Michael Sheldon's Stuff

I’ve begun work on my Summer of Code project for Jokosher. My task is to integrate VoIP facilities, making it possible for people to treat their contacts as if they were just another instrument. Hopefully making life simpler for podcasters interviewing guests, or for podcasts who’s presenters are all remote.

To start with I’ve been creating python bindings for libempathy and libempathy-gtk. The initial use of these libraries is for the accounts dialog, so that Jokosher can share the same accounts dialog (and actual accounts) as any other libempathy based applications. The bindings currently wrap approximately 75% of libempathy’s functions, which is far more than I need myself, but I’d like to try and make the bindings as complete as possible so that they can help other GNOME developers wanting to make use of VoIP functionality.

Here’s a quick screenshot of Jokosher displaying the libempathy-gtk accounts dialog. There’s still some bugs to work through, but things are starting to pick up momentum :).

The schedule for LUGRadio Live ’07 has now been announced and it looks like I’ll be giving my talk at 2:00pm on Saturday, just after lunch. I’ll be discussing a little project I’ve been working on for a while called SabreGL; this is an attempt to bring the easy 3D game creation offered by proprietary products such as DarkBASIC and Blitz3D to the Free software world.

SabreGL’s still a long way from being perfect, but I think LUGRadio Live will be a good chance to introduce it to the world and get a little feedback on how people would like to see it grow.

I’m hoping to be able to show off SabreGL’s current features by hacking together a small LUGRadio themed game, I shan’t be revealing the full details of this before my talk, but to whet your appetite here’s a little screenshot:

(Yes, I know they look slightly like zombies, I suck at texturing ;)).

I’m looking forward to meeting up with various of the #lugradio denizens again, although I’m a tad worried that since I’m on at the same time as The Angriest Man In The Universe some of my potential audience may be too intimidated to turn up to my talk ;).

The Korenwolf (Corn Wolf) is a breed of wild hamster native to Belgium and some parts of Germany.

First attempt at doing something computery with a drawing. Sketched and scanned the initial outline, then made it into a vector drawing with Inkscape and finally coloured it using the GIMP.

Also, happy new year :).

After a brief chat with mattl in #jokosher I decided to hack together a little Grease Monkey script to find the FLV URL for a YouTube video (like extensions such as Fast Video Download do) then strip out the flash player and replace it with an <embed> tag, so a player like mozilla-mplayer can display the video instead.

No more audio syncing problems, no more jerky playback and most importantly no more non-free flash plugin :). The only downside is that it has to buffer the entire file before it’ll play correctly.

Here’s a pretty screenshot of it playing a video about the One Laptop Per Child project.

And here’s the actual script if you want to give it a go:

FLV Player

When I get around to it I’ll see about adding support for more sites (google video, daily motion, etc.).

Version 0.2 of Jokosher has now been released, with lots of new exciting features including: Internationalisation, LADSPA effects, extensions, presets, a metronome and (hopefully) more robust recording support along with a slew of bug fixes. And in related news we’re currently the top rated application over at gnomefiles.org :).

Elisa is a neat new Python and Gstreamer based media centre system with a nifty plugin architecture. Over the weekend I’ve put together a little Flickr backend plugin (thanks to philn for spotting a few of my silly mistakes), allowing the use of flickr:// URIs for viewing pictures. It allows for the following locations:

• flickr://user/bees
• flickr://tags/hamster
• flickr://tags/gstreamer,fluendo
• flickr://search/jokosher
• flickr://group/56878019@N00

Requests are split up in to pages (defaulting to 10 pictures per page), with a “Next Page” folder for displaying the next set of pictures. When displaying in a Slideshow this follows the “Next Page” links down, to display all the pictures in a location.

Here’s a screenshot of it displaying flickr://tags/jokosher:

Now I can sit around all day watching slideshows filled with hamsters :).

Got a train in to Koln today and bought myself a nice new Dobro (all quite the challenge to my poor German skills) and have started to learn to play some nice mellow sliding blues. Here’s a picture:

It’s suprising how loud a little guitar can be :).

I bought myself a digital camera yesterday, so I could take some pictures of my year here in Germany. I’ve only taken a couple of pictures so far, but I’ve setup a gallery at: http://gallery.mikeasoft.com. It just has a few pictures of my flat and the surrounding area at the moment, hopefully I’ll have a bit more to add next weekend when I plan to make a trip to Köln in search of a Dobro.

For a few months now I’ve been working with a nice chap called Michael Harpur to create a site filled with sailing tips and advice which, more importantly, allows other people to share their tips as well. My role has mostly been to code up the technical side of things while Michael provided much of the design and the hard work of seeding the site with around 100 very detailed tips. It’s still only in a beta stage, so there may be a few rough edges and we’d appreciate any comments people have. We have a fair amount of extra functionality planned for the future, but more ideas certainly wouldn’t hurt :).

http://www.inyourfootsteps.com