Planet SoC

Yeah, you guessed right: the aboutnoya blog will move to a new server. Straight out of the world of Gates and Windows to a friendlier place powered by a VPS running Debian.
PS: the blog might be unavailable from time to time for the next few days until the move is complete. If that happens, just don’t worry and check back later .

Who would have thought that driving across Canada, moving into a new house in a totally unknown city, finding a social life, beginning a master’s project, applying for scholarships, taking a full-time course load, and trying to TA a course without knowing anything about the subject would occupy all of my time during the past month? Despite my last post to this blog where I proclaimed that I would continue to work on various programming projects after GSoC finished, I don’t think I’ve even signed in to IRC let alone looked at a piece of source code. Sigh.

Extra! Extra!

We’ve just released the most awesome f-spot so far: 0.5.0! It features a countless amount of enhancements, polish and bugfixes. Here’s some appetizer, but you’d better taste it by yourself:

- New Sidebar context switching
- Extendable Editors
- New Metadata display
- Color profile support
- Duplicate detection at import time
- Reduced and faster db access, faster queries on big collections
- Light speed tagging
- FullScreen mode enhancements
- New extensions distributed by default
- Updated documentation
- Updated translations
- Hundreds of bugfixes
- New contributors

We’d like to thanks everyone involved in that release cycle, bug reporters, triagers, testers, developers, translators. So thx, and keep up the hard work.

GSoC has officially come to a close, and in a very short time I have managed to make a more or less working version of In The Mood in C. On the plus side, it does seem to be more efficient, using less memory, and it gets rid of any possible command-line-parsing errors. Also, I’ve re-done the vector file storage so that it’s in subfolders, so there’s guaranteed to be unique names (basically the complete path for each song is copied over into ./gnome/rhythmbox/inthemood), and I’ve left the .mp3 or .ogg extension to make them easier to locate in the database (might be a little confusing if you ever look at those files, but they are indeed text). On the down side, anyone who tried the python version, you’ll have to re-analyze your database, due to this reorganization of vector files. Sorry!

Version 0.5.0 brings online-functionality to libsoylent. Want to launch a chat with someone? One function call. Want to see who’s online? One function call. Want to see someone’s online-status? You get it.
This release is also the last one for Google Summer of Code 2008. It’s the result of about four months of work. Phew.
The plan for the next release is that it will be a pure documentation and bug-fixing release. Also in that version: libsoylent will stop taking control of strings passed to it.
Changes

(Moving: I’m moving to ggmarcondes.com/blog)
Hi guys,
As usual, it’s been a long time since the last post. Although I don’t have difficulties talking to people, it is still strangely hard for me to post in english…
But let’s go to the news: the Voice Notes addin is already into tomboy Addins directory at the gnome svn server. Check it out [1] and apply a patch [2] to enable its compilation (it is disabled because is not stable yet).
Some notes about it:
- Present: it is not speech-to-text. At the current state, it’s just a recorder/player that keeps a voice record related to the note. And the main difference since the last post- no popup window.

Just in: The new sidebar editors in F-Spot have landed. Apart from the color tool and some cosmetic changes, it’s mostly finished.

Also: F-Spot now features a histogram in the sidebar.

Sidebar + Histogram

That is all.

PS: F-Spot already had the histogram. It was just very well hidden.

Let me present you the newest version of libsoylent: 0.4.0. Three weeks of hard work went into this release, and in fact so much was added and changed that we decided to skip a version-number. Sorry 0.3.0.
So, what’s in it? More or less a complete people-management-library. Our goal was to create a simple yet-powerful API that “just works”. Hopefully we managed that. If you have no clear picture of what libsoylent is or just want to know more about it, look at the examples we’ve put up on the libsoylent-page.

I’ve been sadly neglecting this blog, and even worse given the current timing, my GSoC project - next week is the ‘pencil’s down’ date, and I’ve decided to re-write everything in C. However, I’ve got a good excuse: last week I gave a presentation at the North American Congress On Biomechanics (NACOB) in Ann Arbor. It was pretty nerve-wracking, my second conference presentation (and much more intimidating than the little Ontario-grad-students-only OBC), but I think it went well. I also got to see some other interesting presentations and meet some fun people, so all in all it was a great trip. Oh yeah, and I also saw Rod Stewart at the DTE Energy Music Theatre. It was pretty funny to be amongst 15 000 drunken screaming middle-aged soccer moms.