Older blog entries for Uraeus (starting at number 360)

Seems an basic webpage for Pitivi the GStreamer based Non-linear Video editor is available. Since working on Pitivi will be one of Edwards main tasks when he arrives at Fluendo in March I hope we can make it an application a lot of people want to use.

Spent the end of last week with Wim and the Imendio guys. Some people just pop up in the strangest of places. Then again I know Mikael, Anders and Richard go to all countries where they expect to see scantily clad women so I guess I shouldn't have been suprised at seeing them.

Decided to try and get my co-workers at Fluendo to join me in signing up for a green card course at one of Barcelona's many golf courses. The excitement towards the idea hasn't been through the roof yet, but I hope that will happen once I get them onto the field :)

Working on a bugfix release of the flumotion streaming server. Starting too look nicer as more and more robustness fixes and polish gets in. Thomas did a very nice hack today to get the hardware name into the GUI today, so instead of just having /dev/video0 you are now told it is a Logitech Webcam for instance. I did a teststream from my extremely low quality webcam today using the server. viewing the stream in 3 different players. It is nice to see that Theora support is getting quite widespread :)

audio cd playing does not work for me with Fedora 3; and it looks like /dev/cdrom is not generated for me; cause it a DVD? Recreatig /dev/cdrom fixed only part of the problem. need to investigate more and file a report.

Also tested the JDS livecd Callum linked to. It works well, in fact some stuff feels snappier than on my FC3 install. Guess they do some pre-loading or ramdisk magic to make that happen.I also think the wide 'start' button is a nice feature as its is easier to hit then the small hat/foot I struggle with today.

One not so nice thing about JDS is that they include a lot of different technologies, but does nothing to make them look relativly the same. Why for instance are the Java apps not using GTK+ look and feel? And a theme for Yast/Qt so it looks like the Sun GTK+ would make the admin tools a little less alien.

So I posted my candidacy for the GNOME foundation board today. Hopefully we will have enough candidates to make it a real vote, think I would feel better not getting on the board after being part of a large field of candidates than getting on the board due to there not being enough candidates to make it a real election. Anyway I hope anyone reading this will vote for me :)

Zaheer have gotten quite some downloads of his Caster live-cd. He only announced it in his blog, so I guess planetgnome actually has a decent readership. Next step is for zaheer to start merging the DVB plugins for gstreamer :)

Iain is working on getting ding-caching abstraction into GStreamer. It is the last thing needed before we can make GNOME only rely on GStreamer instead of directly on a sound server. This will make the transition to using polypaudio much smoother and it will also make sure that when someone wants to ouput directly to their soundcards, then everything gets sent that way, not just most of the stuff. We just have to hope that the iain@gnomedorks.org email address I set him up with will not distract him to much from the hacking :)

Discovered that the new Novell desktop comes with alsa disabled in regards to gstreamer. Had hoped that Suse being 'the' alsa company would have patched our plugin instead of fixing it. Anyway Ronald will be working on making the alsa plugin robust now that we have chained ogg support working in GStreamer CVS.

Also happy to see Bastien propose Totem/GStreamer for inclusion in GNOME. Would be happier if he had tried the solution himself, but I guess you can't win em all :)

Also noted that Martin Soto commited his new cothreads based scheduler into GStreamer CVS this weekend. Hopefully this means he started on merging upstream his changes to GStreamer to get 'perfect' DVD support going.

Jan is hacking on annodex support for GStreamer. Guess we even try to add support for it in the java applet player. Hopefully we can so do fun stuff like the clickable tv casts seen in Starship troopers. 'Want to learn more?' :)

Finally got my domains moved over to apestaart. Hopefully I get email working again soon so my gnome.org mail don't start bouncing. Since it is set up now I guess I have no more excuses for not getting enterprisegnome.com going :)

Already up and running on Fedora 3, think it is the first time I am doing some before the offical release :) Now is only Thomas will hurry up about getting updated rpms with webcam and wireless drivers ready :) The Nvidia rpm from livna already installed :)

Congrats to Eugenia and gnomefiles for reaching over 500 projects listed the last few days. gnomefiles has become a daily stop for me to check out what new apps have been released and which have been updated.

Checked out nvidia's webpage today in relation to some special effects software. Saw an image on their frontpage and thought WOW, the time has come for me to get one of those modded machines if they have started looking that cool. A second look made me realize it was just a promotional drawing from nvidia and not a real box :)

mallum posted some job adds from Nokia on advogato for people to do some GNOME style multimedia programming. I thought I repost the offer 1 and offer 2 for people reading Planet GNOME and Planet GStreamer. I think people looking for a job will find Nokia's plans in this area very interesting and rewarding to work on.

I updated the appliation list today. Adding a lot of new projects. Think Murray will be very happy to see Towel for instance, which is using gtkmm :)

Yesterday it was a public holiday in Spain so I went over to Wim's place to watch some movies on the projector. Thomas came over for the first film of the evening, LOTR Fellowship of the Ring extended edition. To say that the film was a hit with Thomas I guess is a bit of an exhageration :)

The second movie Wim and I watched was Kiss of the Dragon by Luc Besson (staring Jet Li and Bridget Fonda). I have to say I am getting rather disapointed with mr.Besson. His movies seems less and less inspired lately. I loved the 5th element, Jeanne D'arc and the first Taxi movie. The two Taxi followups and now Kiss of the Dragon seemed like they are made without any real feeling, just pumping out cliche like movies.

Worked a bit on improving the GStreamer webpages today. They are actually not so bad, but some things tend to become old and need updating. I will also do a overhaul of the GStreamer application webpage over the next few days to add all the new applications using GStreamer that are popping up.

Did a small meeting at Fluendo today in order to try and figure out how to proceed short term. Always a challenge in a new company to balance between your long term and short term goals. For instance there are some items we can do short term in regards our products which has instant commerical appeal. On the other side doing these will detract attention from our long term commerical goals. We will have a follow up meeting with Julien tomorrow to make some decisions.

Noticed Animal Shelter management software popping up on gnomefiles today. I always thought that the narrow niche applications would be the ones never to go opensource, but I guess I have just been proven wrong :)

I also request that anyone reading my blog ask johan dahlin aka jdahlin on IRC on when the first release of his gst-python and gtk-python based video transcoding application will be out. He needs some encouragement :)

Wim, Johan and me meet up with some cool and crazy hackers in Barcelona last night trying to help them get Flumotion going so they could stream the Piksel conference in Norway today with it. They had a really cool office in Raval which was part office part hackers cave :) Got a system called Pure Data demonstrated which where quite cool. Kinda like gst-editor on steroids. Had a great time compiling software, drinking, lots of 'tobaco' being smoked and in the end debating world problems.

Bilboed reported good progress on Pivitivi today. Happy to see a GStreamer and Gnonlin based Non Linear editor finally nearing a first release. I have promised to help with advocating Pivitivi and grow a vibrant development community around it. Hopefully we succeed :)

Been playing my music over the last days using Amarok. Its using GStreamer and Markey have been doing some great work both hacking GStreamer and Amarok to get it to where it is today. If you are a fan of xmms style music players this is definetly a step up from xmms. The inline visualizations for instance are very nice; and the fade to silense on exit is another cute touch. Not sure how much I agree with the UI choices done in the playlist setup, but with the huge amount of music players out there, variety is good. No point in having 10 players who behave identical :)

Got the contract with David Vignoni signed today so he will start creating new artwork for Fluendo starting monday. Hopefully we will have a Flumotion release it not to many weeks looking stellar :) Having worked with David a lot before, since he is the maker of the Nuvola icons which I put into gnome-themes-extras, I am really looking forward to working with him on Fluendo related graphics. Might also make getting Nuvola in g-t-e up to date easier :)

Weekend aproaching now. Going to the cinema today with Johan Dahlin to once again try to see collateral. Then afterwards I probably try to hook up with Wim to experience some more of Barcelona's nightlife.
On thuesday thomasvs will be thankfully be back. He way to central to our operations to not have on hand here. Already have a long list of items I need to discuss with him.

Have been working a lot on the Flumotion manual over the last few days (flumotion-doc in svn for those interested). Those into this will know that when you encode a stream or file with many formats which are variable bitrate formats you can choose to encode in a specific bitrate (more predictable for streaming) or encode towards a specific quality level which keeps the image looking better but the stream could at times grow in size which of course often is problematic if you are streaming over the web.

Anyway you set this by typing in a number either for the fixed bitrate your want or the quality you want. But of course people without a lot of experience in the field would have no idea what bitrate or quality number they want for their theora video (myself included). So I figured trying to relate the quality and bitrate settings to stuff like DVD or VHS in the manual might be an idea. Well easier said than done, first of all there are no objective ways to measure this and secondly few if any people seemed to have a clear idea on what values would relate to what qualities. That you have to add resolution into the equation too doesn't exactly make it easier. I found one test online comparing sound quality between codecs on various bitrates, but it only convinced me that my plan was much easier to come up with than execute.

So instead I ended up explaining the difference between setting the bitrate and setting the quality and suggest the person streaming do some tests to find a level that fit their demands :)

jdahlin have been doing some cool work lately on Flumotion getting it to autodetect the available devices on each worker. Which means that if you install flumotion workers on 2-3 machines each with different kind of video/audio input devices and then bring up the flumotion wizard it will give you a selection of devices based on what is available on the machine of the worker in question :) nifty!

Also started to see some really good progress on some work we contracted out and sent out a second contract for our second contract asignment. Since it is part of my job to handle them it feels very good when things seems to work out smoothly. Soon starting some work where we are the ones being contracted so I guess we will know how it feels at both sides of the table :)

New release of the server out yesterday. Glad to see that the issues reported where either known or small. Which means it will be easier to move ahead instead of being 'stuck' where we currently are we the server in order to fix basic issues. Thomas and Johan have been doing some fantastic work on the server so far.

e8johan: The answer to your question is both yes and no. Yes, sure it is a plus, but on the other hand there have been and is lot of other options for easier OO in GNOME using C++, Python and Java for instance. So concluding that Mono developments main attractiveness is due to easier OO is probably much to simplistic. I think it is more that people feel that with Mono the platform is actually taking a big step forward; ie providing more than just some extra programming language gloss. That Miguel is a good advocate probably doesn't hurt Mono either :)

That said I think the position of Python as a programming language in the GNOME community is understimated. Considering that Red Hat seems to use it for most of their stuff, Ubuntu is using it for their stuff, my own company Fluendo is using it for our stuff, and of course a lot of independent developers are using it, I think that Python is probably the most widely deployed development language for GNOME apart from C.

Pointing back to the mono discussion I guess Miguel would be fast to point out that you can easily tie inn Python stuff to Mono using Iron Python. Although afaik no of the main commerical or independent users of python are doing so yet :)

Just read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry defending the settlement of the Kodad lawsuit. It was sad reading. I guess it would be impossible for him to say that the settlement was the stupidest thing Sun have ever done, McNeally would probably have fired his ass for it. But no matter what angle Jonathan tries to put on it Sun showed less backbone and insight in this case than Microsoft has done with Eolas or IBM have with SCO. And if he thinks people in Java community will praise him for giving in to Kodak I think he is wrong. What Jonathan fails to see is that giving in to Kodak (or anyone else) is wrong cause it leads to the same problems as giving in to terrorists and blackmailers; it will spur more such actions. Maybe Sun have got Kodak of the back of Java developers for the time being (of course if I where Kodak I would really start looking around for other patents to bring up knowing that Sun is ready to cough up huge amounts of money no matter what), but they have also made sure that thousands of other people with dubious patents have seen and learned that taking Sun to court over them will get Sun to hand over huge amounts of money even if they, as Schwartz himself admit, think the claims and patents are bogus. And the natural extension of that is of course that if a deep pocketed giant to Sun are prepared to pay great amounts of money to settle groundless claims then surely smaller players (like the companies and people in the Java development community) would be even easier pray wouldn 't they?

So Jonathan you haven't saved anyone, you just brought hell one step closer to our door. Thanks.....