC, DJGPP and even Visual C.

I stumbled upon Python and its community and I fell in love. It is still my go to language for almost everything, even if only to try out solutions and then port them to the target language.

The last major event was a couple (and a bit more…) years ago when I started to use more and more Javascript, from plain servers using express to fully encompassing frameworks like LoopBack. From big iron to smaller micros (besides code isomorphism is really interesting)

After that I toyed with some languages but nothing really caught my attention. Among them I used Ruby, Haskell, Go and a bit of Java just for kicks or helping out long time friends. Also TCL, I   liked it as an extension language but I wouldn’t write an application from scratch using it. Go is really interesting (mainly because Docker and all the tools revolving around it) but I really need some itch that calls for it.

The major breakthrough came when I rediscovered Forth and Erlang.

Forth is really interesting as an embedded language because it’s so easy to implement and there are so many things powered by it.

Erlang was on my radar for a while and has, at least on my circle of friends, this aura of mystery.

After a post on PyAr I decided to join a local group and give it a go. I started with the exercises of Learn You Some Erlang and I couldn’t be happier.

It makes my head twitch and think in new ways. I just lust for the time of the day devoted to it.

Shelling out.

I was re-reading (again, I forgot how many times) one of my favourites writings of Scalzi, “Being Poor”.

It opens with the line “Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs“.

A couple of months ago I changed my phone for a new one. I’ve switched from a flip-phone (a Sony R306) to a Motorola MotoG. On the way I lost five days of runtime on a single charge and that peace of mind that I can bump it into everything without caring that much or that I can leave it unattended on a table and no one will part with it (and also the AM radio).

On the other paw, it is developer friendly, has a ton of shiny and distracting things and syncs without a hitch.

Back again to what made me think of it.
It is advertised as a cheap entry level phone and it kind of is on other countries. At the exchange rate and taxes back then I paid a fair price compared to what it would cost had I bought it on an foreign shop.

However, it is not (at least to me) worth what it costed if I only wanted a phone to IM and talk instead of a development tool. It was more or less the same amount of money that I spend on three months of food. Many people earn less than that sweating blood on never ending days.

On a few minutes I traded money worth three months of food for a device that fits in my palm. It was an investment that paid for itself in a few weeks but I still feel quite strange.

Jinxed.

So, my car sort of appeared.

Without its five tyres, the stereo and speakers, (ok, a cheap one but enough to listen some music), the ashtray and cigarette lighter. Among other things were missing some clothes (a hoodie I really liked and spares for a couple of days), a mix-cd one of my best friends made for me and a cheap spray of vanilla with a touch of chocolate. At one point the ceiling was dismantled because now it feels quite loose. Someone cleared the odometer and made about 100Km after that. Someone else decided that it was funny to cut the drivers seat belt. Oddly enough, the fire extinguisher and the jack were spared.

It was also filled with ashes. That brought back memories of a past I thought long forgotten. No matter how many cans of disinfectant I used or how hard I scrub I still felt dirty, dirty deep inside me. Like it was written with fire on my soul.

I also wrote ‘bribes’ for the first time on my accounting books.

On top of that my laptops power brick died but it was just a matter of a quick splice near the strain relief.

Yay.

Things are looking different today…

Clearly I’m a glutton for punishment.

Today I decided that I can’t have enough and it was time to upgrade my distro so I can play with newer things (and also because google was nagging me to use an updated browser).

I did a dist-upgrade and that not only completed without a hitch but I also had a bit more of free space afterwards. Previously I hammered the thing and then just gave up all hope.

I’m starting to like this new future were things work like they should.

Now that I jinxed it I went full steam with a do-release-upgrade. It is downloading 3277 files at the blazing speed of 20 kB/s.

Let’s see if I still have a working machine by monday.

Emptyness

Lately I’ve been living most of the time alone on a house that used to host from four to six people and boy, it feels quite strange.

I can’t say I understand them but I’m starting to do things that always seemed a little weird to me before.

I arrive in the evening to be greeted by an all encompassing silence, I turn on the lights on many rooms, otherwise I feel a bit uneasy (and it is a pitch black here). I also find myself talking a lot more to my cats and thinking out loud.

All of a sudden lots of sounds, that were always here, step to the foreground. I can hear a faucet dripping on the far end. Kind of like the first time I wore earplugs and I started to hear my inner machinery.

Walk

This Sunday I went to the beach, Palo Blanco, and as it was a lovely day upon arriving I decided to walk from there to Isla Paulino. Had Sade and Gerry Rafferty stuck on my mind.

I made almost every conceivable mistake, starting by not telling anyone about my plans. Well, I did tell my whereabouts but not that I would walk along the shoreline to the island. Alone.

Started the trip with only a thermos and some cookies because I knew it was going to be just a short one. Halfway I slip and fall, breaking it. I was this close to spraining my ankle and the other bottle of potable water was at the car, together with the flashlight.

I really underestimated the effect of the cold. After a while of walking barefoot as I only had one pair of shoes,  my feet started to hurt and all of a sudden it stopped (I realized that after stepping on thorny grass, wondering why I felt nothing, but it surely hurted when I took a  hot shower back home). Also between the hard sand and the cold water I had to walk slower than usual (quite a bit)  because my tenons ached and at that pace the night would find me still in the middle of nowhere walking back to the car.

The net result was that I walked a tad less than two hours when on more favourable conditions I need about one. Lucky me I arrived at the urbanized part of the island with a few minutes to spare before the last ferry to Berisso leaved. The Sun was starting to set as I walked to the docks chatting with a group of fishermen from Quilmes and there we parted ways, they crossed to Ensenada and I went back to Berisso.

At home I drank some warm tea in a hurry, grabbed a coat and called a taxi. The driver wasn’t thrilled, it was dark already and a trip there sounded like trouble (and my looks were of no help). I was a bit concerned wondering if my car would still be there by then (I also left inside my backpack with a spare set of keys). It was.

According to the improved Google Maps experience (not!, at least not now.) I walked about 5Km, made about 6Km on boat and another 6Km on taxi.

It was totally worth it. The beach and jungle (?) are lovely, more even so without traces of people. Sadly there is a lot of trash, some brought by the river and other left there by who knows. Like always, plastic bags and drums, car chassis and other parts (!) and the new addition this year, textured condoms. Many of them.

Anyways, wonderful moments.

And people still ask why I don’t want to move out.

Previous walk was here.

Ayer me olvidé una zapatilla en tu casa…

… no sé qué pasa ♫.

Most of the times I sleep at someone else’s place I forget something, like a sock or a handkerchief. Some do that on purpose to have an excuse for coming back but I’m a different kind of creep. I’m just Clumsy.

Last weekend I forgot an Ankh Cross.

It’s been a while since I had time to make something, take pictures and write about it so I’ll just post some old ones from the making of said cross. The rest can be found at flickr.

Ankh made out of scrap aluminum from a hard disk

Title courtesy of Mostruo! – Tu culpa

Walk.

Today I  woke up almost as tired as I went to bed yesterday. Most of the people is not working because of a multi day holiday. Or something like that.

Like yesterday I (unsuccessfully) tried to figure out why WebVfx refuses to play nice with gstshm. So I went for a walk to clear my mind.

One of the nicest things about living in Berisso is that I have really really close almost virgin fields and beachs, an island, “normal” city stuff and industrial/maritime landscapes. Today I went to Ensenada, there are many places that look like a still from movies such as Tank Girl or Mad Max; toyed around the docks and abandoned ships. Also met a woman that kinda looked like Lori Petty these days. Scary.


Ver mapa más grande

Google says it was a 12.5Km trip. I took me a bit longer but I tried really hard to slow down and enjoy it instead of just walking.

Back at home I’m out of ideas and this is still broken. I guess it’s time to panic.

 

Using WebKitGTK as the UI for GStreamer applications.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how can I make nice and easily customizable interfaces for video applications. My idea of ‘nice’ is kind of orthogonal to what most of my expected user base will want, and by ‘easily customizable’ I don’t mean ‘go edit this glade file / json stage / etc’.

Clutter and MX are great to make good looking interfaces and like Gtk have something that resembles css to style stuff and can load an ui from an xml or json file. However, they will need sooner or later a mix developer and a designer. And unless you do something up front, the interface is tied to the backend process that does the heavy video work.

So, seeing all the good stuff we are doing with Caspa, the VideoEditor, WebVfx and our new magical synchronization framework I questioned:

Why instead of using Gtk, can’t I make my ui with html and all the fancy things that are already made?

And while we are at it I want process isolation, so if the ui crashes (or I want to launch more than one to see side by side different ui styles) the video processing does not stop. Of course, should I want more tightly coupling I can embed WebKit on my application and make a javascript bridge to avoid having to use something like websockets to interact.

One can always dream…

Then my muse appeared and commanded me to type. Thankfully, mine is not like the poor soul on “Blank Page” had.

So I type, and I type, and I type.

‘Till I made this: two GStreamer pipelines, outputting to auto audio and video sinks and also to a webkit process. Buffers travel thru shared memory, still they are copied more than I’d like to but that makes things a bit easier and helps decoupling the processes, so if one stalls the others don’t care (and anyway for most of the things I want to do I’ll need to make a few copies). Lucky me I can throw beefier hardware and play with more interesting things.

I expect to release this in a couple of weeks when it’s more stable and usable, as of today it tends to crash if you stare at it a bit harder.

“It’s an act of faith, baby”
Using WebKit to display video from a GStreamer application.

Using WebKit to display video from a GStreamer application.
Something free to whoever knows who the singer is without using image search.