Murray Cumming, maintainer of the GTKmm C++ bindings of GTK+, lambasted Jeff Waugh today. Both are prominent members of the Gnome developer community and also high profile. I always felt that Jeff was always very polemic on his replies to me for pretty much anything. Be it I was a real bitch on the d-d-l mailing list, or truly very helpful, his reactions were always one and the same towards me.

I never really understood what Jeff was really doing for Gnome, especially after he stopped maintaining his Python apps. Jeff blames his depression for all that, but if depression is the cause of the problem, maybe he should give Gnome a rest for a while. I know how hard it is to work full time on something when you are depressed — I’ve been there, and I am there.

Murray is not very friendly nut either, and we have a major disagreement about how GTKmm should be maintained (he keeps breaking the API every few months and so GTKmm apps stop compiling and it’s required that either the apps must be updated, or have many parallel versions of GTKmm installed). However, I always had the feeling that he’s a bit more connectable than Jeff.

Now, I know that Jeff passes by my blog every now and then and there’s a good chance that he will read this, but I must be truthful, so I am. Besides, I am pretty sure he feels the same for me anyway, so I guess we are square.

Now, regarding Gnome. It has fallen apart. Nothing gets done in a serious note anymore. Since Havoc Pennington took his team away from full-time core Gnome work a few years ago, and since Novell failed to make their Mono-based utils accepted, Gnome is one big sterile place. It’s sad, because it IS my favorite DE. I like Gnome. But maintaining a DE is not the same as developing for it and innovating every now and then. Oh, well, whatever. I use Windows XP when sitting my ass in my office, and Mac OS X when traveling or in front of the TV. I don’t really need Linux anyway. Not without a usable video editor.

Update: Thom blogged about it too.

We spent Thanksgiving at the Village of Squaw, home of the Winter Olympics of 1960. We booked an apartment there for 4 days and we had a great time — minus the fact that there was not much snow so my JBQ could not ski. I love these small apartments as they are fully equipped, so I can cook there. We didn’t hike as the weather was very cold (-12C to -4C), so we stayed in for the most part and… watched lots of TV.

Nonetheless, I did find the time to shoot 40 minutes of video, which translated to the following 3’22” clip. HD version here.

>First of all, this presumes that the Linux (or Open Source) community WANTED to “come up” with the iPhone. I would argue that the community is decidedly NOT interested in that. Therefore, failing to create the iPhone is not proof of the community’s failure to innovate, replied Jim.

Oh, shut. up.

If the community had decided to not come up with an iPhone-like device, then this itself is a proof that OSS is not the panacea that RMS wants us to believe. To come up with something like the iPhone software (I am not even talking about the hardware), you need more than one person. You probably need anything between 25 and 100 people. And you need them closely working. Not via IRC, not via mailing lists. But face to face, daily, for a couple of years.

It’s because of that exact same reason why there is not a single serious video editor on Linux that works as well as Vegas or Final Cut Express or even iMovie. Because it’s not a small hack that you put together in the afternoons with your buddies over IRC. It’s a very complex problem and it requires a lot of experience with graphics, video, audio and a need to work perfectly together. I was talking with JBQ the other night about video editors and he agreed that it’s much more complex to write a *good* video editor than to write a *modern* web browser.

I’ve said it a thousand times, I will say it one more: the BeOS was great at its time because the engineers working on it could walk at the cubes and offices of the other engineers and discuss, ask, argue in real time and take architecture and engineering decisions in minutes. This created a cohesive, small, fast and beautiful OS as the iPhone feels today to most. The OSS community does not have this luxury because of its very nature of its contributors being scattered in the globe and work at their own leisure. Complex applications that do well in the OSS world (e.g. Apache, PostgreSQL) is mostly because the core individual contributors work full time on them, or because companies are behind them. Not Joe Programmer from his mommy’s basement. Joe can certainly offer a patch to a complex OSS application, but anything more than that would be overkill. Joe can certainly still write “Yet Another Image Viewer” though.

I won’t be able to reply to most comments btw, holidays are coming.

F_ck you both, Motorola and HTC. Both use the mini-usb port for headphones port on their latest phone models. So a few months ago I bought two Motorola converters (mini-usb to 3.5mm audio jack). So when I tried these cables on my new HTC Kaiser, they wouldn’t work. Apparently HTC uses a different internal wiring. Why?!? Why make the freaking lives of the consumers so difficult? I am not ok at all to use the mini-USB port for audio (which is also shared with data and charging, so you can’t do multiple things at once), but when there are such incompatibilities between different manufacturers even when using the same kind of port, I just want to throw their phones out of the window.

I think I will be using the iPhone from now on as my main phone instead of my HTC PocketPC. Except Apple, a small glimpse of hope from Nokia’s S60 team and the non-smartphone line from Sony Ericsson, no hardware manufacturer out there has a clue how to create a good cellphone experience. The PocketPC OS is not bad, but HTC pisses me off all too often.

* Mike Gravel has been my favorite of the presidential candidates, but he was left out from both the MSNBC and the CNN debates. This is a very sad thing, because I find it manipulative. Most Americans don’t even know who Gravel is because of that.

* I was watching a documentary the other night on ancient Athens. It’s a bit disconcerting how democracies fail. Same thing with Rome. Apparently, they don’t seem to last more than 150-200 years, and then it falls to totalitarianism. Call me a negative egg, but I don’t think that our world will enjoy representative democracy for much longer.

* Comcast added a bunch of HD channels on their listing (including History and National Geographic). Unfortunately, no SciFi Channel though, so no “Razor” in HD this week…

* Going back to the Village of Squah this weekend. I hope the weather will be good so I shoot some nature video. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

The Westcott reflector arrived! It’s huge and it does make a difference on lighting! 🙂

The Kindle is an interesting concept and Amazon is the right company to push such a product. Google’s Robert Love wrote a good blog post about it. If this thing has PDF support and had better looks, it would have been a killer device. Although some purists will still say that carrying real books with real paper pages all the time in your bag, is still the way to go. I am not one of these purists.

Great, all I ever needed was spyware on my iPhone. “Anonymous stats to help the development of the product” isn’t quite so, neither I gave consent beforehand.

Update: Apparently it just sends the identifiers for the applications, so the servers from Google and Yahoo! send special data to your iPhone (these work as browser “user agents”).

I have had it with both Quicktime and VLC. None is able to playback fast enough on my 3 Ghz hyperthreaded P4 720p h.264 CAVLC video (and consider that the CAVLC entropy coding is easier to decode than CABAC). WMP is able to playback without a problem .m2t and WMV up to 1080p without a major problem, but when we are talking about h.264, both Quicktime and VLC do a shitty job. Apple’s trailers decode really fast because they encode their videos with the simple h.264 profiles/levels, but when you encode using Vegas or even ffmpeg, it seems that the only machine in my house that is able to decode these is the PS3. I tried Mplayer too, but the Windows port is a complete joke (it plays back my 16:9 videos in cinemascope aspect ratio, or something).

Enter Media Player Classic (MPC). Of course, this is a popular media player in the Windows geek community, but the official version has not been updated for ages. Thanks to Dr Evil, one of the ffdshow maintainers, he built a new version and it works remarkably well! Get this: 720p plays without a hitch! 1080p plays acceptably well too (there are dropped frames, but it’s watchable)! And it even recognizes the new .mts h.264 format from Canon (as found in their AVCHD cameras). And if that was not enough, MPC is able to somewhat playback Cineform files. There were artifacts while playing that format, but given the fact that no other open source app is able to play these, I’d say it’s better than nothing. And lastly, the application does de-interlacing, the RIGHT way! Eat that VLC! If there is only one minor usability problem with the app is the confusing zoom/stretch options it’s got in its menu, but other than that, I could not find any problem with the app.

So, to fully appreciate MPC and fast decoding, download the latest build here, and also the latest “nightly by clsid” ffdshow build from here (they go together). Thank Dr Evil for both.

* “Climate change is real and is happening at an ever faster pace, a United Nations scientific panel said in a hard-hitting report issued this weekend on tackling global warming.” And USA still doesn’t take action about it. There were a lot of initial disputes about global warming, but the truth is, it’s real.

* “A court in Saudi Arabia increased the punishment for a gang-rape victim after her lawyer won an appeal of the sentence for the rapists, the lawyer told CNN.” The world is still a crazy place.

* OSNews and Gnomefiles moved to a new server last night (8-core Xeons with 4 GB RAM). This probably was the smoothest server move we ever had. Hats off to Adam, our web master, and Jon, our server admin!

* A Canon ZR800 is on the way for me, plus a light deflector and a Canon microphone for my HV20. Truth is, getting all that stuff already, is VERY SCARY.

* TV is indeed dead. From all the new TV series this season, only “Pushing Daisies” makes it above 10-11 million viewers, and that’s already pathetic compared to previous years where they would be at least 2 big hits per season with over 15 mil viewers each. The future is the internets.