Le coin à Guij

Thanks to my awesome employer Igalia, I am flying tomorrow to the cold city of Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2012.

I will give a lightning talk, Saturday at 13:40, about my balloon adventures at Nowhere, with an emphasis on how Free Software made it possible. Hopefully, this will motivate other Free Software hackers to get out of their basement and hack in the “real” world :).
The talk should be streamed live at this url (in the Ferrer room).

Many other Igalians will come (I think there will be 14 of us), and will give talks.

Tomorrow (Thursday 5th of August 2010), I am going to meet Paola and Ugo on the Camino de Santiago. They’ve been walking since last Friday, and with them, I should try to reach Santiago de Compostela, after about 3 weeks of walking, if we make it to there, that is.

Since I’ll probably have plenty of things to tell from the road, I’ve started another blog just for that, which you can find there: http://santiaguij.blogspot.com/.

UPDATE: made it there, and finally uploaded all the videos, and wrote many articles, on my santiago blog.

Yesterday, I left a message, in French, on the voicemail of my now ex-landlord to set up a meeting to give him the keys back. He uses Vodafone, and they have that nice service where they transcribe automatically voice messages into text messages (they call it DictaSMS). It turns out that it doesn’t work that well for messages in French, as opposed to what they seem to advertise. Here’s the text I received shortly after leaving my message on the voicemail:

DictaSMS ha enviado al [number redacted out]: “Bueno(?) Tomas, yo ___ se si tienes el dinero en mi movil en el bolsillo ser una peli y luego en el super, soy Juan Bou es un profesional para pedirselo papel mas chulo. Chao.”. Servicio ahora dispo en castellano,catalan,ingles,frances,portugues,aleman.

So, well, thanks for the laugh Vodafone :)

GStreamer had been ported to android for a while by Prajnashi and Edward Hervey (see http://groups.google.com/group/prajnashi), but this has been done on a “platform” level. In other words, to use it, you need a custom firmware. What I would like to see is a way to embed GStreamer in an application that you can distribute for usage on any android phone. The big tasks I see to achieve this are the following:

1. Compile GStreamer (and its dependencies) using the NDK
2. Find a way to alleviate the limitations of android’s dynamic linker on at least some versions of android (I’ve only tested with 1.5 so far, which is what I have on my phone), and compile, as properly as can be, all the gstreamer plugins that might be useful
3. Write/port a binding that allows  to use GStreamer from the java code of an android application.
4. Conquer the world!

So far, I have achieved or almost achieved step 1, and a kind of proof of concept for step 3:

• compiled GLib and GStreamer with the NDK (see there: glib, gstreamer), branching from the work previously done for the “platform” port
• wrote a minimal binding using JNI (which seems to be the recommended way on android); for now, as it is generated by hand and I am lazy, it only binds gst_init() and gst_version_string()
• integrated all that in a modified version of the “Hello JNI” NDK example, that displays the result of gst_version_string():
  

I still have to run some tests and get a better understanding of the problem and existing solutions for step 2. As for step 3, the only java binding I could find is based on JNA, which, as I understand it, is not ported to android. Since I don’t feel too much like porting JNA to android (I’m afraid that would involve too much java black magic), I lean towards the solution of a JNI binding generated (most likely statically, at least for a start) using the GObject introspection stuff, especially since I’ve always wanted to play with that.
So, hopefully, I will soon post updates on the advancement of these things, posting this might create some peer pressure to motivate me ;).

If you have any ideas/advice/comments/questions about all that, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me

Ok, I think there are three reasons for me half abandoning this blog:

1. lazyness
2. micro blogging
3. ugliness of the style of the blog

Today, I have resolved point 3 (or at least made a big leap in that direction).
That old CSS, first with the Union Jack, then with a mix of it with la Senyera and the awful pink background amused me at the beginning, but I think I got tired of it. So, here’s the new style, aimed at simplicity and readability, hope you like it! Of course, (constructive) comments are welcome!

For the nostalgic/masochist among you who know how to use their web browser, the old stylesheet is still available under the name “old ugly style”.