So a big thank you to Leslie and her team at Google for also this year accepting GStreamer as a mentoring organisation. Last few years we had some great projects coming out of the Google Summer of Code, including MPEG PS muxing, Quicktime Muxing, ASF muxing, LADSPA version 2, Avisynth, MHEG support and more.

If you are a student and want to get some useful experience while getting paid this summer, developing multimedia software, I think there is no better way to do so than a GStreamer GSoC project, for instance you could help us develop our first native VAAPI elements or any of the other tasks on our SoC project suggestion list.

Of course don’t limit yourself to that list, personally for instance I would love to see some proposals from students interested in extending PiTiVi.
With it being shipped with Ubuntu now and transition support getting merged very soon it is a great time to help userfriendly video editing on linux become a reality. Just be sure to keep it stable as you add your features though as we don’t want join the other efforts out there in the click and crash category ;)

Interested students should check out the Google Summer of code website for details on how the project works and how to sign up.

Please feel free to ask questions on the GStreamer-devel mailing list or on the #gstreamer channel on irc.freenode.net.

Update: Thought I should also link to the Google Summer of Code timeline. As you see the student application period starts on the 28th of March and ends on the 9th of April. Every year I strongly recommend people to get their applications in early as it lets you get more feedback on them and update them to a state where your chances of getting approved is significantly higher. The earlier in the process this happens the more discussion you can have with a potential mentor and thus better are your chances of making your proposal something the mentoring organisation wants to let got forward.
And as a sidenote, on the other end of the scale I should also mention that I seen good proposals which has been dropped as the student doesn’t seem to bother responding to feedback and questions.

Decided to join the early adopters crowd today and use the desktop of the future by switching to using GNOME Shell on my desktop. Luckily with Fedora its dead simple, you just yum install gnome-shell and then switch using the desktop effects widget under Preferences. Scarily simple.

So far GNOME shell has been very stable for me and the user experience has been mostly good. Still feels a little alien compared to what I was used to before, but nothing annoyingly alien. Only irritant so far is that the clock on the shell is using the luddite AM/PM time system instead of the proper 24H clock and I can’t figure out how/where to fix it. :)

Will report back next week if I decided GNOME shell is here to stay on my desktop or if its still needs some more love before I am ready to let it rule my life.

So due to sometimes needing to run a few Windows applications I have a Windows Vista partition on my hard drive. Today I decided to upgrade it to Windows 7 using the upgrade media Lenovo had sent me. So one would assume that upgrading a Vista partition which was the original Vista installation my laptop came with and that I had almost nothing installed on would be simple and straight forward. Wrong. Very wrong. I ended up on a screen with a absolutely useless error message saying that the upgrade failed due to an error and I should try again later. Brilliant. What made it even more fun was that there was another field listing applications which might malfunction after the upgrade. Due to the useless language above I assumed those concrete applications was the actual problem so I started an effort to try to deinstall said applications. One would think that would be a simple process, but as it turned out, some of them I still got complaints about even after deinstalling them….brilliant. First batch of 3-4 wasted hours gone.

Finally I gave up on the upgrade and re-installed Windows 7 instead. Install went fine, but of course the Windows bootloader overwrote grub. Not a to big of a hassle as I was able to restore it quickly enough with the Fedora rescue disk. Or so I thought. It turns out there is some weird kind of installation activation checking in the Windows 7 bootloader, which means that when I tried to use grub it failed giving me a error about my installation probably having been attacked by malicious software and thus refusing to let me boot into windows.

So after 3-4 hours later again and after getting the beta version of a windows boot loader editing application I finally had my system working again, this time booting from the windows bootloader into grub for my linux partition.

Conclusion: Claims of Windows being an enterprise ready and user friendly commercial operating systems turns out to be highly overstated.

We just went to lunch today and decided to try out the new Jamie Oliver restaurant in town. Think the general consensus was that is was a disappointment. Nothing inherently wrong with the food, just that it tasted a bit bland, and when you go to a restaurant where a famous chef has put his name on the door you do not expect bland.

I guess as a lot of people I been reading about the troubles of Greece over the last weeks. Have to say I did find it a bit funny though when I read that their prime minister George Papandreou claims that their budget plans are credible and good. Sorry, when you are up to the neck in debt and the cost of that debt is about to choke your nation then you need to present a budget plan that brings your budget into the black, you can’t promote a budget that only reduce your deficit and thus increase in debts as a solution. You are still drowning, just a little bit slower.

I sincerely hope the EU doesn’t try to bail out Greece as it would be a long term catastrophe, European governments need to learn that they need to balance their budgets instead of pushing their problems into the future and leaving a even heavier burden on the future generations to try to solve. If Greece gets bailed out then the only result will be that Spain, Portugal, Italy and eventually France will come knocking too, not to mention some of the former east block countries.

Went down to London yesterday for a meeting and I used the opportunity to visit the scandinavian deli and grocery store there. Turned out to be pretty nice, with a decent selection of food. I stocked up on Swedish liquorice, Norwegian lompe, Danish red hotdog sausages and a Norwegian brown cheese.

In other words I am well set for another week of scaring Abigail with Scandinavian food :)