From tomorrow onwards, till the 7th of August, I’ll be completely offline (and probably my mobile will also be switched off/out of service area). I’m going in for hibernation .

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Steve Jobs

Blogging this, so that I don’t forget it… .

Hippopotamus 0.2 would be released within the next few days^(tm), and you can look forward towards the following features:

• Support for audio (both the Speex and Vorbis are supported)
• Support for saving the Ogg stream to disk
• Support for specifying the bit rate of the Theora and Speex/Vorbis streams.
• Support for selecting Video and Audio Input devices (I’ve not made up my mind about this thing yet)
• A saner pop up menu from the status icon
• Support for some basic metadata for the stream (maybe sometimes I should look into this ??)

Here’s a mockup for the impatient:

Version 0.2 of the Document Properties Plugin that I mentioned yesterday has been released. Go grab it. (Installation instructions remain the same).

Changes in this release:

• Disable the Properties menu item if no document is loaded, or if the current document does not have a valid URI (happens when you do a File->New).
• Made the user, group and the permissions labels selectable.
• Properly handle files that have SUID/SGID/Sticky bit set.

Any kind of feedback/flames is appreciated .

..and in other news, I managed to get sound working in Hippopotamus today, and cleaned up some really weird bugs. Expect a release early next week.

Also, finally I managed to upgrade the Drupal installation at FSF India to the latest release. The Drupal devs should ideally post *.diff files with new releases – it would make life much easier for us (in case anyone is wondering, it would turn most upgrades into a one command affair with patch ).

Last evening, I was pretty bored, and decided to teach myself PyGTK and the other related Python bindings for GNOME. My Python skills are not very good (the only things I have done earlier are a few ugly and hacky scripts to find out translation inconsistencies in a given set of PO files and a really weird sounding Bangla enabling frontent for Dhvani). So after around two hours of struggling and a lot of head scratching, I came up with a Python based plugin for Gedit which shows some (not very interesting) information about the currently opened file. Here’s a screenshot:



You can download the plugin (usual alpha software related warnings apply) from my here. To install, perform the following steps:

$ mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins
$ cd ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins
$ tar xzvf <wherever you have downloaded the tarball>


In case you have been unable to access sites like Blogspot, Geocities etc, take a look here for an explanation.

Just managed to release Hippopotamus 0.1. Release announcement has been posted. Give it a spin if you want…

Just came back to Bangalore after spending the weekend at Goa – here are some of the pictures that I took. (More pictures are at Flickr)

For the past few days – I have been working on a application to make myself better acquainted with GStreamer, and I have decided to call it Hippopotamus (more on that name later…). I was looking for a logo, when I came across this image at WikiMedia Commons. I took the idea – polished it a bit, and came up with the following logo for my application:



I plan to make a release within the next week.

Yesterday – I caught up with one of my old school mates Surjo. Surjo is doing his 3^rd year internship here, and has been in the city for the last one month or so.. We went to a few second hand bookshops, had beer (and dinner) and talked in general about our “good old days” . It turns out that quite a few members of the South Point HS’03 batch are in Bangalore – maybe we can have a mini-reunion of some sort here.