the fifth episode of gnome screencasts is out and a video player is waiting to be made by you! have fun!

and there it is! the long awaited fourth episode of gnome screencasts! this time we are going to create a guitar tuner for all you music lovers out there!

if you happened to to have learned something from this episode or just enjoyed it, please flattr me.

...and the next episode is available especially with love for you! this time i included a small mistake, are you able to find it?

thanks! thanks for the great feedback i have received about the previous screencast.

besides the really constructive comments, over 2000 people watched the screencast in the first two days, and right now over 3500. this really has motivated me to continue this series.

what i am really missing though is some good documentation about introspected languages such as python or javascript. while the vala documentation is already quite nice, the other languages simply provide no documentation at all. even with knowledge on what the differences to the c api are this forces me quite often to look up the methods directly in the introspection files. certainly not the way to go.

now, please lean back and have fun watching my new screencast (featuring the almighty vincent).

again, this is a very lucky day for you! especially if you don't know anything about programming, but desperately looking forward to create a new shiny gnome 3 app. i stayed up all night baking cookies for you.. erm no not this time. i stayed up all night preparing a screencast to learn programming with gnome technologies! yay!

i quite started where the great gtk+ kick-start tutorial by alberto ruiz ended and want to continue with a series covering most of the great gnome technologies out there.

if there is enough interest i am planning to continue this series, and hopefully you might be the next great super uber gnome hacker himself!

any feedback, suggestions and help would be appreciated!

now stop talking, keep watching! have fun!

what can you do if you go hiking into the mountains with your camera, but there is no good weather and/or light around? i recently started doing some hdr photography. the results are pretty amazing, although i am still at the beginning of a very long journey.

all the photos were done using the bracketing function of my camera with -2/0/2 ev. you can compare the hdr result with the originals below.

basically i used the tool enfuse to merge the different exposures into a photo that looks very much like a tonemapped photo. i then used pfstools to dive into the hdr world and get two photos, one with the fattal 02 and one with the mantiuk 06 algorithm. all three were then merged as layers in gimp. and voila, that's it (basically)! oh, and i just used free software for it, isn't that great?

in the year 2011 bc all of cheese is occupied by some italian guys. all of cheese? no - a few indomitable portuguese speaking people still hold out. and one of them is luciana who was responsible for the awesome cheese 3.0 release, which she released yesterday.

luciana will be a cheese maintainer from now on, so welcome her hearty! ils sont fous ces mainteneurs de fromage.

as might you have heard, the opw internships ended a few weeks ago. it was a great experience for me and definitely a step into the right direction.

the cheese project had two interns, laura (mentored by me) and luciana (mentored by thiago). in short, they were pretty awesome. if you should have missed what they accomplished during their internship, read through their blogs. if you are too lazy for it, just wait for the cheese 3.0 tarball and experience their work yourself. and if you are too lazy and can't wait for the gnome 3.0 release then the following was made especially for you with love! a teaser containing some of the highlights:

introspection support, svg overlays, full featured libcheese and libcheese-gtk, photo and video resolution preferences, a release, another release, camerabin, usability improvements, command line options, luciana being interviewed and becoming famous and last but not least laura being interviewed and becoming famous (unfortunately not yet published).

so if you happen to like the new cheese release (and i am sure you will), do them something nice! i personally really enjoyed (and still enjoy) working with laura and luciana!

some translators asked me if there is a way to preview the awesome effects of gnome video effects. they really had a hard time guessing what each effect could look like based on the description.

and from now on it is possible. have a look at all those nice effects! thumbs up for nicolas christener, who lent his beautiful face for this purpose!

.

To read the first part, please follow this link.

This is the second part about how we think our favourite addressbook application could look like, what is needed to get to it and the reasoning behind it. It introduces the visual ideas of our favourite addressbook application. Comments, ideas, suggestions and small ponies are always welcome. Please add them to the first part, to have them stored in one place.

A very interesting feature for many people is the integration of our applications with social networks and other services. Information should be therefore pulled out from social networks, services like jabber or other.

We started with the idea of having already a complete database aggregated from various sources, such as your normal addressbook, Jabber contacts, mail addresses and social networks. We then tried to see how we can improve the workflow of finding and interacting with your contacts.

Think of a person. What is it that came first to your mind? Certainly it was her name and a picture of her. We found that those two properties were amongst the most important elements. So we started right there, how could we display a contact in order to help people finding it quickly? We quickly discovered that some people may find a contact easier visually, some prefer to read through text. Both need to be empowered.

Another very important fact is that you often create groups of people in your memory to easily find and group them together. For example your family, your friends in one city, fellow GNOME hackers, work buddies and so on. Additionally to that we thought it might be a good idea to have some additional automated groups. Except "Favourites", they are all set up automatically. The Favourite Group could be then either created automatically by filling in contacts you are much in contact with, but can be also done by letting the user mark specific contacts as favourite.

Editing and creating new groups has to be damn easy of course. This is how we thought it might work out quite nicely:

Often you remember a piece of information but not the rest of it. For example you want to see whose phone number this is, you forgot the last name of a contact or forgot the postal code of the contact. The search must be extremely powerful to be helpful. So we simply allow to search in each contact information, starting on the name, over any phone number, mail addresses, but also anniversaries or notes on that contact.

If you don't want to edit or look up a contacts information, you mostly want to interact with him. That is why we are allowing to let other programs hook into the addressbook. For example Empathy could be interested to open a conversation window if the contact has a jabber address. On the mockup you can see four ideas. A user could quickly contact a person by hovering on the contact tile and pressing one of the buttons which appear. This will launch the chosen gateway with the primary address detail. If he however wants to use a specific detail, he can use the full contact preview. You might notice that there are buttons on the bottom toolbar too. Here we want to have actions such as merging contacts, sharing them or sending mass e-mails when selecting multiple contacts.

We would like to realize this solid integration with other applications via "service handlers", which provide extra functionality for attributes of a person. For example Empathy could be interested in Jabber addresses, while a libchamplain gui would like to display the addresses of a contact on a map. We therefore want to allow applications easily to hook into GNOME Contacts by providing a handler file stating the fields the application is interested, an icon, a name and an executable or dbus function. It will be then automatically shown on contacts, which provide such information.

On the full contact view pane, you can simply edit a contact by pressing the "Edit" button. It is very important, that each field you edited manually will not be overwritten by automatic aggregation processes, except the user wishes that. Edit will happen inline, and we boroughed a lot of ideas from mobile phone addressbooks.

Last but not least we thought that using drag'n'drop could even improve the user experience, so this is an example of what we came up with.

This is the end of our design document. Thanks a lot for reading. We really hope that we got it right and hopefully are able to accomplish this great idea. If you have any suggestion to make or want to help us, we would be more than happy to hear from you. Please add them to the first part, to have them stored in one place.

To read the first part, please follow this link.

my old gpg key 0x6EEC9E62 went into retirement. the key id of the new one is 0xDB8E409F. i changed my pages and mail signatures respectively.

if you don't believe me you can buy me a beer and i will show it to you personally.

you may noticed filippos astonishingly cool super awesome video effects some time ago and were desperately waiting to use them. good news for you! with cheese from git master, gstreamer 0.10.20 and gnome-video-effects 0.2 which was released a few minutes ago you are finally able to.

as andreas just woke up from his afternoon catnap, we quickly produced the blockbuster "andreas and daniel enjoy the new effects". have fun watching it!

click screenshot to open screencast

• even in my childhood back in the alps it was rarely that cold. my only counter weapon: wearing all the sweaters i brought at once.
• there is a tram between the openismus office and jon's home where i can sleep, but so far we missed it every time and had to go through snow storms seeing yeti's and other strange snow ogres at a windchill factor of -50 degrees
• andreas finally found his hobby: sleeping on the couch while others are working for him. periodically he wakes up, does some awesome artwork and goes back to sleep
• frederic is my hero: after being silent for the whole morning he suddenly comes up with a javascript powered search on http://library.gnome.org and the ported gnome3 website theme on l-g-o
• food is just amazing, the openismus girls and boys impress us each time anew
• clemens came by for a short chit chat, great to see him again!
• andre fought his way through the czech rail system and is spending some time with us
• we discovered the world's fastest shoelace knot, so far i am very happy with it. andreas still fights innovation
• i also had the opportunity to refresh my swedish a bit, most used phrase so far: ska vi fika
• oh, and i am sponsored by the gnome foundation, thanks a lot!

today is a special day because i was working for you. indeed i was working all night for you. for free! and it even gets better: i was spending my precious time to develop an amazing program, which you can get also for free! that must be amazing news for you. now you not only get the precious time from a fellow gnome programmer, but also his amazing product. man, i would like to be you in this moment (not working, but enjoying a rock breaking new program).

i am talking about the retroscope, which i am presenting to you right now (for free again, man, today must be your lucky day). the retroscope is an apparatus nat was doing already for some time at his parties. basically you need a tv and a camera. you then set a time delay on your camera and hit play. then just watch what used to be or watch the people watching what they where watching while ehh.. i think you get it ;)

nat's original retroscope

nat was using an ordinary camera and his tv for it. having a bad sleep i woked up and thought how hard could it be to create an app for that, with all the awesomeness of the new cheese and gnome-video-effects. it was a ten minute job actually:

[Effect]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Time delay
Comment=Show what was happening in the past
PipelineDescription=frei0r-filter-delay0r delaytime=30

or alternatively just using gstreamer elements:

[Effect]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Time delay
Comment=Show what was happening in the past
PipelineDescription=queue max-size-time=0 max-size-bytes=0 \
  max-size-buffers=0 min-threshold-time=30000000000

and that's it! you can now have your own retroscope inside cheese. at that moment i wanted to jump back into my warm, comfortable bed but i stayed awake for some more time. and guess what, i just did it for you (for free again)!

i was not happy at that point of time, because i knew that you could have a retroscope, but it was not configurable! a thing i needed to change, so i took some clutter goodness, some spicy vala, a slice of camerabin and a breeze of gstreamer, mashed it together and voila, there it is: the retroscope.

with just some minutes more free work for you i created a tarball just today: retroscope 0.1.0. have fun with it, and remember: i did it all for free because i like you!

in a few hours i am leaving to visit thailand with my girlfriend for about four weeks. i don't bring any electronical device with me, so do not expect any reply before i come back end of september.

have a nice time!

i am finally back from the netherlands, after a short trip to amsterdam together with nico, tom, jürg and simon. followed by a short stay in munich and a ride to my home in italy, right in between the lovely alps.

guadec

guadec was awesome as always, and bastien loose the freefa cup as always ;) most of my bugs have been finally fixed during guadec, and it was also good to see you people again! you can find my photos of the event at the usual place.

i would like to thank the foundation for allowing me to attend such a great event!

gnome-video-effects

ladies and gentlemen, gnome-video-effects finally landed! during guadec i was finally able to rip the video effects out of cheese, basing on yuvi's work. the result was a new module containing effect presets which can be shipped, downloaded and edited by the user. basically an effect is just a text file with an ini syntax-like description of a gstreamer pipeline, for example:

[Effect]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Hulk
Comment=Transform yourself into the amazing Hulk
PipelineDescription=videobalance saturation=1.5 hue=-0.5

easy, isn't it? have a look at the new website to get an insight of how this is working. we also have a bugzilla product and a tarball will follow shortly.

cheese and farsight-utils are using it already, gstreamer is eventually doing a GstGnomeEffectFilter, empathy can use it with the next farsight release and pitivi is adopting it once the effects become configurable. now that are some awesome news, aren't they?

also, if you have some cool ideas about a new effect, just send me an effect file or the gstreamer pipeline and i will happily add it to the gnome-video-effects module.

cheese

now, how could i top the previous awesome news? i can actually ;)

cheese three zero is growing at an amazing speed and i just love the new design and the rewrite. you probably have already seen yuvi's screencast, if not go watch it!

even so, we are facing some regressions comparing to cheese 2.30, which are basically:

• missing throbber while the webcam is loading
• video recording is not working, and we probably want to evaluate other codecs such as webm too
• the broken cheese-widget (bastien would kill me if we would release it that way)
• removing the mx dependency and using ClutterTableLayout, which has just been merged today

because of this (no, not because of vuntz, but because of the above mentioned points) and to be able to do a good marketing beforehand, we will postpone the release to 3.0 and releasing 2.30 as 2.32 with some minor patches added. i will send out an announcement mail shortly. of course, as the cheese rewrite is such a nice thing to play with, we will provide 2.91.x packages, which hopefully get into distributions and allow people to test it and furthermore to have a real stable, rocking three zero release next year.

this gives us also some time to add even more crazy stuff, such as the new effects, filippo was working on his spare time as a top secret project. go watch his screencast!!!

olpc deployment in the philippines

i just got a mail from adam holt, the olpc community support manager. olpc-affiliated filipino community group ekindling.org is looking for anyone with strong open source/sysadmin/teaching skills who could help on the ground deploying XOs and Sugar for an organized laptop deployment (100 XO-1.5s) beginning around september or october in the philippines.

you can find some more information about the olpc project in the philippines here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Philippines and http://ekindling.org/news. by the way: here are some photos of the exact island (lubang), where it will take place. also, have a look at the background story.

if you are interested, please contact adam holt, ryan letada or the olpc philippines mailing list.

i can assure you, that this is a great opportunity, where you can gain a lot of experience, do something good and learn something for your live!

in case you have missed yuvi's post about the preview version of cheese 3.0, this is the amazing screencast he made:

please try it out and report any issues to us ;)

i took a few days without mails, as you probably have noticed. my mail server crashed and unfortunately i had no secondary mx in place, so probably all mail you have sent between wednesday 11th july and now are either deferred (i still will get them) or are lost.

if you are in doubt, please resend your messages. and if you are not, you can still meet me in person and buy me a cup of tea!

please update your bookmarks, feeds, post-its, tattoos, contacts, addressbook and everything else to my new domain http://www.dgsiegel.net.

i already updated the planet to aggregate my new website. furthermore there is a 301 redirection from my old place.

on behalf of the summer of code admins i am officially announcing the gnome summer of code sailing trip in the mediterranean sea. we finally were able to put it together, an idea which started at last years guadec and will be executed this summer, right after guadec 2010.

30 people on two small sailing boats, having fun together for 4 days. starting in venice (italy) on 2nd of august, we will travel along the coast of croatia and back. the return date is set to 5th of august. we will be accompanied by two professionals and a cook who will make sure, that the ships don't capsize and the sharks don't eat us. and the best: you will get a full sponsorship if you one of these 30 lucky boys or girls. with the money, we could allocate through the last years with the summer of code program, this is now possible.

please save your seat as fast as possible, and post a short summary why we should choose you over the others on our form. be quick, it's first come, first serve!

we will post more details in a few days, if you need more information, don't hesitate to contact us summer of code admins.

every summer of code student of gnome can be accepted, that means if you were a student or mentor in 2005-2009 or will be one this year, you can apply.

while the release team is still busy preparing the gnome 2.30 release, we developers laze around. tomorrow, 31st march we are doing this together with some beer (or wine who prefers that), some good food and some good talking:

at 19.00 we are meeting at the faun restaurant, hans-sachs-strasse 17, munich.

hope to see you there!

yay, gnome was accepted as an organization for google's summer of code 2010! if you want to help us judging applications and/or to be a mentor go to http://socghop.appspot.com/ and sign up.

remember to continue to add awesome ideas to our ideas page!

students, feel free to hang around in the #soc irc channel, on the soc mailing list and to contact the people you want to work with during the summer!

as of last friday, i shall be referred to as "B.Sc. daniel g. siegel". of course other titles, like "my hero" or "awesome guy" are still applicable. ;)

"on the new threats of social engineering exploiting social networks" is the title of my bachelor thesis. i analyzed new threats in social networks analyzed new threats in social networks and how they can be exploited using social engineering methods. concretely i wrote a python prototype which is able to harvest data from twitter and present it in a way that one can use it for social engineering attacks.

together with my supervisor, i created a paper out of my thesis which hopefully gets accepted at the sesoc conference next year. unfortunately i am not able to publish the paper too, but i will once the review process is over.

bastien nocera is my hero for today and tomorrow!

(not only because he did implemented like 50% of our ideas for cheese three zero)

yep, the planning for cheese 3.0 went on for a while already, and each of us has plenty of ideas in his mind. now we want to get more concrete and set up a plan for the upcoming cheese 3.0.

join us tomorrow, at 15.00 cet (central european time) on the irc channel #cheese (irc.gnome.org).

reminder for myself: whenever the whole x server freezes and your harddrive makes funny noises, stand up and get your backup drive. the chances are high that you are experiencing a head crash.

at least that was happening to me a few days ago. fortunately i had a 10 days old backup, which saved my day. i am back now, if you tried to reach me last week, please re-send your message(s) if you did not have already done so.

ah, and be sure to have a working backup ready! ;)

a few minutes ago i just uploaded the new cheese tour, which you can find on http://projects.gnome.org/cheese/tour.

it features several photos of og's beautiful girls and new the high-res cheese icon made by ulisse. i really hope that people will like it!

there is another great opportunity waiting for you! yeah, i mean you, you awesome gnome hacker! while gnome 3 is getting in shape, an awesome project related to it is getting too: zeitgeist! therefore we proudly are announcing the zeitgeist hackfest 2009.

all the cool hackers are meeting at the tis innovation park in bolzano (italy) starting from 9th to 12th november 2009. but not enough of good news: the last day, 13th november, will feature the south tyrolean free software conference, including several awesome people of the free software scene (the awesome stormy was there last year for example).

if you are interested to come you should add your name to the hackfest page and of course you should spread the word about the hackfest! :)

just do not believe him! this is the truth:

due to the awesome work of aidan delaney (code) and ulisse perusin (icons), cheese gets a new functionality: the burst mode! aidan blogged already about it.

from now on you can watch foxes walking in your garden, people getting drunk over time at your party or vincent loosing the ice cream deathmatch. just set the amount of photos you want, and cheese will take them at a defined time delay.

ah, the obligatory screenshot:

• the talk together with andre went quite well. i had a talk with many people about it and i think we can really improve. now i just need to track down sandy
• we probably do a summer of code catching up here in gran canaria. some tea drinking, eating, swimming, whatever. i will announce it.
• actually, i _am_ daniel and do cheese. funnily however i never get bothered about that, its just david who does not like people who talk to him about cheese.
• lucas told me secretely yesterday, that he is actually 23 years old, hmmm...
• jan and others: i definitely need a release of gst-gl!
• vuntz is not quite a party boy, he disappeared quite quickly yesterday, to develop his plan of taking over the world.
• gnome-do definitely should follow the gnome release cycle and get added as a gnome module!
• matthew promised me to fix the hildon patch in cheese. we will see...
• andreas is a liar! he tricked me for more than two years, thinking that the beautiful cheese icon was made by him. totally wrong...
• matthew had a nice theory about the usability of pissoirs, however philip did not see to understand it.

gcds

an awesome week in gran canaria is waiting for us. for me this was only possible due to the awesome work and financial help of the travel committee. thanks a lot to all of you!

i will be leaving for gran canaria on friday, travelling with condor from munich airport. my return flight departs on sunday 12th july again to munich airport. if you are on the same plane or plan to arrive at the same time, i would be glad to meet you!

soc

together with andre i will give a talk about the success of summer of code and ghop in gnome. though we want to have a slightly different look on the topic: how much code is actually used after the summer, how many students stay in the community and how and what do we have to change to the better. if you have something you might think is relevant to the topic, please feel free to contact us. we would be glad to add different views to our talk. see you on sunday!

hackfest

the speck hack fest in autumn of the last year, was a quite nice experience for us and we would like to do it once again. this time however we want to keep it somewhat bigger, and therefore we need you! together with the south-tyrolean free software conference we will offer a framework for the hackfest. the topic is not defined yet, but it would be great if we could set up some ideas during gcds. please contact behdad or me.

refering to https://twitter.com/davidsiegel/statuses/2081147972

unfortunately there were not many changes in cheese in the last time, but some weeks ago, i was fortunate and got a small parcel with some usb devices in it. with it a small note from a cheese user, which said, that he would like to thank the cheese team for its work.

as i had some free time, i began have a look at those usb devices and created some plugins for those. to use those plugins, just download the plugins package here: cheese-plugins-0.1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 1d874bfb305227b830dd017598ea0a9f)

i included a README file, which quickly explains how to install the plugins. but basically you just need at least cheese 2.24.2 installed. you then can install the plugins locally without messing up your system or you can install them into the system, like cheese. however, please read the README file before you do anything else.

the package features those things:

the usb rocket system: some of you may already know that fun gadget. the purpose is simply to aim and shoot one of the rockets over the usb connection. funnily, this did not require any kernel module or something, but just some coordinates and data which you need to send over usb. with this plugin enabled, you just can take a photo of a person or anything else and if cheese does recognize the person or whatever afterwards, it will shoot a rocket into that direction (persuming, that the rocket launcher is set up correctly). i also added the possbility to use a photo as a target, which you already have taken earlier. i had quite a fun with it already ;)

something for the cats and dogs: there was also another strange device in the box, which featured a small tank, which you can fill with something, presumably dog food or water. if you then send the proper signal over usb to it, it opens the tank for a few seconds, enough to let some of the dog food or water fall out of the tank. i placed a nap under it, and added the same target algorithm i used in the previous mentioned plugin, and now if my dog enters the room, he gets some food.

the police siren: same thing as above, if a target enters, the siren goes off.

other: i also added some other things, which people can use, if they do not have any of the above devices:

• the movie filter: finally you can be right inside a movie. this new filter allows you to choose some settings from cinema movies, but also to create some by yourself: by now we included the sin city effect, the black-and-white-very-old-film effect, the 300 (sparta) effect and some western like effects.
• the hotornot plugin: based on the website hotornot, cheese rates your look by the already known faces on hotornot. it then gives you a rating from 1 to 10.
• the i am famous plugin add a picture of a famous person to cheese and take a photo with that plugin enabled. cheese then will tell you how similar you look to that person. for example, i have a 3% similarity to vuntz ;)
• the i am famous filter: as above, just add a picture of a famous person to cheese and then take a photo with the filter enabled. the filter will modify your face to look like the famous person.

thats all for now. please test those plugins and filters and tell us how you like them!

as you probably already know gnome was accepted as organization at this years summer of code. what we need know are some brave, awesome, great, amazing, glorious, fabulous, definitive, outrageous people who can help us triaging all the awesome, ludicrously, amazing.. okok not again ;) ideas at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas

the awesome gnome summer of code ideas triaging meeting will happen on march 21st at 14h utc in the #soc-admin channel (irc.gnome.org). if you would like to throw your hat in the ring for the triaging or selection committees and other gsoc related tasks, pop on over to #soc-admin, join the soc-mentors-list and let one of the administrators for the program know you want to be involved in making gnome rock.

happy birthday wouter!

the hackfest was quite amazing. even if i needed some days to recover my health state, it was great fun and it was also great to see some great people! just some foot notes, if they are visiting your city:

• call the local beer distributor and tell him, that you need some more for sure
• keep an eye on them, they easily get lost and return to the hotel (after a few hours)
• do not start a conversation about dvc systems, they will convince you for their system
• could be a coincidence, but there is always bad weather when you want to go up in the mountains with them
• make sure, there is a bed for behdad in the conference room
• stormy is awesome!
• do not have any books laying around, otherways they are doing that meme too

a few days ago, my favourite music player, muine, suddenly stopped working. this probably because of the recent upgrade to mono 2.0 and the 2.24 c# libs.

the muine project seems to be dead too: no mails on the mailing list, no project page updates and the only commits are either translation updates or some small bugfixes by wouter "no-i-wont-let-muine-die" bolsterlee.

therefore i spent the last days looking out for a nice music player. and it seems that there is no single music player that i liked. to be honest: they all suck. every single one of them. most of those players include things like podcasts, internet radio, browsing by genre, managing multiple playlists, burning cds, cd ripping, lyrics support, database searches, brewing coffee and giving ones shoes a shine.

why should i need all this? just because every other music player has those (and much more) features, everyone else has to join and has to overload his software with totally useless things. yeah i know, the users say "how could you dare to give out a player, who cant listen to podcasts, watch videos, burn cds and feed my dog? dont you listen to your users?"

it seems like everyone listens too much to those feature requests, and most of them are useless anyway. now please have a look around, every music app has gazillions of features and not one does it right. every player gets loaded with tons of features on every release. you know for sure some products, which were developed to death exactly this way.

muine is just ingenious, with its brilliant user interface. the search based album/song window works extremely well for finding quickly the songs you want to listen to. the single playlist model is fast, easy and doesnt suck. it discovers new/changes music files fast and painless. it automatically looks for cover art if not present in the album directories (yes, most of the players out there fail to do even that). and with muine-shell, you can even remote control it by dbus, ir or whatever you want. but yeah, muine sucks because you cant burn cds, watch videos, download podcasts, browses by genre and so on. but please remember, that there are better tools for those jobs. remember what was said about unix?

this is the unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well.

if you are able to get muine running, please use it for a few weeks and you will see what i mean. muine got it right, most other tools did get nothing wrong, as nat said some time ago. thanks for reading.

update 1: the theme i used for the screenshot is called kin dust

update 2: i already tried out muinshee and it looks nice, but i think it isnt ready for production yet. if you compare muinshee and muine directly, you definitely will spot some differences, which i do not like at the moment.

we are keeping promises! yes, indeed: we promised 0 open bugs at the time, when we release cheese 2.24. and now guess what, yes we made it! see this beautiful screenshot i made some day ago:

no! the screenshot is no fake! if you think so (and you should not think so, as i wont buy you any beer or ice cream) you can click here
of course cheese never had any bugs! we just had some ehm.. aah.. small uuh.. hey, should i buy you a beer or an ice cream?

but this is not the only good news, just a few minutes ago i released cheese 2.24, which really rocks! and i wont buy you any beer or ice cream if you say something else ;) it would be boring to list all the new, shiny, rocking things, so just have a look at our NEWS file, which explains meticulous every new feature and bug fix or read the next paragraph.

as good things normally are coming as a three-pack, i have another great news for you: we added an amazing tour through cheese. this page explains quickly and in a beautiful way why you should install cheese and use it!
thanks again to og for sharing those beautiful screenshots with us and his soon-to-be-famous daughters for acting as models.

by the way: do you know the amazing people behind cheese? no? of course you want to meet them, everybody wants to! i want to present them to you, so that you can buy them a beer or an ice cream for their amazing work!

first and foremost there was jaap who sent me patches and patches during my summer of code time and afterwards. if you are asking yourself why cheese is working with quite every webcam out there which runs on gstreamer, yes, jaap is your hero then. recently busy with the cheese vala branch and a wedding he is one of my heroes in the gnome development, as he is not only working on cheese but everywhere, where help is needed.

you probably know andreas already. (if not, he is the left person on the photo, allthough some people think that he is just a robot and his master is this cat on the right, which of course is not a cat, but the reincarnation of picasso, who is controlling that person on the left). though he is _the_ rockstar hacker ehm.. artist ;) quite all the icons used in cheese are made by him. except the easter egg icons, they were made by kalle persson. did i just say easter egg? no, i meant ehm.. ah forget it!
anyway, i cant say more than this: andreas is one of the greatest artists around and we should be proud to have him on board!

my slave, patryk. he even answers with "yes, my master", isnt that cool? ;)
patryk is also a long time contributor for cheese, and he made many things you probably have already seen, e.g. he stole the beautiful eog-scrollbar, added a flash when taking a photo, worked on v4l and many more things. yes, he rocks too, even if he is working on an unknown linux distribution in his spare time.

felix is quite new to the gnome development and cheese too. he was my student during the summer of code 2008 and developed a dbus backend for cheese. some parts of it are already inside cheese, the rest will come for 2.26. but try to press f11 when running cheese and a wonderful fullscreen mode will enlighten your eyes. though, please do not try this at a party, or every guest will stand in front of your computer instead of drinking your beer and eating your ice cream. felix also wants to use cosimos mediamanager to make it possible to change and upload your avatars easy and painless to empathy, your favourite social network site, evolution and many more places. this totally rocks!

and now last but not least: filippo, a summer of code student as felix. have you seen his screencasts? if not, watch them, they are probably the coolest thing i have seen in the last time. he is also bug hunter number one (after me of course ;) ) in cheese and made it possible that we reached 0 open bugs in these days. and of course we are trying to use his gstreamer gst-gl plugins in cheese 2.26. definitely!

so, those were some of the cool people of cheese. quite all of the photos above were made with cheese and/or gst-gl plugins. hug those guys, buy them a beer and/or buy them an ice cream, they deserve it! thats all for now, thanks for reading! you can continue drinking your beer or eating your ice cream now.

dear hackers,

we are trying to organize the speck hack fest 2008 as best as possible and we put some packages together for facilitate your hack days in bolzano.

unfortunately some accomodation packages are available only for a short period because bolzano is fully booked in november and the hostel and the hotels are keeping our registrations only for a short period.

if you already know you would join the hack fest it would be better if you have a look at the packages we prepared as soon as possible and register yourself online at http://sfscon.it/2008/registration/gnome-registration

at this link you will find every kind of information about the packages! if you need further infos do not hesitate to contact patrick or me!

the hack fest is followed by the south tyrol free software conference on 14th november which program and details will be available as soon as possible at http://www.sfscon.it. there will be many interesting speeches and i think you could ehm.. well, you have to join also the sfscon the day after the hack fest.
btw: did you know that stormy is maybe holding a talk there? ;)

hope to see you in bolzano...
daniel

p.s. if you want to sponsor the hack fest we have no problems with it ;)

harhar.. seems like my evilish plans are getting real ;)
thanks to pierre slamich for notifying me about this!

read the full review here

for everyone who did not manage to visit istanbul, for everyone who cannot visit boston, for everybody who holds a hackfest at his appartment, because its so cool, for everybody who just takes some time off to visit the hackfests around the world and of course for everybody who wants to sit together, meet other gnome developers and wants to hack there is another amazing opportunity to meet, discuss and hack: the speck hack fest 2008

the speck hack fest is a hackfest for gnome developers and contributors. it will be held at the tis innovation park in bolzano (italy), an innovative and technological center in bolzano and it will be organized by the tis - free software center. you can take a look at the video presentation of the city. it will end with the south tyrolean free software conference, which will be on 14th november.

already, there was a lot of feedback when we talked about a possible hackfest in italy. we have discussed and the art team and webkit/epiphany people are seriously considering coming. of course you should add yourself to session page if you want to hold a session. if you want to propose an idea, about a really great topic, you should not hesitate to add that idea too to the session page and there may be some people who want to hold a session about that.

if you are interested to come you should add your name to the participants page and you should spread the word about the hackfest! :)

we will publish further information about accomodation, registration and the hackfest in general soon. if you need to have further information right now just ping patrick or me.

the deadlines are approaching fast and as always we want to do everything in the last few moments. in this case its a bit different, there were a lot of ideas and patches travelling around. but at the end, we do not have many new features in cheese. bad? probably not, because at least in my opinion we will be able to provide a rock stable release, which works like a german tank.

therefore i want to announce the first official glorious, amazing, international, extremly difficult, adventorous, cheese bug hunting competiton (short: gai eda competition. please do not confuse it with some transvestite)
right now, cheese has about 40 open bugs. to have that german tank release we want to have 0 open bugs when releasing cheese 2.24. sounds great, not? the rules are simple:

• fix 5 non-trivial bugs and get one beer when you see me the next time
• "fix" means, that you actually provide a patch or do some work ;)
• you can win more than one beer of course
• you can swap one won beer with one ice cream if you like
• cheese developers and their relatives are excluded from this competion (guys, i own you some beer nevertheless...)

update 04.08.2008: i think, resolving 5 bugs could be quite hard, so the new prizes look like the following:

• fix 3 non-trivial bugs and get one beer when you see me the next time
• fix 5 non-trivial bugs and get one beer and one ice cream

while having this great competition i encourage everybody to tell us issues, enhancements and ideas, which should be fixed before 2.24 and open some new bug reports for those issues. but please remember, that we will not add any new feature to the 2.24 version. of course new features can go into 2.26 and we want to accept those things too.

my two slav.. ehm soc students are working hard in the mean time to get their projects finished.

filippo already has done an awesome work already, i totally love the effects the created in the last weeks. right now he is busy polishing the gst-gl plugins, which we can (and _must_) use in 2.26. they then will provide a release, which every gstreamer based application can use easily. sounds awesome, not? if you have any more ideas about great effects, please bug him about your idea as he seems already bored ;)

in the meantime felix was working on the internals of cheese and made it dbus capable. he wants to add it then to cosimos mediamanager library, which will expose cool features to the gtkfilechooser. a user then could say "hey i want to add a photo of my as a buddy icon in empathy" and he just opens the gtkfilechooser and then clicks on the cheese icon. everything else will go automatically, awesome, not? ;)

so guys, keep up the amazing work!

by the way: while reading the ct magazine, i discovered a cheese screenshot in one of the articles. it doesnt feature any text about cheese, but its great publicity anyway ;) you can find it at page 42 in the newest edition.

last night, while i already had some beer, and we were right into celebrating my birthday, which actually is today, i figured out something: exactly on this very day, a year ago, i released cheese 0.1.0, which was the first release in a long series of versions of that program.

while looking back, it was awesome to develop the program, it was awesome to get so much feedback, it was awesome to receive and apply patches, it was awesome to get and fix bug reports, all that was just awesome. and i want to thank everybody, who did something, which made cheese even better, be it documentation, translations, patches, bugfixes, bug reports, usefull hints, feature requests, or even if you just used cheese to take a photo of you, your family, your friends, your goldfishes or three-headed monkeys. thank you!

a year has passed, and it seems, that cheese actually works on most computers and with most webcams. awesome! im quite satisfied with the state of cheese right now, as i planned to have an equivalent photobooth clone made in one year. in my opinion, we already reached that milestone with 2.22, but of course, some things are still different, some small features still not available, for example movie recording on the apple side or live previews and better effects on the cheese side.

now, whats next? we are concentrating on two big things: closer integration into gnome and even more fancy bling bling! we definitely want to do those things better for 2.24. but more on that later

a year has also passed for me, a year which transformed me from nobody, the gnome user, to a guy, who has a gnome svn account and is presuming right now to be a soc mentor (dont even believe him). that passed year was just awesome. i met many new people, and i even had the possibility to met some of them face by face, which was also awesome of course. some of them became friends, which also is just awesome. after all, i just can say one thing: every single people in the gnome community is just awesome and i am glad that i have the possibility to work beside so many geniuses and awesome people.

now to my two slaves..ehm gsoc students, who are working on cheese with their great ideas:

filippo is adding some new opengl based effects to the gstreamer framework, which cheese can use to finally morph you into the real hulk, in order to even scare your goldfish. he is doing a great job and i cant wait to see the first effects working and implemented in cheese. a great thing about his task is that he is working on a gstreamer plugin called gst-gl, which can be used by other applications, to provide the same awesome effects. just awesome!

felix, who still does not have a blog, is working on the integration of cheese into the gnome desktop. he already enhanced cheese to use XDG folders and is working right now on the dbus side of cheese. he will make it possible to remote control cheese and allow each single application to use cheese to take photos or movies just by using dbus. this of course is awesome for buddy icons, which then can be used in gdm, empathy, evolution, social network websites and many many more. isnt that also awesome?

oh.. by the way: i just found out, that nautilus has a preview mode for audio files, which totally kicks ass, ehm i mean is totally awesome. not just because of those small things gnome totally rocks and i wouldnt talk about decadence in any way.

thats all for now, happy birthday cheese! people, rock on, make gnome even more awesome!

dear dave and probably others: youre talking about not having the time to read that book, but it seems that you have some time to open a web browser, to log in into your blog, to create that new post, search the book on amazon and then actually write a few lines on it. then you will spend some time on reading the comments and maybe spend a few more minutes on doing some replies.

now, think about other useless stuff youre doing. please also pay attention about the definition of useless: listening music, drinking a beer with some friends, cooking for people, sleeping, having fun with cheese ( ;) ) is _not_ useless, at least it shouldnt. however staring on the computer screen or browsing the web for new wallpapers probably is. how much time are you spending on nothing?

its amazing how much more time you will have if you try to keep an eye on yourself, and for sure you will be able to tag your book with the "already read"-tag. my opinion, it works for me.

cimi is my hero for today:

finished? well, macslow has a really good chance to be my hero for tomorrow ;)

some days ago, i wanted to know, how i could improve the countdown widget, which we accidentally have in cheese. andreas, calum, chris, benjamin, lennart, patrys, robert accidentally said all the same: why does it have to be red? and they were right ;)

so what i accidentally did was to read out the bg[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] for the background and text[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] for the text which represents the numbers. so far it was pretty easy. too easy? probably: i wanted to have it sexier and lennart provided accidentally a lot of color space information and algorithms (though at the end i copied accidentally everything from gtk, because those functions accidentally are not public). we now just converted the rgb value of the gtk theme color to hsv and played around with the saturation value. after playing around we just converted it back to rgb and had a "light" color and a "dark" one. this accidentally provides a sexy glassy effect.

one thing that took me pretty long to understand was that bg[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] and text[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] reported wrong colors in some cases. patrys accidentally knew some gtk interals and told me that colors do not have to be in a gtkstyle if the widget has not been initialized yet or is initializing. and accidentally i experienced those cases. the solution to this problem was accidentally quite easy: we just had to implement a callback function for the style-set signal. this signal gets emitted as soon as gtk is able to tell you the colors, before the first expose event and sometimes between expose events if the user switches the gtk theme. now it worked. and accidentally the widget changes its color on runtime if you change the gtk theme while taking a photo. sounds cool, not? ;)

there was one issue left: we could set the text color, the background color, but how about the camera icon, which is a svg icon? the icon basically is just white or transparent and again, i saw that drunk developers do a better job when it comes to totally strange problems: the only solution we figured out in #cairo was to do svg dom processing (ugly!!!) or hard-coding the svg (even more ugly!!!). but last night, when i came home, not as dry as i am at day time, i accidentally met a nice cairo function: cairo_set_operator(). now guess what accidentally happend? i tried every operator (at that time i could not think anymore) and i accidentally saw that CAIRO_OPERATOR_XOR was doing an amazing job. what basically was happening is the following: imagine two layers and put the first one below the other. now you combine those two layers to one, but just take those "pixels", which are either in layer one or two, not in both. so you just get those fragments, where the first layer has a color and the second is transparent or the other way round. so, andreas was kind enough to swap the transparent and the white surfaces on the icon and that did the trick: i just paint the first layer in the theme color, and then removed everything, which was outside of the camera symbol by using CAIRO_OPERATOR_XOR. so the camera symbol accidentaly has the color i actually want.

to prove it, i did some screenshots. and remember: accidents happen! ;)

note 1: since 2.22 there is actually a gconf setting called /apps/cheese/countdown, where you can decide whether the countdown widget should be displayed or not. the development version features a menu entry for that.

note 2: the screenshots are actually no fakes. i just cut them out from the window, as i do not want to show me to you today ;)

some time ago, macslow created that awesome countdown widget for cheese, which basically looks like this:

even if i like it, some people may not, as they have amblyopia or related problems.

idea: read the color out of the gtk theme, so the problem should be gone for most people, BUT:

• the color red is not available in themes like clearlooks, ...
• adding a gtk key for that specific color just for cheese does not seem to be a good idea

any idea?

...if mr. andersson treats his designer slaves like his dogs, horses, ehm.. whatever ;)

in the last days i got many comments about april fool jokes, good april fool jokes, not so good april fool jokes, patents, former bad companies, and free software in general.

one mail was so deep going and hit the issue so unerring, that i asked mark van den borre for permission to post it here:

[...]

I can only speculate about the negative response you've experienced. My guess is that many geeks are painfully aware how little they can do about the software patents problem already. That's an uncomfortable feeling you're forcing them to look at.

Many of us, in the absence of major pro-swpat attacks against software freedom, see only one way forward: trying to assemble as big an anti-swpat ecosystem as possible as fast as possible. Think free software projects, small software development shops, free software services, conscious users.

Many of us also know it there's even more severe treatment in the legal system of knowing versus unknowing patent infringement, which is why organisations like SFLC tend to discourage public discussion of anythig patent. So you're right, there is something of a taboo. It's even inspired by law and "justice".

dear arc, bolsh, chpe, cyberdork33, gerd kohlberger, gicmo, hughsie, karl lattimer, lapo, luis villa, macslow, mattias eriksson, michaël van dorpe, murrayc, nicolás reynolds, oskar rubinstein, pachi, patoh, thomas lunde, uwog, vuntz, the redhat crew germany, the ubuntu forums and several other people,
as you might noticed, the blog entry about a fictional lawsuit against cheese was an april fools joke. i do not want to talk about the taste of the joke, which is of course really really bad. many people got irritated about my lines and didnt have look at the calendar. mikkels post was of course not planned and in my opinion those two posts together were really hard to people, who are working in and for the free software community for a long time, like behdad, vuntz and luis villa and of course others.

a comment which really thrilled me was the following: "[...] but his post and this one (in light of the reactions, more than the content) are like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater."
this is so true. many people had fun reading that post, but i had the feeling (and several comments, mails, ... proved it) that some people had no fun at all. moreover, they were scared, concerned, perturbed.

why? why was this joke not taken as a joke by so many people? in my opinion it is just too close on reality. we all know that software patents are bad. we all know what they can do. but what would we do if something like this would happen for real?

it seems to like some topics are taboo. even this one. but to resolve the problem of software patents, the right way is not to _not_ talk about them. so please take this april fools joke as a warning what could happen, and not even on cheese, but also on other free software projects, and that this could reveal itself in a real mess. imagine, someone from [bad company] would call you and force you to stop developing a project. fortunately the free software foundation and the software freedom law center are already doing a damn good job and so we developers are able to work on nice projects, just because we all think that free software is awesome.

back to fun (isnt everything about fun?): it was april fools day and life isnt as serious as we sometimes think it is. and it is totally ok to buy me not one beer wherever you meet me this year.

all hell broke loose yesterday: i got a phone call yesterday by a nice lady, which presented herself as a former advocate of apple. she told me that the objective of her team was to find copyright and patent violations and therefore she called me:

obviously i did something wrong by starting such a project as cheese, which is a pure clone of photo booth. this would violate the us patent IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing, which was filed on february the 28th 2006 and as gnome is registered and known as an organization of the usa, this patent would be applicable.

i thought, that such patents would just apply, if there is some commercial interest behind it, but she knew it better: as i created cheese in the summer of code program, i "worked" for google, which makes everything a commercial project, even if now i "probably" do not get any money. in addition the full us patent law applies, as i a) worked for google in the usa for the summer of code program and b) cheese is now included in gnome, which is an organization registered in the usa.

she also told me, that of course there are similar applications like photo booth, but cheese acts as a clone and therefore an illegal copy because it works on intel based macs and therefore would be a competitor of photo booth. the fact, that cheese just runs on linux on the intel based macs was worthless by her.

so it looks pretty bad for me now.. i got a deadline of 5 work days to remove cheese code and binary versions from all places i have access to (probably svn.gnome.org, ftp.gnome.org, ...).

i already contacted a lawyer, which thinks he can help me, but of course it is david against goliath...

so, if you know a way out of this, please contact me!

today is easter, how adequate ;)
i already found my eggs, but did anyone already find the easter egg we build into cheese 2.22 or in the rest of the desktop?

thank you jeff ;)

...to propose your idea for summer of code!

no, really, please add your idea to http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas we really need some more entries to give students some starting points.

if you would like to be a mentor, please add your name to the proposed ideas you would like to mentor. thats all for now, thanks!

...that is cheeses icon here! extremely nice! congratulations to everybody for the best GNOME ever (as always ;) )

naive myself... if anyone would have told me last year, that i would be able to develop a tool for taking pictures and videos from a webcam, which then will go into gnome, will be used in distros like ubuntu, fedora, suse, ... no chance that i would have believed him. now, a year later we have a very nice tool, which should not dread the comparison to other tools, even proprietary ones, like apples.

we had people that were able to send the pictures of her children to her grandma, people who installed cheese in their office lobby, people who send their identity card to their agency through cheese because they didnt have a scanner around, people who just had fun with it. and it is all about fun. therefore i would like to thank all the people for the fun we had developing this program, all the people who gave me a chance to start, all the people who helped me to reach this point and everybody who will help us in the future. THANKS!

does this mean, that cheese is finished? hell, no.. we have a lot of open ideas and want to bring them into gnome 2.24 to make it a even more brilliant desktop and finally be able to say "yeah, 2008 was definitely the linux-on-desktops year" ;)

what is it?

Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others.

what's changed in 2.22.0?

• typo in the documentaton: ximageskink instead of ximagesink
• menu entries for take a photo and recording never switched, fixes bug #516745
• select a thumb near the deleted item, fixes bug #505442
• make sure we have the right prototype definition, fixes bug #519030
• rephrased hard-to-understand sentence in docs, fixes bug #518838, courtesy of Claude Paroz
• drop libglade and use GtkBuilder instead.
• putted gtk calls in critical section in threads, fixes bug #516697, courtesy of Mathias Clasen
• make use of the gconf countdown setting and show or hide the countdown depending on that
• replaced all gnome-vfs calls by gio
• install bugreport script in libexec instead of lib, fixes bug #514833
• translate effect names too, courtesy of Tommi Vainikainen
• pressing 'esc' cancels countdown/stop video recording, courtesy of Tommi Vainikainen
• the bugreport script didnt get copied on make dist
• new effect images by Lapo Calamandrei and gidesa
• fix bug #510610 - Typo at the documentation
• remove gnome-vfs completely from cheese-window.c
• use gio instead of gnome-vfs for file copy
• make Save dialog title localizable
• don't use gnome-vfs for opening links in about dialog
• write logging to file ~/.gnome2/cheese/log and send this along in bug-buddy reports, fixes bug #510270
• plug some leaks, courtesy of Mauro of GHOP project. fixes bug #505441
• run webcam detection in background thread, fixes bug #505553, courtesy of Steve Magoun
• uso GIO g_file_trash() to trash files, patch by Luca Ferretti
• update to new manual provided by Joshua Henderson as part of GHOP
• remove the queue-size=2, this should fix bug #507416 - iSight camera does not work in gstreamer
• added/updated translations
  • ar, courtesy of Djihed Afifi and Khaled Hosny
  • be@latin, courtesy of Ihar Hrachyshka
  • bn_IN, courtesy of Runa Bhattacharjee
  • ca, courtesy of Gil Forcada
  • cs, courtesy of Vitezslav Kotrla.
  • da, courtesy of Kenneth Nielsen
  • de, courtesy of Andre Klapper and Hendrik Brandt
  • el, courtesy of Athanasios Lefteris
  • en_GB, courtesy of Philip Withnall
  • es, courtesy of Jorge González
  • et, courtesy of Ivar Smolin
  • eu, courtesy of Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio
  • fi, courtesy of Tommi Vainikainen
  • fr, courtesy of Claude Paroz, Stéphane Raimbault and Robert-André Mauchin
  • ga, courtesy of Seán de Búrca
  • gl, courtesy of Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
  • gu, courtesy of Ankit Patel
  • he, courtesy of Yair Hershkovitz
  • hu, courtesy of Adam Pongracz and Gabor Kelemen
  • it, courtesy of Alessandro Falappa
  • ja, courtesy of Takeshi Aihana
  • ko, courtesy of Changwoo Ryu
  • lt, courtesy of Gintautas Miliauskas
  • mk, courtesy of Arangel Angov and Jovan Naumovski
  • ml, courtesy of Ani Peter
  • mr, courtesy of Sandeep Shedmake
  • nb, courtesy of Kjartan Maraas
  • nl, courtesy of Wouter Bolsterlee.
  • oc, courtesy of Yannig Marchegay
  • pa, courtesy of Amanpreet Singh Brar
  • pl, courtesy of GNOME PL Team
  • pt, courtesy of Duarte Loreto
  • pt_BR, courtesy of Pedro de Medeiro and Og Maciel
  • ru, courtesy of Vasiliy Faronov
  • sl, courtesy of Matej Urbančič
  • sv, courtesy of Daniel Nylander
  • th, courtesy of Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
  • tr, courtesy of Baris Cicek
  • uk, courtesy of Maxim Dziumanenko
  • zh_CN, courtesy of YangZhang
  • zh_HK, courtesy of Chao-Hsiung Liao
  • zh_TW, courtesy of Chao-Hsiung Liao

where can i get it?

you can get it by pressing here

what does it look like?

etc

some patches couldnt make it into this version but will definitely go into 2.24. those patches include the port to the nokia n810 (maemo) device, usability enhancements, user interface enhancements and a lot more. stay tuned!

some days ago, i asked how to take screenshots of cheese for the next gnome release. while getting some more or less useful hints, a person, who wanted to fire me and likes a lot of ice cream, asked me about my address. and no, i wont tell you who he is

in any case, i came home this week and a parcel waited for me. i did not knew what and where this came from. i opened the parcel, even with the fear of an attack by a terrorist. after evacuating my street i could open the parcel with the help by the local bomb squad. in there was a undefinable something packed into white paper. drugs? see yourself:

vincent, thanks a lot for the new cheese mascott! now we just need andreas to convert the cheese icon to it ;)

but after all, i wont keep it very long. i will send it to some gnome lover out there immidiately after the gnome release with 2 other things in it: a cheese and a surprise. watch out for incoming parcels!

hey guys, what about a bugzilla bingo?

rules are easy:

• choose 16 bugs in the bugzilla system of modules that are going into gnome 2.22
• arrange the bug numbers in four vertical and four horizontal rows
• one severity for each bug (has to be defined)
• strike out the bug number, if the bug was fixed
• several winners:
  • the first who strikes out one entire line
  • the first who strikes out one diagonal
  • the first who strikes out all bugs
• prize? has to be defined

i will show you an example with cheese bugs and not the same severity:

505442	508910	510270	510270
509475	483811	500819	509793
you	get	the	idea
more	and	more	bugs

what happens when a mirco müller, a patryk zawadzki and a crazy cheese developer come together? well, nobody tried it yet, but macslows countdown widget, which he posted yesterday was matter enough for me to force my slave patryk to integrate that into cheese.
press relations officier of cheese said that it was an honour for him to follow the GNOME release cycle, release the first package in this year, and to have such important persons working on cheese (i do not really know, who he meant, but probably myself). further he could get a really really really important person in the GNOME network to my house, who then recorded the screencast of cheese with the main developer.

what is it?

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.

what's changed in 2.21.5?

• version bump to follow the gnome release cycle
• add a stylish countdown widget by Mirco "MacSlow" Müller, courtesy of Patryk Zawadzki
• add X-GNOME-Bugzilla-* keys and validate .desktop file. fixes bug #508910, courtesy of Luca Ferretti
• vertical and horizontal flip options were switched (again). fixes bug #479238, courtesy of Steve Magoun
• use the gst-player by Mathias Hasselman for playing the shutter sound
• removed color forcing. This has been fixed in gstreamer
• do not crash when trash directory is not present. fixes bug #507071
• make cheese build against uninstalled gstreamer. fixes bug #479259, courtesy of Tim Philip Müller
• added/updated translations
  • et, courtesy of Ivar Smolin
  • ja, courtesy of Takeshi Aihana
  • ca, courtesy of Gil Forcada
  • oc, courtesy of Yannig Marchegay
  • sv, courtesy of Daniel Nylander
  • fr, courtesy of Robert-André Mauchin
  • pt_BR, courtesy of Rodrigo Flores

where can i get it?

you can get it by pressing here!

what does it look like?

no screenshot this time! i have something better for you: ~2mb

update day after

cheese _does_ make a shutter sound when taking a picture and it _does_ show a flash light when taking a picture ;)

4 months development time, uncountable hours of work, 170 svn revisions, about 50 fixed bugs, 40 new features, at least 2 easter..ehm christmas eggs and pretty high number of actual code changes. and yes, we are donating the numbers i mentioned above to YOU!
and yes you are right again, you can get our packaged parcel by pressing here.

what is it?

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.

what's changed in 0.3.0?

• add a shutter sound, when taking a photo
• sort the thumbnail chronologically
• make the effect chooser look a bit nicer
• give thumbnails a frame like in nautilus and eog. fixes bug #500819
• enable shortcuts if the mouse pointer is over the xoverlay. fixes bug #493196
• add new shortcuts
  • space for take a photo/start-stop recording
  • ctrl q for exiting
  • f1 for help
  • delete for removing a photo or video
• add a gconf backend
• chosen effects are stored in gconf. fixes bug #488834
• store the used webcam device in gconf. partially fixes bug #473038
• use a throbber, when the camera is loading
• add drag and drop support to the iconview
• vertical and horizontal flip were switched. fixes bug #479238
• many usability improvements. partially fixes bug #501337
• point to the right homepage in the about dialog
• add a boilerplate for a manual in cheese. partially fixes #480628
• make video and photo button a toggle button. fixes bug #498022
• make links on about dialog clickable. fixes bug #499425
• translate menu items created by gtkuimanager, fixes bug #500821
• change the first item in menu to "Cheese"
• add a "Move all to trash" option
• use gtkuimanager for the menu
• give the ability to record videos from the menu
• provide access to the effect chooser using the menu
• use radio buttons in the menu to change between photo and video mode
• use HAL to detect webcams
• make ximagesink an xvimagesink work for all cameras
• only use raw video formats. fixes bug #502174
• use the highest resolution for each camera
• add --verbose command line option, fixes bug #499399
• cheese was refactored and uses now a webcam class
• removed some memory leaks
• fixed many, many bugs
• added/updated translations
  • ar, courtesy of Djihed Afifi
  • ca, courtesy of Carlos Garcia Porcel
  • cs, courtesy of Vitezslav Kotrla
  • de, courtesy of Andre Klapper
  • el, courtesy of Athanasios Lefteris
  • es, courtesy of Jorge González
  • fr, courtesy of Pierre Slamich
  • gl, courtesy of Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
  • it, courtesy of Alessandro Falappa
  • nb, courtesy of Kjartan Maraas
  • oc, courtesy of Yannig Marchegay
  • pt, courtesy of Miguel Rosa
  • ro, courtesy of Anastase Valentin
  • sl, courtesy of Deni Bačić
  • sv, courtesy of Daniel Nylander

where can i get it?

you can get it by pressing here

what does it look like?

etc

with this christmas release we wish you all a happy christmas and a good start into the new year. we would love to get some christmas pictures of you and your friends, family, childrens, santas and reindeers ;)

diego after trying out the development version of cheese:

dieguito: how am i supposed to use it?
daniel: do you want to install it?
dieguito: i want to build it to be able to report bugs
dieguito: read: i want to make your life hell
daniel: then install it ;)
[5 minutes later]
dieguito: the take photo effect is amazing
dieguito: and the thumbnails look really cool
dieguito: the colors are perfect now
dieguito: and the size too
dieguito: i must say your software produce homoerotic feelings for you in me
daniel: hey, i could put that on my homepage!
dieguito: I hope my foundation candidacy is not affected by this...
dieguito has signed off.

all in all i think we will make a rocking release (not ultimately thanks to jaaps contribution) in a few days/weeks/whatever, stay tuned!
update: jaaps homepage

dear sir or madam
i wanted to advise you, that the official cheese homepage has moved to http://www.gnome.org/projects/cheese.

yours faithfully, the cheese-guys.

they stole that! does anyone has some money to sue them? calming is just the fact that i implemented video before they released leopard, harharhar ;)

and as raphael mentions: at least if you search for "photobooth cheese", cheese is 2nd and apple is not even on the list.

update: as sven pointed out: i did not mean, that cheese was first, i meaned, that they stole my slogan (see title)

about a month ago i got a mail from drew gibson (a system admin of http://www.oanda.com):

I was thinking of putting a webcam and Cheese on a PC in our companies lobby to entertain our staff/visitors (our staff are easily amused! :-) [...]

today i got another mail:

Sorry for the size of the email but here are the photos!

The centre screen is Cheese (v0.2.3) with our own atnabtu.com (All Their News Are Belong To yoU) financial news website to the left and a more general news aggregator to the right.

Cheese has been well received, our CFO was caught waving her arms and making faces at the camera!

well... i never thought that it would be look so great, im really out of words... but see yourself, its just terrific ;)

prepare-Changelog? hey, didnt you know im lazy?
svn2cl? is much too lazy, as it is always a step behind
anything else?

yeah! etienne and me hacked a little script, which is for lazy hackers as we are. its a simple wrapper around svn commit which updates the ChangeLog file with the commit message before actually commiting. That means, that the same commit message will be used in the svn log as in your ChangeLog file.

sounds great? then get it, while its hot! download cicl!

patches and rewrites are welcome!

btw: marco, your beamer themes look awesome! now i just need to find a place where i can do a presentation to bore someone the pants off ;)

as jeff thanked for the cheese, i want to thank him for my brand new jabber address, which is dgsiegel@gnome.org.
dont hesitate to contact me, im as bored as you probably are right now, reading _this_ ;)

yeah, so long.. soc is finished by about 34 minutes ago and cheese is about 95% of my expectations and initial proposal. of course i wont stop here, and develop cheese further on, with some kick-assing-ideas until we finally can teach people, that some fresh cheese is even better than premorse apples..

now this is the real "dot-oh"-release, even if there is a "one" at the end, have fun with it!

what is it?

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.

what's changed in 0.2.1?

• improvement the video pipline. and i mean a LOT of improvement
• add a countdown, when taking a photo
• add a time counter to the video recording
• added the following export methods/capabilities:
  • open the file with gnome-open
  • save as dialog
  • delete
  • send by mail
  • export to flickr
  • export to f-spot
  • set as account photo
• we found the bug! v4l works now, courtesy of Patryk Zawadzki
• added a popupmenu to the iconview
• added some parts of the lucas(R)-eye of gnome iconview
• if the same effects were chosen in photo and video, they wont apply. fixed
• the first item in the iconbar wasnt deleted. fixed
• updated translations:
  • cs, courtesy Vítězslav Kotrla
  • de
  • fr, courtesy of Pierre Slamich
  • it, courtesy of Alessandro Falappa
  • nl, courtesy of Wouter Bolsterlee
  • pt, courtesy of Miguel Rosa

where can i get it?

check out the cheese homepage, which is pretty old

what does it look like?

this screenshot is a special one, dedicated to one of the great guys of gnome

hey, thats just unbelievable.. just a moment ago, a very famous person (and i mean a very very famous person) entered my room and wanted to record something for all the gnome-people out there:

by the way: the above was recorded by using cheese 0.2.0 which is available at all stores from now on and with the following new features:

• store video thumbnails in the right thumbnail directory
• video support. we can record a video with audio taken from any source
• add mnemonics for the buttons in the ui
• probably the dumbest change ever: the fsf has changed its address
• updated translations:
  • de
  • fr, courtesy of Pierre Slamich
  • it, courtesy of Alessandro Falappa
  • pl, courtesy of Tomasz Dominikowski
  • pt, courtesy of Miguel Rosa

warning!

the video support is still in testing and will either or all

• wont work
• crash your computer
• kill your cat
• kill you and your cat
• go out for dinner with your wife/girlfriend
• send the message "i hate you" to all your friends
• steal money from your credit card
• send me all your beer, money and tshirts

you have been warned!!!!

the president of the v4l-land just congratulated me a few minutes ago on _officially_ supporting v4l, version 1, in cheese. further he wants to extend his congratulations and salute diego escalante urrelo, who has patched cheese to get v4l working. he also wants to salute all v4l-users out there, and of course v4l2 users too, and wishes them much fun playing with cheese.

what is it?

cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.

what's changed in 0.1.4?

• remove photos automatically from the thumbnail row if they were deleted on the filesystem
• check automatically for webcams and their resolution
• notification if cheese isn't able to get the webcam working
• v4l support, courtesy of diego escalante urrelo
• store photos under ~/.gnome2/cheese/images
• add only valid jpeg photos to the thumbnail row
• sort thumbnails aplhabetically before adding them
• let the window resizable
• icons were installed with permissions 0755. fixed
• added gtk-update-icon-cache on installation
• lot of refactoring
• new about-window, courtesy of Jaap Haitsma
• use g18n for i18n
• updated dutch translation, courtesy of wouter bolsterlee
• updated french translation, courtesy of pierre slamich
• added polish translation, courtesy of tomasz dominikowski
• several fixes

where can i get it?

check out the cheese homepage, which is yeah, kinda new!

miscellaneous

• there is a snapshot-page on the cheese homepage. please feel free to send me your (nice|funny|ugly|vincent-like|unnormal) photos made with cheese.

what does it look like?

this time i dont want to be selfish and show you another photo of my face (hey, i know im looking good ;) ), no this time i want to show diego with is v4l device! take this as a proof, that v4l _really_ works with cheese

i just wanted to remind some people, that thinking before talking removes some side-effects like this ;). obviously it's quite hard to think, after having about 15 tickets left and 23 in your stomache.

• vincent (the dutch guy): (after looking a while at my badge) you don't look like your name
• wouter: actually, summer of code doesn't really exist, right?
• vincent (the untz one): you're fired! and you are fired too! and you do really bad work! (this guy had black hair...)
• me to some collabora guys: so what are you talking about and why are you talking in french?
  • answer: ah, we're talking about strip clubs in montreal (maybe this could be the place for the next guadec? ;) )
• lennart to raphael: what??? you don't know david hasselhoff? we germans love that guy! (actually, the real phrase was a bit different, but this sounds better)
• andreas to some guy: do you want a really dirty icon from a really dirty icon designer? (actually, it's widely believed, that it wasn't the real andreas, as he was about 1,80m tall)
• question: do you want some tickets? i got some left.
  • answer1: oh, sorry, but i still have about 13
  • answer2: i actually could offer you
  • answer3: i will get you one and you will drink it
• lennart after reading some quotes: i guess they should'nt read planet of gnome for a while...

so, i'm leaving in a few hours. if anybody has some free t-shirts for me, just look out for me. it was a great time and much much fun. thanks for the oppurtunity!

cheese? yeah, its not only something to eat! this is a under the bonnet-release, that means, that no new features were added in the ui, but many things were done below it.

what is it?

cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.

what's changed in 0.1.2?

• the buildsystem is now toc2, big thanks to Stephan Beal for helping out
• added the new cheese icon, courtesy of Andreas Nilsson and Josef Vybiral
• added czech translation, courtesy of Vitezslav Kotrla
• added portuguese translation, courtesy of Miguel Rosa
• added spanish translation, courtesy of Ricardo Gonzalez Castro
• added galician translation, courtesy of Ricardo Gonzalez Castro
• added italian translation, courtesy of Alessandro Falappa

where can i get it?

check out the cheese homepage, which is still shining!

miscellaneous

open bugs

• cheese still has problems with some v4l-(only)-devices. if somebody knows a way round to this, contact me!

note to the build system

yes, i can hear it already.. "why didnt you choose autotools?? its a standard!". yeah, i think we all know about those standards, be it a build system or a document format. i played with autotools for about two weeks. two weeks of no coding, no new features, as i was trying to understand the gnu "auto, my ass" tools. the only thing i find was problems and things were just harder to do. this changed when i found the toc2 build system. its really easy to maintain your project with this thing. now you might say: "hey, but i have to learn how to use it first! kinda silly?" and "but i have to install that first?" ehm no, as you will find your configure file and makefile and the only thing you have to do is a ./configure && make && make install as usual. this is because toc lives in the source try, quite like autotools, but not fully, as no global installation is needed. pretty cool, isnt it? have a look at the toc2 homepage for further informations.

what does it look like?

as stated above, nothing in the ui changed, but as you gnome-people are some screenshot fetishists, i made one, only for you!

a new release of cheese is landing! this time featuring hulk (not hulk hogan, the other guy, the green one ;) )

what is it?

cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.

what's changed in 0.1.1?

• add new effect-chooser
• allowing to chose more than one effect at the same time
• add translation (german)
• several fixes

where can i get it?

check out the new, shiny cheese homepage!

what does it look like?

well ok, the title is a bit misleading (alltough i _have_ birthday today) ;) now sometimes its a privilege to be with certain people, and its even more, if they are celebrating your birthday. therefore and not only therefore i want to give something back: cheese 0.1.0
yeah you have heard right, its done. well to recapitulate: it works (somehow, i dont know why ;) ). please test it, have fun and give me some feedback!
only some small notes to the testers:

• at the moment there is only a small, ugly Makefile, live with it (the next release will feature autotools
• please read the README-file ;)
• to install it, please refer to the README-file
• new ideas are always welcome!
• the effects-chooser is pretty scabby. but its only there to change the effects. i will remove it as soon as possible and include my newest idea: MANY effects at once (i hope those apple-guys dont hear that)

get it here (and dont waste my bandwith by downloading 17K twice, those two files have the same content):

cheese-0.1.0.tar.bz
cheese-0.1.0.tar.gz

well.. taking photos, saving them and reloading them is fully functional:

soc has started a while ago. well.. to be honest, it hasnt started at all, but i have started coding ;) after some pretty hard and unprofitable days, featuring several, not to say MANY, rewrites of the program, i have managed to get a working application. i were able to get a picture from the camera on the screen through several gstreamer loop ways. the next days will feature several things, like getting a picture saved and so on..
i also have found a pretty cool sounding name for this photobooth-like application. its name will be cheese, and it may features a nice icon of a piece of.. yes, you know it already. if you are wondering, what im doing, please go ahead and read my proposal: soc_photobooth.txt
the following is a screenshot of todays version, i will keep you up to date.
ahh.. before i forget: you can get the code from my darcs-repo. but only if you are really wondering, what im doing ;) just do a
darcs get http://home.cs.tum.edu/~siegel/dev/cheese


spring is coming with beautiful days and some beautiful news: my application on googles summer of code has been accepted. very big thanks to everyone, who has helped me, including my mentor, who has helped me a lot with his ideas and suggestions.

just _thinking_ resolves problems, just doing resolves them too.. sometimes, yeah you know.. der bundestrojaner (german)

well, i did it. i cant believe it, but i just passed my fearful expected math-test diskrete strukturen. well i didnt pass it too good, but its quite enough (almost for me here). now theres going to be some big partys and maybe some holidays (if i can place them between my partys and my bed). wohoo! ;)

vim really turns out to be my uber-favourite (for now it was only my favourite)... just try those commands and you know what i mean. and yes, you have to know some books/moviesi (at least one) to understand those things. :h!
:help 42
:help holy-grail
after all, look at those old, longhaired kernel hackers, how fast and nifty they are.

well...
a new part of my life started. im at university now, or lets better say at THE elite-university ;). no, i dont want to speak about the rankings of universities. im in a new city, im a year older and a bit wiser (at least i hope so ;) ). now its kinda strange to get all this new stuff, but i begin to like it. time got a new definition and i have so much time like newer before but also coevally really no time for anything else. now ive got a few days of relax and then the university-life will start again. im really happy to have left school (it was soooo boring) and to handle some things which are much more interesting. now upon the fact that everything is new, we have a new year etc. etc.. i created this new site which is under heavy development (as everytime this wont change). hope you like it. daniel