Monthly Archives: July 2007

Antibiotics

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So after spending 8 days sick after returning from the UK I managed to get myself to a doctor yesterday. Got set up with a package of antibiotics which seems to be working pretty well. Still not 100% well, but at least I don’t feel like a bulldogs chew toy anymore either.

In terms of the new company things are moving forward at a brisk pace and I hope to be speaking with a local graphics designer I know this week, in order to have a nice logo and profile created for the company before we announce it.

Things are also moving rapidly forward on the moving front. Alia has been checking out various moving companies as she and Zaheer will share a moving truck with me, and I contacted a couple of storage companies today to start getting some information on pricing and availability. Know that my energy is starting to return thanks to the antibiotic I also hope to get moving on the UK room soon.

Another year another GUADEC

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Had a great time at GUADEC this year, better than expected even as I was feeling a bit worn out and tired before it got rolling. Meeting the other members of the community again and hearing about all the plans and efforts underway is incredible energizing and gives renewed energy for ones own part of the greater effort.

Seems tighter integration with internet services and technologies was the topic of the conference.Havoc’s Online desktop of course catching the most attention, but there where other efforts presented too, like Spyro and of course the work the Songbird guys are doing. I also think Conduit will have an important role in our new direction. Of course the question now is what ideas we from the GStreamer community can bring to the table to move this even further forward.

Currently visiting Tim and Heather at their place in Bristol, but flying down to Barcelona this evening. Think the coming weeks will be hectic as in addition to getting the new company rolling I will be packing for my end of August move to the UK. On top of that I have Zeeshan and his girlfriend Ansku coming down for a visit mid-August.

Managed to catch a slight cold here in sunny brittain, hopefully it will clear up once I get back to the sauna which is Barcelona.

Asus Pro31S and Linux

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So I recently purchased an Asus PRO31S laptop and I figured I should report on how it plays with Linux in case other people out there are looking at the machine also. The specs are really nice using the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset, nvidia graphics, lightscribe capable DVD writer, Wireless card supporting up to 802.11n. It also sports a built in camera above the screen, built-in bluetooth and DVI out.

I am writing this entry on the laptop so obviously it do work, but I have to admit getting it set up was a much bigger challenge than I expected. The first problem was that no Linux distribution was able to properly detect and access the DVD drive. As you might guess this is slightly painful when trying to install linux as the DVD based installs fail as soon as the install for the first time tries to access the DVD drive. Managed to get latest Fedora installed in the end by using Network install. Once I had the core system installed I realized I needed the very latest proprietary nvidia driver to get X working at all, version 100.14.11. Problem is that the system seems unable to have the X display reset, so if I start the system with the graphical boot loader or try to go into a console I just get a black screen. So ctrl+alt+f1 etc., is not currently available and if I have the graphical boot enabled I will only get a black screen instead of the gdm login screen.

The Intel wireless cards works, well sorta. It seems to consider the signal strength very weak even if I am sitting next to the wireless router. With the original Fedora 7 kernel I needed to manually install the updated kernel driver from Intel, but with current kernel updates it seems to work fine out of the box apart from the signal strength issue. While I am not 100% sure at this point I also think the signal strength issue is what is making Skype etc., useless on the laptop.

The Asus also comes with its own annoying startup sound, you can turn it of in the bios, but it seems doing that causes the sound card to not initialize properly or something under linux, giving you zero volume sound.

Things which seems to work perfectly however for me on the laptop is the smartcard reader and the bluetooth support. The camera also seems to work fine with latest kernel updates.

Suspend partially works in the sense that I do seem able to suspend and then resume the system, but things like the wireless networking did not seem to want to resume again.

So the current status is that I have a useable laptop for my day to day needs, but there are still a lot of things that aren’t working fully. Hopefully the driver issues will sort themselves out over the next Months, but at this point in time it is not a laptop I would recommend for a great out-of-the-box linux experience.

The Incredible Summer of Code students

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One thing I wanted to do for a while, is write up an entry praising this years Summer of Code students working on GStreamer related projects. The success rate of a Summer of Code project is a highly uncertain thing for a variety of reasons including things like overly optimistic time estimates, underestimation of the difficulty in doing the task at hand, bad/missing communication between mentor and student and so on. And of course even in the cases where a student manages to meet the objective goal of the summer project it do not necessarily mean that the upstream project will be able to merge the results without further work.

Anyway, this year things seems to be progressing extremely well with few or no major hickups.

Michael Sheldon have been steadily progressing on integrating Telepathy and Jokosher and his recent screenshots of his progress are truly exiting. Applications taking advantage of the advanced infrastructure that has been built to do some innovative things is something we wanted to see happen for a long time and this one has also been on the blue-sky plans for Jokosher from early on. Some nice screenshots available here and here.

Sebastian Droge have been hacking on improving our infrastructure for doing media editing/manipulating applications as part of his Summer of Code and most of his fixes are already in GStreamer CVS. He is currently working on fixing the long term painful issue of accurate seeking in mp3 files, which has been causing pain and problem for both Pitivi and Jokosher for a long while. Not a highly screenshootable effort, but none the less a very critical one.

Thanks to the incredible work that Brandon Lewis has been doing on Pitivi as part of his Summer of Code we now have cutting in Pitivi which is a major milestone in getting Pitivi to a stage where its actually useful and not only showing a lot of promise. More on that including a screenshot in Edward’s blog.

I guess you all have read Daniel Siegel’s great blog entries outlining the development of Cheese. This photoboot like application just kicks ass and what is more I am sure we will be able to resuse a lot of the work of Cheese in for instance Empathy as that efforts gears up to take on iChat in the blingy chat client space.

Alessandro Decina has also been kicking ass on improving GStreamer’s DVB support, which he is working on for the Freevo project. He is initially focusing on DVB-S, but to make sure those of us viewing DVB-T didn’t get left out in the cold, I bought a DVB card for my own money and sent of to Alessandro :)

So to sum up, you guys rock!

My contact information and more

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After my last blog entry where I let it be known that a group of us left Fluendo I realized that I had forgotten to put up my new (old) contact information. So people who need to reach me/us can contact me on uraeus*at*gnome*org.

I also want to say thank you to all those who sent us emails and messages of support and best wishes, much appreciated.