Deinterlacing, now in Totem

Totem, in git master for GNOME 2.32, has support for deinterlacing video streams, thanks to the work by Sebastian Dröge. You'll need gst-plugins-base from git master to test it out for now.

Free of charge, you'll get Philip Withnall's work on not blocking the interface when parsing playlists. This should make Totem feel more responsive overall.

Code for cash: Summer of Code ideas

As you might know, the time as come to put in your applications for Google's Summer of Code project ideas.

There's a good bunch of ideas available on the GNOME side of things, but if you fancy helping out GNOME without working on GNOME, you might also like the ideas from FFMpeg, GStreamer, or BlueZ (some of it directly related to gnome-bluetooth).

And if you're into web development, we have 2 good ideas in the GNOME Wiki (See the Front-end for common web services and Collaboration server/client ideas).

Speaker testing

Based off the work Lennart did, let me introduce you to the speaker testing UI in gnome-volume-control.

Patch lives in Bugzilla, and will be in the Fedora 13 repositories shortly.

Too many modules

Today I released GNOME 2.28.0 versions of:

- totem-pl-parser and totem

- gnome-bluetooth

- gnome-media

- and gnome-user-share

I also released a new nautilus-sendto, with a revised GNOME-ish version number.

Both gnome-bluetooth and totem are also due 2.28.1 releases to fix a couple of buglets.

Some little tools

GNOME 2.28 and Fedora 12 are approaching, so I'm in full bug fixing mode.

I've been using clang on totem-pl-parser as a test:

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/ --libdir=/usr/lib64 --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang make

All the little bugs will be listed in clang/index.html. I fixed most of those, and pushed them using git-bz:

$ git bz file totem-pl-parser/general HEAD~10..

And voila, a nice list of patches, ready to apply.

Contributing translations

In a comment to my last post, somebody mentioned that the translations would be better on Launchpad than in GNOME. Adi Roiban posted two articles on his blog showing how to contribute to GNOME translations:
Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations and Contribute to GNOME as a translator

I'm pretty sure I'll leave the GNOME translations as a feature in that list :)

Things you shouldn't do

Things you shouldn't ever be doing.

• Transform a filename into a URI like that:

uri = g_strdup_printf ("file:///%s", filename);

Use g_filename_to_uri() instead. Same goes for the opposite direction, where stripping "file://" isn't good enough to transform a URI into a local filename. Use g_filename_from_uri(), or g_file_get_path() if you're actually going to be opening the files.

• Use GStreamer to play a single small pop sound:

Use libcanberra instead. It's portable, might use GStreamer in some cases, and very certainly requires less code for a simple use like this.

Bruno, you should get a Bugzilla component for Garfunkel.

NB: It doesn't actually look like that

If you read the Phoronix article about the new gnome-volume-control (also seen linked from OSNews), don't worry, the upstream (and Fedora) applet doesn't look like that.


It looks like that.



Ubuntu's mixer applet is a different UI on the old mixer applet in gnome-applets, and not the PulseAudio-powered volume applet now in gnome-media.

In addition to the article being outdated (the treeview with the one-by-one sound event customisation is already gone), it also invents new features such as «the ability to adjust the alert volume on a per-alert basis». God knows where they got that from.

/The guy who did the last gnome-media release

Me stickers!

I haven't received my stickers yet.

A step closer to World Domination

Same as. But more times.

About wasting time

Make sure your application's setup uses GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS in configure, and has WARN_CFLAGS in the CFLAGS... I just wasted too much time doing fixing a bug that wasn't.

Better late than never

Back in the day, I used my paycheck to buy the top-notch MP3 player that was the Rio500. Unfortunately, I forgot it in the back pocket on my plane seat when flying over to Raleigh for my Red Hat induction. And then I used one of my first new job paycheck to buy a second generation (and very very expensive) iPod.

You could say that hacking on Walk500, a front-end to that great player is the reason why I'm hacking on GNOME these days.


I couldn't bear the thought anymore, and bought a Rio500 on eBay for $5. Hacking on it half-an-hour at a time, I cleaned up the code. The latest release of the modern era is available on SourceForge.

Stormy for GNOME!

As Luis mentioned, congrats to Stormy for getting the GNOME Foundation gig, and well done to the Foundation for hiring such a great person.

What Luis didn't mention is that we know for a fact that a few people have a crush on Stormy. You know where to send the hush-money.

libgweather split

Federico was lying. Took me 25 minutes as the SVN logs can attest ;)

Shame SVN can't copy across repos, we'd have been able to carry the logs as well (yeah, I guess I should have asked...).

gnome-bluetooth kill kill

Last week, I did more work on the Bluetooth device selector, to avoid some of the problems we saw with the one in gnome-bluetooth (mainly the "I work with loads of nerds and there's 500 Bluetooth devices in the vicinity" use case). The patch is available on the bluez-devel mailing-list.

It looks pretty good, but would require some work before it's something bluez-gnome can export as public API.


Anyone fancying some cut'n'paste fest for gnome-phone-manager?

Go! Package!

Thanks to work by Olav and others, I've been able to create a new SVN repo easily, and I've committed the Nintendo DS Rom thumbnailer to SVN, and made a release.

Good mojo for the person that'll get it in Fedora.

Update: And obviously, there was a bug in the Makefile which meant that the release didn't work. 1.0.1 is out. Thanks Laurent :)

Another Update: Third time's a charm. Trying to put garbage in GConf really isn't fun. I'm done for today, don't care if it's broken again.

More website videos and sports

This week-end, I added yet a bit more functionality to our NarrowSpace plugin (ie. the QuickTime compatibility plugin), implementing another bunch of missing Javascript functions.

If you have a website where some buttons don't work, take a look at the output of your web browser (using firefox -debug for Firefox, mozilla -debug for Mozilla, etc.), and you might see things like:

** Message: WARNING: Site uses unimplemented function 'totemINarrowSpacePlayer::GetRate'

Then file a bug against Totem's browser plugin component, with the debug output messages, and the URL to access the page in question. Hopefully, we'll be able to implement the missing functionality, as we've done for the Apple site above.

As for sports, I caught the France - Italy game on Saturday in a local French pub, after having watched England - Israel. And my cousin has made the Solheim Cup team this year (it's the Woman's equivalent to the Ryder Cup). Starts on Friday, I hope she does well.

Lazy^WWindows web, can you help?

Trying to fix a little Totem bug, could anyone with a Windows machine and Windows Media Player 11 copy the output of this page in the comments (of the blog, or in the bug)?

Thanks!

Note that I tried to install it with Wine, but no luck, at all.

New releases

bluez-gnome 0.10 was released, and now includes my patches for the "Browse device" functionality. I also released a new shared-mime-info and Totem devel version today. Everything's nicely sitting in rawhide now (or it will be if my last build worked).

Now, I'll go back to doing nothing, as I'm supposed to be on holidays.

By the way, the Simpsons movie was really nice, go and see it. That was my Wednesday morning AFK :)

All merged

I bought an M3 Simply for my Nintendo DS, to avoid carrying around the tiny little cartridges, especially when I travel (as per last week's GUADEC where I didn't bring mine). After downloading the ROMs for my games from some shady websites (uhuh), the filenames were less than helpful, but I realised all the sites had nice little icons. Sure enough, they can be thumbnailed. Shame I can't move my Final Fantasy III or Mario Bros saves to the micro SD card...



The Browse Device functionality is now all merged in bluez-gnome, thanks Marcel! Now to clean up the widgets, and finish off the wizard.