Short heads-up to Belgian students interested in participating in Google Summer of Code 2010. Next week, March 9, there will be an info session at the K.U.Leuven computer science department (200A, room 00.225), from 12:00 to 13:00.

Bram Luyten (mentor at DSpace) and Vincent Verhoeven (2 year as student) will do most of the talking, but as I happen to work there, I (2 times student and now GSoC admin for GNOME) will be present too and talk about doing a GSoC with GNOME. Obviously there will be plenty of time for questions as well.

If you want to be the next GNOME rockstar, this is your chance, come over and have a chat!

More info

Dear higher powers,

Could we please have a GNOME usability hackfest every year or so? The magic that comes out of those is awesome.

That will be all.

Stuff to look forward to at FOSDEM 2010: The GNOME room and for the first time ever: the Mono room. And seeing everybody again, off-course. Can't wait!

Together with Mike Gemünde (tigger), I am happy to announce that we are working on adding image support to Taglib#, which is the metadata library used by Banshee and currently only supports audio and video files. So why is this important? Because we will be able to vastly improve the metadata handling inside F-Spot. Furthermore, should Banshee ever decide to add photo support. it'll be ready for them to use.

The aim is to have a usable, complete and solid metadata library. This includes extensive unit testing (to the extreme). If we will handle your files, we want to guarantee that it will be done correctly.

All of this can be found on Gitorious. The code is in the photo-support branch of the mainline repository, master is a copy of the SVN repository for upstream Taglib#. Currently we support JPEG and TIFF, with Exif and XMP (see the wiki for more details). We plan to expand this to every other format out there. More instructions on how to get the code and test it can be found here.

So what's the plan here? First, we will improve the git version as is. When it is ready, we will then start embedding it into the F-Spot tree (while keeping the main repository synced in gitorious), to let it mature. Over time, we'll be working with upstream to have it merged back. I have already talked with Gabriel Burt about this, so this "fork" won't stay around forever.

We are looking for people that want to help us out. By testing it (to make sure we handle your files correctly) and off-course by hacking on it. Much to my surprise, I noticed that writing a metadata library isn't all that hard, so you don't have to be a superhero hacker to be able to do something useful.

Want to help out? Hop onto IRC and join #f-spot (on irc.gnome.org), come and talk to me (rubenv) or Mike (tigger).

Three weeks since the end of GSOC 2009 and I still haven't managed to blog about it. Shame on me! This summer I worked on RAW handling and processing for F-Spot. In the long term, F-Spot should become a capable image processing tool, like e.g. Adobe Lightroom. The purpose of this GSOC was to get a step closer towards that goal.

There are three big issues that need to be solved to get there:

• RAW decoding and loading
• RAW processing
• Repeatable (non-destructive) editing

RAW decoding and loading
RAW files are generally stored in an undocumented, proprietary format, which often varies per camera model. Decoding these files was something F-Spot did not attempt to do yet. During this summer, I refactored the image loading facilities in F-Spot towards a unified loading model, into which I hooked up a new RAW loader, based on LibRaw.

This means that F-Spot can load and display any RAW file supported by dcraw (upon which LibRaw is based). That basically means all RAW files.

RAW processing
A big task in handling RAW files is processing: transforming the raw sensor data into RGB pixels, applying white-balance and gamma corrections, noise reduction etc. All of this needs to happen in a high bitdepth (10, 12 or 14 bit) for optimal quality. I investigated three paths here: reusing the dcraw processing routines, GEGL and hacking it up myself.

Trying to reuse the processing routines from dcraw was a nice way to learn how much of a horror the dcraw code is. Certainly the most bizarre code I've seen to date. Also, these routines were not reusable for e.g. JPEG, which would have meant that we needed to implement things like white balance adjustment twice.

Plan B was to use GEGL, the great image pipeline that will power The GIMP. While promising, it was still way too slow to be usable (minutes of time needed to load one RAW file).

Plan C involved hacking it up myself. This would have meant changing GdkPixbuf to support higher bitdepths and write a ton of very complex computation algorithms.

In the end, I made the wise decision not to try to build a high bitdepth pipeline and focus on the other tasks. For now, I let LibRaw do the initial processing, up to the point where we have an RGB image, which is then handed over to F-Spot for further processing.

Repeatable (non-destructive) editing
The third task was repeatable editing. To go for the Lightroom experience, with all the knobs and wheels to adjust, we needed a repeatable editing framework. Those familiar with F-Spot know that all editing is currently destructive: each operation creates a new JPEG, with the quality loss that goes along with it. I wrote the first version of a non-destructive image processing framework and converted all color operations to it.

It means that we go from:
original --> editA --> editB --> editC

to:
original + adjustment settings --> result

This is a good thing, every arrow means potential quality loss.



So, what's next? Where are we at?
This code is not merged yet, as there are still some things that need to be worked out. Those who want to try it (make backups, your database will be changed!) can find it in the libfspotraw branch on Gitorious. Alert readers will have noticed that we are not there yet, which is true, but given the size of the task, that was to be expected. We are however a lot closer in the right direction. More information and details can be found in my final report email.

In the meantime, I have started hacking on another important issue related to F-Spot. But you will have to wait until I have returned from my trip to Lisbon (leaving tomorrow, coming back Sep 18) for more details.

As Stephane mentioned in his blog, F-Spot 0.6.0 is out.

Some of the highlights of this release (in no particular order):

• This release contains the folder bar, which I previously blogged about.
• This is the first release where we all used Git and it has massively paid off. Contributions are flowing in at a massive rate, from lots of people. See for yourself on Gitorious. Now that the release is out, it's time to go over merge requests. It's hard to keep up with them.
• F-Spot is getting ready for GNOME 3, with the introduction of GIO/GVFS and GtkBuilder. There are still parts of the code using the old stuff, but we're gradually replacing it.
• Bugs fixed! Over 120 bugs have been closed between the previous and the current release. This number does not include duplicates.
• And perhaps the most important: we're retooling things, refactoring and cleaning, which was much needed and will allow us to make it better faster, make it easier to add stuff and simpler to contribute.

With the pace going up and the codebase improving, you can be sure to see great stuff in the future of F-Spot! Oh and if you'd like to help build that future, drop on by on IRC: #f-spot on irc.gnome.org.

A little while back, Mike Gemünde (tigger) wrote one of the nice features that will be present in the upcoming F-Spot release (really soon!): the folder bar. What is this? It's a new sidebar page that shows the folders in which your photos are located and allows you to browse them by folder.

While we still believe that you shouldn't be bothered with files and directories in F-Spot (and focus on photos), it's impossible to hide this completely: laptop users can't store all their photos on the internal disk and often need an external hard disk. And some users are really fond of their directory structure. We're not trying to impose anything and this is a first step to give the users the freedom they want: browsing by directory. This is in git right now and will be present in the upcoming release.

Future things we should support can include things like support for external USB hard-disks. Want to see that happening? Come over and have a chat, we're always looking for extra developers and user interface designers.

This post is long overdue, but still deserves posting: I went to GCDS earlier this month and I cannot deny the fact that I had a great time. Some remarks:

• The whole conference appeared to be nicely organized, kudos to the organizers for that.
• Having GUADEC and Akademy at the same location was quite interesting. What struck me the most was how differently both communities experience their conference. I was under the impression that KDE hackers prefer to hack at the conferences, while we GNOME people prefer to talk.
• Related to that point: GNOME people tend to spend longer hours at the parties. KDE people are nice chaps, but they go home awfully early. Other GNOME hackers observed this fact as well.
• The amount of friendship and open-minded unconstrained communication between everybody in our community is amazing, especially given the fact that most of the people there worked at competing companies. This is something that might be very hard to find in any other corporate environment
• 
  
• Spending time in the presence of all this people is extremely motivating. We should especially invite summer of code students to come to GUADEC.
• Massive thanks to all the sponsors organizing the parties, Codethink sponsoring the pre-SMASHED dinner and OpenSuse (and Guy Lunardi in particular) to sponsor the big dinner at the beach on Thursday.
• And an enormous thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of my travel and stay.

Am already looking forward to the next edition, be it with or without Akademy.

Last week at GCDS, we rented a minivan and road-tripped around the island. One Banshee hacker (Bertrand), one F-Spot hacker (me) and six guys from the GNOME art team (Garrett, jimmac, Benjamin, Andreasn, Vinicius and mpt). From a risk management point of view, this was suicide, who whould do our artwork if we drove into a ravine? Fortunately, that did't happen, we had a great day and I can write this blogpost, a tale about design.

We were already aware of it, but hadn't fixed it yet: the F-Spot preferences dialog is totally netbook unsuited. And it is extremely ugly. Behold:

During GCDS, I was approached by Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt). He wanted to redesign our preferences dialog and fix it. We had a good chat and ran over the current preferences dialog, what it does and why. Two or three hours of sketching and drawing later, he presented this:



It's a simple paper mockup, describing the current dialog, what's wrong and how we can improve it. This was then followed by a proposal for a new design. For a hacker, this is gold. We generally aren't the best user interfaces designers (let's just admit it), but we do like good design. When given a spec, we can make things happen quickly. This mockup made sense and it was sound: it follows the HIG.

I handed it over to Stephane Delcroix and an hour of hacking later, we had a new preferences dialog:



Much nicer!

The moral of the story
The moral of this story is twofold:

• For hackers it's important to realize that our artwork team isn't just a bunch of guys with an obsession for pretty icons. They also do our visual styling and help us design great interfaces (one of the things that made GNOME to be a success). If your interface sucks, turn to them.
• For designers: we love you and even if you don't feel like coding, a simpel well thought-out mockup can have a huge effect. If you feel stuff is suboptimal, go to the maintainers and talk to them, usually it's not a big change, but with a large result. And generally maintainers love UI suggestions, if they make sense. And as a shameless plug: we at F-Spot really love UI designers, we know it isn't what it should be and if anyone wants to help with these kind of things, do get in touch.

It's this kind of cooperation that makes the GNOME community such a nice place to be in.

Officially a computer scientist
As of today, I have graduated and I am now officially a master of computer science, with a specialization in software engineering. Awesome! I graduated magna cum laude (with an average of 81.52%) and scored 18.5/20 on my masters thesis. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with this.

What's next? After much indecision as to whether I'd like to find a job in the open-source (GNOME) world or do something else, I've accepted a PhD offer at the Distrinet Research Group of K.U.Leuven. GNOME hacking will stay a spare-time activity for now, though I might change that decision in a few years. Exciting times ahead!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
Tomorrow I'll be flying out to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I'll be spending 11 days in Gran Canaria. I will be arriving in the late afternoon, so that shouldn't stop me from dropping by at the Canonical hosted opening party. Really looking forward to another GUADEC, Istanbul 2008 was really great. Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip, without them, this would not have been possible.



I won't be giving a talk, but if anyone wants to have a chat about F-Spot (or any other subject), come and find me!

Somebody dropped into #f-spot on irc.gnome.org a few days ago and asked:

Fortunately, the answer is yes, F-Spot is very much alive and kicking. It's true, the pace was down for a period of time, mostly due to people getting precious time claimed by other obligations. Things are coming back up to speed lately and that's what this post is all about.

Build problems: resolved
F-Spot was quite hard to build for some time, due to a dependency on gtk-sharp from SVN. On top of that, this led to bugs for some users. Two weeks ago, sde came in and fixed it all.

Building F-Spot should now work on all modern distributions, without the need to install libraries from source. You can get it at git://git.gnome.org/f-spot.

F-Spot and Git: the power of DVCS in action
We've set up an automatically synchronized copy of the F-Spot git repository on gitorious.org. This allows external contributors to branch and publish their work, in such a way that we can track it. This has paid off, as you can see over here: http://gitorious.org/f-spot/. There's a buzz of activity with lots of cool branches being worked on. We love git, many thanks to the guys that made it happen, it's making our work so much nicer!

What's cooking
Here's a short rundown of what people are working on (remember, this is all very experimental and beta, no promises on it ever getting released):

• Mike Gemünde (tigger) is currently cleaning and refactoring quite a lot of IconView code. This will get our codebase into a much leaner shape, which will make future modifications much easier. He is also working on adding geotagging.
  
  
  
  Setting geodata (click for larger version)
• Paul Wellner Bou (piz) is working on a lot of stuff, including a nice extension that allows you to compare different image versions.
  
  
  
  Compare versions
• Lorenzo Milesi (maxxer) is taking care of bugzilla. Incidentaly, he also blogged about all this stuff. This is not coordinated, but it does nicely confirm the extra buzz I was talking about.
• Wojciech Dzierzanowski is working hard on Tabblo exporting to make it rock hard.
• And as for myself: I've been prototyping some stuff related to progressive image loading and preloading. I'm also looking into RAW processing for my GSoC. All of this is going at a rather slow pace as I'm in the final stages of writing my masters thesis.

Many hands make light work
It's true, F-Spot is far from perfect and we're all too aware of that. Also, there's so many cool features that we want in there, but haven't found time to build it yet. But we all want to build the nicest photo app there is.



And you can help with that! If you know how to program, join us on IRC and feel free to poke me. Many hands make light work and currently most of our hands are already overoccupied. We have plenty of feature requests already, so unless you want to program them yourselves, you'll probably just have to wait for it.

UPDATE: Due to me incorrectly parsing gitorious.org, I wrongly quoted Lorenzo as doing the Tabblo work. While he is helping to get it merged, it is Wojciech who deserves all the credit for the development, sorry for that!

Often being the subject of rants and critics (often undeserved), Pulseaudio hasn't won the hearts of everybody yet. But today it has won mine:

Getting Pulseaudio to work over Bluetooth was simply a matter of connecting and moving the stream. Trivial you might say.

A big congratulations to Lennart Poettering and Bastien Nocera for getting the two to work together (and probably others involved as well, credits to them as well). Guys, remind me to buy you a drink at GUADEC!

GNOME just got 25 students accepted for GSoC 2009: check them out here.

I'm happy to be one of them, working on RAW for f-spot.

Less pleasant news, it turns out I'll have to withstand Stephane Delcroix' terror reign another summer to be his student slave ;-).

In the Gnome Git documents, there is a little gem hidden which deserves to be repeated:

Since all gnome modules have a common url prefix, it can be convenient to set up a clone alias:

git config --global url.ssh://[login]@git.gnome.org/git/.insteadof gnome:

Then the clone line becomes much shorter:

git clone gnome:[project]

Don't forget to change [login] and [project] to the appropriate values in the above.

I recall people asking for pictures about it, but never saw one, so here it is:

Been thinking about Maemo lately. Despite these harsh economic times Nokia still keeps hiring software developers to work on the platform. This leads me to wonder just how big the market for internet tablets really is, if they ever want this to be profitable.

No, they are probably working on a phone. Just imagine it, a phone running a platform that leverages core open-source technologies (both GNOME, freedesktop and soon QT), rather than reinventing it all (like Android does).

This would be the most awesome hacker phone around. So Nokia, where and when can I start sending you money? I'd pay lots of it and I'm quite sure I'm not alone.

Just returned from FOSDEM and it was a blast. All this energy is a huge source of motivation. The FOSS community (and the GNOME one in particular) is alive and kicking!

Nice seeing so many familiar faces again! Hope to see you all in GUADEC GCDS 2009!

After being annoyed with it for months (and not remembering what caused it), I decided to track down why both Ctrl-A and Ctrl-Q map to Select-All and why neither of them quits the program.

Turns out having both fr and us as keymaps is the culprit: BGO #569554. Bizarrest bug ever...

And for those wondering how I figured this out: Binary Gconf Search. And no, it was not fun...

While figuring out why Tomboy takes quite a lot of time to start (BGO #567989, hint: it's not the lack of SQLite), I was reminded of Lord Kelvins old saying: "To measure is to know".

Thinking how to quantify this, it occured to me that the GNOME community has the perfect tool for figuring out slowness: Federicos awesome timeline tool. All I had to do is figure out how to use this with Mono, which is very easy, as you will see below.

Federico uses a nice trick using syscalls, which are logged using strace. Fortunately, this is very easy to reproduce with C#.

1. First we need to generate them, add something like this to your program:
   
public class TraceLogger {
    public static void trace (string group, string format, params object[] args)
    {
        string message = String.Format (format, args);
        string str = String.Format ("MARK: {0}: {1}", group, message);
        Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall.access(str, Mono.Unix.Native.AccessModes.F_OK);
    }
}

2. Liberally sprinkle tracing statements in your code, like this: TraceLogger.trace("Main", "Starting main loop");
3. Modify your startup script so that the line containing "exec mono ..." now reads "exec strace -ttt -f -o /tmp/timeline.strace mono ....".
4. Use Federicos script to plot it: python plot-timeline.py -o graph.png /tmp/timeline.strace.

That's all there is to it. The attentive reader will notice that I used the tracing format a bit differently, rather than printing the program name, I use a group parameter. This makes the graph easier to interpret: if you add too many tracing statements, it might be hard to see where the big gaps are. Hijacking the color coding avoids this interpretation difficulty.

Now hurry up and make your Mono apps even faster!

What baffles me the most about the DVCS flamewar currently going on (remember, we were already there at GUADEC 2008, anyone want to bet if we'll manage to keep this going until GUADEC 2009?), is that there's an apparent lack of sysadmin manpower to do a migration to git, but we do have sufficient manpower to develop an entirely new system that unifies two version control systems and do the migration to that git+bzr combo.

Can somebody clarify this paradox for me?

GNOMErs, if you're planning to go to FOSDEM next February, don't forget to add yourself to the attendee list. And don't forget to sign up for the saturday GNOME social event!

Extra! Extra!

We've just released the most awesome f-spot so far: 0.5.0! It features a countless amount of enhancements, polish and bugfixes. Here's some appetizer, but you'd better taste it by yourself:

- New Sidebar context switching
- Extendable Editors
- New Metadata display
- Color profile support
- Duplicate detection at import time
- Reduced and faster db access, faster queries on big collections
- Light speed tagging
- FullScreen mode enhancements
- New extensions distributed by default
- Updated documentation
- Updated translations
- Hundreds of bugfixes
- New contributors

We'd like to thanks everyone involved in that release cycle, bug reporters, triagers, testers, developers, translators. So thx, and keep up the hard work.

The minimal dependencies should be as they were for 0.4.4. But if you want to build for gnome 2.24, you'll probably need gtk-sharp 2.12.3

Just in: The new sidebar editors in F-Spot have landed. Apart from the color tool and some cosmetic changes, it's mostly finished.

Also: F-Spot now features a histogram in the sidebar.

That is all.

PS: F-Spot already had the histogram. It was just very well hidden.

After finding out that the Gegl C# bindings were completely broken, I took the time to update them. In the process, I've also replaced the build system to make sure they are installable.

In short: Gegl# is now usable, start hacking!

When it comes to performance, F-Spot hasn't always been the best of it's class. Part of my Summer of Code time has been spent on improving that. While reworking the editors (which will land soon), I ran into trouble spots, which I've started fixing. My mentor improved in these.

To show the difference, I've made a small unscientific benchmark. Below are the times needed to add 2 tags to a set of 1000 photos. During this amount of time, the user interface freezes.

Observe how the whole UI freezes for over 20 seconds in the currently released version. In SVN, you hardly notice it happening! This is a 44.5 times speedup!

Similar improvements are to be found everywhere. I'm most fond of the fact that the image doesn't reload anymore while adding tags. This means using type-to-tag (the t-hotkey) is now completely instant and a joy to use.

All of this is in SVN and will be available in the next release.

Am currently flying back from Istanbul to Brussels, with an in-between stop in München. Looking over the fluffy clouds beneath me, I wrote down some of my thoughts on the latest GUADEC:

• It was my first GUADEC, so I cannot compare, but this one was awesome!
• Kudos to the local team, very friendly and helpful people.
• Kudos to Baris for organizing it all, must have been an insane task, but it was executed well.
• Istanbul is a wonderful city, that never sleeps. Jackhammering at night is the most normal thing in the world.
• Meeting all these wonderful people is an enormous source of motivation and inspiration
• Oh btw, did somebody mention we hired Stormy Peters as our new CEO? Stand up Stormy! *applause* Meeting Stormy and talking to her was very pleasant and gave me great confidence on her suitability for the task, as well as the future of GNOME.
• Parties on boats rock. Totally.
• Lots of people stayed for a few days of tourism after the conference, leading to pleasant meetups in the evenings
• Swimming near ferry terminals is a good way to lose your sandals. These boats, even from a large distance, create huge waves. Good thing I managed to recover them, saving us from a barefoot walk home
• Turkish people are very friendly, apart from some crooked taxi drivers (which you recognize quite easily).

In all, I'm very satisfied, hope to see all of you back soon.

Google Summer of Code
Lots of activity around F-Spot lately. As there's a number of people very curious about what I'm doing, I've made a small screencast providing a sneak preview.

In the screencast I first highlight the old editing tools below, which are quite hidden. I then show you how the new tools will be implemented.

The UI is still very basic, as my GTK+-fu isn't all that strong.

F-Spot performance enhancements
At the same time, both Stephane Delcroix (my mentor, who should really blog more!) and me are working on big patches to improve F-Spot performance. Expect a much smoother experience soon!

Great news from F-Spot land!

F-Spot 0.4.4 released
First of all, the new F-Spot 0.4.4 is just released (credits go out to Stephane Delcroix, who should really start blogging more).

From the release notes:

About a month after 0.4.3.1, we've released F-Spot 0.4.4. It features
some new blinky features, a better gnome and gnome2.22 integration,
updated translations and tons of bugfixes.

Major changes since 0.4.3.1:
- theme switcher
- reduced startup time
- migration to gio started
- sort tag by popularity
- rating with hotkeys
...and more

And, as this release is a pre-Soc one, more fun stuffs are coming.

More info here, downloads also on the website. This immediately marks the point where I can start pushing my GSoC code into trunk. So without further ado:

Google Summer of Code work started
One of the major problems F-Spot currently has is the space-wasting sidebar:

As you can see, it shows some information and a tag tree to search images. Not all that bad actually. Now when you switch to an image, you get the following:



The tag tree is quite useless in this view (except for tagging, if you don't use the awesome tag-to-type 't' key). On the bottom of the screen, there's a tiny row of editing tools. My Summer of Code work aims to improve the F-Spot experience, in part by moving these hard to find tools to the sidebar, where they will be much easier to use (and take up less space).

I have just landed the first bits of code, based on an old bitrotten patch, which makes the sidebar switchable. Currently there are three panes, looking like this:



This code still has a lot of issues though. For instance, the information box on the bottom left is gone. It'll be back, soon. Slowly the summer has begun, with plenty of cool stuff coming up. Stay Tuned!

It is now official, I have been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code. I will be working on F-Spot, a photo management application. My mentor will be Stephane Delcroix, who is already trying to trick me into bringing him breakfast.

The last few years I was occasionally involved both in F-Spot and Banshee. Now that Banshee is totally rocktastic, it's time to make F-Spot shine.

I will be working on the Sidebar, most specifically integrating editing tools. You can read my proposal over here. This is based on Jimmac's awesome mockups.

Now here's your chance to add your pet peeve: I'd like to invite everybody to let me know of their favorite features which should come in the sidebar. I'll stick to my proposal for the coming summer, but I'd love to know what people are really waiting for. So e-mail me or comment with those suggestions, if they're really good, I might even squeeze them in!

Some updates from the past week:

Summer of Code
I have submitted my Google Summer of Code proposal for a Banshee project to the Mono Project. I might submit another one to GNOME (just in case), but only if I can work it out in greater detail. I don't want to waste reviewers time by sending in half a proposal.

Zend Framework & Doctrine
After trying out the Zend Framework (a PHP Application Development Framework) and Doctrine (a Object Relational Mapper for PHP) for quite some time, I wrote up an article on Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine. If you want to play with some of the nicest PHP technologies currently around, check it out!

Oh and this is probably my first message to appear on planet.grep.be. Hi all!

The long wait is over, Canon just announced the EOS 450D. I'm getting one as soon as possible.

Interestingly, it uses Secure Digital instead of the usual CompactFlash cards. Does this mean we are seeing the beginning of the end of CF, or is it just Canons clever way of luring existing EOS 400D users (who have a stack of CF cards) into a higher price category?

For all you GNOME users with extreme compression needs, I bring you an early newyear present, LZMA support in file-roller.

This was done in under an hour, kudos to Paolo Bacchilega (who made file-roller) for making it this easy.

Happy newyear!

PS: This is probably my first post to hit Planet-GNOME (I'm not a high volume blogger), so: Hi everybody!

I will not be attending GUADEC this year. Why? Because I was selected to participate in the IBM Extreme Blue program. As the internship runs most of summer, I will not be able to spend a week in the UK. Too bad, I really wanted to go, but I guess it'll be GUADEC 2008 for me then.

In other news, I was accepted as a member of the GNOME Foundation. When the next Foundation Board election runs, be sure to put me on the bribe list ;-).

The wait is over, we're finally going to start working on Banshee 0.13.x. I figured I might have a look at our bugzilla, as I knew we had a few patches waiting there.

Note how I said "a few".

In horror, I found out we had almost 50 patches waiting for review. Sorry to all the patching heroes (Scott, Pepijn, Jan-Arne and everyone else I'm forgetting), we were all horribly busy, but that's about to change.

I've started to review all patches, most of them are actually pretty darn good.

We also have over 240 bugs waiting for a fix. If you're looking for a place to start contributing, this might be where you want to look. There's plenty of stuff that can be fixed quite easily (we just need someone to do it). Head over to the bugzilla and pick your pet-bug.

If you need help fixing bugs or writing patches, feel free to poke me on IRC, I'll be on #banshee (irc.gimp.org) most of the time, I'll gladly help you out.

Let's reduce our bug count by a huge magnitude during the 0.13.x series and make Banshee not only the coolest, but also the most solid media player around!

FOSDEM is over once again. A very pleasant edition.

It was great to finally meet the awesome Dodji and the endless stream of energy called Miguel De Icaza. Also met up with some of the f-spot hackers. As usual, this was a serious boost to the creative energy. More hacking coming up. For now, you'll have to do it with the pictures.

Soon in CVS:

Obviously disabled by default. There's a release of the new 0.11 branch coming soon, lots of magic on it's way!

Having recently launched my new blog, I am finally able to post more tech-related things. I now have two sections, one for life-related posts and one for tech posts. Up to the reader to choose which one to read.

Anyway, here's what I'm cooking:

Domain name
I'm thinking about changing the domain name of my website. All links pointing to lambda1.be will continue to work, but I'd like to get your opinion:

• savanne.be
• tundra.be
• permafrost.be

Which one do you like best and why? Put it in the comments, mail me, or just say it to me, i'm curious what everybody thinks. Or should I stay with lambda1.be?

Easter egg
By a stupid coincidence, I've found an easter egg in GNOME, who said GNOME was boring? ;-)



Here's how you can see it too (atleast, if you are running a decent GNOME):

• Open a terminal, and start the zenity about box: zenity --about
• Type the word zen: z e n
• Have fun dressing the monk!