Planet GStreamer

One request we get often here at Collabora Multimedia is from people using GStreamer in the embedded and mobile sector and are looking for ways to stream over RTSP with GStreamer, often in combination with various kinds of transcoding and proxying functions. Due to this we have launched a new project, the GStreamer RTSP server. This server is written by GStreamer maintainer Wim Taymans and is tightly based on the RTP infrastructure in GStreamer that he has been working on for quite some time now.

It is a server written in C which can stream any GStreamer supported file over RTSP using any of the wide range of RTP formats supported by GStreamer. It also allows you to take any RTSP or HTTP stream and proxy it onwards over RTSP. The screenshot below is of totem playing a RTSP stream of the Max Payne trailer from Apple’s website. The stream offered by Apple is a normal Quicktime http stream, but our RTSP server repackages it and retransmits it over RTSP on my local network on the fly.

The code is currently only available through a git repository which you can grab using this command:
git clone git://git.collabora.co.uk/git/gst-rtsp-server.git gst-rtsp-server

The reason there is no formal release yet is due to early stage the software is in, while it works it is not very user friendly yet, with media paths having to be edited and compiled in with the server for instance. But for those looking for a RTSP server solution using GStreamer, which is suitable for putting onto embedded and mobile devices, then it might be enough to get you started and of course we at Collabora are available to offer assistance for those who want it. One hope we have is that this code will help people doing DLNA servers support the mobile profile of that specification for instance.

We also plan on moving the code into GStreamer’s code repository once that is migrated to git from CVS.

The Secrets of JavaScript Closures talk that I delivered at Fronteers 2008 was filmed, and the video is now available. You can watch it with streaming Flash video from the presentation page. (I’ve dropped a mail to ask whether I can re-encode it as downloadable Ogg Theora for people who don’t have Flash.)

I’ve just spent the day hacking on FBReader to make it work correctly under OpenMoko (OM2008.*). Until now it’s been pretty much unusable due to the GPE version of FBReader expecting you to be using a device that has some physical buttons which then get bound to vital functions like turning the page. The changes I’ve made are as follows:

• Add scroll forward/backward buttons to the toolbar
• Add fullscreen mode button to the toolbar (doesn’t have an icon at the moment, it’s the third button from the right)
• Change fullscreen mode so that it doesn’t hide the toolbar (otherwise there’s no way to get back from fullscreen mode)
• Switch to using the much prettier blue tango icons
• Make the line separation larger so the text doesn’t overlap
• Reduce the font size
• Change the default colours to match openmoko’s colour scheme better (and so it’s a little easier on the eyes)

And most importantly…

• Make it so that tapping the sides of the screen turns the book’s pages (left = backwards, right = forwards)

Here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like:

And what it looks like with my patches:

To install it simply run:

opkg install http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/enca_1.9-r3_armv4t.ipk http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader_0.8.2a-r7+elleopatches_om-gta02.ipk


For those interested the patch can also be downloaded from http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader-openmoko.patch.

Bonus points for anyone who knows what book I’m testing it with in the screenshots (without googling) ;).

I’m at the Boston GNOME summit right now. Yesterday a lot of work got done on gobject-introspection and AT-SPI D-Bus, which is completely awesome. I had a great discussion with Dan Williams about where we should go with gnome-phone-manager, NM’s new ModemManager and OpenMoko’s gpsd. My interest here is having a consistent place for getting GSM/CDMA cell location information.

A lot of very interesting ideas have been flying around about new user experience ideas. It seems a lot of people have been thinking similar things but didn’t really know that others were also working/thinking on the same ideas. We’ve just started the future user experience hackfest, I hope out of this we can forge some common future direction and common projects. I’ll report more after the hackfest!

Too much time spent playing with legos today...

Yesterday was spent doing a company event (climbing trees in ‘el bosc vertical’) - I had to rub my eyes when I got on the bus to see the bus close to full, some 45 people leaving from the World Trade Center. We’ve come a long way.

I had a flight booked on Saturday morning leaving at 8:00 AM in a vain attempt to get to Christophe’s wedding on time. I wasn’t able to arrange for transportation getting off the plane (Kristien ‘working’ at the radio and other friends not going to the service) so I took the early flight for no good reason at all in the end.

There was also a birthday party last night, with food starting at 22:00 and, in Spanish tradition, with 30+ people attending, at least an hour between the ‘last coffee’ and ’standing outside’ moment - which was at 1.30

Does one cut his losses at 1.30 AM for a 6:40 AM wake up or just keep going ? I went with the latter and joined the group in going out, which, in Spanish tradition, involved people proposing various places, going to a few, and settling on something that actually has room in the area of some place we actually wanted to go but didn’t have room. We shook the booty until 4:45 AM - I wanted to give myself at least one full sleep cycle.

Woke up into a coma, dragged myself out of the house, kept myself awake with loud music in the taxi and in the waiting area, and continuously dozed off and woke up again when my head fell on the plane.

With the plane arriving 20 minutes early, I was able to get on the regional bus - without having to wait for it, and leaving just as I had gotten on - that leaves just outside the airport, takes 55 minutes to go to my house where it has a stop exactly in front of it. A rare trip where all elements align to make it a swift one, even if the conditions were less than ideal.

So, today’s best moment ? Figuring out for a second if there’s any way I can prolong my comatose state and attempt at dozing, setting my alarm to 40 minutes into the future, and then sprawling myself across the backseat, with The National on headphones, dozing off with the rumble of the engines, sunkissed by an October morning sun filtered into warming specks by the dirt on a window that went unwashed for a month.

Comfortably numb.

Rich Johnson (nixternal) on listening to the completed Severed Fifth album Denied By Reign:

“Oh yeah…this is the kind of shit I want to listen to before I break into someone’s house and rob them.”

Denied By Reign. Released Oct 21st.

As most of you probably know already, GUPnP is now officially part of Maemo and therefore future internet tablets. This is a major milestone and gives a big boost to my motivation to continue my UPnP adventure. Although I try to put as much of the bits and peaces of spare time i get from my job into UPnP work and I am pretty sure the Intel (former OH) will continue their work as well, we could certainly use more hands to accelerate the development.

If you want to help, here is a short list of TODOs that you might want to have a look at and decide if you could help on any of these:

• Bindings: Although the more bindings we have the more worlds we can conquer but what we definitely need is bindings for most popular languages in GNOME/Maemo world, namely C#/mono, Java and Python. If you are interested in helping with this, I strongly suggest you take the g-i-r route. Also if you are only interested in C# bindings, I suggest you talk to Jerome Halton who already have a half-baked solution.


• Integration: GUPnP can't possibly become the standard UPnP framework of the GNOME world until we have:
  
  
  
  • plugins for Totem, Rhythmbox and Banshee enabling these apps to browse and search contents on UPnP MediaServer (MS), export playback control on the UPnP network by implementing a MediaRenderer (MR) and to redirect playback of contents to other MRs.
    
    You might notice that I didn't mention sharing of contents on the network, the reason for which is that I believe (and Jorn agrees) that that should be the responsibility of a dedicated MS (gupnp-media-server) as part of the desktop session. Having a dedicated MR OTOH hardly makes any sense.
  
  
  
  • GVFS backend for UPnP, allowing the GIO world to browse, copy and move contents to/from UPnP MS as if it was just a local filesystem.
  
  
  
  • PulseAudio integration: Wouldn't it be nice if I could redirect all audio output of my laptop/internet tablet to my cool UPnP-enabled speakers or my desktop machine running Totem, Rhythmbox, Banshee or better yet PulseAudio itself (which would mean p-a implements both an MR and an MR control point (CP)? This is actually part of Lennart's great plan to conquer the world so I thought I mention it here in case someone does it before Lennart gets the time to do it himself.
  
  
  

UPDATE: Forgot to mention a very imporant task: Porting to platforms other than Linux. We mostly use glib, libxml2 and libsoup so this shouldn't be a huge task. The only platform-specific code in the whole stack that I know of is the networking bits.

As received in an email from Scott. Awesomeness.

Discuss.

• While Scott is working on all sorts of awesome, Gabriel and I are hard at work in mostly bug-fix mode to prepare for Banshee 1.4, to be released on November 10^th.

  Tomorrow we will release Banshee 1.3.2, the third release in the development series leading up to 1.4.

• Currently I am finishing up the new collection indexer API that allows other applications to index or monitor the Banshee library over DBus. Alex Launi is patiently acting as a guinea pig - implementing support in GNOME Do!

• Check out the new Banshee Calendar that we'll try to keep up to date and relevant, with new release information being added hopefully well in advance of actually making releases.

• Mono 2.0 has finally been released - and the web site got a huge, long over due face lift!

• And of course this weekend is the Boston GNOME summit! See you there!

For a long while we had discussions here at Collabora Multimedia about how to push Pitivi forward at a more rapid pace. While Edward has been working on it as time allows, we came to the conclusion that if the Linux desktop was going to have a nice and easy to use video editor any time soon, we needed to do something to increase the pace of development significantly. We have several efforts under way to achieve this and I will announce the first one today:

We just hired Brandon Lewis for the sole purpose of doing Pitivi development. Brandon has been working on Pitivi for a long time now, having gotten involved during last years Google Summer of Code. He brings a lot of python development skills to the table and will let Edward focus his currently limited Pitivi hacking time (we hope to change this too soon on Pitivi related improvements in GStreamer and Gnonlin.

Brandon job will be making sure all the features available gets exposed in the user interface and that the user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

So Brandon, welcome to the team and lets make Pitivi rock!

As I mentioned in my previous blog post here at Collabora Multimedia we have been working with Canonical and the BBC to create a plugin for Totem which plays BBC content. This work is progressing well and with the recent patches we made for Totem to sort out python threading issues are looking really good. I really recommend that people running the latest Ubuntu test releases grab this for some testing. I attached a screenshot of Totem playing a Dirac stream from the BBC showing Big Buck bunny.

Update:: I noticed a lot of people commenting on the user interface. We are aware that the current user interface is far from perfect and a lot of the requested features are planed. So far we have focused on getting the base technology working smoothly which I think you will agree is the most important first step. A nice looking user interface is of little value if the application locks up

So it seems ars technica picked up on Codethink’s little pet project! Obviously the little amount of info on the wiki isn’t enough for everyone who’s interested and enough has changed since the GUADEC talk that I should write a bit here to clarify what’s going on and where we’re going.

First off, we’re currently not using GVFS or FUSE - the core Wizbit component is simply a versioning, distributed object store. The current plan is to later hook up with a metadata service, maybe tracker, and use this to export a FUSE filesystem using the metadata.

This core Wizbit service is just a library with its own api, maybe hooking up to gio streams for ease of use from GLib based applications.

The current focus of our work is solidifying this store and the synchronization between multiple machines. We’re prototyping its use in Tomboy. Karl is also working on making some of these pretty widgets for navigating history work.

We’re not actually using Git underneath, but using our own implementation of concepts from both Git and Bzr. This is for a number of reasons, partially that making a library from git’s code proved more trouble than just reimplementing the concepts (as things like JGit found). Also the nature of the problem is sufficiently different that things like the packed format don’t behave in a suitable way for general file system usage. The work on packing is yet to be started but we’ll probably use Robert Collin’s groupcompress idea from bzr.

I promise we’ll make the wiki a bit better when the code’s stabilised a bit!

Thanks to Edward and Tim, who fixed a few locking and threading problems in the Python support for Totem, the YouTube plugin is now faster and doesn't lock up the UI when receiving results.


Fetch it in Totem 2.24.2.

Dell has started shipping pre-bundled Ubuntu with our Fluendo codecs.

Julien showed me this image on the site:

Whee!

I just upgraded my machines to Intrepid, so I could fix Totem’s slow startup speed. And it turns out stuff works better than before. Thank you everybody - in particular Kernel, X and Ubuntu people - for making stuff work so well.

DIGG THIS STORY!!

I am absolutely tickled pink to announce the winners of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For those of you living under a rock for the last few months, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase was an initiative that we ran to showcase free culture artists in each version of Ubuntu. Each time we release a tasty new Ubuntu, we include a package full of example content (rather craftily named…example-content), and with Ubuntu being installed on so many computers around the world, it is a great opportunity to bring the Ubuntu ethos to the creative arts and showcase some free culture content.

To do this, a while back I announced the competition and we had a slew of entries. We then asked a carefully chosen panel of creative types in the Ubuntu community (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) to pick their top three entries from each of the categories (Audio and Video) and then we sent the finalists to the Community Council to pick the winners. I am so proud to announce that the winners are:

Andrés Vidau (Audio Winner) Download Entry Andrés Vidau was born in Mexico City in the roaring 70’s. It wasn’t very long before he found his way into playing the drums. He and 3 friends formed the band: GasMoztaza. Starting in music with some punk rock and ska rhythms. A few years later got into electronic music and formed the band: Caravanacid which enjoyed a moderate success within the Mexican Trance Scene. From Mexico City he moved to the Caribbean where he made underwater movies for diving tourism and then finally moved to Barcelona where he resides now. Patas de Trapo is a track that was born in a one-track side project, and in collaboration with guitar player Mauricio Barron, current member of indie rock band A Colores. With Mauricio playing the guitar and Andres sequencing the rest of the song. Andrés is an Electronics Engineer and Ubuntu user since Gutsy Gibbon.

Andrew Higginson (Video WInner) Download Entry Andrew is not your typical English computer user. He is fourteen and produces artwork on his computer, with Free Software. The likes of Inkscape and The GIMP are his tools, all for the low price of nothing. He discovered Ubuntu in the latter part of 2006 and since then hasn’t gone back. Projects like Wikipedia allowed him to develop his artwork skills, something he is very thankful for, as it allows him to ‘wow’ his friends as he does now. He loves the fact that Free Software enables someone with his lack of an income, to produce such great pieces of work, at such high quality, without having to break the bank. Free software has not only introduced him to unleash his creative side in computing, but to be able to give back to such programs that initially helped him is an extraordinary experience, that only free software can offer. His creation – ‘Stop Motion Ubuntu’ that you see in the Examples folder, was his first venture away from still images to moving ones. Again he only used free software, available in Ubuntu – and his webcam. While not sure how it would turn out, he is surprised at how well it was received and will certainly continue to use video as a new medium. When he hasn’t got homework scattered across the desk, Andrew spends most of his time creating artwork, coding with Python, helping new Ubuntu users (like he once was) via Launchpad Answers and when he can, writing on his blog. Generally he moves from project to project, helping out wherever he can.

When we release Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, you will find both Andrés and Andrew’s submissions on the disc, exposing their work to millions of Ubuntu users. Congratulations guys!

Also, we are going to do this for every release of Ubuntu, so creative people…get those creative juices flowing ready for the Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

This weekend we were invited to one of Kristien’s friends’ birthday party. It was dress-up, and the goal was to dress like people who don’t have any money and are invited to a formal dance.

This was a perfect match for my cross-dress-shoe habit, so I wanted to go one step further. I ended up getting two really cheap blazers in a recycling store (one red, one blue), and cut a diagonal through their backs, and sewed them back together:

It came out rather nicely for a quick sewing job, I’m considering taking the other two halves and actually spending some time finishing it well for a trip to New York.

Was forced to pick up a new skill today - driving through pouring rain with non-functional wipers. I had to drive for 2 hours like that. I got out of the car all cross-eyed and with a hint of headache.

The trick is to focus on the tail lights of other cars and the white lines, and keep your distance. And, possibly counterintuitively, driving faster or getting take over by big trucks splashing water all around actually helps in this situation.

Jokosher 0.10 Released

After almost a year and a half, we got another release out the door. As I mentioned last time this release did not have as many features as the long wait would suggest. Instead there are a few modest features, many welcomed stability fixes, as 0.10 sets the stage for a faster release cycle and development time for Jokosher. Barring any major disasters with the development team, the last year of stagnation is over. Of course it will go even faster if we get more of you involved in planning, testing, etc.

PulseAudio and JACK support

I have been putting a good chunk of time towards developing the new audio backend feature. It allows the user to select any recording backend and any playback backend that Gstreamer supports. Currently it has been tested with ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio and JACK, but if you know the name of the Gstreamer element you want to use you can specify it as a custom backend in the preferences dialog (think recording from network stream). This feature will make an appearance in 0.11 in time for Ubuntu Jaunty, but you can see a screenshot of it right now, or checkout the custom-audio-src branch and try it yourself.

Jokosher 0.10.1 Bug Fix Release

After releasing 0.10, we continued to do testing ourselves and got a lot of feedback from other users. This made us aware that there were many small bugs which had been overlooked, and could be easily fixed in a few weeks. We did just that and released the bug fix update 4 weeks after 0.10. The source tarball is available on the launchpad release page, where you will also find the list of bugs fixed. We released 0.10 just in time for the feature freeze in Ubuntu Intrepid, and then released 0.10.1 just in time for the Ubuntu beta freeze. Both times the wonderful Daniel Holbach from the Ubuntu MOTU team packaged our release and uploaded it to the Ubuntu universe repository within a few days. If you know any other distros that have the newest version of Jokosher, please let us know and we will add them to the download page.

Multichannel Recording Works!

After years of talking about it, Jokosher was able to finally record multiple channels simultaneously from professional audio cards which offer up to 8 channels. The code for this feature was put into the custom-audio-src branch just a few days ago, and reports have been very positive. There are a few bugs to be worked out before this can be merged into trunk but it would be great if you can try out the branch yourself and report any bugs you encounter. You should expect to see this wonderful feature available in 0.11 along with the JACK and PulseAudio support.

If you're playing FIFA '09 on the PS3, join the club! It's called "FreeFA", the shortname is "FFA".

buzztard

I began the month with the remainder of the namespace cleanups. Should be all fine now. The ktorrent guy was not giving in. Well that's their way of handling it then.

I have registered buzztard with the translation project. All strings are frozen for 0.4. Now of course I look for translators who are willing to help.

During testing, I discovered that for some bpm and tick resolutions, notes where swallowed. This was due to different rounding behaviour in the sequencer and the plugins. This is now fixed. As a side effect, I can now render in any sampling rate. That will help my mameo version :)

Faithful readers already know I am not the biggest fan of dentists. Last year in August I had an urgent problem, and my regular Spanish dental office apparently was closed all of August, without any information on what to do if I had an urgent problem, not on their voice mail and not on their website (which by the way was so broken that it scaled the flash animation to 10% of the page width, but I digress).

I ended up in the emergency dental office on Passeig de Gracia, and there I was helped very well by a very good young doctor. I felt I finally found the perfect dentist.

That is, up to the point where I got an infection on one of my teeth, and she told me it would cost anywhere between 2000 and 4000 euro to get the tooth pulled and a bridge or an implant made, and that it wasn’t covered by my health care.

I guess that’s when I decided to be stupid and try and get it fixed in Belgium. And for that I needed to make sure my health insurance was still ok in Belgium, and for that I needed some E-three-digit form that I still don’t have my hands on after 9 months.

When last month the left part of my body started feeling strange I thought it was time to just go find a dentist and get it fixed, coverage or no.

My wishes for a dentist are pretty simple. It has to be a woman (from my experience I find they are usually more emphatical), I prefer them relatively young (I have this vague hope that they are more likely to be up-to-date with the latest technology) and it helps if they speak my language. Now that I live here in Brussels though, of course most dentists are French. And probably not that easy to get to.

So in the end I found a website that lists dentists in all zip codes. And since I live just on the border with Wemmel, a mostly Flemish community, I thought I’d try my luck there. I found a female doctor with a Flemish name and an email address, which hopefully indicates she’s hip to the times. (Yeah so discrimination is not a problem for me when it comes to dentists - take it up with my teeth).

So, two weeks ago I called up a new dentist for a practice run. It was a bit strange. She was appointment-only. I asked her:

‘When can I come ? I know next week may be a bit soon, but …’

‘No, next week is OK.’ Pause.

‘OK, so which day next week ?’

‘Any day is fine.’ Ok, so you have an empty agenda ? Huh.

‘Ok, how about next Monday ?’.

‘Yes, next Monday works.’ Pause.

‘Uh, ok, so at what time ?’

‘I have some room at 15.00′

‘OK, see you then.’ Click.

I got there on time, and she made me wait 40 minutes in a cold underground waiting room with TL lighting smelling of mold. At least there were comics.

She was surprised I’ve been walking around with this infection for the last 8 months. It didn’t matter that it didn’t actually hurt. And apparently in Belgium they don’t cover this kind of operation either, so the 9 months of waiting was a waste.

It got slightly better after that, I guess, but I still wasn’t planning on going back for a second visit. The problem is dentists always figure me out in the first visit, and slap me a second appointment immediately, to which they know I cannot say no. I’m sorry doctor Prados from Barcelona, I really liked you better. My new dentist prescribed me some antibiotics and sent me on my way.

Anyway, today was the second visit, the one where she pulled out my tooth. As dentists are wont to do, she lied about what she was actually doing (”I’m just feeling where it’s going to hurt when I pull” - oh really, then why did a big chunk of tooth just break off ???) But we at least had a decent conversation while waiting for the anaesthesia to kick in, and she noticed and actually liked my shoes. Or at least, I think - she said her son would probably wear the same if he knew.

In the end it was a reasonably painless experience, the tooth was in fact pretty damn brown, and there was a huge sack of puss hanging from it. It almost felt OK. And she gave me reasonable answers to all my questions.

It got weird again towards the end though - I asked:

‘How long do I keep the cotton wool in my mouth ?’

‘Oh, ten minutes.’

‘Ok, so what if is still bleeding then ?’

‘Oh, right, I’ll give you some extra.’ She takes some from a bowl and puts them in my hand.

‘Uh. I thought the point of me taking antibiotics for a week was to kill bacteria. Am I not going to get new ones if I just stuff these in my pocket ?’

‘Oh, right. Well, here’s a plastic cup, put them in there.’

O. kay. See you in two weeks.

And I just know I’ll be going around for a nice series of five or so visits again…

Axis and GStreamer

Axis got a new camera out these days called the Axis P3301. Axis is well known for having what are probably the best network cameras on the market and this new beauty is especially nice as it uses GStreamer internally. It also supports Avahi, so you can get access to its services through avahi enabled applications, hopefully a feature we can get supported in Totem so you get access to these kind of cameras in your network very easily. Wim got gifted one of these by Axis while at their office in Sweden, which we got up and running at the Collabora Multimedia office now. Axis also got a video server, the AXIS Q7401 which also use GStreamer internally.

Jokosher

Jokosher is making great strides forward currently too. They did their 0.10 release a little over a Month ago and today Peteris Krisjanis told me that they just landed support for multichannel soundcards, which has been a major missing feature for a lot of potential Jokosher users. The mutichanel code is currently hosted in this branch on launchpad, but it will of course move into head once it gets stabilized.

Pitivi

Things are also moving forward with the Pitivi video editor these days. Edward recently merged the two Google Summer of Code projects that had been happening over the summer and also switched to the so called advanced timeline view to be the default in Pitivi. Thanks to Serat’s work there is now a structure in place in Pitivi for handling live sources, like webcams or DV cameras for instance. The simple timeline feature has also been dropped now as it turned out to be a lot less useful than we originally envisioned. So going forward the focus will be on making the previously named ‘advanced’ timeline userfriendly and easy to use instead. We will have some further cool Pitivi related announcements coming soon

Collabora Multimedia

We had our first ever full meeting of the Collabora Multimedia division over the last few days in Barcelona. It was the first time Wim, Edward, Tim, Mark, Sebastian and myself where all together. It was both a social event to get to know eachother, but also a good chance to discuss various technical issues. For instance Tim and Edward managed to solve a painful python threading issue we have been experiencing in a current project we have been doing together with Canonical and the BBC, which is writing a Totem plugin to enable viewing of various BBC content easily through Totem (as mentioned in the Ubuntu beta release notes. The plan is to push this plug-in upstream also, so that everyone using Totem can get it.

What’s scary about 5 second boot is not that it is possible. What is scary is that Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo and Suse couldn’t do it. Not even close.

And that seems to be a mindset issue: “It’s not about booting faster, it’s about booting in 5 seconds.”

I was wondering why Arek was arriving later than usual to work, to the point of being late at his own developer meeting where just a week before he instituted a rule that the last person in the meeting is to buy the rest of the team beer on Friday. This week he told me why, and yesterday he blogged about it: an implementation of the Vorbis decoder that works in Flash Player (albeit the newer version 10). It’s based on the Jorbis code which we took for Cortado, and it looks like it’s more than fast enough too.

I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you buying him beer for this so he can make good on his promise to the rest of our team. And he probably accepts pre-orders for a Theora decoder in beer too :)

Congratulations Arek on the release!

Fortunately, I will be in San Francisco when Ubuntu 8.10, the glorious Intrepid Ibex is released and as such, it would be remiss to not organise a bit of a knees up (translation for my American friends: “drinks in a bar“). So, in conjunction with partner in crime Tom Haddon, we are organising the Ubuntu San Francisco Release Party. Yes!

Here are the details:

• WHEN? - Thursday 30th October : 7.30pm
• WHERE? - The lower bar as you walk in on the left, The Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105 : Tel: (415) 974-0905
• HOW? - Google Maps

The plan is simple. There is no plan. We plan on just meeting up at The Thirsty Bear, having a few drinks and getting to know each other. Everyone is welcome, from any project, field or otherwise - just come along, meet some people and celebrate the new release. We have deliberately kept this as low-key as possible - the main idea is to meet new people and have a bit of fun.

If you want to come along, all you need to do is show up - feel free to post a comment on this blog if you will be there.

This is one of many release parties. Go and see Ubuntu 8.10 Release Parties In Your Area and if there isn’t one in your area, why not organise one!