fnocbed

end debconf;

...and what a pity. This debconf has been absolutely magnificent. The orga team has done a wonderful job. Many a beer have been toasted to these people, and they have deserved every pint.

I was as usual a member of the video team, and as usual, I got in less work than I should have. and as usual I feel a little bit rotten for it. I hope I put in enough camera work hours... Our results did end up very very good, though. A big thank you to the rest of the video team. It's astounding how damn professional the videos came out! It looks like something that was produced with cameras at least two orders of magnitude more expensive.

For the conference I was supposed to write a program that would include some small headers at the start and end of every video. These would show the coming talk, with author information etc. I started work on it in Python, but I simply ran into too many frustrating gstreamer bugs. Even though it's gotten a lot better, it's still a very frustrating toolkit to be using. I hope it will get better. It is in all fairness a very ambitious project. Some of the bugs were just downright weird.

At the beginning of the planning of debconf7, the terms were that we would get to use Teviot Row House, our main venue, 24 hours a day. However, for the hosts this proved to be unacceptable. So - we have a secondary, night, venue. This turns out to be a semi-derelict, deconsecrated church. Churches tend to have organs. So, in a dull moment, while I was wating for some XML parsing code (Thanks, LarstiQ!) I sneak up and start... repairing it. With the help of Simon Richter and David Noble, we did actually get the organ working - first manual-drive, then we wired up the old blower motor. The thing worked beautifully, and the organ returned to past glory.

I'll write more about the organ effort at a later date. Now, I'm going to fix the organ up a bit before leaving to go home.

Picture taken by Dave Noble

I need help...

So we were toying around with the ideas for debconf7 and one of them (and a very good one it is!) is to set up a temporary DVB-T station. That's right! A Debian TV station! Isn't that a great idea!? This, however, means one thing: We need an ident. What better ident to use than a swirling Debian swirl!? So, I find a neat Debian wallpaper somewhere and decide to make a series of JPEGs to spin it around. The bash line I ended up using was this:

toresbe@fortran:~/ident$ rm big/*.PNG; for deg in `seq -w 0 . 360`; do export file=`perl -e "print "1$deg*10""`.PNG; echo $file; convert debian-swirl-big.png -rotate -$deg big/$file; TEST="`file big/$file | sed -e "s/,//g"`"; convert big/$file -crop 1024x576+$(((`echo $TEST | cut -d " " -f 5`)/2-512))+$(((`echo $TEST | cut -d " " -f 7`)/2-288)) done/$file; done

I just found that so horrible that I found I needed to blog it. It physically repulses me. I LOVE it! :)

The reviews are unanimous:

19:30 < daven> dude
19:30 < daven> that is sick
19:30 < daven> and twisted