After SVG Open got a lot of attention I got motivated to do something with SVG this weekend. So I created a bunch of scripts to generate png files from various svg rendering systems and a webpage displaying these png files side by side.
The results can be seen here on my SVG test page. As you can see librsvg is compares pretty well to the competition, although it seems our recent changes to add Cairo support have lead to quite a few regressions as librsvg was almost perfect earler for the non-text tests on that page.
So am using Epiphany currently, the GNOME intergrated browser. So I decided to try drag&dropping an image from the browser into the Gimp.
Well it works as Gimp accepts the drop, but it turns out that since the Gimp in their brilliance don’t use gnome-vfs they didn’t have anything able to retrieve the image..great… So I decided to try EOG and gThumb instead, well it turns out these use gnome-vfs, at least EOG does, but they don’t accept the drop…..AAARGH, sometimes I want to scream!
Lots of cool stuff happening lately. On Friday Wim and Thomas managed to get RTP/RTSP going with GStreamer and managed to put our office teststream onto a cell phone, I took some earlier pictures myself of a distortet testvideo signal, decided not to put them up as the office stream image looks much better.
Jono Bacon put up a great article on Linux video handling, including a lot of talk about GStreamer and Pitivi. Make sure to read it!.
GStreamer 0.9 is progressing fast, Wingo is porting over the soundcard mixer stuff currently which is one of the last remaining pieces for being able to port ‘GNOME’ over to 0.9/0.10. Plan on putting together a list today of plugins that needs porting in the hope of getting some community action going on it.
I also went to the Barcelona FNAC store today to buy myself some comics as I figured it was the kind of easy reading that could get my going forward with my Spanish. They have a quite good selection of comics at the FNAC and I bought an Astrix album, 3 Thorgal albums and some belgian comics I hadn’t heard of before. Coming home I sat down to try to read the Astrix story first as I have it back in Norway in Norwegian. Got a bit disapointed at first that I wasn’t able to understand more of the dialogue as I felt I had started to get a semi-usable passive vocabulary from watching subtitled tv. Then after 4-5 pages I noticed the word ‘amb’ in a setence and my alarm bells started ringing. After some further investigation it turned out that album and all the albums I bought where in Catalan not in Castilliano(Spanish). Suxors. Guess I try to go trade them in on Monday again unless Wingo wants them for his Catalan learning.
Anyway I got myself a big fat English/Spanish-Spanish/English dictionary also as my little pocket dictionary has its constraints.
Been trying to use NetworkManager over the last year is it is theoreticaly a very nice solution. Unfortunatly it do have a lot of weird issues too. Today I filed this bug against it since it seems unable to let me get dns access to local machines. That combined with my older bug which I only see at home where it stops resolving random DNS entries. And there is of course the more cosmetic bug about how it should use the global keys before giving up connecting to a server. Hopefully with it being on the way into both Novell and Gentoo more eyeballs will help iron out the final issues.
The Cairo backend for librsvg is quickly taking shape now that Dom, Caled and Carl and collaborating on it. Even though Cairo is quite unoptimized yet we are seeing some great effects compared to the libart backend. The gearflower.svg file for instance renders 6 times faster with librsvg-cairo than it does with librsvg-libart. As Cairo gets optimized the difference will increase even further.
Cool stuff!
GStreamer 0.9
Good progress being made on all fronts with GStreamer 0.9 (maybe apart from making a new release from CVS :). With Ronald’s patch from bugzilla I was able to play Ogg, Avi and a Real file in Totem today. Only the Ogg near perfect, but still its nice to see things coming together. The new CVS Totem looks nice, great work from Bastien and Ronald.
I quite some time ago blogged about my impression of the DaVinci code (and my general lack of being impressed by it).
Anyway there was/is a copyright case filed against Dan Brown from a disgruntled author who felt Dan Brown had taken many plot ideas from him and used them in the DaVinci code.
This author even have a blog set up to cover the case. The judge recently came out with a clear non-infringement verdict in the case and it is an interesting read for those of us following the SCO case as it gives one example on how todays judges view copyright (and sorry SCO, general ideas are still not copyrightable).
Even though most book authors seems to think of themselves as the embodiment of creativity and new ideas, the reality is that everything they do someone else have written before them. Sucessful writing is not really about unique plot elements, its about craftmanship, the skill of enganging the reader in whatever story you are telling. A great and relativly fresh plot can not cover over bad writing, but good writing have a good chance of covering over a weak plot. (Although some unappy readers like myself, with the DaVinci code, feel a bit cheated when we get treated to a weak and illogical plot).
I guess next on Perdue’s lawsuit list would be Jacqueline Carey as her Kushiel triology also touch the topic of a feminine divinity and is loosely based on religious history with some added spice.
So after a lot of work Ambulant
worked on my machine. Sent Jack and co. my configure and Makefile fixes so hopefully they will merge them.
Next step is to have Tim investigate utilizing libambulant in GStreamer/Totem. Luckily Jack from the Ambulant team seems very interested in this too, so hopefully by working together we will be able to get somewhere.
As Dom mentioned in his blog, Cairo support in librsvg is starting to take shape now with Carl Worth hacking on it like crazy. Will also see if I can get the Ambulant guys interested in using librsvg to try get SVG support into Ambulant. Dom fears I will create a lot of work for him and Caled doing that, while I always say that there is nothing to fear except fear itself.
Food on sticks
So with Tim and Ronald here we went out to eat at a Basque tapas place last night. They have a fun setup where you go around taking and eating the tapas you want. In each tapas there is a toothpick and in the end you pay based on how many toothpicks you have collected. A highly trust based
concept, but it seems to work.
We have been looking to add SMIL support for GStreamer and GNOME for a while now. Problem have been that there hasn’t really been and complete usable implementation yet under an acceptable license. Well I discovered Ambulant
recently. Currently its under a GPL+exception license, but they seemed open to dual license it under the LGPL which would make things easier to relate to in a GStreamer and GNOME context.
Ambulant is a C++ based library which includes player(s) for a lot of platforms, including a simple Qt player for Linux. It currently use ffmpeg for network and format support and expat as its XML library. We would want to replace ffmpeg with GStreamer, expat with libxml and hook up Totem as the GUI. Currently fighting with its build system and some GCC4 issues, but hopefully I get it running to test it soon and then later on I hope someone who actually can hack is willing to help out to intergrate it with our stack.
Been a lot of blogging back and forth about dconf over the last few days. Can’t help but feel its an example of stop energy in action. I wish we could be better at not using words like ‘crack’,’stupid’,’bloated’,’overdesigned’ and so on when commenting on what other people do and instead try to give constructive feedback or give constructive feedback under less insulting headers. Could be that dconf is a bad idea that we will never end up using in GNOME, but publicly lynch mobbing the project and its developers isn’t a good example of the type of developer outreach we claim to want to do.
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