Present Perfect

So, it's now official: Flumotion has won the 'Best Streaming Innovation' award at last week's Streaming Media Europe conference in London. Thank you for all who voted! I'm surprised to see so many people in total vote, that means that there are quite a few real users out there.

I wasn't there myself to accept the award (our commercial team accepted what basically is a technology award, but we get along well enough :)), but I did go on Friday to replace Julien on a panel about the promise and disruoption about Open Source Video (scroll to the bottom).

This was actually my first panel, but I think we did well, especially considering it was the last panel of the day. There certainly were many more questions from the audience then in the transcoding panel I attended earlier that day. The panel was led by Dr. Tsur from Kaltura, an open source video platform.

After the conference I took the underground with Damien from New Bamboo who was also on the panel. They developed Panda, a cloud transcoding solution with the very catchy tagline of 'video solved'. It uses ffmpeg at its core, which might get them in trouble now that they want people to run it as a cloud service, so I suggested he take a look at GStreamer instead. My first suggestion was that it should be doable to provide a drop-in binary replacement with the same interface, but having looked at the output of ffmpeg -h this weekend, I'm not sure anymore - that binary was already complicated to use way back when and it has only exploded further.

In any case, since it's an open tool, maybe someone at work should take a look and see how easy it would be to teach it GStreamer. Or, maybe instead, we should open our own transcoder solution.

Anyway, back to London and the conference. Since the conference was over after the panel and people didn't hing around, I called Lotte, a friend living there, to go have a drink before taking the Eurostar back. And thus it happened. I felt like a real global cosmopolite, having a drink in London after a conference for my Spanish job coming in from Belgium wearing a Spanish jacket, American shoes bought in London, a Florentine shirt, and New York pants.

So, it's now official: Flumotion has won the 'Best Streaming Innovation' award at last week's Streaming Media Europe conference in London. Thank you for all who voted! I'm surprised to...

The phone doesn't take great pictures, but I'm sure you get the idea:

71095

A nice, inspiring view.

The phone doesn't take great pictures, but I'm sure you get the idea: 71095 A nice, inspiring view.

Last year one of our sysadmins set up the possibility for our people to have a vacation autoreply for their mail.

Is it just me, or are vacation autoreplies worse than the problem they solve ? I've never agreed with the need for them - to me, email is a more convenient letter in the post, but with the same obligation of speed of response, so it's fine to be away for a week and not reply yet.

But it's just really annoying for the people that aren't on holiday to continuously receive double the email. And it's doubly worse when those people on holiday still send out mails, causing you to reply. It's like a honey trap!

Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy beause of the holiday heat.

Last year one of our sysadmins set up the possibility for our people to have a vacation autoreply for their mail. Is it just me, or are vacation autoreplies worse...

Jan and Arek entered this year's ICFP programming contest. It's a three day programming contest, so this morning they asked if they could swap their Friday project day for today to finish the contest. They seem to be in the top third at the moment.

Arek's never been a fan of long meetings, but today's standup meeting was particularly amusing with Arek urging everyone to keep focused and get out there quickly. They had less than two hours left on the clock.

71089 Spot the seven differences

Amusingly, today they came to work with almost the same shirt on, by accident! I can only assume there is a big clothes factory in Poland where they have huge stock of the same fabric...

90 minutes left, knock them dead, guys!

Jan and Arek entered this year's ICFP programming contest. It's a three day programming contest, so this morning they asked if they could swap their Friday project day for today...

while looking for load balancing projects.

This gem from Cisco's site:

Maximize application availability by providing universal, application-fluent business continuance capability.

while looking for load balancing projects. This gem from Cisco's site: Maximize application availability by providing universal, application-fluent business continuance capability.