When the world centers around Barcelona
Been a busy last few days. Matthew Allum of OpenedHand fame came to town on Monday with his wife. Yesterday Tim Ney arrived, to have some meetings with the organisers of next year’s GUADEC, and Oyvind aka Pippin popped into our offices too for a visit. So we ended up going out to dinner last night at what turned out to be a good, but rather expensive resturant (45€ per person for a 3 course dinner with drinks).
I joined Tim at the meeting with the local GUADEC organisers last yesterday and they do have an impressive locale available. I think we can be sure it will be very well organised and the infrastructure is above anything we had before. The biggest challenge is sorting out GUADEC in a way which makes sure we don’t drown alongside the other conference which has a daily attendance of around 2500 people last year. The organisers seemed willing to let us have the cellar for mostly ourselves which meant a footbal field size open room and 5 conference rooms. In addition to that we would have our keynotes etc., in the main room which I think had seating for at least a thousand people.
GUADEC for next year is only early planing stage now, but I think doing a GUADEC for people in or interested in joining the GNOME community in the cellar should be our goal and then try to do some more outreach kinda talks as part of the other conference, as it is already well attended by local businness and government.
I have in general been in favour of ditching the current version of our user day for quite some time, as it haven’t worked very well IMHO. But for next year, where GUADEC will be part of this larger conference, keeping some remains of it around might be a good idea.
SVG going forward
Great news from the SVG camp. First of all thanks to the hard work of Caleb librsvg is now features plugable rendering backends. With Dom and Caleb doing the final needed auto*magic yesterday. Which means that instead of being tied to libart (which have served us faithfully for the last years) we are now ready to have other rendering backends implemented. Carl Worth of Cairo fame have already sworn a holy oath that he will now implement a Cairo rendering backend for librsvg. Which means we can have a gradual migration to Cairo as our primary rendering backend for librsvg. It also turned out we had a few problems with how to handle SVG icons when used as GTK+ stock icons, but Matthias Clasen fixed that just hours after I reported it to him, thanks Matthias!
GStreamer 0.9
Things are flying by in GStreamer 0.9 CVS. Core issues are being sorted out at break-neck speed. In the core the major issues are taken care of and people are commiting more polish type things currently, fixing small irritants left from the 0.8 days. New plugins are being ported over from 0.8 at a quick pace too and I expect to be able to playback most of the important video and audio formats early august at the latest.
Nokia 770
Got our hands on a couple of Nokia 770 devices yesterday. Will be interesting to get some development work done on the actual device, like getting a working Ogg implementation for the Texas Instruments DSP CPU’s.
The arrival of Jan
The Spanish embassy in Sydney finally came through and Jan got his work visa yesterday. So he will be arriving here in Barcelona on Saturday. It will be great to finally have Jan around in person, as its been a long and frustrating wait for both him and us to get his work permit in order.