Gregynog 2008

Gregynog is an annual colloquium organized by Swansea University. I was invited to give a talk yesterday about web, webapps and the evolution of web programming. I uploaded the slides here (PDF) if you want to have a look.

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

OpenSource Jam & Literate Programming

I gave a short talk yesterday about LP at the OpenSource Jam (bi-mensual open source meeting, at the Google London Office). So, here is the pdf of the presentation (just click on the above image to get it). People seemed to like the talk, and there was some interesting comments about the lack of good documentation tools (particularly, the need for multi-level documentations), the similarity with DSL, and some in-house LP tools used by some companies.

update: A blog post describing the event and pictures have been posted by the open source team...

Flow, State and Persistence

I gave a talk today discussing state and persistence in your work environment, for the No Grownups Seminar Series.. Here is a flash version of the talk, and here is the pdf one. Have a look !

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...

Screenshot UKUUG Demo

Just to show you how the demo was looking:



Nice no ? :)

UKUUG Talk

I just gave the UKUUG gnustep presentation an hour ago, and I think it went fine...
Not completely as planned -- I wanted to use keynote on an ibook for the slides part, and use my powerbook under linux to make the demonstration via a vnc connection, and of course... when I tried the setup yesterday it worked without a hitch. But when I tried today just before the presentation the client didn't want to connect for whatever reason .. as I didn't have the time to find what was the problem, I ended doing the keynote presentation with the powerbook (at least it was faster and smoother than if I had used the ibook g3..), and just rebooted under linux for the demo. Not as smooth, but that was ok.

The GNUstep presentation .. -- well, manipulating apps wasn't that easy as the screen wasn't cloned, so I needed to look to the projection screen instead... ;-) but I was able to present mostly all I wanted:

• GWorkspace, with Camaelon + the new icons from jasper...


• panel hiding, applications hiding, tear-off menus (but all rather quickly though... not sure I explained well that part)


• the services system, taking the LaTeX service, the Zipper service and the GNUMail service as example (LaTeX in Ink.app, then use Zipper to create some tgz from GWorkspace, and finally select the tgz and mail it via GNUMail...


• GORM -- I started with the basic demo of slider + textview linked together, then I did a demo using a custom palette I wrote yesterday (just for the talk!), which had one object managing a volumetric dataset (a head), and two views rendering the dataset. So it let you create a complete app visualizing a dataset in different way... all in Gorm, without needed to code anything. Pretty nice I thought ;-)
  

I could have talked much longer than the authorized time, I forgot to say and show some things, but all in all it went well. At the end of the talk the chairman asked how many people had used GNUstep before the talk (3 persons), and how many will try after the talk (5-6 persons?). With around 20+ persons (?) in the room that wasn't bad ;-)

Apparently people were impressed by Gorm :-) , and liked the look of the apps ("it's clean") -- good icons and Camaelon did their job I guess ;-)

I'll put some screenshots later so you could see how did that look..

update...

Well, quite a lot of things to do this week... in the end I didn't have time to work on camaelon last weekend (well, I worked on the glyph bug) but camaelon 2 release is still planned soon, along with other étoilé's components (hopefully this weekend ? finally ?) .. I need to fix the display glyph bugs in -gui first..

Else, I'm preparing the GNUstep talk I'm giving at the UKUUG 2005 Linux Technical Conference this saturday at the university of swansea, I'll try to make a cool demo of gorm, showing the power of building apps with components .. ;-)

On other topics.. my bag was stolen this afternoon *on my desk*, in the lab, when I went to lunch for half an hour... quite a few things inside, like, my passport, my keys, my newton... that really, really sucks. damn. This in a building supposedly with secured access..

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 :-)