Cool things are happening all around. I mentioned the Rhythmbox support for DAAP some days ago and I have know also learned that DAAP support for Maemo and the 770 is under development. Which means you can listen to anything shared from Rhythmbox or iTunes (apart from DRM’ed crap) using your Nokia 770 device.
Flumotion and GStreamer 0.9
Wingo managed to get Flumotion running with GStreamer 0.9 on Friday which means that we hopefully can do a new release of Flumotion soon which runs both with GStreamer 0.8 and GStreamer 0.9/0.10.
Fluendo plugins beta
Also been working on preparing our beta program over the last couple of days as we are preparing to launch our first set of plugins upon an unsuspecting world very soon. Lot of ‘fun’ work writing licensing text and similar, but luckily that is mostly a one time task per plugin.
LiveSupport
Got informed of a new GStreamer using project today, LiveSupport which is software for managing a radio station. They also started on a SMIL element for GStreamer as part of that effort which might be a better suited starting point for GStreamer SMIL support than the Ambulant project I mentioned in an earlier blog. Of course some licensing issues involved as usual, but hopefully we can get those sorted out :)
Desktop eyecandy
Been thinking a lot about how to approach the desktop eyecandy issue. Think I will start by fixing up my old Colony theme (which is a dark futuristic theme) and see where it stands today. When I made it (and abandoned it) many months ago it did trigger some ugly bugs which hopefully are fixed by now. I also talked shortly with some of the people in #gnome-art about it the other day, among them Star which hadn’t been around for a long while. Think the idea of asking artists to provide desktop screenshot mockups displaying features they would like to have available when themeing would be a good start. We would also need to get some coders onboard to help file patches against relevant projects as I think just filing bug reports would not be enough to get this moving. So if there are any interested hackers out there please mail me at uraeus(at)gnome.org or come to the #gnome-art channel on Gimpnet. Helping out with this would probably be a great way to get involved with GNOME hacking in general as it would expose you to a lot of different modules.
Jan and Jaime’s going away party
So Jan and Jaime are organizing a party today as they are returning to Australia in a few days to get married, go on honeymoon and eat vegemite. This means they will not be back in Barcelona until November. Wine and Cheese have been promised, some of it probably even from the Wine and Cheese region of France.
Election in Norway
Yesterday there was a national election back in Norway. Didn’t get around to voting at the consulate here in Barcelona so I guess I have no right to complain, but I will do so anyway…argh the socialists won :(, whats worse is that they won due to how the election system works not because the majority wanted them as they actually got fewer votes than the sitting right wing government.
Yeah, it’s too bad that the socialists won. Now that the gass price is allready at 12kr/liter I can’t imagine what the “commies” are going to do with it now. The only good thing is that they want to use more $ on fiber throughout Norway.
Espen
It’s nice someone is thinking eye candy stuff in GNOME community.
If you look Windows Vista’s screenshots and it’s theme, it looks much more interesting than for example Clearlooks. Personally I like Clearlooks, but it is pretty dull and after Vista it’s not interesting at all.
And those screenshots are pre-beta2 so there isn’t even Vista’s real capabilities in use (beta2 has them).
I’m a bit worried that GNOME will look gray and nineteen and people are not interested it at all when they see it.
http://www.win-vista.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=62&mode=&order=0&thold=0
http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=30382&category=main
Well, thats what you get when your concern is society, and not your fucking ego.
It’s truly moronic to complain about gas prices when alot of people suffer in the worlds richest country. Oh, and believe me, they didn’t win “because the election system works for them” (cf. http://www.aftenposten.no/valg2005/resultater/landsoversikt.html and count.) Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with socialism, get your act together, and think of someone else for a change.
Mr. Anonymous, he never said “for them”. I would defend Christian and to explain to you why you are wrong, but I think I’ll pass, seeing as you are clearly in a minority, both on this blog and in Norway.
Wouldn’t Topaz be the perfect opportunity to take the eye-candy leap, similarly to what KDE seems to be doing with their Appeal project? GNOME 2 is quite conservative, and from an “objective” outsider’s point of view, it would seem to be a good marketing ploy to make GNOME 3 more mainstream than what GNOME 2 achieved. A fresh start with a fresh graphical foundation seems to be the targets of Windows, KDE, and Mozilla’s Gecko for the future.
If you count the votes and not the mandates, the left wing still is bigger when you bring in RV, which didn’t get any mandates. Who would also very lightly be supportive of the left wing coalition, in contrast to FrP regarding the Bondevik issue. So I think it would be wrong to say that they won on false premises.
Foxtrot: I beg to differ. Please do yourself a favor, and count the votes. Did you know, that in a recent poll, 88% of the current faculty of the universities of norway and its students, would vote in favor of the socialists? The “socialist movement” in Norway is quite far from the idea of communism, and there seems to be a lot of confusion about this abroad. I always favor people over money. Am I bad?
The numbers that said the socialists had fewer votes than the right wing came from Bondevik, the guy that just lost the election. He counted one party (FrP) that clearly had stated they would not support a new goverment with him in charge. At the same time he forgot to count the votes one of the small left wing parties (RV) got.
The numbers are stated in this article if you read norwegian:
http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=290187
Basically, if you count the “two options” people could vote for, the left side won by several hundred thousand votes. If you count every right side party against every left side party, the left side still won by approx. 17 000 votes.
And I must agree with the previous statement made by anonymous. The left side in norway are not communists, far from it. And btw, I’m glad they won, I voted for them.
“I guess I have no right to complain, but I will do so anyway…argh the socialists won :(“
Well, I don’t have the right to vote in general elections in Norway, but at least with the socialists back in power there’ll hopefully be less posturing, scapegoating, evangelism funding, special interest pandering, “phallic” money-wasting prestige projects and retro-Thatcherite policy projects. The one good thing which happened, and which got a storm of criticism from the populist peanut gallery, was the restaurant/bar smoking ban.
Let’s just hope the socialists can reign in some of their own special interest groups and deal properly with the state-owned, under-regulated near-monopolies in various sectors.