Older blog entries for dsandras (starting at number 37)

I was interviewed earlier this week for my work on GnomeMeeting by the national radio in Finland thanks to Johnny Ström from Linuxvaasa.com. Of course, the interview was conducted using GnomeMeeting. Johnny told me they were pretty impressed by the product. It was fun!

GnomeMeeting

I have worked this week on codec plugins for GnomeMeeting. All codecs are now plugins... That's the continuation of Craig and Julien's work on plugins for devices.

I'm just back from the Libr'East in Paris. I spent most of my time with Dodji, strider, hub, lrz, ange, ... from GnomeFR. Such meetings are always nice because you see people in reality.
I also met Fabien Penso from LinuxFr. I discussed a long time with him and it was nice to see him again. I hadn't seen Fabien in reality since at least 2 years. Nice to see he has interesting projects in mind for the future.

gaim-vv

I read about that, and I don't really know what to think about it except that people will still need more professional VoIP and videoconferencing tools. That's what we are trying to provide. Also playing the game of big companies and reverse-engineering proprietary protocols is perhaps not the best thing to do in the communication world.

I have spent the last few days hacking on Evolution Data Server support in GnomeMeeting. It has been exciting and it begins to be usable. However, there are still a few things that we would need but that the API doesn't provide yet. Anyway, I think it will be a great feature for GnomeMeeting 1.2 and it will be a big step forward in terms of integration with the desktop.

I will be speaking at the Libr'East in Paris this Week-End, see the website for more info. I still need to finish my talk. I hope to be able to show some GnomeMeeting/Evolution interaction as that's what I'm working on currently.

Exams

Last year for Jonita, courage!

Work

I've been working hard on my project at work. It is fun, but a bit stressing too, because the result of my work doesn't entirely depend on me...

GnomeMeeting 1.00 has already been released and GnomeMeeting 1.0.2 is on the way. That release adds more translations, includes one bugfix, but also depends on the Janus release of OpenH323 for which a few bugs have been fixed too.

The development in CVS has continued. Julien has worked on a pure GLib backend to store preferences in GnomeMeeting. It has been integrated in CVS and is enabled when you compile GnomeMeeting with --disable-gnome. Of course, that doesn't mean that GnomeMeeting is moving away from GNOME as one of my main objectives is to be more and more integrated to the desktop - next step is some work to integrate the address book with evolution-data-server -. But some people have been asking since a long time for a lightweight GnomeMeeting version and for a Windows port. Some people have made good progress on the Windows port, and the ability to compile without GNOME features and dependencies was required for that port. In short, that is an option I don't like, but it was required.

Life

Somebody crashed his car into my 2 months old car while I was parked, and he drove away. Some days, staying in bed would be better.

Mailman Spam

markmc: The GnomeMeeting list suffers the same problem with spam than the GConf list. I would say it receives about 50 mails to be moderated per day when it is quiet. I'm using mladmin to discard mails. I even thought putting it in a cron.

GnomeMeeting 1.00 has been released yesterday together with a brand new website. We have not received complaints despite the big amount of downloads of the software, which is good news. Many things are on the roadmap to 2.00. Mainly SIP support, support for audio and video codecs plugins, better address book integrated with Evolution Data Server, Bonobo or DBUS integration, ...
We actually have 2 big directions for the 2.00 release: better integration with the desktop, and support for the other major VoIP/IP Telephony protocol, namely SIP. SIP support is a bit worrying because it will add more complexity to the software. Calling normal users won't be more difficult than it is now and will still be based on URLs, however, people will have to understand that when they are using a Gatekeeper, it only works for giving and receiving H.323 calls. Similarly, an incoming H.323 call can only be forwarded to a H.323 host, an incoming SIP call can only be forwarded to a SIP host. Does that mean that we should have 2 different possible settings for the forward host, or only one which would lead to an error when the host you are forwarding to only supports one protocol? If we have 2 different settings, what will we do for the current "FORWARD ALL CALLS" setting, should it be usable only when you have specified your 2 forward hosts? That will be a hard task, but our main motivation will be to "keep things simple"

IRC release party

We did an IRC release party yesterday, it was fun. Nearly nobody was talking on IRC as we were all connected to a big MCU provided by Stefan. Video and audio chatting is much more convenient than simple IRC, and you can see how the party is happening in the rooms of the different people involved in GnomeMeeting. All of us want to do it again for 1.2.

FOSDEM was a big success this year. We had many more visitors than what we would have dreamed of. I met many GNOME and GnomeMeeting hackers, which is always fun because you can meet in reality the people you are discussing with on IRC (and GnomeMeeting) on a daily basis. It was a pretty tiring weekend but I think we all enjoyed it very much. I will have some free months now before starting organizing FOSDEM 2005. I would like to thank all the people who helped making it the success it was, and I would also like to thank the hackers with whom I spent my time during the weekend because it was a great moment for me!

GnomeMeeting

I have not slept much recently because of the GnomeMeeting 1.00 release being scheduled for next week, because of FOSDEM and also because of an important project ending today at work. It was a very busy month, but I'm proud of what has been accomplished.

Let's hope the GnomeMeeting release will be a big moment.

Life

I have had a real Geek life the last weeks, but it was fun after all (not for Jonita though).

I got invitations from Jonita, Kenneth and Yoann. I had decided to not join Orkut, but I finally did it. Let's hope the GnomeMeeting Orkut community will grow that way. Orkut is definitely a nice concept.

1.00

Still working on it, I hope it will be ready in time...

I was in Geilenkirchen last week for the Open Source Telephony Summit. That was an excellent opportunity to meet other VoIP Open Source developers, and I had a great time there with Craig, Robert, Roger, Derek, Oliver, Stefan, ... We discussed a lot about the future of GnomeMeeting and about the future developments to be done after the 1.00 release is unleashed. I'm very enthousiastic about the post 1.00 release because it should make of GnomeMeeting a very complete VoIP application supporting all major protocols.

GnomeMeeting 1.00

I haven't code much lately, but I spent my time reading the code, reviewing patches from Julien and cleaning stuff. I think 1.00 is nearly ready, many users are already using our CVS snapshots, and we do not have many bug reports, which indicates a good stability despite the *huge* changes in this release.

Life

So many things to do, and so few sleep. It seems like I'm becoming again hard to live with, especially with the poor Jonita. Hopefully, everything will go better in one month.

I had a wonderful New Year's eve with Jonita and my parents. Much more fun than I had expected and it finished really late, which is good for me.

GnomeMeeting

I have worked a lot on GnomeMeeting the last few days and weeks during my spare time. Most of the features I wanted to see in 1.00 are already implemented. I will now spend the rest of the available time before the release of GNOME 2.6 to polish the code and work on documentation with zanee.

I just read Ettore passed away, I can't believe it. I didn't know Ettore very well, I just had a few mail exchanges with him in the past and I also met him at Guadec. He was the first one to propose integration of GnomeMeeting with Evolution.
The community has lost another great hacker in one month, such things shouldn't happen.
Condolences to his family, his friends and to Ximian.