Debarshi's den

I am back in Helsinki today (actually I returned late last night) after a thoroughly enjoyable Desktop Summit. Apart from the Beach Party and the Island Party, which were great, I also met a bunch of interesting people — Murray Cumming, Jonathan Jongsma, Tim-Philipp Müller and Alexander Patrakov (he has written a DTS encoder). I also ran into Arun Raghavan after may years and he got me a Collabora key ring.

Sometime during the Island Party, after Daniel went looking for more food (yes, he is alive and doing well, although his latest antics on his bike had left him with a badly sprained ankle), Michael introduced me to Adam Dingle and Jim Nelson from Yorba. It was nice to see that they somehow knew me as “the guy who wrote Solang” and we discussed at length about the possibility of using GEGL and Tracker in Shotwell. I must confess that I used to have a hard time grasping the significance of the phrase “the awesome Yorba guys” until I actually met the two of them. They are amazing people.

In fact, I think this conference was more about meeting people whom I only knew from IRC and planets more than anything else.

Now that the fun is over, I have a got a few things that I need to work on. Apart from some pending work on Telepathy and Gstreamer, I am planning to do a couple of other things. Not sure what will come out of them, but still.

One is adding support for the NateOn protocol to Telepathy. Joone says that the Pidgeon plugin does not work and that there is a Qt client which is now unmaintained. He has sent me a couple of emails that will hopefully help me understand the protocol.

Secondly, I will write a Gstreamer element for Alexander’s DTS encoder. I am not an audio geek by any stretch of the imagination, so I personally have no use for it, but I will do it just for the kicks.