J5’s Blog

Rome.ogv

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Above is a song I was writing for my sister’s wedding. Unfortunately I never finished it and logistics got in the way of me bringing a guitar to Italy (namely I didn’t want to lug a guitar all around Italy). I thought I would record it using my Cannon PowerShot camera and edit it with Jokosher and PiTiVi to see how far our tools have gone.

I have to say it was fairly easy but I still ran into issues. As far as UI Goes PiTiVi is much easier to use than Jokosher in terms of organizing what I wanted to do. I really only needed Jokosher to tweak the sound a bit but it was still a bit of trial and error to get something decent. I used the high and low pass filters to filter out background noise and echo from my room. Jokosher lacks a basic noise filter effect which can be implemented manually in most other editors by taking a sample of the ambient noise and phase shifting it 180 degrees so the ambient noise is canceled out. Unfortunately the solid bar UI which departs from the usual wave graph makes it impossible to do this by hand. In any case the low and high pass filters worked fairly well to get the most annoying twangs and hisses out.

Another issue is not being able to mark cutin and cutout points and have PiTiVi sync the video with these point. I essentially had to do minimal processing in Jokosher so I could easily sync the video to the edited sound in PiTiVi. It would have been nice to trim the audio in Jokosher and when I imported it into PiTiVi, had it sync up to the correct points in the video. Manually doing that in PiTiVi is hard because of the timeline scale and the fact that it is exclusively drag and drop. It would be nice to be able to enter exact values or load markup metadata so I could snap to my cuts. Once the audio is in PiTiVi we are stuck with PiTiVi’s audio tools which will never be as complete as Jokosher’s (assuming Jokosher gets some development love). It would be nice to be able to jump back and forth between the two.

All that being said, once I planned out what I wanted to do it took no time at all to do it for a video as simple as this. It might not be all roses and honey yet but it is much better than it has been. The next step is to start multi-tracking in Jokosher and syncing it to a video. We shall see.

For those attending the Boston GNOME Summit this year the open bar social, affectionately known as the Beer Summit will once again be held at Flat Top Johnny’s with four reserved pool tables from 8:00pm-closing on Sunday October 11th. Chat about the latest GNOME technologies over some beers and a friendly game of pool. It is our way of saying thank you to our contributors and community.

I myself will be in Italy until the 11th so I may or may not be able to make it out depending on how I feel but I have left the conference in the capable hands of Colin Walters, Jon McCann and Adam Jackson. They will be there to make sure you get your coffee, find your hacking room and enjoy yourself during the summit.

Novell came in and is sponsoring the 2008 GNOME Beer Summit at Flat Top Johnny’s tomorrow night starting at 7pm.  You will need to be at the Summit to receive your GNOME foot stamp in order to partake in the open bar.  Beer, wine and soft drinks will be covered.  We also have the four pool tables in the back next to the couches.  So come on down and discuss the future of GNOME with good friends over a couple of pints and a game of pool.

I thought I was going to be on vacation for my birthday this year but it turns out I’m leaving the day after so I decided to do something this Friday to celebrate with people in Boston.  I’m going to have a small dinner with close friends at Good Life Bar around 8:00 and then perhaps some drinks at Jacob Wirth.  In any case I’ll be microblogging my whereabouts on identi.ca so use it as an excuse to come down, drink a few beers and have a good time.

That is to say I have a direct flight today from New York to Istanbul today.  I’ll be ariving early tomorrow morning and will be staying at the Hotel Golden Horn in Sultanahmet.  This should prove to be one of the best GUADECs ever.

Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun.  Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family.  I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card.  More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com – a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.

I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.

I won’t be at the Gnome Summit on Saturday because of prior engagements (literally, I am going to a wedding).  We were however fortunate to get money from Google to host a Beer Summit on Sunday night starting at 7:00pm at Flat Top Johnny’s.  There are a couple of pool tables reserved and free beer available so hackers can exchange ideas, build friendships and hustle each other in an enjoyable setting.

Now for a small update on the Cookbook.  I haven’t had much progress since a large number of unexpected distractions have popped up.  The good news is Lulu.com updated their site and one of the options is a wizzard for cookbooks.  Of the three designs for page layout submitted by,  Vinicius Depizzol, Silvia Miranda, and Diego Escalante Urrelo, I liked them all and they all fit very well with each other so you all are going to be the first to get a book, payed for by me, once it is published.

As for my name on this list, I would like to thank the Acadamy, my Mom – hi Mom – Roderick’s Mom, and…what I don’t get to make a speech for being on the “B” list and I still have to wait in line at Spagos?  That’s it, I’m firing my agent.

I just found out a couple of days ago my best friend proposed to his girlfriend Missy and she said yes. That is great news in itself but I also found out I am to be the best man at their wedding. I haven’t known Missy for that long but I do know she is beautiful and sweet and a perfect match for Charlie.

Recipes

The GNOME Cookbook Project is now in full swing. We now have a wiki and mailing list. Anyone who has mailed me with a recipe can you please post it up somewhere and provide a link on the wiki. Feel free to add the recipe as a wikipage. We also need more contributers. Please pile on as many recipes as you wish.

Photos

Remeber we also need high def pictures ready for print so all you GNOMIES out there with SLR cameras, it is time to team up with some cooks and get snapping. Hey you might even get a free lunch or dinner out of it.

Design

Design is also very important. All you design gurus out there we need to slap together a workable layout using open source tools. Are you up to the challenge or are you affraid your hunger will get the best of you? Feel free to take breaks and cook up the recipies you are laying out.

Cover Art

Have you ever said to yourself, I wish my design would end up on the front of a GNOME Cookbook? Well now is your chance…to say that to yourself and compete to get your art on the cover. Whoever wins I will personally come over, if am ever in their neighborhood, and cook them a dish from the book.

Remeber GNOMERS, feet are vehicals for finding food and fine food is worth finding. So run, don’t walk, to contribute to this wonderful symbol of our community on this, the tenth anniversary of GNOME.