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).

iPhone and iPod touch support in Fedora

As Martin posted recently, libimobiledevice hit 1.0.0 earlier this week.

As a timeline of what's available in Fedora, here's a list of the features available in each Fedora release for iPhone and iPod Touch users:

- Fedora 11 contains libimobiledevice 1.0.0 and filesystem access through ifuse

- Fedora 12 was the first distribution to ship with out-of-the-box support for gvfs-afc, presenting you with your device on the desktop as soon as plugged in.

- Fedora 13 (and the upcoming Beta) will contain libgpod and Rhythmbox with music syncing support for those devices.

Loads of tweaks are happening now in Fedora 13 to make the experience smoother. Feedback in the bugzillas, as per usual.

Guessing DVD titles

I just pushed discident-glib to GNOME git, a small library that uses discident.com's service to guess the title of DVDs. They have a database of some 250k DVDs, though the database itself isn't open, and the API doesn't seem to allow submission.

Still a few FIXMEs to go through and API docs to write, and it should be ready to be integrated in your favourite DVD ripper.

Drop me a line if you're interested in using it in your app.

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.

I can't even spell my own name?!

Thanks to David, I finally fixed the header title of my blog to spell my name in Hebrew properly. David, don't hesitate to let me know if it still sucks :)

For the record, the banner was previously in Katakana, then in Arabic for a while (thanks Imed!), and in Hebrew since Eitan kindly transliterated my name for me.

If you have some Hindie skills, drop me a note :)

Before everything is broken

As my awesome hosting provider is closing his servers soon, I moved my DNS to using GANDI's DNS servers, and my mail to Google's servers. Things should still be working as before, but do let me know if I really broke something...

Tea break! (and High-Quality vids)

We're currently closing up on some discussions at the GNOME UX Hackfest, and I'm going through my browsing history and cleaning up my TODO lists at the same time.

I thought I'd mention this nice link if you haven't seen it. Theora, when encoded with a newer Theora (Thunelsda) encoder, should at least match “MPEG-4” (in quotes, because I don't want to mention specific profiles, and get into a pissing contest).

Monty's been working on Theora and Vorbis quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure he would admit that the Theora of past didn't do justice to the capabilities of the codec.

Have fun with the surround sound work in Vorbis too :)