I also decided to have a look at the new APIs of the day and try to update Cupid to it. Noticed that GtkFileChooserButton cannot do save actions (filed as #164900), which means I need to continue using GnomeFileEntry. GtkUIManager (replacing GnomeUIInfo) keeps confusing me for some reason, maybe I need to look for some hello world example code (which http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkUIManager.html basically is, but not just yet). GtkTextView looks nice, but is incredibly complex if you just want a simple HTML-like textbox. How do I get the complete text from the GtkTextBuffer...? Need to move over to GOption (instead of popt) at some point too, but GStreamer doesn't use it yet, which is kind of annoying. I guess I'll quietly continue to use deprecated widgets/objects for a while longer until I get familiar with the new ones...
Eh...
You're European? Write a letter to your national agriculture minister, today. Don't ask me what agriculture and computing sciences have to do with each other. I don't know. But I'm sure they can tell us, because boy, those agriculture politicians make some heavy decisions for us...
Without patents in this area, all investments would be void, since everyone would just steal the competitor´s product instead. However, the acceptance of re-patenting of a specific mirror-formula of a product of which the original patent was expired (breath here :-) ), is an example that even in this field, patents are very much imperfect.
Somehow, it feels frustrating that modern machines have about as much video-RAM as my machines used to have real RAM. I guess I´m just an old fart.
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/pkg/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/deps http://users.bromstraat.net/fkooman/fedora/gstreamer-cvs/$basearch
Put that in your yum.conf and you're set.
Also, since Benjamin worked on a puzzle game, I decided to make it work in Totem. Next stop: DVD menus.
Some small TODO items before I commit the subtitle + stream selection patches (they'll be committed together):
Where we are:
So far for the good stuff. In the recent Gnomedesktop.org article on the new GStreamer releases, I was kind of stunned by attitude, but the main point is a good question: how far are we (cmp. mplayer/xine)? So let's see. Note that I'm talking about my local version here, which is not CVS (although all my patches are available through bugzilla) and definately not a release.
There's also some areas in which we don't lack with respect to them, but they still need fixing, e.g. error messages (our errors displayed aren't exactly HIG compliant in some cases) or metadata display (although we support metadata, it isn't always displayed in totem; I know why, but I don't have time to fix it). So in short, TODO list (in random order):
So that's not too bad, but far from perfect. The thing that does annoy me in the gnomedesktop.org comments is the random attitude where Joe Random User will tell me what to work on and how important his requested $feature is for the general wellbeing of GStreamer or GNOME. During the past three months, I've worked non-stop on improving such things, and it starts feeling rather endless. But seriously, everyone can work on fixing and improving error messages in applications, so why isn't that happening? So let's try something else. Here's your chance, interested hackers and soon-to-be hackers. There's lots of small things that need fixing, that are not too hard but will be a very valuable contribution to GStreamer and GNOME. I'll gladly help you getting into this, I'll poke you in the right direction if you need that and generally be available to answer questions. If you want to contribute, come online on #gstreamer on irc.freenode.net or mail the list, and by doing that, contribute to a very lively part of the GNOME desktop!
Life:
This appears to be the section in which people with a hackergotchi tell you what they've been doing yesterday. So, I went to a music concert in Amsterdam with performances from DJ Tiesto, Blof, Acda en de Munnik and some more. Was pretty cool. Met up with some people there and got home late and had a headache. It's interesting how young people in this country are being motivated to be involved in society (this was charity for Asia); disaster happens, so let's do a cool concert. They did this for Theo van Gogh, too. It feels kind of weird to have a great time because a disaster happened... Ohwell, I guess it works, it was crowded as hell. :-).
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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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!