J5’s Blog

This is just a reminder to those who are coming to the launch party. The dinner reservations has be moved to 8:00 at The Blue Room in Kendall Square. We also have the two back pool tables reserved at Flat Top Johnny’s at 9:30. See you there.

Hey all. We are winding down the release and ramping up to getting our party on! The Boston/Cambridge GNOME 3.0 Launch Party will be happening this Sunday down in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. We will be meeting for dinner around 7 at The Blue Room and then going to our tradition hang out spot, Flat Top Johnny’s, for drinks and a couple of rounds of pool. If you are planning on coming please add your name to the wiki ASAP so I can make reservations. I plan on making them by tomorrow night. Hope to see you there!

Hey all you Northeast GNOME developers and users. We are having a GNOME release party this Sunday, April 10th sponsored by Red Hat. We are still scouting for a good location but the idea is to go to a bar with either a bowling lane or pool tables where drinks, games and food will be sponsored. Please head over to the wiki and let us know you will be coming so we can figure out the best venue to hold it.

Come on down and have some fun while we celebrate the hard work that went into this historic release for the GNOME Project.

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.