Fluendo

First day at work for Michael Smith today, he still hasn’t got a blog, but I am sure we can remedy that soon. Unfortunatly due to a messup with Dell he still hasn’t gotten his laptop and will have to make do with one of the stationary machines for the time being. Anyway its good to have him inhouse, when Jan arrives will will start to have a sizeable group of people. One thing I noticed is how vulnerable you are when you are just 1-2 persons working on something, it means that if someone goes away be it vacation/sickenss or whatever things tend to stop up. With our recent additions we will become more agile and able to cope easier with changing priorities and urgent customer needs, or vacations :)

I think we will need to hire additional people quite soon with the contract pipeline we have, but our current level of outsourcing is making it not urgent at least.

GNOME Themes Extras

After a long time I found in the coming I finally managed to sit down on Sunday and work through the issues of getting the new GTK+ icon themeing working. Updated Nuvola and CVS g-t-e now have a iconrc free setup. Needs a bit more polish to be perfect, in terms of adding more stock icons etc., but I think I can do a new release soon. Hopefully I be able to integrate Jimmac’s Gorilla updates too.

Will hopefully be able to get going on the Open Clipart updating too with the new DMS system seemingly running, just need to corner Bryce on IRC first to get the details on how :)

Ogg continued

Saw people replying to my Ogg post, mostly stating what I somewhat expected, they really like to try using Ogg, but the tools are a bit raw yet. ffmpeg2theora or my own GStreamer based transcoding script gets the job done, but quality of the transcoding varies a lot, often leaving a unusable result as was Jono’s experience. Well I hope that within a couple of months we have Pitivi working so well that distro’s start bundling it and giving people a tool to transcode their DV’s and other media files into Ogg. Why must world domination be such hard work to achieve….

Migrating blog

So I am still contemplating migrating my blog over to blogs.gnome.org. I guess I am waiting for someone else to migrate over from Advogato first, so I can just steal their scripts for migrating my blog history over :)

The dying child debate technique

A common way to evoke emotion or support for something you
want to happen is to make it a matter of life and death for
a specific person, preferably a child. Multiple times I have seen people trying to get politicians to spend more money on something by parading some sick kid in front of journalists.
The problem of course is that its seldom as simple as these
heart wrenching cases want to you think. And often the examples pulled forth doesn’t hold water as they work both ways.

Now it seems this age old technique is being brought to bear on the issue of intelectual property. It started with a Bilboard article in which a Musician claim that if Creative Commons had been along when he was young then he would be dead of Aids by now. I remember reading it and thinking what a bunch of bullshit the article was.

Well the counter example is now out on
Kuro5hin with a guy telling the story of how patent law is hindering his access to medicine which his life depend on.

Of course neither of the two examples are really proving anything in regards to intelectual property, except to show that the current system creates winners and losers, like any system would. And that in some cases being a winner or a loser is a matter of life or death. I guess the real debate is wether we want life and death issues to be decided on the roulete table of IP reward systems.

Promoting Ogg

Why is it that even people closely aligned with free software or Creative Commons aren’t pushing Ogg encoded videos stronger? Only reason I can think of that isn’t sad is that they don’t have any good tools to create the Ogg files with. Hopefully when we get PiTiVi more widely distributed it will resolve that issue and much more Ogg content will appear. If Pitivi doesn’t cause a large influx of Ogg material being put online I guess I need to start harassing everyone I see posting quicktime, divx, mpeg or real movies.

Often suprised by the amount of C# development happening around GStreamer. Especially suprising as the GStreamer C# bindings are still only available from the Mono CVS repository as far as I know. Anyway I was pointed to a new media player application today called the Maxima-MediaPlayer.
Also of recent interest is Sonance which is licensed under the X/MIT license and also have its development sponsored by Novell.

Been playing music using the GStreamer 0.9 version of Jamboree today. Works well, with instant song change when next is pressed. Being rather experimental it do crash on me about once per hour, but still for something which only 2-3 people have tested so far it works well and is stable. Jan have hinted about having a Rhythmbox port to 0.9 ready soon too.

GStreamer 0.9

Things are buzzing with the 0.9 branch these days with bugs getting fixed or plugins ported non-stop. Currently have 42 plugins on my install which is a whole lot more than before I left on vacation. Also did my first successfull transcode yesterday transcoding a variable framerate video file into a static framerate videofile successfully. Since that didn’t work in 0.8 it felt like an extra victory. Nice thing is that a lot of the plugins get cleaned up as part of the porting, so the quality of the plugins are increasing a lot as part of the update.

New arrivals

Jaime arrived today and so did Michael. Jaime is staying at my place while she is looking at a place for her and Jan to stay (Jan is set to arrive within a couple of weeks, all depending on how fast the spanish embassy in Sydney work). Michael will be staying at Wim’s place while looking for a place to rent and he will be starting his work at Fluendo next monday. Hopefully we have the laptops and furniture ready for that :)

LUGRadio

Yannick and Gustavo from Nokia is interviewed on the latest LUGRadio show, be sure to listen in as its quite interesting. They also talk a bit about why they choose GTK and GNOME technologies instead of going with qtopia for instance, which was already there. The freedom that the LGPL gives, used by GTK+ was an important factor for them and I think going forward we will see how important this is in many situations.

One thing that struck me for instance, who work on multimedia stuff, is that we might not be able to do opensource Qt based applications using GStreamer (or any other multimedia framework for that matter) that ships with non-free plugins. The reason for this is that the Qt license (and I think this applies to both the GPL and the QPL) demands that all software linked to it is under a compatible license. So what we have been doing for instance with sponsoring Totem development, in order to make it work better both with free software plugins, but also of course with closed source plugins we are making, is simply not viable with Qt based software. In the sense that even if the Qt-based player where under the BSD license it would still put demands on the license of GStreamer plugins. I did try to get Markey to LGPL or GPL+exception Amarok some time ago, but maybe getting him to do so wouldn’t really help, as Qt licensing would kill the issue anyway. Could be that the QPL (as opposed to the GPL) would allow this in some form, which I will have to investigate at some point, my current memory of it is that its like the GPL but allows linking to OSI approved licensed software. Anyway, it just underscores why I feel core libraries like GUI toolkits etc., should be under licenses which puts no demands on other parts of the system.

Google

Talking about licensing. I wonder if Google have managed to put themselves into the center of a licensing storm. The recently released Google player used the Videlan client as its foundation, which is under the GPL. Something Google acknowledges. At the same time I assume Google have paid the patent holder for the use of the patents regarding mp3 and mpeg4 for instance. The problem is that these patent licenses are considered to violate the terms of the GPL, which why even if they paid all relevant patent license fee, Red Hat or Novell would never consider shipping Xine or Mplayer on their desktop offerings. Well Google is doing this, which means that either have negotiated terms for their patents use which means anyone can take the google player code and use it as the basis for their own playback system, saying that they have a fully paid up patent license courtesy of Google, or anyone with a VLC copyright can sue Google for a GPL violation. I did mail the Google email address listed for questions about their code, doubt I get any answer though as their lawyers have probably asked them to shut up about it as answering can probably only get them in deeper.

Back from England

So I am back in Barcelona today after 9 days in England. Barcelona almost felt like returning to place from a distant memory when I walked out of the airport so I guess it means it have been an eventful week.

Wolverhampton

Started out with some LUGRadio live and and paintball fun in Wolverhampton. It was great to meet people like Jono, Bastien, Rob and Ronald again. The LUGRadio team had done a good job on the conference and I think everyone there had a good time.

The Sunday paintball session was quite fun although some of the bruises I aquired can still be felt :). Also managed to guilt Jono into continue playing after he tried to wimper out of the afternoon session.

Guildford

The on Sunday evening it was down to Guildford to visit with Bastien for a few days. Had great time and also managed to get a haircut at Bastien’s local resturant. I think Bastien felt the haircut was vanity based more than need based, and I am not sure I can argue to strong against it. Went out in Guildford on Monday evening trying to local beverage and peeking at the local life in realtime. We went into London the day after and met up with Ross and some local debianites. Ate a splendid meal at Wagamama, a Japanese Noodle resturant.

Maidenhead

Leaving Guildford to go to Maidenhead on (not as virgin territory as the name might imply) I was put on the wrong train, cost me about an extra hours worth of traveltime. Also decided that the London train setup is a confusing mess. Seems they have 4-5 ‘main’ train stations. Anyway Julia met me at the Maidenhead trainstation and we headed back to her house before going out for dinner at the local italian resturant.

Cambridge
Went on a daytrip to Cambridge on Thursday to visit with Michael Meeks and family. Had a great time and it was wonderful to catch up with Michael again. Started to grow a little tired of slow brittish trains though. Back to Maidenhead in the evening where Julia had prepared dinner for me and two friends of hers from New Zealand. Seems moving to England for a while is a typical New Zealand thing as the two girls, like Julia, and another friend of hers called Amy who I met later in the week had all gone to Univeristy together and they where all now living or preparing to live in England.

Friday turned out to be a slow and thus relaxing day. A meeting I had set up got cancelled so I wandered abit around London and did a little shopping. Also went to see War of the Worlds which wasn’t to bad. Don’t understand how people can spend time shopping though, after 30 minutes at the first store I went into (happened to be the GAP) I had already spent more money than I had planned too. Chilled out in Maidenhead during the evening reading a book Bastien had lent me.

Saturday I met up with Julia and her friend Amy close to Kew Gardens. Ended up eathing lunch there before stopping by Amy’s place for Julia to pick up some stuff before going downtown London to a greek resturant to meet up with Michael , another common friend from the Borneo trip. Eat some great food and drank quite a bit of greek beer.

Sunday was going home day, and me and Julia took a walk around Maidenhead as my airplane was leaving relativly late in the evening. Told Julia how I felt about her in what I guess could have been used as a scene in a chick-flick, only problem was that the result wasn’t as desirable as one could have wished. To follow up on the chick-flick theme I guess they stopped making scripts like that in the sixties or something as the marketing people discovered the audience wanted happy endings. Wasn’t all bad I guess, will at least let me feel I made a good attempt, and with these things its always the things you didn’t do you regret.

Anyway back to the house and grab my stuff before heading off to the airport. Turned out 3,5 hours wasn’t enough time for taking the trains from Maidenhead to Gatwick, so I ended the day with coughing up 200 £ for a new ticket and a hotelroom for the night..