Another day with lots of stuff happening. Wim added some queing and a status toolbar and info to his Java applet. The office teststream already use the updated applet.

Jan had a really great
screenshot of running a lot of visualization plugins
after he cleaned up the GStreamer visualization plugins. Rather nifty command line pipeline to display those plugins in his terminal too.

Bilboed posted a nice updated shoot of the Pitivi NLE. Looking sweeter by the day.

Worked on various job related contracts today, looking forward to being able to announce those as I think the community will be very happy about them.

Also took the time to reply to the Foundation election candidate questions. Think I was the third one out to do so, so I guess it mean I am not a total slacker :)

Also did some QA work over the last few days, very happy to see that Benjamin’s and Ronald’s ALSA fixes cleared up my issues using ALSA. Hopefully they solve 100% CPU problems for other people as well.

We got a new toy into the office today, but I am letting Thomas announce it when he has some cool stuff to show around it :)

Also found a new GStreamer based application today, Eina

Seems an basic webpage for Pitivi the GStreamer based Non-linear Video editor is available. Since working on Pitivi will be one of Edwards main tasks when he arrives at Fluendo in March I hope we can make it an application a lot of people want to use.

Spent the end of last week with Wim and the Imendio guys. Some people just pop up in the strangest of places. Then again I know Mikael, Anders and Richard go to all countries where they expect to see scantily clad women so I guess I shouldn’t have been suprised at seeing them.

Decided to try and get my co-workers at Fluendo to join me in signing up for a green card course at one of Barcelona’s many golf courses. The excitement towards the idea hasn’t been through the roof yet, but I hope that will happen once I get them onto the field :)

Playing with JDS and more

Working on a bugfix release of the flumotion streaming server. Starting too look nicer as more and more robustness fixes and polish gets in. Thomas did a very nice hack today to get the hardware name into the GUI today, so instead of just having /dev/video0 you are now told it is a Logitech Webcam for instance. I did a teststream from my extremely low quality webcam today using the server.
viewing the stream in 3 different players
. It is nice to see that Theora support is getting quite widespread :)

audio cd playing does not work for me with Fedora 3; and it looks like /dev/cdrom is not generated for me; cause it a DVD? Recreatig /dev/cdrom fixed only part of the problem. need to investigate more and file a report.

Also tested the JDS livecd Callum linked to. It works well, in fact some stuff feels snappier than on my FC3 install. Guess they do some pre-loading or ramdisk magic to make that happen.I also think the wide ‘start’ button is a nice feature as its is easier to hit then the small hat/foot I struggle with today.

One not so nice thing about JDS is that they include a lot of different technologies, but does nothing to make them look relativly the same. Why for instance are the Java apps not using GTK+ look and feel? And a theme for Yast/Qt so it looks like the Sun GTK+ would make the admin tools a little less alien.

So I posted my candidacy for the GNOME foundation board today. Hopefully we will have enough candidates to make it a real vote, think I would feel better not getting on the board after being part of a large field of candidates than getting on the board due to there not being enough candidates to make it a real election. Anyway I hope anyone reading this will vote for me :)

Zaheer have gotten quite some downloads of his Caster live-cd. He only announced it in his blog, so I guess planetgnome actually has a decent readership. Next step is for zaheer to start merging the DVB plugins for gstreamer :)

Iain is working on getting ding-caching abstraction into GStreamer. It is the last thing needed before we can make GNOME only rely on GStreamer instead of directly on a sound server. This will make the transition to using polypaudio much smoother and it will also make sure that when someone wants to ouput directly to their soundcards, then everything gets sent that way, not just most of the stuff. We just have to hope that the iain@gnomedorks.org email address I set him up with will not distract him to much from the hacking :)

Discovered that the new Novell desktop comes with alsa disabled in regards to gstreamer. Had hoped that Suse being ‘the’ alsa company would have patched our plugin instead of fixing it. Anyway Ronald will be working on making the alsa plugin robust now that we have chained ogg support working in GStreamer CVS.

Also happy to see Bastien propose Totem/GStreamer for inclusion in GNOME. Would be happier if he had tried the solution himself, but I guess you can’t win em all :)

Also noted that Martin Soto commited his new cothreads based scheduler into GStreamer CVS this weekend. Hopefully this means he started on merging upstream his changes to GStreamer to get ‘perfect’ DVD support going.

Jan is hacking on annodex support for GStreamer. Guess we even try to add support for it in the java applet player. Hopefully we can so do fun stuff like the clickable tv casts seen in Starship troopers. ‘Want to learn more?’ :)

Finally got my domains moved over to apestaart. Hopefully I get email working again soon so my gnome.org mail don’t start bouncing. Since it is set up now I guess I have no more excuses for not getting enterprisegnome.com going :)

Already up and running on Fedora 3, think it is the first time I am doing some before the offical release :) Now is only Thomas will hurry up about getting updated rpms with webcam and wireless drivers ready :) The Nvidia rpm from livna already installed :)

Congrats to Eugenia and gnomefiles for reaching over 500 projects listed the last few days. gnomefiles has become a daily stop for me to check out what new apps have been released and which have been updated.

Checked out nvidia’s webpage today in relation to some special effects software. Saw
an image
on their frontpage and thought WOW, the time has come for me to get one of those modded machines if they have started looking that cool. A second look made me realize it was just a promotional drawing from nvidia and not a real box :)

mallum posted some job adds from Nokia on advogato for people to do some GNOME style multimedia programming. I thought I repost the
offer 1
and
offer 2
for people reading Planet GNOME and Planet GStreamer. I think people looking for a job will find Nokia’s plans in this area very interesting and rewarding to work on.

I updated the appliation list today. Adding a lot of new projects. Think Murray will be very happy to see Towel for instance, which is using gtkmm :)

Yesterday it was a public holiday in Spain so I went over to Wim’s place to watch some movies on the projector. Thomas came over for the first film of the evening, LOTR Fellowship of the Ring extended edition. To say that the film was a hit with Thomas I guess is a bit of an exhageration :)

The second movie Wim and I watched was Kiss of the Dragon by Luc Besson (staring Jet Li and Bridget Fonda). I have to say I am getting rather disapointed with mr.Besson. His movies seems less and less inspired lately. I loved the 5th element, Jeanne D’arc and the first Taxi movie. The two Taxi followups and now Kiss of the Dragon seemed like they are made without any real feeling, just pumping out cliche like movies.

Worked a bit on improving the GStreamer webpages today. They are actually not so bad, but some things tend to become old and need updating. I will also do a overhaul of the GStreamer application webpage over the next few days to add all the new applications using GStreamer that are popping up.

Did a small meeting at Fluendo today in order to try and figure out how to proceed short term. Always a challenge in a new company to balance between your long term and short term goals. For instance there are some items we can do short term in regards our products which has instant commerical appeal. On the other side doing these will detract attention from our long term commerical goals. We will have a follow up meeting with Julien tomorrow to make some decisions.

Noticed Animal Shelter management software popping up on gnomefiles today. I always thought that the narrow niche applications would be the ones never to go opensource, but I guess I have just been proven wrong :)

I also request that anyone reading my blog ask johan dahlin aka jdahlin on IRC on when the first release of his gst-python and gtk-python based video transcoding application will be out. He needs some encouragement :)