Collabora Multimedia at GUADEC

The full Collabora Multimedia crew is in The Hague this week for GUADEC and our annual get together. It is the first time all 12 of us are together and its nice to spend some time face to face to get to know each other beyond IRC.

Currently doing a little hackfest at our hotel, pushing forward some cool stuff like echo cancellation, PiTiVi and more.

GStreamer Conference 2010

The preparations for the GStreamer 2010 conference is moving ahead at full speed. Today I was able to put the speakers list and program online showing out strong lineup of presenters and topics.

The actual GStreamer conference website is here for those of you who missed it the first time.

So be sure to mark 26th of October in your calendar so you can attend.
There are some great GStreamer related talks that will happen as part of
the CE Linux conference too, but I will wait until that program has been announced before letting you know more about those :)

OpenOffice and GStreamer

Was happy to see this OpenOffice and GStreamer blog entry today about how OpenOffice has chosen GStreamer to power the multimedia support in OpenOffice going forward. While users of OpenOffice on Linux have been able to enjoy GStreamer support for quite some time thanks to the efforts of Novell, it is still good to see that the upstream project is also coming around to officially supporting this. Currently only enabled by default for Unix/Linux systems I hope we will see it used on Windows and on MacOS X eventually. A big welcome to the OpenOffice community into the GStreamer community :)

One man against the elements

Every once in a while a man is faced with what seems like an insurmountable obstacle, at that point he has two choices, give up and despair or tackle the challenge head on. Yesterday I was faced with such an obstacle and in honour of my mountain dwelling ancestors I did the right thing and of course took on the challenge.

So what peril came across my path you ask? What challenge lead me to having to reach for new heights in ingenuity and problem solving? Well I will tell you. It all started in those days that Cambridge was bathed in blue skies and sunlight for over a week, it being such a rare occasion I felt a special tribute to the sun needed to be built and with no one else stepping up to the plate it was left to me to take on this Herculean and potentially dangerous task. The first component of my sun altar came from a land far away, known for its huge amounts of sunlight and its skimpy bikinis. This crucial building block was called the Amazonas Paradiso Terracotta Hammock and yesterday morning it was delivered to my humble abode.

However standing there with my new hammock I realized all was not well in the land, my garden only got one tree in it. And while others might have looked to the sky and screamed ‘why me?’ I instead decided to take matters into my own hands. So after a quick trip to B&Q I had gathered the materials I needed to create my own tree, my frankentree one could say. After a lot of digging, hammering, drilling and rope cutting, my act of creation was done, and a wonder had appeared in my humble garden.

And thus it had happened, against all odds and mother nature herself fighting against me, I had endured and in the end succeeded in my mission.

So now I can spend the rest of the summer relaxing in my wondrous hammock, enjoying Pax Romana