MaW’s Blog

I should be posting about Yule and things, but I’ve not got the patience right now. I do however absolutely have to say congratulations to Matt and Becky, who just got engaged.

Firstly the hysterical laughter. I know I mentioned it last in the topic, but it’s very, very funny and deserves to go first, so first it has been put.

With that out of the way, what else was I going to write about? Ah yes. Towel proceeds. It needs a good deal more polishing, but it’s gradually getting there for another release, this one with significant enhancements. The things I’m aiming for are:

• metadata caching in saved playlists, leading to improved load times
• don’t have GDK markup errors on track titles with double quotes in
• use GStreamer 0.8 (done)
• use GStreamer for metadata reading, instead of id3lib, libvorbis and libflac
• metadata editing using GStreamer
• miscellaneous UI improvements
• anything else that seems like it’ll fit

After that, the next release will likely dual-build with gtkmm 2.5, which is important because there are some handy new widgets I would find useful, lots of nice bug fixes and stock icons for play, pause etc.

Another project I’m starting to help with related to Towel is gstmm, the C++ bindings for GStreamer. They use the same system as gtkmm does, so they should be eminently compatible with a gtkmm application such as Towel. Development has unfortunately been stalled for quite some time, so hopefully Bryan Forbes and I will be able to get something passably wrapping GStreamer 0.8. And hopefully it won’t take us all year to do it.

Last night was the penultimate Tai Chi before Christmas. Not many people came so we didn’t do a new move in the longsword form, but instead spent quite a while doing Chi Kung and pushing hands. Learned some interesting things, improved my technique in one kind of movement particularly. Then we revised the longsword form as far as we have reached, which was useful to pick up on the details that tend to get lost in those first few weeks after doing a move where you’re more worried about which arm to stick out than the finer points of the move. Curiously, everyone at Tai Chi thinks the way Christmas is handled by the shops is very irritating. Where are the people that the shops are doing what they’re doing all this for?

Not sure what I’m doing for Yule yet this year. We shall see. The full moon group are doing a Yule ritual, so it’s likely I’ll go to that. It is highly likely to be a significant improvement on doing one solo.