Nokia N800

I am seriously thinking about getting a Nokia N800. All the mobile phones with built-in webbrowsers and stuff has always let me down. But I would like to be able to go down to starbucks, read some webpages, update my blog and chat without having to bring the laptop. The lack of a keyboard is a bit unsettling, but I have heard that the on screen keyboard works just perfectly.

So maybe we will see a maemo xmms2 client soon? :)

Chilean...

It's funny how different the Chilean Spanish is to the Spanish Spanish. I almost forgot how funny and unpronounced they speak here. Some of the language changes I can understand, Chileans has a lot of indian (mapuche) words mixed in their Spanish, for example "Palta" for avocado which is Avacata in Spain. But there are things I never really got my head around... in Chile they never ever use "Vale", an expression for Okey in Spain and they look very funny at you when you say it. They do use "listo" instead (even though they can't pronounce it so it becomes "litto"), which brings us to the way the brutally remove 's' from words...

Anyway... I am still enjoying the fact that I am back in Santiago. Went downtown around lunch today and had some lunch at that place I "always" had lunch when I worked right next to it. Took a stroll around Plaza de Armas and used the metro, it all feels so familiar. Also, I miss the ensalada chilena in Spain, why don't people do it proper but here?

I am thinking about next weekend, maybe I should take a trip up to the andes or go out dancing at the disco place? Dunno yet...

Santiago 25-26th of August.

I am in Santiago for a week doing some work, but it also gives me some times to enjoy the city again. I really really like Santiago even if it shitty cold here right now (around 3-10 Celsius). It feels a bit like coming home again, the streets and houses all look very familiar.

Saturday:
I left Madrid late Friday (or very early Saturday) and arrived Saturday morning in Santiago. I could sleep ok on the airplane and I only had to kill 3-4 hours in the end of trip. I took a cab to the hotel and I had a flash of recognition when I rode the taxi into the city. The rest of the morning was filled with me checking in, unpacking and taking a shower.

I went for a walk from the hotel where I live on Richardo Lyon up towards Tobalaba and my old apartment. A bit of nostalgia hit me when I went up my old stream (Callao). By now it was time for a bit of lunch, so I went to my favorite italian (Tiramisu) and had a pisco sour :-) It was very good, haven't had any in a long long time. After enjoying this very nice meal I took a long walk to Parque Araco. I planned to kill some time by watching a movie and do some shopping. It ended up so that I had to kill some time until the movie started. So I went shopping, got a new pair of trousers, a music dvd with hooverphonic and a nice bottle of wine.

I watched transformers again, it was my second time. I selected that movie mostly because it was the only one that wasn't dubbed to spanish and was somewhat interesting. I still find it a OK film. The action is great and the humor is very funny. But it's not a film that sticks or leaves a impression. After the movie I went and picked up some sushi to take with me to the hotel.

Went home to eat sushi and sleep. I slept well.

Sunday:
Today I just had a walk to Los Leones, had some lunch at Subways and then walked over to a coffeplace and had a dount and coffe. Rest of the afternoon I have spent online. Tonight I will go out for dinner with my friend here in Santiago. Be back with more reports later on :-)

XMMS2 DrJekyll, Esperanza 0.3.0 and more.

Today I uploaded the final of XMMS2 DrJekyll and 0.3.0 of Esperanza.

There is a lot of changes in both. Noteworthy changes for XMMS2 includes:

• Collections. After almost a year in development (it was last years SoC) the API is pretty stable and very usable. I was amazed how much you could do with it when I started to convert Esperanza to it.
• Playlist plugins are available again. Lot of people have asked for that.
• WAF. We switched build system from SCons to WAF and it has helped us a lot (also created new wondrous problems).

The noteworthy changes for Esperanza is the following:

• Medialib browser.
• Collections API conversion.
• Stream browser.
• Lot of stability changes

Now I will probably go a bit silent within XMMS2 for a while since I am going to the WGT festival in Leipzig, Germany (drop by and buy me a beer!) and after that to San Francisco (drop by and buy me a glass of wine!). Hopefully this summer will give me some time to make some internal changes in Esperanza.

Enjoy the releases!

Open Audio Summit?

The idea crossed my mind when I saw this: http://2007.oscms-summit.org/

Wouldn't it be cool to invite all open source audio related projects and people and organize a OpenAudio summit? I think a lot of things could be gained from that. Like interoperability and idea sharing. I am willing to help organize to do this. What do you other projects think? Also we should locate a good sponsor to be able to do it.

XMMS2: State of the Union

I haven't really posted here as much as I should. I just wanted to quickly update the current status of XMMS2.

XMMS2 DrJekyll pre-testing:
DrJekyll is the next developer-release. We should start pre-testing this week. Jekyll contains tons of cool goodies. Most notable is the additions of Collections. You should all look into porting your clients to this concept since we are going to deprecate the API for touching SQL directly.

Google: Summer of Code:
We have decided to apply for summer of code once more. Hopefully we will be picked and we can accept a few student this year also. You can visit our project ideas page and give some insights on what you want to see in XMMS2.

Graphic contest:
We have a strong need for a graphic profile in XMMS2 so we are going to spend some SOC money from last year on announcing a contest that will bring us (hopefully) a logotype and a nice wiki design. This project will probably be launched within a few weeks. Look at this spot later on.

More mDNS madness, this time Qt4.

Ok, so after my last post about mDNS I haven't touched it since the API really put me off. But wanting a sexy mDNS browser in my newly founded Qt4 client I took a bite in the bad Apple and started to write a C++ wrapper class for mDNS (bonjour). After reliving all the madness of before I managed to do a pretty neat class. It works just fine on MacOSX (where bonjour is default), Linux (with avahi-dnssd-compat) and probably Windows too (if you download and install the lib from Apple).

If you ever need the code, go here: implementation and header.

Here is the result: Esperanza server browser window.