Just discovered the photo tagging feature of facebook. It lets you click on various people/objects in your photo and facebook then tries to give you a square box centered around the object to clicked on, in other words they have some basic shape recognition stuff built in. What you usually do is mark the people who are in the picture, and if they are your friends on facebook they will be told that a new photo with themselves are online. Also the image will be added to the link with photos of the person in question on their facebook profile page. You can also tag other people’s photos, but they will have to approve your tagging before it becomes public.

While simple I found it pretty nifty actually. We will hopefully be enganging in a huge EU funded project at Fluendo starting in January. If that project goes through it would be nice to see if we can add a feature like that for video’s as part of that project as collaborative editing and metadata handling is a big part of the project. Of course the technical challenges are much bigger in the context of video so it might not make the cut as it wasn’t concretely planned for in the current proposal. But no matter what the project will be a huge boost for the Pitivi project and the features we offer in Pitivi.

Read David Trowbridge‘s blog entry about the recent blogging campaign posting one of the AACS keys with interest. As someone who has to deal with software patents and DRM systems on an almost daily basis as part of my job I would have to say I disagree on his conclusion that such efforts have no value and should just be considered worthless online ‘whining’.

There was a similar thing happening with CSS back in the day, where people posted the DeCSS source code everywhere and put it on t-shirts etc. While it might not have caused the whole DRM eco-system to fail it did play a part in the content industry starting to question the value of DRM systems. If we get a similar story now with AACS it could be the decisive blow that ‘educates’ the content industry on the futility of pursuing DRM systems.

The fact that we have had DeCSS out there now for many years has also been a useful tool for countering many of the arguments made by for instance the DVD CCA, regarding why DRM systems are needed. In the DVD CCA FAQ there is a question about why CSS is necesarry. They are saying that without CSS the content industry would be hesistant to release their content. Well DeCSS has been out for a long while now and there is a long list of DVD rippers out there using it, available for all major operating systems, yet that fact doesn’t seem to have put a dampener on the willingness of the movie studios to release more DVD’s…..

So David might feel that the ‘Civil disobedience’ in regards to AACS is worthless, yet I say that discrediting the major DRM systems out there actually do serve a purpose in terms of educating people about the futility of such systems, and also demonstrates that the assumption that without effective DRM systems sales will collapse is a false one.

And being someone who has to deal with people doing hardware, software and content in this area I can tell you that the ‘educational effect’ of more and more DRM systems getting broken is slowly changing the mindset and level of understanding of the industry.

So while I as part of my work have to deal with the laws and regulations as they are today and have to work within the constraints they set that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the efforts of those being able to operate in less restrained ways than we can as a company. The world is a complex place and a working democracy is much more than just voting and mailing your local politician.

Well then you are in luck. Edward just pointed me to the budget airline bmibaby (pronounced ‘be my baby’) which offer budget fligths directly to Birmingham which will save you quite a bit of both time and money compared to flying into a London airport (cost me a total of 70€ in train tickets the last time going back and forth to Wolverhampton/Birmingham). If you are flying to London I do recommend Stanstead over Luton though, unless you are comfy with the UK public transport system as the train from Stanstead goes directly to Birmingham, while you need to switch twice when going from Luton by train.

Noticed that Miguel speculating about a Linux version of Silverlight. Personally I hope
we do not see such a announcement. Everytime Microsoft has promised Unix support its been done to rob their cross platform competitor of the argument and in the end not delivering. I remember Windows Media Player being announced for Unix back in the day when Microsoft where in the process of trying to kill off Real networks as a competitor in the streaming media space. In the end all they ever produced was a broken alpha release for Solaris and in the end they never released a final version for either Solaris or any other promised platform. Another example of such a sabotage targeted ‘port’ was Internet explorer for Unix, which Microsoft made as part of their effort to take down Netscape, which never came further than some hackish versions for Solaris and HP-UX before getting canceled.

Do we really want to see Microsoft try the same technique again? Sadly enough I doubt the mainstream press is observant enough to call Microsoft on their game even if its the Nth time they do it.

Came accross some old drawings made by Larry Ewing (the guy who created Tux) where he had tried making a GNOME mascot it seems. I hadn’t seen them before, but they are actually quite cute.

There are more sketches and animation variations available at:
Larry’s GNOME directory.

Would just like to remind all established project contributors that the GNOME Mentor Summer of Code deadline is approaching fast. In fact we want most mentors ‘signed up’ within two days. So if you haven’t signed up to be a mentor already do so quickly. If you already have signed up as a mentor please use the ‘request mentorship’ button to ask for mentorship of your relevant projects. Projects which do not have someone requesting mentorship for them within a few days will have less a chance of getting approved among the final projects than projects who only aquire a mentor at a later stage. You find information on how to apply for being a mentor on the Google Soc page.

The call for applications to host GUADEC 2008 went out yesterday. One question that came up right away was if people outside Europe could apply to host GUADEC. I am not on the commitee deciding this, but from previous years discussions its not set in stone that it do happen within Europe. The requirements is more that it would be reasonably cheap for people living in Europe and north America to get there. This means that in my opinion a good application from for instance near-europe would have a good chance of getting the go ahead. I suggested in an earlier blog that a Moroccon Linux user group apply to host it in either Casablanca or Marrakesh. With companies like Easy Jet now flying there this is absolutly within the realm of feasible in terms of cost of travel for participants. And of course many near-europe countries come with the advantage that they offer cheap food and lodging once you get there.

That said I also think it would be great to see some east European applications this year. So far Guadec has moved up and down a rather strict north/south axis even within the borders of Europe.

So if you are part of a group of linux user group in east or near Europe this is the time to get moving on organizing an application to host the coolest conference in the free software world!

Having discussed how to evolve GNOME on LUGRadio I figured that
an interesting proposal for a Google Summer of Code project would be to fork GTK+. Many people in the community have talked about how GNOME 3 would need to happen outside the current structures. I also think that nothing fundamental will change in GNOME without a new GTK+ giving the impetous for such a change. So a enterprising student could put together a proposal for taking GTK+ and trying to make a ‘Beryl’ version. The goal might not need to be to create something that would actually become GTK+, but instead come up with changes to GTK+ that enables some stunning graphical effects inside GTK+ applications, kind what they are doing with Beryl on the window manager level. So the ‘fork’ would not care about things maintainability, portability or sensibiilty, but instead try to enable some select demo applications to do some amazing looking things. Enlightenment (which also sports a GUI toolkit these days) would be a good example for ideas for some cool effects, Beryl another. Another idea could be to try to integrate librsvg with GTK+ and use it to do interesting things. The goal of such projects should simply be to try to inspire the GNOME community into taking the leap.

When GNOME originally came out its themeing capabilities essentially set the bar for letting users and developers change the look and feel of their desktop. Lets try to do so again

And to make it clear. With Fork I don’t mean an actuall fork in the sense of a new project meant for a life of its own, more of doing a wild and wacky experiemental branch.

Found this interview today with Jeff Bonforte, a Yahoo VP. He talks a lot about usability of web applications and claims a focus on usability is the reason Yahoo messenger and email is more popular than Google’s services. I would have been more impressed if he had also mentioned that a large part of those numbers might be related to Yahoo’s email and chat being around for quite a few years before Google got into those markets.

He has an interesting quote in the article though:
On Yahoo! Messenger for the Mac client, I reduced the functionality by 30 per cent and increased usage by 35 per cent. As we take out features, it tends to do better with the mainstream users.

Apart from being an interesting quote in terms of the eternal discussion about GNOME usability it did strike me that being an online application maker has some great advantages, like being able to measure exactly how each change you do influence usage patterns and popularity.

I spent quite some time yesterday trying to editing a document I had been sent. I didn’t actually check the file format before I loaded it into OpenOffice, but today I found that it was a RTF file. Anyway, the editing went well and I saved my changes without thinking about it and sent the document of to the people I was corresponding with. Then today I got a mail back that the document was unreadable. It was at this point I realized it was a RTF file and not a Doc file I had been sent.
I tried loading the file in OpenOffice and it failed miserably. So it turns out that OpenOffice exports RTF which neither it or Microsoft office is able to read.

Out of the blue came my saviour. Abiword was able to import the document and save it again in a RTF format that OpenOffice was able to read and all my changes to the document were saved from oblivion.
Abiword had a weird error where it ‘blinked’ on certain section of the document, but that was a small issue compared to the almost destruction caused by OpenOffice