Base-Art / Misc

Hi Planet GNOME!

2008-02-27T22:05:30Z

Just a quick post to say hi to the GNOME community. Thanks Jeff for adding me!

So I'm Philippe (philn on IRC), working for Fluendo on the Elisa MediaCenter, writing Python fluently during work hours for fun and profit and off work, only for fun :)

I regularly write news about Elisa, did some posts about Pigment and GStreamer too and a good bunch of posts related to various hacks and ramblings about Python.

So expect new posts about Pigment and Elisa towards better integration in the GNOME desktop. I'll also try to blog about my little growing experience in the GStreamer world :)

N810: first impressions

2008-02-13T13:49:31Z

Two weeks ago I bought my N810 with the discount code kindly offered by Nokia for the Maemo development program. The device is really nice, the OS2008 provides a totally new user experience (compared to the version I used on my N770). So here are few remarks I have after few weeks of usage:

the padlock slider is too easy to activate.
the keyboard is coool but I sometimes have difficulties with the keys of the first row in the keyboard. To me they are slightly too near from the screen.
I dislike the kinda "micro" USB plug, it looks like some Nokia specific plug, a mini-usb plug would have been more handy so that I could use the same USB wire as for my camera.

So far I used the IM a bit with Frank for a video chat and with Mom for an audio-only GoogleTalk chat. Sound is good but video quality was bad, I need to make more tests I guess :)

Played a bit with MediaStreamer and Coherence, everything works fine, excepted seeking that's lacking because Coherence HTTP server doesn't yet support HTTP range requests.

I also did some media transcoding so that I can watch videos on the device. Videos need to be encoded in MP4 at some specific resolutions. Fortunately there's an handy script at maemo.org to do the whole job for me :)

Last weekend I gave a try to geottagging using the documentation on Maemo wiki. I ended up with a nice KML file that can be displayed on Google Earth and Google Maps (see below too). I'll directly integrate these features in my gallery soon, geotagging is an interesting thing, especially for my next holidays... :)

Agrandir le plan

In the coming weeks I'll start developing user-interfaces using the Python EFL libraries. I'll most likely play a bit with the Coherence MediaRenderer called Compere, so far implemented using PyGame and try to rework it with the EFL libs... More to come later :)

edit: Frank the Coherence guru reminds me that Coherence de facto supports HTTP range requests but MediaStreamer HTTP client doesn't implement the seek requests correctly... :)

Back from FOSDEM

2007-03-06T21:36:38Z

So I was at FOSDEM 2007. Nice conf, many people and interesting talks. I crashed at Thomas'_ place for the week-end, thanks dude :-) Of particular interest:

OLPC : laptops for children
OpenMoko : open-source phone
Metisse : not a 3D desktop!

I wish I could attend to OneTeam and Telepathy talks. Thomas told me about a nice project presented there as well: MetaSploit.

Elisa talk went quite well, I got many interesting questions especially about the PVR we plan to bring in at some point. The Seamless guy showed up at the end of the talk, Seamless is a DVD player written in Python and using GStreamer. It wasn't updated for a while, still using gst 0.8 as I understood. But soon it'll be ported to 0.10 and maybe at some point an Elisa DVD plugin will be available :)

Stefan gave me a N770 so that I can hack on a Elisa client for Maemo platform, thanks again Stefan!

New home, new country, same job

2006-09-01T21:45:25Z

After nearly 6 months spent living in Lyon, I headed south once more, to Barcelona :) I entered a new flat with 2 other frenchie fellows, we'll be damn fine there!!

We still have some administrative paper work to do, but it can wait, we did the essential ones.. The flat is a bit messy right now, there are stuff to unpack lying around, and pieces to put back together, but it will get better soon ;)

It seems there are many things to visit right there. Beach is nice too, and mountains are not that far... So much to discover!

So, I will be in the same office as my co-workers at Fluendo, still working on Elisa. I think the project will evolve faster and better in this new context. Talking with people face to face is really better than IRC or video-conferencing; and by the way Fluendo folks are so fun to work with :)

Switching server

2006-08-03T13:02:23Z

This evening base-art.net, pythonfr.org and few other hosted domains should be un-available while we migrate websites to a brand new dedicated server. So, fellow readers, don't be surprised ;-)

Things will come back up this night hopefully. I'm still reachable by mail, phil at base-art dot net. Jkx, the summer-server-migrator, did a good job and won few beers :-)

Pimp this rage

2006-04-20T22:29:14Z

Looks like Raster has been hacking on a media center thingy. So far it looks great, i've watched the demo video, installed rage in no time and got it running in, well, even less time :) I must say i'm really impressed by the look and feel of the app. Need to keep an eye on this !

I've even seen a -gstreamer option, but somehow didn't worked out. Also video thumbnail build/playback didn't worked, but i'm not really up-to-date with my EFLs these days, and Raster warned Rage could make your computer blow out :) Anyway, keep up good work Raster!

Watch out the demo video, it's really impressing.

So (privately) delicious

2006-03-19T11:48:44Z

Del.icio.us folks added the so awaited private bookmarks saving support. That's a great step for this service, i need it to save links to private websites or htaccess protected websites or even job-related locations.

By default the new option is not activated, and once active you need to validate a little checkbox on the "new-post" page to keep the link private.

New home, new job

2006-03-17T18:48:33Z

Last month i moved from Brest to Lyon, for a new job. I'm now working with Fluendo folks on a Gstreamer/Python media center open-source project since March 1st.

The project is very ambitious, the plan is to provide a cross-platform, great looking media-center supported by a community of developers and users (like Gstreamer for instance). We are working hard, i'll probably post more on that topic later on.

So, moving on was a bit hard, including flat-hunting, lots of administrative tasks (phone, electricity, dsl subscriptions and i forget some others). I'm not finished yet, but quite lazy for the remaining ones. Flat hunting was hard but my new home is quite good, i'm happy with it ;) And many thanks to Gagoune for hosting me during few weeks!

BTW hello to planet gstreamer! Very happy to be here :)

Merry christmas !!

2005-12-23T21:47:52Z

I just wanted to share a very cool blog i've found few days ago. It's about those little cute thingies:

Here it is : http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/

France T�l�com, au revoir

2005-11-09T12:48:15Z

Aujourd'hui j'ai recu ma derni�re facture FranceTelecom : un avoir de 21� :) Et oui, je suis en d�groupage total chez le N9uf depuis fin octobre:

T�l�phonie illimit�e (bluff� par la qualit� de la VoIP)
Conservation du n� FT
VoiceMail
TV (enfin, normalement ... QQ1 pr�te sa T�l� ? j'en ai pas encore :))
ADSL 8Mbits

J'en ai �galement profit� pour flasher mon WRT vers OpenWRT sans probl�me et le configurer gr�ce � qqs scripts de Brest-Wireless ..