librsvg and Cairo

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.

SCO of the literary world?

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.

SMIL the next chapter

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.

Stop energy

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.

Open source browser for Maemo

Philippe De Swert just announced yesterday night that he have ported the gtk-webcore based browser from GPE to Maemo/Nokia 770. Take a look at the nice screenshot
of the little baby in action. Wonder how long before a minimo based browser pops up

Also there is a Nokia 770 blog for you to read.

More important court case for open source than the SCO/IBM case?

While many of us follow the SCO case through sites such as Groklaw I wonder if it should take precendence in importance to another important case underway to the free software community. By now the SCO case is shown to be so weak and unfounded that Darl probably spends his evenings praying that he will not end in purgatory for it.

Anyway I think people should instead start taking greater interest in the class action lawsuite lead by Handal & Associates against the DVD patent holders. This case claim that the DVD patent pools basically constitutes price fixing and a conspiracy to monopolize and demand that all the patents involved gets found invalid. If they succeed it will have a profound effect on free software as things like mpeg2 becomes royalty free. Secondly it will probably be the death stroke for royalty bearing patents pools, which most likely will lead to more royalty free standards.

SVG in the news

A nice story today on Slashdot focusing on the new Inkscape release. I am really happy about how Inkscape is progressing, both due to how it helps promote the wider usage of vector graphics on the desktop, but also since it is now using gtkmm its a very good proof that C++ development under GNOME is a viable option using our C++ bindings.

Inkscape also provides the librsvg team with much needed motivation to increase the functionlity of librsvg. Current cvs of librsvg seems to cover everything possible to export as SVG from Illustrator, so its good to have a free software application like Inkscape being there to really take advantage of possibilities in the SVG format. Hopefully
Inkscape will get support for filters soon so that the filter code that Caleb wrote for librsvg can be put to good use and get some stress testing.

Another Fluendo team member

With Ronald going of to Cornell this fall to get his Biochemistry Phd we needed someone to take over his job.
Today we are happy to announce that we reached an agreement with Tim-Philipp Müller who will be joining us in August. Tim-Philipp have been very active for the last year fixing bugs and helping out keep GStreamer bugzilla in check so
we feel very confident he will be able to hold the fort.

Great to have you onboard Tim-Philipp!

I am also pretty confident that Ronald will not disappear completely from the GStreamer and GNOME development scene, even if he at least for a while will be hidden in the fog of
academia. Maybe he will make sure GStreamer supports some medical image formats for instance Ronald have done a tremendous job both as a community member of both the GStreamer and GNOME communities and as an employee of Fluendo, making applications such as
Cupid, the video recorder and fixing up issues making Totem and GStreamer play much better together. And and on top of all that maintaining the gnome-media package. The amount of effort he has put into fixing bugs in GStreamer and to support more formats and datatypes is simply astounding. I also think that anyone who have ever come to the gstreamer IRC channel would agree that he is among the people there most willing to help and give advice. A big thanks to Ronald for his effort so far.

Going out

Been keeping pretty busy recently. Went to a Joss Stone concert with the rest of the crew on Monday for instance. Pretty nice concert hosted in Pueblo Espanya. Joss was pretty as can be too, although someone should have told her that even when you are drop dead gorgeous you shouldn’t have your mothers kitchen curtains retailored into a top.

Yesterday evening we celebrated a combination of Michael finding an appartment and Edward signing a contract to stay on at Fluendo after his internship ends. We went to a place called Belchica which serves belgian beers of the high alcohol level type. Woke up this morning with a bad headache which managed to be combined with a painful cramp in my left leg. But after massaging my leg for 10 minutes and sleeping for an extra hour I felt pretty fine and went for the long walk to work.

Spanish lessons

So I am back to taking spanish lessons again. Had my first lesson yesterday and I have to say I feel much more likely to actually get somewhere this time. I have enough of a spanish vocabulary now to at least make a guess about words or put together a simple sentence. We are only 2 people doing this class which feels a bit weird, but I guess it will also mean I have to push myself harder as there is no crowd to get lost in, which is good. Its a two week introduction course which is meant to be followed by a beginners course afterwards.

Distro wars

We are currently two people in the office running Fedora, three people running Ubuntu, one person running plain Debian and one person running Gentoo. Not sure why I am mentioning it, maybe I wonder if we are representative of the spread of world linux developers.

Moving out and moving in

Michael got himself an appartment today, or rather he got one which will become available the first. Good thing as Bastien confirmed his visit at the end of August today, so I now know for sure that the guestroom is available

Weekend in review

So it finally happened, Jan have arrived from Australia, and did so on Saturday. So Edward and me headed over to Jaime and Jan’s place for a little food and some drinks that evening. Later on we headed out for some more drinks, starting with Zahara, a cocktail bar at the tip of Barceloneta. Later in the evening we where joined by Thomas and Kristien, Wim and Sabine and finally Michael and Scott.

Daytime both Saturday and Sunday where spent on the Barcelona beach trying to ensure a future for my bronze beachgod visage.

On Sunday evening Edward and me ended up watching two sci-fi movies, Terminator 3 and Barbarella. I guess apart from both being ‘sci-fi’ I guess they couldn’t have less in common.

GStreamer on Windows

It have has (choose either of these two verb forms, but please choose the correct one. ed) arrived. Michael Benes has created the missing plugins to make GStreamer work on Windows and ported his media player to Windows to prove it. With this GStreamer now runs on Linux/Unix/MacOSX and Windows, which makes it fully cross platform. Cool stuff indeed!

WARNING! Andy Wingo might end up suffering from violence in the near future.(He will be remembered as a martyr who died for correct style and grammar. ed)

When the world centers around Barcelona

Been a busy last few days. Matthew Allum of OpenedHand fame came to town on Monday with his wife. Yesterday Tim Ney arrived, to have some meetings with the organisers of next year’s GUADEC, and Oyvind aka Pippin popped into our offices too for a visit. So we ended up going out to dinner last night at what turned out to be a good, but rather expensive resturant (45€ per person for a 3 course dinner with drinks).

I joined Tim at the meeting with the local GUADEC organisers last yesterday and they do have an impressive locale available. I think we can be sure it will be very well organised and the infrastructure is above anything we had before. The biggest challenge is sorting out GUADEC in a way which makes sure we don’t drown alongside the other conference which has a daily attendance of around 2500 people last year. The organisers seemed willing to let us have the cellar for mostly ourselves which meant a footbal field size open room and 5 conference rooms. In addition to that we would have our keynotes etc., in the main room which I think had seating for at least a thousand people.

GUADEC for next year is only early planing stage now, but I think doing a GUADEC for people in or interested in joining the GNOME community in the cellar should be our goal and then try to do some more outreach kinda talks as part of the other conference, as it is already well attended by local businness and government.

I have in general been in favour of ditching the current version of our user day for quite some time, as it haven’t worked very well IMHO. But for next year, where GUADEC will be part of this larger conference, keeping some remains of it around might be a good idea.

SVG going forward

Great news from the SVG camp. First of all thanks to the hard work of Caleb librsvg is now features plugable rendering backends. With Dom and Caleb doing the final needed auto*magic yesterday. Which means that instead of being tied to libart (which have served us faithfully for the last years) we are now ready to have other rendering backends implemented. Carl Worth of Cairo fame have already sworn a holy oath that he will now implement a Cairo rendering backend for librsvg. Which means we can have a gradual migration to Cairo as our primary rendering backend for librsvg. It also turned out we had a few problems with how to handle SVG icons when used as GTK+ stock icons, but Matthias Clasen fixed that just hours after I reported it to him, thanks Matthias!

GStreamer 0.9

Things are flying by in GStreamer 0.9 CVS. Core issues are being sorted out at break-neck speed. In the core the major issues are taken care of and people are commiting more polish type things currently, fixing small irritants left from the 0.8 days. New plugins are being ported over from 0.8 at a quick pace too and I expect to be able to playback most of the important video and audio formats early august at the latest.

Nokia 770

Got our hands on a couple of Nokia 770 devices yesterday. Will be interesting to get some development work done on the actual device, like getting a working Ogg implementation for the Texas Instruments DSP CPU’s.

The arrival of Jan

The Spanish embassy in Sydney finally came through and Jan got his work visa yesterday. So he will be arriving here in Barcelona on Saturday. It will be great to finally have Jan around in person, as its been a long and frustrating wait for both him and us to get his work permit in order.