My life was saved yesterday.

Less dramatically, a piece of software made my life better whereas, without it, life would have been worse.

Let’s give a bit of context first though: I’ve a very basic form of regression testing for Firtree (reflecting its somewhat volatile nature) which consists of a number of ‘example’ python scripts which exercise Firtree’s features. Each script also prints out the allocated object count at program exit which, if non-zero, indicates something has fecked up in my reference counting, either inside Firtree itself or in the Python bindings.

Usually, being a good little software engineer, after writing a feature, but before committing, I run these scripts confirming they still look right and this reference count is zero. Yesterday I went a bit mad and added a ton of features and an associated ton of commits. As is virtually guaranteed when you behave so recklessly, when I did run the scripts everything looked screwed up and memory leaked like a sieve. This prompted one of the worst things you could hear when, for example, you are sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car: a single, sharp, under the breath uttering of the word ’sh*t’.

Fortunately I had used Firtree as a test-bed for developing with Bazaar, a decision I am now very glad of. Suddenly I had the coding equivalent of a TARDIS and an infinite number of universes to play with. I branched off from the last ‘good’ version of Firtree and gently rolled forward in time until the naughty patch was revealed. Then, in true time-traveller style, I made a change in the past but then let the future merge in. Painless in the extreme with bazaar. Finally we reached the ‘alternate 1985′ where, far from being the apocalyptic vision I had created, all was well and no memory leaked (that I could detect).

I am far from groking Bazaar in any meaningful way (as anyone who cares to notice the fsck-ups in the Firtree tree will attest) but already I have experienced a complex branch and step-by-step merge which would have been incredibly painful with other tools.

Oh, by the way, feel free to s/Bazaar/$MY_VCS/. This is more a post of how rocking modern VCSs are, not how Bazaar is necessarily the best.

Update: An example of the process is available on my website. I’m not recommending this as the ‘Right Way’ but it worked for me.

On August 24, 2006, Wildflowers Records alternative-country artist Amy Speace stopped by Fort Collins' KRFC 88.9 FM for a live in-studio interview and performance on the station's Live@Lunch show. Now MusicDish is making 8 tracks available from that memorable show freely available in MP3 format through social networking site ReverbNation at http://www.reverbnation.com/amyspeace

The full album is available for download at http://www.musicdish.net/amyspeace/mp3/

So, LugRadio is coming to an end. The news actually, genuinely, brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye. How sad is that?

LugRadio was my first introduction to, and a primary method for discovering, so many new pieces of software which I’ve gone on to love such as Ubuntu and Clutter. I will genuinely feel the show’s absence and will feel far less informed of the ‘exciting’ events on the free desktop.

Salut, LugRadio!

The Bill Gates leaving video is another in a fine line of nice internal Microsoft videos (such as the wonderful Microsoft matrix spoof).

To provide a balanced opinion, however, I should probably link to one or two (seek to 3 mins in) of the less successful ones.

The best way to test your dog food is to eat it yourself and so this afternoon I set out to write a little PyGTK app that would use the Firtree Python bindings to allow you to pull an alpha matte via chroma key. Chroma key, for the less SFX minded amongst you, is the process whereby the green backgrounds so beloved by special effects people everywhere are ‘cut out’ and replaced by… well, whatever you want your actors to be standing in front of.

Pulling a matte, as such a process is known, is a little tricksy and requires not a little tweaking. I had in mind an app which would let you load a high-res photo, pan and zoom around it lightning fast and let you see the results of tweaking all the matting parameters in real-time. Just the sort of thing Firtree is supposed to be good at. An afternoon’s hacking later and we have this little gem:

It is a recording of the chroma key app that, as of 10 minutes ago, resides in Firtree’s examples directory. You load your image, select something that is background coloured and fiddle with some sliders. Firtree’s pixel pushing powers allow it to reflect the result in real-time. I love it when software starts to become useful and not just Another Framework TM.

This is actually the second little app I’ve written which has used Firtree. I find writing little apps like this very good for shaking out bugs and exposing use cases I hadn’t though of. The first ‘non-trivial’ Firtree app was one I wrote at work. The app displays streams from a pair of computer vision cameras and allows you to monitor the stream, record it and overlay detected features in real time. It is suprisingly useful to be able to get on-demand feedack as to whether your funcky computer vision algorithm is working :).

Update: Should anyone care, you can also browse the source to the app via launchpad.

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