I received an email tonight from a user who characterized me as “impolite” for not replying to his previous email in a timely manner (two days). I make an effort to take constructive criticism in stride, and am always looking for ways to improve the quality of the free volunteer services I provide to the community. In that light, I took a few minutes to take an inventory of the various things I did this week to see if I could have avoided the dissatisfied email.
So, what have I been doing in the last week?
- Gained access to Andreas Lunderhage’s debugging environment, analyzed the USB traces and successfully debugged the Pinnacle Hybrid Stick 320e so it now works (a tree has been setup for a PULL request). Also found a bug in the em28xx driver along the way.
- Analyzed the code for the PCTV 70e so I can get that device working. Remote debugging in Timo Karhu’s remote environment scheduled for next Monday.
- Spent the evening debugging a DVB-T locking issue with on the Afatech AF9013 demod that only happened with mplayer, using a remote environment provided by Jelle de Jong. Problem isolated and maintainer informed of the issue (as well as finding two bugs in mplayer).
- Continued work on the new xc4000 driver for the PCTV 340e. The stick needs to be up and running by Sunday since I’ve been waiting nine weeks to get access to a DVB-T generator and I don’t know when I will have access again.
- Rebuilt my Windows environment so I can get the i2c analyzer running and can debug outstanding issues with three different tuners.
- Sent 51 emails, including emails to linux-media, video4linux, and various users emailing off-list with questions and problems with the hvr-950q support.
- Review and analysis into the viability of adding support for the Empire Portable Media Station.
- Continued collection of information on a reported issue with em28xx audio and Fedora 11 with PulseAudio.
- Answered Mauro’s questions about the colorspace and output format registers on the em2750
- Evaluated the work required for dib0700 analog support, including reviewing Michael Krufky’s dvb-usb analog tree, reading of the CCIR-656 spec, and trying to identify how audio is managed between the cx25843 and the dib0700.
- Responded to emails from three different people looking for saa7136 support, and tried to determine what their requirements actually were.
- Dealt with a couple of support issues related to the Terratec Cinergy T XS USB support I pushed upstream last week.
- Continued looking into the 950q colorspace problem and an unconfirmed regression in xc5000 reported by a user.
Now if only I didn’t have to spend nine hours a day at my real job…
Avoid responding to private e-mails. I usually drop ’em like a hot rock.
OSS is best developed in public for a number of reasons, one of the biggest being
that you loose the multiplier of a community being able to step in and help shoulder
the load. Granted that multiplier ebbs and flows, and may not be too much greater than
1.00 at times; but in private email exchanges you force it downward to 1.0. (or maybe lower)
Hey Andy,
I know a number of LinuxTV developers who tend to do that, and I can now better appreciate how they got to that point. And I have certainly received emails where my first thought was “This is just a user not knowing what he is doing – anybody who follows the mailing list could have answered this.”
I guess the answer is I need to get more diligent about doing a reply adding the ML to the cc:, and telling people they should be sending their questions there. I make an active effort to not just route emails to /dev/null, but of course it does happen sometimes unintentionally.
>Analyzed the code for the PCTV 70e so I can get that device working. Remote debugging >in Timo Karhu’s remote environment scheduled for next Monday.
Do you made some progress on the PCTV 70e?
Hi Torsten,
I was unable to get it working remotely. I did actually get my hands on a 70e board last week (thanks to a developer at PCTV), but haven’t had any time to work on it.
Devin