Quick update on (mostly) non-brewing related stuff.

Video Streaming

After somehow missing that gstreamer XML pipelines have been deprecated, and after futile attempts several months ago to get them working - I had a chance to pick it up again and start trying to use the library directly.

It works really well either wrapped up with something like the CPAN wrapper for Perl (yeah, I know, I know) - or directly via C/++. Or, if you install the tools package, from the commandline (sheepish grin).

So for encoding and streaming stuff it works quite well, but is useless for transmission to the client (I was hoping for an end to end gstreamer solution for the sample project I was playing with) - so you still need something to repackage the stream into RTP/RTMP, as the gstreamer RTP stuff doesn’t really cut it.

ffmpeg would make a good overall solution, and the ffmpeg server will repackage on the head end - but the overhead is higher than gstreamer’s if you’re generating multiple streams from the same source. You could get around this by writing a custom binary around ffmpeg perhaps. Food for thought.

Someone has suggested Wowza Media server is great for this type of deployment, as it does no encoding work but will repackage RTP/RTMP for clients - but the licensing prices are pretty abysmal - there should be an open source alternative… this isn’t that interesting to me to go down that path though, and I think I’ve reached what I can reasonably do.

Storage Box

After a bit of a delay with changing jobs and making space for the rack in the garage - the storage box is up and running again. I haven’t really had time to test the controller issues, it’s been so inconvenient without it.

At least now it’s sitting on a UPS and I’ve built the old array’s disks into a RAID6 array for my personal docs, and presenting NFS to my VMWare server - which is a whole different story involving the disk controller in the x336 and VMWare’s Linux driver interface. Basically, I’ll get orders of magnitude better performance switching to it, and that makes me happy.

Brewing stuff

In the short time I’ll have at home today, I’m hoping to blend together my liqueurs and get $partner to give me some more feedback.

I’ve also bought some mint to re-create the mint liqueur I did, after a leaky spirits bottle saw it empty itself all over the floor sadface I’ll also throw on a chilli liqueur.

Also, instead of posting a list of things that I want to brew each post, I’ve put them on my wiki here (link removed).

Some new additions however, which I think are worthy of a mention here:

Bee Pollen I saw a container of this at the shops today, really interesting stuff… but it contains enough natural sugars and whatnot - and apparently a few people have brewed it. So I’ll give it a go and see how it goes… could be interesting.

Whey Wine After being tortured by final pictures of Shay’s Milk Liqueur - I went on a bit of a Google to see if there were other Milk/Whey based drinks… the Whey Wine mentioned on Wikipedia seems worth a shot… again, could be interesting.

Software Messaging

Having been exposed to TIBCO’s JMS implementation at work, a few of the things I’ve been rolling around in my head for a few years about software messaging and middleware are starting to make a bit more sense.

Whilst I’ve been looking at building a few fairly tightly coupled framework libraries - the idea of using generic messaging interfaces over a generic messaging bus makes things so much easier. When you’re not rolling your own, you can also really leverage a lot of the ‘solved-problems’.

To that end, I’m hoping to throw together a VM running Apache ActiveMQ - a different JMS implementation, and have a play around with that, but I have other code to bust out before I get to that…. it’s kind of breathed new fire into a few projects that have been on the back burner though - keen to clear my plate and get cracking…

Which lastly takes me on to…

Work & Motivation

Without putting too fine a point on it, things are a lot better work-wise than they have been for a long time. Not being actively prevented from doing your job, and having meaningful and constructive work to do makes a huge difference - and it really helps you engage with the work that you do have going on.

… and being engaged means I’m starting to get back into the swing of things personally. Now I’m not spending my evenings recovering from a mental mind-fuck, I’m finding that I’m a lot more interested in the technical projects I’ve had on the backburner for a while now.

So things are good, and despite a shortage of sealed glass jars (hint, hint - to anyone reading who wants to offload any)… all is well. More updates to come!