Older blog entries for dsandras (starting at number 22)

Today is probably the worse day this year for me. I definitively left the office where I worked as a researcher during 2 years. Leaving was my own decision, but seeing professors and colleagues so sad that I'm leaving is really difficult for me. I don't know what to add... Very difficult day...

I'm now officially unemployed. I've had several propositions but I don't know yet what to do.

Jonita and me met Christian Strauf, aka tassian on #gnomemeeting, in Brussels last week. Christian was present for a 6Net meeting organized at Cisco. It seems that GnomeMeeting is very often used in such meetings to show typical IPv6 application porting. We discussed about IPv4 and NAT, but also IPv6, and multicast. It seems that multicast is a "must have" on the long term in GnomeMeeting.
Here is the a link to the picture.

GnomeMeeting

I recently added IP detection in GnomeMeeting using seconix.com and not anymore ILS. That permits to have IP translation easily working even if you don't register to ILS. I also added support for the iLBC codec that should be soon standardized by the IETF. It gives very good results especially when there is packets loss.

I spent one week of holidays with Jonita in the North of Belgium. We spent time traveling in Belgium, North of France, and The Netherlands. It was pretty fun and a way to relax, but also to be far from the usual stress. However, I managed to release GnomeMeeting 0.98.5 for GNOME 2.4 from there and to cope with an important bugfix thanks to the help of DV.

VeriSign

I'm very worried that a company like VeriSign can hijack the Internet the way they are doing it. If people permit things like that to happen, I wonder how our future will be.

GnomeMeeting

Despite the new release last week, development on GnomeMeeting has been very quiet lately. That is because I have been busy doing other important things. I will have more time again soon since I'll be unemployed in two weeks. I feel very frustrated by that though.

I finally decided to start looking for a new job, it will be hard to find work on something I like.

Coding on GnomeMeeting 1.00 has continued, I cleaned and improved some code. Having so many threads and mutexes inside GnomeMeeting's code requires deep understanding and you need to pay attention to what you are doing, otherwise crashes and random behavior are to be expected.

Julien has finished his plugins system for PWLib. It means that things like Firewire support can now work as dynamically loaded and optional plugins, it also means less dependencies. I've written an ALSA plugin, it seems to work well. I think that moving to ALSA is the best thing that can happen to Linux distributions.

That's unfortunately the end of the holidays for Jonita and me. Both of us went to Florence, in Italy. The weather was superb, and the city was wonderful. That was also a good opportunity to relax and think about my future and what I want to do of my life. Of course, I could resist to the temptation, and I didn't connect to the internet during 3 weeks. That resulted in several thousands of mails, including spams which were not detected by SpamAssassin.

GnomeMeeting will be included in GNOME 2.4 and thus the development will focus on a better integration with other GNOME components. I'm already dreaming of a full interaction with Jabber clients (there are a few), Evolution (addressbook, appointments, ...), Web browsers, and such things with the possibility to initiate a VoIP session from any software... VoIP is becoming more and more important, and I think that having a good VoIP client is the key to the success for a desktop environment.

The GNOME 2.4 release is approaching and murrayc did another review of GnomeMeeting focusing on improving the usability. I fixed what was needed, but the main conclusion was that GnomeMeeting 0.98 improved much in terms of usability compared to the previous release. That is a good news and it shows that some people noticed my continuous efforts focussing on the production of a better product. We hope to be close to perfection for the 1.00 release.

Finally! After long months of work, coding, debugging and testing, GnomeMeeting 0.98 has finally been released.

Releasing a new version of GnomeMeeting is more and more work for me: updating the website, the FAQ, coordinating translations, coordinating packaging... But I still manage to do it. <dream>Perhaps, one day, some company will finance me to permit me to do of GnomeMeeting the best VoIP app ever... </dream>.

This new release also disappointed me a lot more about some commercial Linux distributions: they apparently want to package only for their future versions, leaving the responsability to package for their current distribution to the software maintainer. I find it sad because in short words, we have to do everything ourselve if we want to provide GnomeMeeting to users of those distributions.

I didn't post any diary entry since a long time on Advogato. The main reason is that I had a lot of work, but also a strong demotivation in everything I was doing until now. Things are now getting better and I started to hack again on GnomeMeeting (which is a good sign).

There were heavy discussions on the GNOME mailing lists to determine whether GnomeMeeting should be included or not in the Desktop Release. I noticed there were several misconceptions about GnomeMeeting and VOIP in general. It seems that some people do not believe yet in VOIP and its future, I have personally no doubt that VOIP will be of an everyday use in the near future and apparently big companies like CISCO also believe it. Secondly, people tend to think that GnomeMeeting is only an application for people having a webcam, which is of course wrong as GnomeMeeting is first a VOIP/IP telephony application, videoconferencing is only a subpart - a bonus - of VOIP.

Not many news lately, I was very busy with my Ph.D., but I continued hacking on GnomeMeeting. New features since last release include Firewire support, nearly completed IPv6 support thanks to Sébastien Josset, and a complete rewrite of the videograbber. I'll hack now on more VOIP-centric features

I received a proposition for hosting the ILS server in Brussels. It will cost me 730 Euros/year. My passion begins to cost me much money. Unfortunately there is no other solution as I definitely have to move my server with the ILS and my mail to a new location.

GnomeMeeting 1.00

I'm now cleaning the code, fixing the last bugs and I will finally add the missing features. I expect 1.00 to be ready around july, 2 years after the first release. GnomeMeeting has improved much since the first days, both in features and in design. The stability is better too, even though some people were expecting me to release 1.00 right after the first release because it was already very stable for them.

I'm looking for a new provider for seconix.com which is the machine that hosts the GnomeMeeting ILS server, the GnomeMeeting channel bot and also all my mail. Bad news, it seems nobody wants to host it for less than 350 Euros/month which is not possible for me. Another proof that belgian ISPs are using Free Software but don't contribute anything back.