Libav 10 and my first year with the team

I am very glad to announce that Libav 10 has been released!

This has a bunch of features that I contributed to, in particular regarding stereoscopic video and interlaced filtering, but more importantly this release has the work of an awesome group of people which has been carried out for a whole year. This is the magic of open source!

I joined the group more or less one year ago, with some patches regarding an obscure H.264 specification which I then later reimplemented in HEVC and then I wrote a few filters I needed and then designed an API and then, wow! A whole year passed without me noticing, and I am still around, sending patches to the same group of people who welcomed someone who had problems with shifting values (sad but true story)!

I met the team both at VDD and FOSDEM and they've been the most exciting conferences I ever went to (and I went to a lot of them). I couldn't believe I was with the devteam of my favourite multimeida opensource projects I've been following since I was a kid! Until a year ago, I saw the names from the commits and the blogposts from both VideoLAN and Libav projects and I had been thinking "Oh wouldn't it be so cool to be like one of them".

The answer is yes, it definitely would, and it's something that can happen if one is really committed in it! The Libav Info page states "Being a committer is a duty, not a privilege", but it sure does feel like one.

Thanks for this exciting year guys, I look forward to the next ones.

MacVim and gVim and Vim configuration

Remember that if you use gVim or MacVim the configuration file is different! GUIs for vim read the options in .gvimrc instead of .vimrc.
However most of the times it's enough to have a simple simlink from one to another, so just do

ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.gvimrc

Note that just deleting .gvimrc won't be enough, as defaults will be loaded then.

Strage issue with Fastweb and SSH/GitHub

I recently changed my Internet Service Provider and suffered from a strange connectivity issue.

When connecting to SSH on Fastweb network I got some random hangs and especially on GitHub I couldn't either fetch/clone or anything.

The solution is quite strange, as found on this forum, and requires to add a flag to every connection made, -oIPQoS=cs0

However it's not possible (or I haven't found a way how) to set connection parameters for git, so I had to rename the system ssh into ssh_right and supply this simple script instead:

$ cat /usr/bin/ssh
#!/bin/bash

exec ssh_right -oIPQoS=cs0 $@