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.
So I thought I should compose a list of all GStreamer related approved Summer of Code projects:
A big thanks to both the students and organisations involved.
Special mentions
Not related to GStreamer, but I found two projects I think deserve special mention looking over the approved projects.
The first is a project for OpenOffice to create proper SVG import support, I really hope this one pans out well as proper SVG support in OpenOffice would be a big step forward :
Draw/Impress: SVG Import Filter
The second project I found I noticed for somewhat other reasons, in fact I would like announce the winner of this years ‘Biggest Optimist in the Universe and Beyond 2007 Award’ to this project:
Dirac encoder and decoder.
Considering how long we have spent on getting Schrodinger up to scratch I am amazed that anyone even manage to believe they can create both a decoder and an encoder for Dirac in 3 Months.
I guess most have seen the story about how EMI and Apple are going to offer big parts of EMI catalogue in AAC format without any kind of DRM protection. If this pans out well I think it could be the begining of the end for widespread use of DRM.
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.
So we had a meeting here at the office last Friday with Robert McQueen, Phillipe Khalaf from Collabora and Stefan Kost from Nokia. The reason for this meeting was to sort out the final points on RTP support in GStreamer. The Collabora guys have approached the issue so far from the VoIP side of things while we at Fluendo have approached it from a RTSP /streaming point of view. The point in time now had come to make sure our efforts stayed complimentary as our work here at Fluendo started pushing into areas which up to this point had been solely the the domain of Collabora. A lot of beautiful diagrams and drawings where made with Wim Taymans and Phillipe being the major designers at the meeting. The result was an agreement on an overall design and also a fairly clear roadmap for how we get there. The first steps taken will be Wim working on adjusting the Farsight Jitterbuffer plugin, including moving it into GStreamer CVS, to also catering for streaming needs and also working on the new RTP session manager design. The plan is then that after a while Phillipe will take over the torch and make sure the updated components fit into the wider needs of Farsight and Telepathy. All in all a very good and productive meeting.
Apart from coming up with some great specs I also think we managed to feed Rob, Phillipe and Stefan with some great tapas and also pour into them a couple (aka a lot) of beers :)
So I mentioned some time ago that we have been working with the wild gang behind Songbird
to enable GStreamer on Windows and Mac. I already posted a shot of GStreamer running on Windows some time ago and today the time has come to show of a shot of GStreamer in action on the Mac.
One of the cool things we discovered was that we are able to provide smoother video seeking on the Mac than you get with the quicktime player.
Be aware that even if the application in the picture is a X11 application the video window is MacOSX native and the same with the sound output. A big thanks to Edward who has been fighthing with the ‘charms’ of MacOSX like crazy to make this happen :)
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!
The new deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is 26th of March. So I strongly recommend any interested students to get moving on sending in their GStreamer related SoC proposals to the Freevo project. You find their project suggestions list here.
Dirk Meyer of the Freevo mediacenter project gst-devel today pointing to
the Freevo summer of code projects page. As you can see they have a lot of GStreamer related things as they are moving a lot of their infrastructure over to GStreamer these days. So I strongly encourage interested students to sign up for Freevo projects.
Aaron Bockover pointed on his blog to some interesting Banshee projects which also involve GStreamer, like making a GStreamer using Windows port of Banshee work perfectly. You find these projects here.
Also a general note to mentoring organisations who have students submit interesting GStreamer related proposals, please be aware that there are many people in the GStreamer community willing to mentor/co-mentor such projects. So if you need mentors with strong GStreamer knowledge for your projects please let us know.
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.