Related, I'll probably rewrite the ASF demuxing element. I recently noticed that the current one cannot even handle a simple sequence of PLAY-PAUSE-PLAY. Related, it does not resync on a broken stream, although ASF is perfectly suited for that. I'll probably take a long weekend off to do this sometime soon.
And two weeks later...
... politicians suddenly wake up. Oh my, v. Gogh is dead! Max van der Stoel, minister of state in the Netherlands, has commented on the issue by saying that we need to build upon having better relations and contact with immigrants.
When I left for the USA, I had to do all this myself. I had to find people to get in contact with, I had to make new friends, and for all that, I had to speak the language and interact with the inhabitants. It's a natural process for newcomers to adapt, not the other way around - it just tells me there's too many of them already and we've screwed up for too long already. Get real, dude, is this what you get paid for?
There was a small corner for Linux-based computing, organized by NedLinux (an online Linux-oriented forum), NLLGG (Dutch Linux user group) and KDE-NL. Unfortunately, no sign of life from GNOME-NL there, but at least something positive. Partly my own fault, I could (should) have helped organizing if I expected GNOME-NL to do something visible... Ohwell.
[edit]
Ah what the hell, I fixed vorbis too. :-).
Apparently, this morning 3:00 AM, a dutch special force team from the police tried to enter a building in which terrorism suspects were hiding to arrest them. One explosion, several gun shots, three wounded policemen and a few hours later, the whole block is shut down from existence. TV shows me images of tens or hundreds marines, heavily armed, keeping a close eye on that building. All TV channels give new updates every few minutes and even radio is united in content. Scary thought. What the hell is going on here? It's like living in a dream. Until the moment that one of them is shot (he's alive) and both are captured, around 6:00-7:00 PM. Until this very moment, we know pretty much nothing except that these persons are terrorist suspects and that there's believed to be explosives in the building.
This is unreal, really.
Impressions
There's apparently a bunch of terrorists in this country. They should die the most horrible death, no doubt about that. We should stab their eyes out, feed their flesh to the dogs while alive and throw the leftovers in the sea. There's no place in this world for terrorists. So far for the easy part.
A whole population, particularly marrocs, but basically all muslims in this country, are being looked at as if they're the terrorist threat themselves. There's fights all over, muslim schools burn, mosques are attacked and churches likewise, to get even. "We" and "they" fight, with words mostly, and agree on something: this is wrong. We're both at issue here. The whole fact that everyone uses that same words "they" and "we" implies how bad we're really doing. The cynical thing is that every dutchman will tell you that he definately knows that it's not all muslims that are that bad, he'll even tell you that he has one, and exactly one, in his group of closest friends.
"They" will tell "us" that we're stigmatizing and discriminating. And "we" will tell "them" that "they"'re segregating and terrorizing. And we both damn well know it's just a subgroup of the others that's torturing society, so why are we making such a big deal out of it? The fact that we do, implies how bad the situation is. And the worst part of all is that we're point at each other and therefore fail to identify those that cause it.
Chained Ogg
For the past two weeks, I've worked a lot on getting chained Ogg (mostly used for streaming Ogg radio over internet) to work, and I was nearly there friday. Wim took over (there were some reference counting bugs exposed elsewhere by my changes), and this afternoon I received the happy news that he got it working. Soon in a CVS repository mirror near you! Many thanks to Wim for helping me fix all sort of weird core bugs that I exposed by my random messing around and for finishing it off.
Totem & GNOME
Bastien proposed Totem (using the GStreamer backend) for GNOME-2.10! I hope that it'll be included, it'll be a worthy and highly appreciated component of the GNOME desktop!
Like I wrote previously, Theo van Gogh, cineast and writer, was brutally murdered by what turned out to be a sicko muslim fundamentalist in my homecountry. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we've turned to a new chapter of sickness in my country after the murder on political leader Fortuyn: we really are screwed this time. Just in case you think it couldn't get any worse from this point on, we were instantly proven wrong. Those muslim fundamentalists aren't just some individuals on crack. They're groups, cells of jihad terrorists, they have lists of people that they're gonna kill and v. Gogh was "just" #1. So far so good. Like any self-respecting jihad-warrior, they're prepared to die for the greater good. Wait a minute, what greater good? The greater good is that respected people such as the mayor of our capital, mr. Cohen, and a member of parliament, ms. Hirshi Ali, will be next. Yay for civilization.
While he was murdered, v. Gogh was stabbed with a butcher's knife with a letter attached (sick, sick, sick). The letter contained remarks such as the following:
Members of parliament have responded united: we support ms. Hirshi Ali, we shall not let this happen. Some political parties have - finally! - announced some plans to prevent this from getting any further. They want to take away citizenship from fundamentalists. Then my problem is, how is this gonna help from more people getting murdered if we can only capture them after they've murdered anyone? Another announcement was that people want to talk with muslim representatives. How is this going to help? Fundamentalists aren't going to talk. You're reaching out to the wrong audience here. Most of those muslims, and especially those that are representatives towards the rest of the country, are perfectly adapted and accept our norms and values. We don't need to talk to those, they're perfectly fine. It is the outliers that we're after here. Face it, I don't have the solution either. But we can't just do the same that we've always done. I'm happy that the political parties are now willing to take action. But please do something that will actually make a difference!
We have fundamentalists in this country. They are prepared to do whatever it takes to destroy our society. That may never happen! We need to take pre-emptive action, to protect our society, our rights, our freedom, our wealth and our children. Sounds like Bush? So be it. It is my country.
Theo van Gogh, maker of dutch films and documentaries on society issues, was murdered today. His TV shows were rather poor if you ask me, but his documentaries were a welcome refreshment of the political correct emptiness that we used to hear from all around. He might not have been the first person to do that, but he definately was one of the most influential ones. One of his latest documentaries included Submission, on the position of females in the Islam (targetted at western society, obviously). General consensus was that the reaction from muslim organizations in the Netherlands on this documentary exactly confirmed the message of the documentary.
I guess democracy is really just a really nice name for a blanket on something that nothing and nobody can really fix: idiots.
Today will be TV day. I'll be one of those morons just watching TV to see which of the two creeps is gonna rule the world for the next four years. Yes, creeps, because if it were for the looks, both would be straight from hell.
However, I can only hope that the US voters will look beyond looks and populism. As much as they are the same in most areas, that effectively means getting rid of Bush. Anything's better than a lunatic that wants to cut neuropharmacological research funding because it's unchristian. Just to mention something else from what all the others will say (wars, international treaties & contacts, ...).
Polls in the Netherlands amongst students show that +/- 85% of the people (ok, so students) wants Kerry. I'll share the majority opinion, just for once.
GStreamer Recorder:
So it had to happen some day, that I would release 0.0.1. It'll be soon. It's basically ready, but requires a new gst-plugins and gst-ffmpeg release because fixes in those are essential for the physical well-being of gst-rec. I can't wait to release. Hopefully, people will use it. It can record to a variety of formats, including MS-MPEG4v3 (in ASF), MPEG-4 (using either of XviD, DivX or FFMpeg's wonderful encoders) in AVI and, of course, Ogg/Theora+Vorbis. I was initially planning to just support Ogg/Theora in this first version, but given the rather poor encoding speed combined with the fact that the others "just work", I didn't really care to remove it. The preferences screen could probably use some UI love, though.
So it's perfect? Nah...
So those of you paying close attention to my blog (don't you all? :) ) would've noticed that my last screenshot of gst-rec actually contained a test image rather than a screenshot of some popular TV series or a good movie. You know why? Because my cables weren't long enough to fit between the TV (one side of the room) and computer (other side of the room)! Of all things that could possibly go wrong, this is the worst. Because you can't fix it apart from going to a shop to buy new cables.
So what's next?
DVD ripping, video transcoding, video editing, it's all there in my magical vision! We've got the widgets and the engine in gst-rec (ok, ok, so editing is a bit more difficult - but who cares). I just need more time. Oh, and Totem will rock your world. More soon! :).
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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