My last posts dates long time ago. I guess that’s the right time for an update.
– real life:
I have to complete my thesis and courses within the next summer, will I manage to get that result, keep working on gentoo, have some of social life and retain my mental sanity? Nobody will know. What’s sure is that I had an ugly compulsory course about win32 internals and .net, I couldn’t think about anything worse than ill coded java or C++, now I can say that there is something wrong, is written in C and is the win32 api.
(Incidentally I should also write a screen/audio capture software in .not for the course and I don’t know how to start, if someone has some ideas feel free to mail me the suggestions)
– media-video:avifile vs mlt++ Who’s more broken?
I’m actively wiping any trace of avifile from our tree, it broken, unmantained and superceeded by other better tools, what is currently stopping me from close it’s coffin is jahshaka and mlt++, mlt++ is a wrapper for mlt (mlt.sf.net if you don’t know) and is currently used by that fine or less NLE as backed. mlt++ is broken and since I’m not so accustomed to C++ (sooner or later I’ll write yet another text about not using C++ if you don’t really want to spend the right time over it). mlt probably could have a release sooner or later and probably those bindings will be fixed, anyway I’m working on a snapshot of it, looks like that just the C++ wrappers are bogus =/ pity, no jashaka with mlt for now.
– media-video:mplayer and ffmpeg To snapshot or not to snapshot?
In those month many interesting new bugs got added, ahem, squashed and some features got in as well, I’m thinking about adding a new snapshot to match what the new xine-lib expects from ffmpeg and probably produce an mplayer snapshot to have most of the related bugs that actually are crawling in bugzilla wiped.
Since the server of mphq is currently about to die and the replacement in on route probably I could wait a bit more and ask upstream for a winter release.
– PPC:
I’m currently testing gcc-4.0.2 and the new glibc and they looks quite promising (and overally more or less bugfree), the only problem I have is about gdb not debugging so well and probably I should pay more attention at the issue.
– media-gfx:blender
I do hope the new, upcoming, blender release won’t spawn again lots of bugs, the new features added look nice, if only had the time to study it properly so I can do something else than a cookie-man (first example of the blender book)
– media-gfx:gimp
The new gimp 2.4 will be great, I’m testing (what an excuse to spend some time editing some old pictures and drawing something…) the latest 2.3.x releases and they look relatively stable (at least on ppc) and with some nice features.
– not really gentoo projects: xiph-rtp
As part of my thesis I’m pushing some draft about vorbis and theora in rtp towards rfc status (I do hope they reach it), so far the most annoying problem has been the vorbis bitstream internals (since is quite complex), ogg (since is too simple and doesn’t have all the informations I need ^^) and getting input for every people/association interested on the topic.
– not really gentoo projects: fenice and nemesi
Another part of my thesis is make fenice and nemesi support vorbis and theora. If you are wondering what they are http://streaming.polito.it
They are quite promising and, beside the Italian doxy comments still present, quite understandable. The main problem: too few people are working on it so the development isn’t as fast as it should.
I guess that’s long ago and I should go back coding/studying/writing/doing something productive