Mona Lisa video

Here is a small video demonstrating the polygons evolution:

(better results should be doable with more time and/or more parameters tweakings)
For this example, I used 50 polygons of at most 16 points, starting with 10 polygons.

Gears presentation at the Google IO conference

The videos from Google IO are online, so if you wonder what I'm working on at Google, here is a nice presentation of Gears for Mobile, by Charles and Andrei:

Slides are also available

DabbleDB 8 minutes demo

DabbleDB is as impressive as ever. If you never heard about it, it's a fantastic database app, one of the few "webapp" that really manages to be as usable as it would be if it was a "normal" desktop app. It manages that by leveraging the power of Seaside, a web application server written in Smalltalk (hands down the best app server I ever seen, period. Beats even webobjects, and you code in Smalltalk. Can't be better, really!).

Discarding the impressive "webapp" aspect (which in a way is more of a sad commentary on the poor capacities of the "web" platform, although it is improving, as dabbledb can show, and as addons such as Gears improve the capacities), it's the only database I know that let you evolve your data model as smoothly as they do it, not even talking about the great tools to easily explore and enrich your data... This is a kind of flexibility that I think should be put back at the center of our computing experience and be adopted by more applications/domains.

Anyway, Avi Bryant released a new 8 minutes demo showing off DabbleDB, after their famous 7 minutes demo they did in 2006. If you never heard about DabbleDB, check it!

GNUstep / Fosdem 2006

This year's Fosdem was, as usual, really cool and quite busy :-)

Here is a page with some pictures, slides and videos of the gnustep talks: http://www.xdev.org/fosdem2006. I'll upload the rest of the videos probably during the next week...

How to make a flash video recording on linux ?

It's rather easy -- first, you need vnc2swf, and a vnc server.
Start the vnc server on a second X port:

vncserver -geometry 1024x768 :1

Then you can launch vnc2swf:

vnc2swf out.swf :1

That will connect it to the vncserver running on localhost:1, and will output the swf file to out.swf. Start the recording by hitting F9; hitting it again will pause, etc.

Now, to add sound, there isn't a nice way of doing it... but what you can do (and that's what I did) is to launch a sound recorder application in parallel, and start the recording at the same time as the video. At the end of your video recording, you should have the video (out.swf) and a sound file from your recorder app, say "voice.aif". You then need to convert the sound file in mp3 (use the mp3 encoder lame for example).

After that, you just need to add the mp3 to the swf file, and you can do that using edit_vnc2swf :

edit_vnc2swf.py -o final.swf -a voice.mp3 out.swf

The last step is to create a html file containing the following section:

<object width="1024" height="768"
CODEBASE="http://active.macromedia.com/flash5/cabs/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0">
<param name="MOVIE" value="final.swf">
<param name="PLAY" value="true">
<param name="LOOP" value="false">
<param name="QUALITY" value="high">
<embed src="final.swf" width="1024" height="768"
 play="true" align="" loop="true" quality="high"
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</embed>
</object>

Note that you need to set the same dimension as the video, else you'll have artifacts.

And... that's it :-)

Flash Demo !

I just recorded a flash demo showing how to use Gorm + the StepTalk palette...
the link is http://www.xdev.org/gnustep/demo.html :-)
I'll probably make a release later today, or tomorrow (just to clean up the last things ;-)