I know many of you have requested Vorbis support on the 770. Well the way we can make that happen is to demonstrate that there is a real interest in this. Nokia gathers statistics on what people report in their bugzilla and this is a big part of setting priorities going forward. So if you want Ogg Vorbis to be supported on the 770 device then please go to Maemo bugzilla and file a bug report requesting they add Vorbis support. I am going to do this myself this week, so please do so yourself and also tell anyone you know to do so too. If you don’t then you lose the right to complain about lack of Ogg Vorbis support on the 770.
Leaving Norway is almost impossible
It seems leaving Norway is one of the hardest things one could do. The Norwegian government have basically decided that Norway isn’t just a country, its a concentration camp. So even after living for almost two full years in Barcelona the Norwegian government refuse to accept that I have moved and demand that I tax to Norway for instance. Will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Norwegian government comes to accept that I actually have moved.
GUADEC over for this year
So GUADEC is over and I am back again at the office. It was a great week and I guess the 7 day GUADEC worked out fine, although I felt people where maybe a little battleworn on Friday. I know I was.
A lot of cool stuff happened this year. For instance the LugRadio guys where able to record short daily LugRadio episodes from the conference using Jokosher. So be sure to grab the recorded episodes from their archives session. Nokia represented by Makoto Sugano also thought Jokosher was cool and donated a 770 device to the project to help get Jokosher remote going.
The Fluendo party was a great success even if we had a painful time figuring out how to start the slideshow looping in Open Present. To those wondering let me just say that the word ‘loop’ never occurs in any dialog related to it and that there is a non-intuitive timer value that has to be filled in 
Edward did a great job organizing a GStreamer and gst-python hackfest at GUADEC. It ended up a quite large group with people interested in and working on Pitivi, Jokosher and last but not least Elisa our media center software which we announced at GUADEC.
The response to Elisa was absolutly fantastic and I hope we will be able to get an active community around it. Philippe and Loic will of course be continuing to hack on it to make it a killer solution.
GUADEC next year will be in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. I hope to be involved a bit with the organisation of that as I have some ideas on some cool and interesting tracks and speakers. Anyway I guess I can discuss such things with many of the local people involved when Edward and me head up to Wolverhampton for LugRadio live next month.
With so many companies involved in GNOME these days logowear is an important way to make your mark. Trying to keep the cooperative aspect strong I decided to help the Opened Hand guys out by wearing a t-shirt that surely points people to OpenedHand :). I am also wearing on of the fashionable Fluendo caps in that photo.
For people wondering about the video archive of the talks done at GUADEC you will find it at http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/guadec/2006/ eventually. Nothing there now, but it is being worked on.
Women’s Summer Outreach Program
Not often I use my blog to say I was wrong about something, but this time I feel its warranted. I have to admit feeling that the Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006 program, started to try to get more Women involved with Free Software, was destined to fail. To me it seemed like an effort to fish in an empty sea. Well as it turned out I was horribly wrong. There turned out to be a lot of submissions and seven projects are now approved. A big thanks to Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach for organizing this.
GStreamer, gst-python hackfest
Edward Hervey is organizing a gst-python centric hackfest here at GUADEC tomorrow at 12.00 in Carpa. (Originally scheduled for Friday).
Projects such as Pitivi the non-linear editor, Jokosher audio mixer/recorder, Elisa media center and the Flumotion streaming server will be there. So if you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects make sure to be there. Also if you have questions about writing GStreamer applications in Python in general experts like Edward, Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Phillipe Normand and Loic will on call.
Important GUADEC updates
A couple of important updates for GUADEC atendees. The first message is that the France vs Spain world cup football match will be streamed at the Maemo party tonight, so no need to panick for the football fan among us.
The second announcement is that the bus service to the GNOME Village has improved with more departures and also an extra stop. Get the details on the GUADEC news site.
Be aware that now that things have cooled down a little the GUADEC news page will be more frequently updated with updated news.
Fluendo GUADEC Party
So at GUADEC and having a great time. To my fellow GUADEC participants: I want to remind everyone of the Fluendo party at El Tres down on the beach here in Vilanova tonight at 22.00. Free drinks and entertainment so be sure to come!
GUADEC highlights
So GUADEC is now approaching with lightning steps. In that regard I should point out that there is a nice collection of lightning talks being held that you don’t want to miss. The full overview is here. Some of the cool highlights are Stuart Langridge of Jokosher and LugRadio fame presenting his project Jackfield, which will bring Apple’s Dashboard applications to GNOME. According to rumours so will Stuart have 90% of all Dashboard applications working in time for his lightning talk. The cool guys from Fluendo Lyon will present Elisa, the media center solution we have been working on for the last months. And last but not least Edward will present on Pitivi your friendly neighbourhood non-linear video editor. There is also a page listing the various GStreamer related events during GUADEC here: overview of some GStreamer realated events at this years GUADEC.
Also be sure to catch the Jokosher talk by Jono on Monday at 16.00 I think it will be interesting, the speed at which the Jokosher community was assembelded and have made a usable product is simply amazing so I am sure Jono will share some tips on community building as part of his talk.
Fluendo will also have a booth at the conference where you can reach us and get demos of our technologies and solutions, so be sure to stop by.
Fighting for the dignity of Gnomes
Michael Sparks at the BBC found this link today which he gave me. Its good to see at least some people continuing the fight to keep Gnomes dignified and special
Back and kicking
Been a while since I blogged the last time. Got sick which took my energy level down to 0. Still not fully recovered, but thanks to the wonders of modern medicine I can at least function quite well now.
Polypaudio (or what is now known as Pulse)
Got a few comments on my previous blog entry where I discussed Polypaudio (Pulse) (and also mentioned JACK). To start with JACK, as I tried to say in my previous entry, I simply think its the wrong tool for the job (the job in this case being a generic sound server for the desktop). JACK solves the problem of low latency access on your local for applications specifically written for it when used in combination with a special kernel. The desktop on the other hand is looking for a solution which mixes your sound streams if you have a cheap sound card, gives you some basic network transparency and sample caching.
In regards to Pulse vs Phonon, I don’t think comparing them makes sense. As for wether Pulse is an unecessary interfaces, well for many of us it is. If you are only playing back sounds on your local system and your soundcard handles multiple writes or you are using dmix then having a soundserver there doesn’t give you anything extra IMHO. The sound server usecase is mostly in the case of remote clients or as an alternative way of mixing sounds to using a kernel/alsa level solution like dmix. Personally I wouldn’t mind having a sound server there even if I strictly don’t need it if it didn’t get in the way. ESD do get in the way which is why I haven’t used it for the last 3-4 years. So I am not giving Pulse a ringing endorsement yet, haven’t used it enough to do such a thing, all I am saying is that its the most ‘plausible to suceed’ desktop sound server project in a long time.
GUADEC just one week away!
So GUADEC will fire up next weekend with the main event next week. Really looking forward to it! The teams here at Fluendo is working hard to have cool stuff to demo for Pitivi, Elisa and Flumotion.
Mugshot, Jobs, SoC, Polypaudio and more
Mugshot
So there s3cr3t project that Havoc, Colin, Owen and others at Red Hat has been working on for the last months was revealed. Mugshot is now out and available. I don’t really get it. I have read the mugshot blog where there are some attempts at explaining what its about, but it fails to explain why I would find it interesting. And I mean that in a non-negative way, I really miss some explanation linking their technical description of how it works/what it is supposed to be with some examples of why I would find it cool to use. Along the lines of ‘You see this, and you use this feature of mugshot and then you are able to do that thing you never have been able to do before’. Currently my feeling is that linkswarm is supposed to be a continous live version of the ‘slashdot effect’ and Music Radar to be manual version of the last.fm group hitlists. Both these descriptions are probably wildly wrong, but they do examplify how incomprehensible the project is to me currently.
Nokia on a hiring spree
Actually impressed by the number of new jobs offered in Carlos latest blog entry. Nokia is really beefing up their development capabilities on the Linux side. I think we will see a lot of great stuff coming out of Nokia and going into GNOME, GStreamer and other related efforts going forward. Their participation in the GStreamer community is much more direct and active now than it was before the initial release, which is a very good thing. So if you are looking for a job doing cool stuff with Linux you should check out the list in Carlos blog.
Summer of Code
One great ideas done for this years GNOME summer of code was setting up a Planet for SoC Students. A lot of students already signed up and more to come. Thanks to Jeff and co for setting up that planet. And if you are a student working on something GNOME/GTK related for any organisation (doesn’t have to be ‘GNOME’, be sure to start blogging about your progress and get your blog listed.
Polypaudio
Lennart Poettering released a new version of Polypaudio recently and also updated the GStreamer plugin to GStreamer 0.10. Personally I been feeling lukewarm about soundservers for a long time, but Polypaudio seems to get a lot of people to at least re-visit the sound server debate. Jan Schmidt whose opinion I respect a lot was very excited about polypaudio and even started trying to work with Lennart on getting the updated plugin into gst-plugins-good. Maybe Polypaudio
is the sound server that convince the world that sound servers aren’t such a bad idea after all. (And I hope no one asks ‘but what about JACK?’. JACK is great, but suggesting it for desktop usage makes about as much sense in my mind as suggesting someone should by a formula 1 car as a vehicle to take their family on vacation.)
The battle against bugzilla
The war to keep the GStreamer bugcount down continues without stop. It is paying off in the sense that I think people notice that we respond very quickly to bugs, which motivates people to report more. Luckily a lot of them with patches. But it also gives us a challenge in keeping up with bugzilla. This morning the statistics showed a total of 167 non-enhancement bugs, with +40 being submitted the last 7 days (and -29 closed the last 7 days). This means that over bug open/close traffic is between GTK+ and Evolution in volume, projects with over a 1000 unresolved bug reports compared to our 150+. It of course means we have to keep our eyes on the ball non-stop or our bugcount will start increasing quickly. Luckily we have a good community now with people offering patches (making resolving the bugs much easier), and also people helping us triange and reproduce bug reports. More is always welcome of course, just someone looking through our bug reports trying to reproduce issues reported and then commenting on the bugs is a great help. Especially if you are able to produce more details than the original report. For instance today I found a bug report saying that playing the WMA streams from Rush Limbaugh’s website caused Totem to stutter. After some testing (I downloaded the mms stream into a file using ‘gst-launch mmssrc location=”mms:uri-to.file.wma ! filesink location=rush.wma’) I found that we played the WMA file fine. So the problem is not the WMA/ASF elements, but most likely somewhere in Totem/playbin’s network buffering. Information like that saves time for the developers, enabling them to spend more time on fixing the bugs, and less time on investigating what the actual problem is. So even if you are not a programmer, helping your favourite project with their bugzilla is a good way to help developers and make your favourite project evolve even faster.
