Monthly Archives: September 2009

Computer missery

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So after my old laptop starting having hickups a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time for me to get with the
times and get myself a new machine. Due to heavy peer pressure at the office I ended up choosing a Lenovo Thinkpad x200s. The machine arrived and I was kind of excited to have such a nice, small and nimble system. And having gotten a Norwegian keyboard for it I could finally write œ,ø and å with ease again. Unfortunately as it turned out the suspend and resume functionality of the machine wasn’t quite at the level I expected, or rather it tended to suspend much better than it was able to resume, which kinda sucked. And considering it was not a especially cheap machine I felt it was rather unacceptable. So after switching back and forth between misc linux distributions and Vista, and doing a couple of bios upgrades, I decided it was time to send the machine back to Lenovo as I assumed it had to be some kind of hardware issue.

In the meantime it was back to my old Asus. Which would have been fine apart from two things. First of all the 3rd party Maplin power supply I got when the official Asus one broke has a built in fan, often making a sound so loud that a helicopter could use it as sound cover. But an even bigger irritation is that it seems the plug is a bit faulty so I know end up having to press the plug continually with my finger to have it give me laptop power, which as one might guess is somewhat of a hindrance when using the machine.

So now I am left in a situation where I spend my day cursing Asus, Maplin and Lenovo in turn for the misery I am in, at least until my new machine hopefully will be returned in working order sometime next week.

My laptop misbehaving would not be such an issue normally during the weekend, but this weekend I need to do some correspondence on it, as I am trying to sort out getting a new housemate after Ian sadly, but understandably, decided after 3 Months of commuting to London that it was an soul consuming situation for him and that combining living in Cambridge with working in London wasn’t something that he could continue doing.

Urgent bugfix release of Transmageddon

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Seems I did a very classic mistake with the new Transmageddon release I did this weekend. I was about to release, but at the last minute I decided to add MPEG PS support as it was ‘only a few lines of code’. As it turns out those few lines where enough to break the profile support and thus things like the iPod profile ended up broken.

So a new 0.13 release is now available fixing the profiles again. And to show the world I haven’t learned the lesson I also added drag and drop support in this version. So you can drag and drop a file from Nautilus onto Transmageddon and it will be put into the filechooser for you. This feature came about due to extensive nagging from Stuart Langridge and cut and paste code from the pygtk FAQ :)

So if you tried 0.12 and the profiles didn’t work for you, try 0.13

New Transmageddon release

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Finally managed to sit down today and clear up all the lose ends I had left in the code since GUADEC. For instance in my mind remuxing was ‘done, but when I started testing and looking at the code this was not the case at all :). To celebrate these cleanups I pushed Transmageddon 0.12 today and I hope it will work reasonably well for people. The major new feature available is the remuxing support, which will let you keep the original audio or video track in the file. Stability should also be a little bit better as I added more error checking, but there is still some way to go there. Things should work fine as long as you got all the GStreamer plugins needed, but if you don’t your success will vary on what type of plugin is missing :)

Also added ASF and MPEG PS support in this release, but in order to create those you need either latest release of gst-plugins-bad for ASF or git master for MPEG PS.

Transmageddon now also sports its own icon thanks to Emily and Liam of fightingcrane.com, a big thanks for that.

Screenshot of the latest release also available of course.

Sorry for taking so long to get this, but I was trying to get DVD ripping support in, but that effort stalled unfortunately. Focus for next release will be to switch from Glade to GtkBuilder and add some more device profiles.

New Collabora website launched

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Today we launched the new Collabora website. I am really happy with it as it much better represents who we are and what we are doing now. Collabora is a fairly sizeable company these days with over 40 developers and 3 offices, not only that we had a few cases with the old website where people have told us that they looked at it and assumed we didn’t offer the kind of services they where looking for, hopefully that is a thing of the past with this new website.

Another goal with the new website is to make it easier to update, so hopefully we will be able to both add more content more easily now and of course improve the text that is already there as we go forward. A big thanks to our project manager Sumana who has been slaving away to get the new site launched, writing a lot of the copy herself.

Anyway, I go back to adoring our new Collabora website now :)