Present Perfect

Life

Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me back to the old world.

I mailed my favourite singer yesterday, who used to front The Afghan Whigs but now forked his own band with The Twilight Singers on the off chance of asking for entrance at the Amsterdam show. The guy got back to me in no time telling me I had passes waiting for me both in Brussels and Amsterdam. As someone on the mailing list once said - That guy has style by the mile.

GStreamer

Two thirds of the way through converting the old error method to the new. I've gotten a good view of the kinds of errors we currently throw, and I think I have them catalogued pretty well. The actual conversion work is just plain boring in a way, but on the other hand it seems very necessary work and just another step in getting GStreamer where GNOME and possibly KDE wants it to be.

Last weekend Julien added DVD support in gst-player and Totem. People will say "so what, other players did that years ago". True, very true. The wonder of it though is that Julien didn't really need to do anything special beyond telling the player to use the dvd source element.

After some people, like thaytan, had worked on fixing up some of the interactivity stuff which they only tested using gst-launch pipelines, and trying to make sure that clicks were sent through from one of the video sinks to the rest of the elements in the pipeline, it just worked in the player like magic just by using the right element. Now that's class. GStreamer is number two on the style-by-the-mile-list today.

I was sort of down on GStreamer for the last month. but Uraeus's relentless energy while staying here for New Year's, combined with things turning out for the better, Ximian having a good hacker working on GStreamer/GNOME integration, us hiring a great hacker arriving next week, Christian's article on OSNews and Slashdot, and exciting plans in the pipeline, I'm totally on the upswing again.

There was one vitriolic comment on SlashDot I had to reply to. It mentioned that gstreamer-universe wasn't apt-gettable for over a year. I don't think I ever got more than two comments on that, all on IRC, no mails or anything, so I guess I lost the motivation to keep it in sync. Anyway, I totally not get people who get their self-motivation or their delusional sense of self-cool from always being down on whatever project for whatever reason. If you think it's cool to diss anything or anyone for no reason at all, you're a moron and showing your lack of self-confidence as clearly as a piece of corn walking through a chicken barn.

Number three on the style-by-the-mile list is stevebaker, doing a presentation on GStreamer right now in Australia at linux.conf.au

I hear the talk went over well, congrats Steve. I really sort of miss his presence, and I wish he would blog a little, and I'm wondering how Bronya and the new kid on the block are doing ... He was a great guy to have met if only for a short period, before he went back down under.

Theora

I should start taking a look at where we are in GStreamer wrt. Theora. We have some exciting plans for it in the near future, and I want us to be ready for it.

Life Completely wired up with positive energy. So bad that I can't sleep. It's 5 AM and I'm supposed to be getting a plane in four hours to take me...