As we are preparing for the first alpha release of elisa the question of file locations came up. In a media center solution you have IMHO halfway lost if you have to expose disk directory layout through the userinterface. Cause since the primary tool for using the GUI is a remote navigating directories and choosing files based on it is simply painful. In the set-top box situation this is not to big a problem as we can enforce certain defaults. But since we also want people to be able to run Elisa on their normal server/desktop systems we need to also consider how these are laid out.

There has been some long discussions about this in the GNOME community about defining special ~/Music and ~/Movie directories for instance that all applications default to. If this was the case we could just have Elisa default to parsing those directories too. Unfortunatly the progress on this has stalled due to what I guess is a combination of issues, one is how to handle localizations (on disk or in GUI) and if the especially the first who does the work to make it happen.

For Elisa we will set specific directories for this first alpha release that can be changed in the elisa.conf file. What the long term solution will be will depend on what happens elsewhere in the community. I just hope we don’t need to have a file manager/chooser module in Elisa long term. At least not one many people would need to use.

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.

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.

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.