Stress

So here we come, today I consider myself stressed as I wasn’t in the last months. No I’m not yet going to burn out, but I might take a day or two off, as this week was full of real life stuff too by its own.

First of all, seems like I caught a cold, and although last night I was able, by going to sleep soon, to reduce its impact, today I’m not sure I’m going to resist too much, and I might get worse. And this is bad because Saturday night I should have gone out with friends… well with some friends and someone I don’t consider a friend anymore, and that I could just punch in the face if I’m left alone with him (add to that another friend of mine who wants me and this no-more-friend to go along well again).

Then there’s the new job, that’s well paid, and interesting, although I have to restart looking at LKML, and in general study the kernel structure as it involves hacking at it (thing that I told myself in the past I would avoid as much as I can; seems like I cannot, as I need a job and this is what I’ll be paid to do)… I was going to look for a book on this to buy (if I remember correctly, Greg wrote one before) to buy, but then I remembered that my sister still has my access token for the online banking, which means that I cannot buy anything online with the pre-paid card.

Also, even if well paid, in this moment it won’t give me enough operating space to allow myself to buy the new box; luckily a friend of mine will give me a 1.4G Athlon box that I’ll be using for a while at least. For the name I’ve decided on Prakesh, Gul Dukat’s starship (yes, it’s a Cardassian one, I never said I limited myself to Federation ships). This means that my work on Gentoo/FreeBSD will not end at all.

Then there’s the stress coming from being a developer itself, like waking up every day and seeing at least six channels where you were highlighted while sleeping (I should probably just stop using IRSSI proxy, and close Konversation when I go to sleep for good). Plus there’s xine that is really getting on my nerves. I’ve been working on the FontConfig stuff, but FontConfig has no documentation a part a reference that summarises everything like “foo_init initialises foo” and stop there; nobody seems to care to help on this from the xine team, but when I ask for changing SCM to something less ancient than CVS, something that does not make you go crazy trying to get a branch to work on, there’s a council telling us that there’s no reason to move out of CVS. Xine council, you don’t see it, more likely, and that’s because you seem not to do much lately.. if it wasn’t for Darrent, we would still be with a completely bugged xine-lib-1.1.1 release!

Oh and the magical thing; playing MP3 with FFmpeg still work “mostly”, although a lot of stuff does not seem to work when it comes to the audio stream of a video file… seems like a solution was suggested by Michael Niedermayer in ffmpeg-devel today, but the av_parser_init() function returns NULL when it was not supposed to do so… (okay I found this one, there was a function overloaded inside xine when it shouldn’t have been there, fixed now, but MP3s still has errors).

Then there’s the KDE release, that’s late, and the usual fools that wants pre-release, who insist on unmasking KDE from package.mask and then come crying to me that it’s not on mirrors anywhere…. Sorry folks, but I don’t like you, nor I like the fools who wanted hidden visibility before GCC supported it decently, nor I like the idiots who still replaces kde.eclass to add the stupid kdenewldflags useflag (that’s pointless as I explained before, too), nor I like the ones who uses overlaid ebuilds and then complains if I say to them that it’s not our fault if GCC 4.1 isn’t able to compile a patched version of kdesktop. Sure, it’s not that better when devs ask users to confirm bugs on versions that are NOT available?

A deep breath, and then I’ll be working on this again… I cannot burn out now, not only because of the job, but before that because a part the users listed above, I know there are good users and is for them that I work on this 🙂