One project using GStreamer which I think is really cool, but doesn’t get enough pimping, is Togra. Togra is a framework that allows you to combine GStreamer media handling with 3D objects using OpenGL. One example of cool usage is the spinning movie cube which was worked on for linux.conf.au. The idea was to have one camera in every room where someone was speaking and then have those video feeds play on each side of the cube. The sound would then fade in and fade out for each room as the cube spun around. This spinning cube was then shown on a big screen in the reception. Don’t remember if they managed to pull it all together in terms of getting the needed hardware, but the cube works and maybe it would be cool to try to get it going for GUADEC this year.

Anyway, Togra allows you do to all these quickly and easily in Python, so if you need to put something together to pimp your own coolness at the next LUG meeting make sure to take a look at togra.

Maemo article

Newsforge has a good article on Maemo and Nokia. The article gives a good insight into the process I think is happening at Nokia where the success and quality of the Maemo platform is causing the whole organisations thinking around software, copyright and patents to change. One could always wish for the change to happen faster, but I think the current development is inreversible. As bigger and bigger parts of the industry starts depending on open source and open source solutions takes over internally as being the most important businesswise I think we will at the same time see a change in these companies from being agressive ‘pro-IP’ to being ‘pro-competition’. See this happening with IBM too, for every month that has gone by over the last two-three years their public comments on software patents for instance have become closer to that of the open source community. Still a long way to go for sure, but the direction of movement seems clear to me. Other companies too, have at least begun not vocally supporting software patents, hopefully they soon start advocating doing away with them as they simply don’t work. Maybe Sun and Jonathan Schwartz wants to be first one out?