an awesome week in gran canaria is waiting for us. for me this was only possible due to the awesome work and financial help of the travel committee. thanks a lot to all of you!
i will be leaving for gran canaria on friday, travelling with condor from munich airport. my return flight departs on sunday 12th july again to munich airport. if you are on the same plane or plan to arrive at the same time, i would be glad to meet you!

refering to https://twitter.com/davidsiegel/statuses/2081147972
unfortunately there were not many changes in cheese in the last time, but some weeks ago, i was fortunate and got a small parcel with some usb devices in it. with it a small note from a cheese user, which said, that he would like to thank the cheese team for its work.
as i had some free time, i began have a look at those usb devices and created some plugins for those. to use those plugins, just download the plugins package here: cheese-plugins-0.1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 1d874bfb305227b830dd017598ea0a9f)
i included a README file, which quickly explains how to install the plugins. but basically you just need at least cheese 2.24.2 installed. you then can install the plugins locally without messing up your system or you can install them into the system, like cheese. however, please read the README file before you do anything else.
the package features those things:
the usb rocket system: some of you may already know that fun gadget. the purpose is simply to aim and shoot one of the rockets over the usb connection. funnily, this did not require any kernel module or something, but just some coordinates and data which you need to send over usb. with this plugin enabled, you just can take a photo of a person or anything else and if cheese does recognize the person or whatever afterwards, it will shoot a rocket into that direction (persuming, that the rocket launcher is set up correctly). i also added the possbility to use a photo as a target, which you already have taken earlier. i had quite a fun with it already ;)
something for the cats and dogs: there was also another strange device in the box, which featured a small tank, which you can fill with something, presumably dog food or water. if you then send the proper signal over usb to it, it opens the tank for a few seconds, enough to let some of the dog food or water fall out of the tank. i placed a nap under it, and added the same target algorithm i used in the previous mentioned plugin, and now if my dog enters the room, he gets some food.
the police siren: same thing as above, if a target enters, the siren goes off.
other: i also added some other things, which people can use, if they do not have any of the above devices:
thats all for now. please test those plugins and filters and tell us how you like them!
as you probably already know gnome was accepted as organization at this years summer of code. what we need know are some brave, awesome, great, amazing, glorious, fabulous, definitive, outrageous people who can help us triaging all the awesome, ludicrously, amazing.. okok not again ;) ideas at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
the awesome gnome summer of code ideas triaging meeting will happen on march 21st at 14h utc in the #soc-admin channel (irc.gnome.org). if you would like to throw your hat in the ring for the triaging or selection committees and other gsoc related tasks, pop on over to #soc-admin, join the soc-mentors-list and let one of the administrators for the program know you want to be involved in making gnome rock.
happy birthday wouter!

photo by barisione (CC-by)
the hackfest was quite amazing. even if i needed some days to recover my health state, it was great fun and it was also great to see some great people! just some foot notes, if they are visiting your city:
a few days ago, my favourite music player, muine, suddenly stopped working. this probably because of the recent upgrade to mono 2.0 and the 2.24 c# libs.
the muine project seems to be dead too: no mails on the mailing list, no project page updates and the only commits are either translation updates or some small bugfixes by wouter "no-i-wont-let-muine-die" bolsterlee.
therefore i spent the last days looking out for a nice music player. and it seems that there is no single music player that i liked. to be honest: they all suck. every single one of them. most of those players include things like podcasts, internet radio, browsing by genre, managing multiple playlists, burning cds, cd ripping, lyrics support, database searches, brewing coffee and giving ones shoes a shine.
why should i need all this? just because every other music player has those (and much more) features, everyone else has to join and has to overload his software with totally useless things. yeah i know, the users say "how could you dare to give out a player, who cant listen to podcasts, watch videos, burn cds and feed my dog? dont you listen to your users?"
it seems like everyone listens too much to those feature requests, and most of them are useless anyway. now please have a look around, every music app has gazillions of features and not one does it right. every player gets loaded with tons of features on every release. you know for sure some products, which were developed to death exactly this way.
muine is just ingenious, with its brilliant user interface. the search based album/song window works extremely well for finding quickly the songs you want to listen to. the single playlist model is fast, easy and doesnt suck. it discovers new/changes music files fast and painless. it automatically looks for cover art if not present in the album directories (yes, most of the players out there fail to do even that). and with muine-shell, you can even remote control it by dbus, ir or whatever you want. but yeah, muine sucks because you cant burn cds, watch videos, download podcasts, browses by genre and so on. but please remember, that there are better tools for those jobs. remember what was said about unix?
this is the unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well.
if you are able to get muine running, please use it for a few weeks and you will see what i mean. muine got it right, most other tools did get nothing wrong, as nat said some time ago. thanks for reading.
update 1: the theme i used for the screenshot is called kin dust
update 2: i already tried out muinshee and it looks nice, but i think it isnt ready for production yet. if you compare muinshee and muine directly, you definitely will spot some differences, which i do not like at the moment.
we are keeping promises! yes, indeed: we promised 0 open bugs at the time, when we release cheese 2.24. and now guess what, yes we made it! see this beautiful screenshot i made some day ago:
no! the screenshot is no fake! if you think so (and you should not think so, as i wont buy you
any beer or ice cream) you can
check here.
of course cheese never had any bugs! we just had some ehm.. aah.. small uuh..
hey, should i buy you a beer or an ice cream?
but this is not the only good news, just a few minutes ago i released cheese 2.24, which really rocks! and i wont buy you any beer or ice cream if you say something else ;) it would be boring to list all the new, shiny, rocking things, so just have a look at our NEWS file, which explains meticulous every new feature and bug fix or read the next paragraph.
as good things normally are coming as a three-pack, i have another great
news for you: we added an amazing
tour through
cheese. this page explains quickly and in a beautiful way why you should
install cheese and use it!
thanks again to og for sharing those
beautiful screenshots with us and his soon-to-be-famous daughters for acting as
models.
by the way: do you know the amazing people behind cheese? no? of course you want to meet them, everybody wants to! i want to present them to you, so that you can buy them a beer or an ice cream for their amazing work!

first and foremost there was jaap who sent me patches and patches during my summer of code time and afterwards. if you are asking yourself why cheese is working with quite every webcam out there which runs on gstreamer, yes, jaap is your hero then. recently busy with the cheese vala branch and a wedding he is one of my heroes in the gnome development, as he is not only working on cheese but everywhere, where help is needed.

you probably know andreas already.
(if not, he is the left person on the photo, allthough some people think that
he is just a robot and his master is this cat on the right, which of course is
not a cat, but the reincarnation of picasso, who is controlling that person on
the left).
though he is _the_ rockstar hacker ehm.. artist ;) quite all the icons used in
cheese are made by him. except the easter egg icons, they were made by
kalle persson. did i just say
easter egg? no, i meant ehm.. ah forget it!
anyway, i cant say more than this: andreas is one of the greatest artists around and we should
be proud to have him on board!

my slave, patryk. he even answers
with "yes, my master", isnt that cool? ;)
patryk is also a long time contributor for cheese, and he made many things you
probably have already seen, e.g. he stole the beautiful eog-scrollbar, added a
flash when taking a photo, worked on v4l and many more things. yes, he rocks
too, even if he is working on an
unknown linux distribution
in his spare time.

felix is quite new to the gnome development and cheese too. he was my student during the summer of code 2008 and developed a dbus backend for cheese. some parts of it are already inside cheese, the rest will come for 2.26. but try to press f11 when running cheese and a wonderful fullscreen mode will enlighten your eyes. though, please do not try this at a party, or every guest will stand in front of your computer instead of drinking your beer and eating your ice cream. felix also wants to use cosimos mediamanager to make it possible to change and upload your avatars easy and painless to empathy, your favourite social network site, evolution and many more places. this totally rocks!

and now last but not least: filippo, a summer of code student as felix. have you seen his screencasts? if not, watch them, they are probably the coolest thing i have seen in the last time. he is also bug hunter number one (after me of course ;) ) in cheese and made it possible that we reached 0 open bugs in these days. and of course we are trying to use his gstreamer gst-gl plugins in cheese 2.26. definitely!
so, those were some of the cool people of cheese. quite all of the photos above were made with cheese and/or gst-gl plugins. hug those guys, buy them a beer and/or buy them an ice cream, they deserve it! thats all for now, thanks for reading! you can continue drinking your beer or eating your ice cream now.
dear hackers,
we are trying to organize the speck hack fest 2008 as best as possible and we put some packages together for facilitate your hack days in bolzano.
unfortunately some accomodation packages are available only for a short period because bolzano is fully booked in november and the hostel and the hotels are keeping our registrations only for a short period.
if you already know you would join the hack fest it would be better if you have a look at the packages we prepared as soon as possible and register yourself online at http://sfscon.it/2008/registration/gnome-registration
at this link you will find every kind of information about the packages! if you need further infos do not hesitate to contact patrick or me!
the hack fest is followed by the south tyrol free software conference on
14th november which program and details will be available as soon as
possible at http://www.sfscon.it.
there will be many interesting speeches and
i think you could ehm.. well, you have to join also the sfscon the day after the hack fest.
btw: did you know that stormy is maybe holding a talk there? ;)
hope to see you in bolzano...
daniel
p.s. if you want to sponsor the hack fest we have no problems with it ;)
harhar.. seems like my evilish plans are getting real ;)
thanks to pierre slamich for notifying me about this!
read the full review here
for everyone who did not manage to visit istanbul, for everyone who cannot visit boston, for everybody who holds a hackfest at his appartment, because its so cool, for everybody who just takes some time off to visit the hackfests around the world and of course for everybody who wants to sit together, meet other gnome developers and wants to hack there is another amazing opportunity to meet, discuss and hack: the speck hack fest 2008
the speck hack fest is a hackfest for gnome developers and contributors. it will be held at the tis innovation park in bolzano (italy), an innovative and technological center in bolzano and it will be organized by the tis - free software center. you can take a look at the video presentation of the city. it will end with the south tyrolean free software conference, which will be on 14th november.
already, there was a lot of feedback when we talked about a possible hackfest in italy. we have discussed and the art team and webkit/epiphany people are seriously considering coming. of course you should add yourself to session page if you want to hold a session. if you want to propose an idea, about a really great topic, you should not hesitate to add that idea too to the session page and there may be some people who want to hold a session about that.
if you are interested to come you should add your name to the participants page and you should spread the word about the hackfest! :)
we will publish further information about accomodation, registration and the hackfest in general soon. if you need to have further information right now just ping patrick or me.
the deadlines are approaching fast and as always we want to do everything in the last few moments. in this case its a bit different, there were a lot of ideas and patches travelling around. but at the end, we do not have many new features in cheese. bad? probably not, because at least in my opinion we will be able to provide a rock stable release, which works like a german tank.
therefore i want to announce the first official
glorious, amazing, international, extremly difficult, adventorous,
cheese bug hunting competiton
(short: gai eda competition. please do not confuse it with some transvestite)
right now, cheese has about
40 open bugs.
to have that german tank release we want to have 0 open bugs when
releasing cheese 2.24. sounds great, not? the rules are simple:
update 04.08.2008: i think, resolving 5 bugs could be quite hard, so the new prizes look like the following:
while having this great competition i encourage everybody to tell us issues, enhancements and ideas, which should be fixed before 2.24 and open some new bug reports for those issues. but please remember, that we will not add any new feature to the 2.24 version. of course new features can go into 2.26 and we want to accept those things too.
my two slav.. ehm soc students are working hard in the mean time to get their projects finished.
filippo already has done an awesome work already, i totally love the effects the created in the last weeks. right now he is busy polishing the gst-gl plugins, which we can (and _must_) use in 2.26. they then will provide a release, which every gstreamer based application can use easily. sounds awesome, not? if you have any more ideas about great effects, please bug him about your idea as he seems already bored ;)
in the meantime felix was working on the internals of cheese and made it dbus capable. he wants to add it then to cosimos mediamanager library, which will expose cool features to the gtkfilechooser. a user then could say "hey i want to add a photo of my as a buddy icon in empathy" and he just opens the gtkfilechooser and then clicks on the cheese icon. everything else will go automatically, awesome, not? ;)
so guys, keep up the amazing work!
by the way: while reading the ct magazine, i discovered a cheese screenshot in one of the articles. it doesnt feature any text about cheese, but its great publicity anyway ;) you can find it at page 42 in the newest edition.


last night, while i already had some beer, and we were right into celebrating my birthday, which actually is today, i figured out something: exactly on this very day, a year ago, i released cheese 0.1.0, which was the first release in a long series of versions of that program.
while looking back, it was awesome to develop the program, it was awesome to get so much feedback, it was awesome to receive and apply patches, it was awesome to get and fix bug reports, all that was just awesome. and i want to thank everybody, who did something, which made cheese even better, be it documentation, translations, patches, bugfixes, bug reports, usefull hints, feature requests, or even if you just used cheese to take a photo of you, your family, your friends, your goldfishes or three-headed monkeys. thank you!
a year has passed, and it seems, that cheese actually works on most computers and with most webcams. awesome! im quite satisfied with the state of cheese right now, as i planned to have an equivalent photobooth clone made in one year. in my opinion, we already reached that milestone with 2.22, but of course, some things are still different, some small features still not available, for example movie recording on the apple side or live previews and better effects on the cheese side.
now, whats next? we are concentrating on two big things: closer integration into gnome and even more fancy bling bling! we definitely want to do those things better for 2.24. but more on that later
a year has also passed for me, a year which transformed me from nobody, the gnome user, to a guy, who has a gnome svn account and is presuming right now to be a soc mentor (dont even believe him). that passed year was just awesome. i met many new people, and i even had the possibility to met some of them face by face, which was also awesome of course. some of them became friends, which also is just awesome. after all, i just can say one thing: every single people in the gnome community is just awesome and i am glad that i have the possibility to work beside so many geniuses and awesome people.
now to my two slaves..ehm gsoc students, who are working on cheese with their great ideas:
filippo is adding some new opengl based effects to the gstreamer framework, which cheese can use to finally morph you into the real hulk, in order to even scare your goldfish. he is doing a great job and i cant wait to see the first effects working and implemented in cheese. a great thing about his task is that he is working on a gstreamer plugin called gst-gl, which can be used by other applications, to provide the same awesome effects. just awesome!
felix, who still does not have a blog, is working on the integration of cheese into the gnome desktop. he already enhanced cheese to use XDG folders and is working right now on the dbus side of cheese. he will make it possible to remote control cheese and allow each single application to use cheese to take photos or movies just by using dbus. this of course is awesome for buddy icons, which then can be used in gdm, empathy, evolution, social network websites and many many more. isnt that also awesome?
oh.. by the way: i just found out, that nautilus has a preview mode for audio files, which totally kicks ass, ehm i mean is totally awesome. not just because of those small things gnome totally rocks and i wouldnt talk about decadence in any way.
thats all for now, happy birthday cheese! people, rock on, make gnome even more awesome!
dear dave and probably others: youre talking about not having the time to read that book, but it seems that you have some time to open a web browser, to log in into your blog, to create that new post, search the book on amazon and then actually write a few lines on it. then you will spend some time on reading the comments and maybe spend a few more minutes on doing some replies.
now, think about other useless stuff youre doing. please also pay attention about the definition of useless: listening music, drinking a beer with some friends, cooking for people, sleeping, having fun with cheese ( ;) ) is _not_ useless, at least it shouldnt. however staring on the computer screen or browsing the web for new wallpapers probably is. how much time are you spending on nothing?
its amazing how much more time you will have if you try to keep an eye on yourself, and for sure you will be able to tag your book with the "already read"-tag. my opinion, it works for me.
cimi is my hero for today:

to

to

to

to

finished? well, macslow has a really good chance to be my hero for tomorrow ;)
some days ago, i wanted to know, how i could improve the countdown widget, which we accidentally have in cheese. andreas, calum, chris, benjamin, lennart, patrys, robert accidentally said all the same: why does it have to be red? and they were right ;)
so what i accidentally did was to read out the bg[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] for the background and text[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] for the text which represents the numbers. so far it was pretty easy. too easy? probably: i wanted to have it sexier and lennart provided accidentally a lot of color space information and algorithms (though at the end i copied accidentally everything from gtk, because those functions accidentally are not public). we now just converted the rgb value of the gtk theme color to hsv and played around with the saturation value. after playing around we just converted it back to rgb and had a "light" color and a "dark" one. this accidentally provides a sexy glassy effect.
one thing that took me pretty long to understand was that bg[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] and text[GTK_STATE_SELECTED] reported wrong colors in some cases. patrys accidentally knew some gtk interals and told me that colors do not have to be in a gtkstyle if the widget has not been initialized yet or is initializing. and accidentally i experienced those cases. the solution to this problem was accidentally quite easy: we just had to implement a callback function for the style-set signal. this signal gets emitted as soon as gtk is able to tell you the colors, before the first expose event and sometimes between expose events if the user switches the gtk theme. now it worked. and accidentally the widget changes its color on runtime if you change the gtk theme while taking a photo. sounds cool, not? ;)
there was one issue left: we could set the text color, the background color, but how about the camera icon, which is a svg icon? the icon basically is just white or transparent and again, i saw that drunk developers do a better job when it comes to totally strange problems: the only solution we figured out in #cairo was to do svg dom processing (ugly!!!) or hard-coding the svg (even more ugly!!!). but last night, when i came home, not as dry as i am at day time, i accidentally met a nice cairo function: cairo_set_operator(). now guess what accidentally happend? i tried every operator (at that time i could not think anymore) and i accidentally saw that CAIRO_OPERATOR_XOR was doing an amazing job. what basically was happening is the following: imagine two layers and put the first one below the other. now you combine those two layers to one, but just take those "pixels", which are either in layer one or two, not in both. so you just get those fragments, where the first layer has a color and the second is transparent or the other way round. so, andreas was kind enough to swap the transparent and the white surfaces on the icon and that did the trick: i just paint the first layer in the theme color, and then removed everything, which was outside of the camera symbol by using CAIRO_OPERATOR_XOR. so the camera symbol accidentaly has the color i actually want.
to prove it, i did some screenshots. and remember: accidents happen! ;)

clearlooks theme

crux theme

glossy theme

highcontrast theme

murrina dark orange theme

morningglory theme
note 1: since 2.22 there is actually a gconf setting called /apps/cheese/countdown, where you can decide whether the countdown widget should be displayed or not. the development version features a menu entry for that.
note 2: the screenshots are actually no fakes. i just cut them out from the window, as i do not want to show me to you today ;)
some time ago, macslow created that awesome countdown widget for cheese, which basically looks like this:
even if i like it, some people may not, as they have amblyopia or related problems.
idea: read the color out of the gtk theme, so the problem should be gone for most people, BUT:
any idea?
...if mr. andersson treats his designer slaves like his dogs, horses, ehm.. whatever ;)
in the last days i got many comments about april fool jokes, good april fool jokes, not so good april fool jokes, patents, former bad companies, and free software in general.
one mail was so deep going and hit the issue so unerring, that i asked mark van den borre for permission to post it here:
[...]
I can only speculate about the negative response you've experienced. My guess is that many geeks are painfully aware how little they can do about the software patents problem already. That's an uncomfortable feeling you're forcing them to look at.
Many of us, in the absence of major pro-swpat attacks against software freedom, see only one way forward: trying to assemble as big an anti-swpat ecosystem as possible as fast as possible. Think free software projects, small software development shops, free software services, conscious users.
Many of us also know it there's even more severe treatment in the legal system of knowing versus unknowing patent infringement, which is why organisations like SFLC tend to discourage public discussion of anythig patent. So you're right, there is something of a taboo. It's even inspired by law and "justice".
dear
arc,
bolsh,
chpe,
cyberdork33,
gerd kohlberger,
gicmo,
hughsie,
karl lattimer,
lapo,
luis villa,
macslow,
mattias eriksson,
michaël van dorpe,
murrayc,
nicolás reynolds,
oskar rubinstein,
pachi,
patoh,
thomas lunde,
uwog,
vuntz,
the redhat crew germany,
the ubuntu forums
and several other people,
as you might noticed, the
blog entry about a fictional lawsuit against cheese
was an april fools joke. i do not want to talk about the taste of the joke,
which is of course really really bad. many people got irritated about
my lines and didnt have look at the calendar.
mikkels
post was of course not
planned and in my opinion those two posts together were really hard to people,
who are working in and for the free software community for a long time, like
behdad,
vuntz and
luis villa and of course others.
a comment which really thrilled me was the following: "[...] but his post and this
one (in light of the reactions, more than the content) are like shouting "fire"
in a crowded theater."
this is so true. many people had fun reading that post, but i had the feeling
(and several comments, mails, ... proved it) that some people had no fun at
all. moreover, they were scared, concerned, perturbed.
why? why was this joke not taken as a joke by so many people? in my opinion it is just too close on reality. we all know that software patents are bad. we all know what they can do. but what would we do if something like this would happen for real?
it seems to like some topics are taboo. even this one. but to resolve the problem of software patents, the right way is not to _not_ talk about them. so please take this april fools joke as a warning what could happen, and not even on cheese, but also on other free software projects, and that this could reveal itself in a real mess. imagine, someone from [bad company] would call you and force you to stop developing a project. fortunately the free software foundation and the software freedom law center are already doing a damn good job and so we developers are able to work on nice projects, just because we all think that free software is awesome.
back to fun (isnt everything about fun?): it was april fools day and life isnt as serious as we sometimes think it is. and it is totally ok to buy me not one beer wherever you meet me this year.
all hell broke loose yesterday: i got a phone call yesterday by a nice lady, which presented herself as a former advocate of apple. she told me that the objective of her team was to find copyright and patent violations and therefore she called me:
obviously i did something wrong by starting such a project as cheese, which is a pure clone of photo booth. this would violate the us patent IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing, which was filed on february the 28th 2006 and as gnome is registered and known as an organization of the usa, this patent would be applicable.
i thought, that such patents would just apply, if there is some commercial interest behind it, but she knew it better: as i created cheese in the summer of code program, i "worked" for google, which makes everything a commercial project, even if now i "probably" do not get any money. in addition the full us patent law applies, as i a) worked for google in the usa for the summer of code program and b) cheese is now included in gnome, which is an organization registered in the usa.
she also told me, that of course there are similar applications like photo booth, but cheese acts as a clone and therefore an illegal copy because it works on intel based macs and therefore would be a competitor of photo booth. the fact, that cheese just runs on linux on the intel based macs was worthless by her.
so it looks pretty bad for me now.. i got a deadline of 5 work days to remove cheese code and binary versions from all places i have access to (probably svn.gnome.org, ftp.gnome.org, ...).
i already contacted a lawyer, which thinks he can help me, but of course it is david against goliath...
so, if you know a way out of this, please contact me!
today is easter, how adequate ;)
i already found my eggs, but did anyone already find the
easter egg we build into cheese 2.22 or in the rest of the desktop?
thank you jeff ;)
...to propose your idea for summer of code!
no, really, please add your idea to http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas.
we really need some more entries to give students some starting points.
if you would like to be a mentor, please add your name to the proposed ideas
you would like to mentor.
thats all for now, thanks!
...that is cheeses icon here! extremely nice! congratulations to everybody for the best GNOME ever (as always ;) )
naive myself... if anyone would have told me last year, that i would be
able to develop a tool for taking pictures and videos from a webcam,
which then will go into gnome, will be used in distros like ubuntu,
fedora, suse, ... no chance that i would have believed him. now, a year
later we have a very nice tool, which should not dread the comparison
to other tools, even proprietary ones, like apples.
we had people that were able to send the pictures of her children to
her grandma, people who installed cheese in their office lobby, people
who send their identity card to their agency through cheese because
they didnt have a scanner around, people who just had fun with it. and
it is all about fun. therefore i would like to thank all the people for
the fun we had developing this program, all the people who gave me a
chance to start, all the people who helped me to reach this point and
everybody who will help us in the future. THANKS!
does this mean, that cheese is finished? hell, no.. we have a lot of
open ideas and want to bring them into gnome 2.24 to make it a even
more brilliant desktop and finally be able to say "yeah, 2008 was
definitely the linux-on-desktops year" ;)
Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others.
you can get it by pressing here!

some patches couldnt make it into this version but will definitely go into 2.24. those patches include the port to the nokia n810 (maemo) device, usability enhancements, user interface enhancements and a lot more. stay tuned!
some days ago, i asked how to take screenshots of cheese
for the next gnome release. while getting some more or less useful hints, a
person, who wanted to fire me and likes a lot of ice cream, asked me about my
address.
and
no,
i wont
tell
you
who
he
is.
in any case, i came home this week and a parcel waited for me. i did not knew
what and where this came from. i opened the parcel, even with the fear of an
attack by a terrorist. after
evacuating my street i could open the parcel with the help by the local bomb
squad. in there was a undefinable something packed into white paper. drugs? see
yourself:

vincent, thanks a lot for the new cheese mascott! now we just need andreas to convert the cheese icon to it ;)
but after all, i wont keep it very long. i will send it to some gnome lover out there immidiately after the gnome release with 2 other things in it: a cheese and a surprise. watch out for incoming parcels!
hey guys, what about a bugzilla bingo?
rules are easy:
i will show you an example with cheese bugs and not the same severity:
| 505442 | 508910 | 510270 | 510270 |
| 509475 | 509793 | ||
| you | get | the | idea |
| more | and | more | bugs |
what happens when a mirco müller,
a patryk zawadzki and a
crazy cheese developer come together?
well, nobody tried it yet, but macslows countdown widget, which
he posted yesterday was matter enough for me to force my slave patryk to integrate that into cheese.
press relations officier of cheese said that it was an honour for him to follow the GNOME
release cycle, release the first package in this year, and to have such important persons
working on cheese (i do not really know, who he meant, but probably myself). further he could
get a really really really important person in the GNOME network to my house, who then recorded
the screencast of cheese with the main developer.
Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.
you can get it by pressing here!
no screenshot this time! i have something better for you: ~2mb
cheese _does_ make a shutter sound when taking a picture and it _does_ show a flash light when taking a picture ;)
4 months development time, uncountable hours of work, 170 svn revisions,
about 50 fixed bugs, 40 new features, at least 2 easter..ehm christmas eggs
and pretty high number of actual code changes. and yes,
we are donating the numbers i mentioned above to YOU!
and yes you are right again, you can get our packaged parcel by
pressing here!
Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.
you can get it by pressing here!
with this christmas release we wish you all a happy christmas and a good start into the new year. we would love to get some christmas pictures of you and your friends, family, childrens, santas and reindeers ;)
diego after trying out the development version of cheese:
dieguito: how am i supposed to use it?
daniel: do you want to install it?
dieguito: i want to build it to be able to report bugs
dieguito: read: i want to make your life hell
daniel: then install it ;)
[5 minutes later]
dieguito: the take photo effect is amazing
dieguito: and the thumbnails look really cool
dieguito: the colors are perfect now
dieguito: and the size too
dieguito: i must say your software produce homoerotic feelings for you in me
daniel: hey, i could put that on my homepage!
dieguito: I hope my foundation candidacy is not affected by this...
dieguito has signed off.
all in all i think we will make a rocking release (not ultimately thanks to
jaaps
contribution) in a few days/weeks/whatever, stay tuned!
update: jaaps homepage
dear sir or madam
i wanted to advise you, that the official cheese homepage has moved to
http://www.gnome.org/projects/cheese.
yours faithfully, the cheese-guys.
they
stole that! does anyone has some money to sue them? calming is just the fact that i implemented video before they released leopard, harharhar ;)
and as raphael mentions: at least if you
search for
"photobooth cheese", cheese is 2nd and apple is not even on the list.
update: as sven pointed out: i did
not mean, that cheese was first, i meaned, that they stole my slogan (see
title)
about a month ago i got a mail from drew gibson (a system admin of http://www.oanda.com):
I was thinking of putting a webcam and Cheese on a PC in our companies lobby to entertain our staff/visitors (our staff are easily amused! :-) [...]
today i got another mail:
Sorry for the size of the email but here are the photos!
The centre screen is Cheese (v0.2.3) with our own atnabtu.com (All Their News Are Belong To yoU) financial news website to the left and a more general news aggregator to the right.
Cheese has been well received, our CFO was caught waving her arms and making faces at the camera!
well... i never thought that it would be look so great, im really out of words... but see yourself, its just terrific ;)





prepare-Changelog? hey, didnt you know im lazy?
svn2cl? is much too lazy, as it is always a step behind
anything else?
yeah! etienne and me hacked a
little script, which is for lazy hackers as we are. its a simple wrapper
around svn commit which updates the ChangeLog file with the commit message
before actually commiting. That means, that the same commit message will be
used in the svn log as in your ChangeLog file.
sounds great? then get it, while its hot! download cicl!
patches and rewrites are welcome!
btw: marco, your
beamer themes look
awesome! now i just need to find a place where i can do a presentation to bore
someone the pants off ;)
as jeff
thanked for the cheese, i want to thank him for my brand new jabber address, which is
dgsiegel@gnome.org.
dont hesitate to contact me, im as bored as you probably are
right now, reading _this_ ;)
yeah, so long.. soc is finished by about 34 minutes ago and cheese is about
95% of my expectations and initial proposal. of course i wont stop here, and
develop cheese further on, with some kick-assing-ideas until we finally can teach
people, that some fresh cheese is even better than premorse apples..
now this is the real "dot-oh"-release, even if there is a "one" at the end, have fun with it!
Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.
check out the cheese homepage, which
is pretty old
this screenshot is a special one, dedicated to one of the great guys of gnome
hey, thats just unbelievable.. just a moment ago, a very famous person (and i mean a very very famous person) entered my room and wanted to record something for all the gnome-people out there:
by the way: the above was recorded by using cheese 0.2.0 which is available at all stores from now on and with the following new features:
the video support is still in testing and will either or all
you have been warned!!!!
the president of the v4l-land just congratulated me a few minutes ago on _officially_ supporting v4l, version 1, in cheese. further he wants to extend his congratulations and salute diego escalante urrelo, who has patched cheese to get v4l working. he also wants to salute all v4l-users out there, and of course v4l2 users too, and wishes them much fun playing with cheese.
cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.
check out the cheese homepage, which
is yeah, kinda new!
this time i dont want to be selfish and show you another photo of my face (hey, i know im looking good ;) ), no this time i want to show diego with is v4l device! take this as a proof, that v4l _really_ works with cheese
i just wanted to remind some people, that thinking before talking removes some side-effects like this ;). obviously it's quite hard to think, after having about 15 tickets left and 23 in your stomache.
so, i'm leaving in a few hours. if anybody has some free t-shirts for me, just look out for me. it was a great time and much much fun. thanks for the oppurtunity!
cheese? yeah, its not only something to eat! this is a under the bonnet-release, that means, that no new features were added in the ui, but many things were done below it.
cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.
check out the cheese homepage, which is still shining!
yes, i can hear it already.. "why didnt you choose autotools?? its a standard!". yeah, i think we all know about those standards, be it a build system or a document format. i played with autotools for about two weeks. two weeks of no coding, no new features, as i was trying to understand the gnu "auto, my ass" tools. the only thing i find was problems and things were just harder to do. this changed when i found the toc2 build system. its really easy to maintain your project with this thing. now you might say: "hey, but i have to learn how to use it first! kinda silly?" and "but i have to install that first?" ehm no, as you will find your configure file and makefile and the only thing you have to do is a ./configure && make && make install as usual. this is because toc lives in the source try, quite like autotools, but not fully, as no global installation is needed. pretty cool, isnt it? have a look at the toc2 homepage for further informations.
as stated above, nothing in the ui changed, but as you gnome-people are some screenshot fetishists, i made one, only for you!
a new release of cheese is landing! this time featuring hulk (not hulk hogan, the other guy, the green one ;) )
cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your webcam.
check out the new, shiny cheese homepage!

well ok, the title is a bit misleading (alltough i _have_ birthday today) ;) now sometimes its a privilege to be with certain people, and its even more, if they are celebrating your birthday. therefore and not only therefore i want to give something back: cheese 0.1.0
yeah you have heard right, its done. well to recapitulate: it works (somehow, i dont know why ;) ). please test it, have fun and give me some feedback!
only some small notes to the testers:
get it here (and dont waste my bandwith by downloading 17K twice, those two files have the same content):
well.. taking photos, saving them and reloading them is fully functional:

soc has started a while ago. well.. to be honest, it hasnt started at all, but i have started coding ;) after some pretty hard and unprofitable days, featuring several, not to say MANY, rewrites of the program, i have managed to get a working application. i were able to get a picture from the camera on the screen through several gstreamer loop ways. the next days will feature several things, like getting a picture saved and so on..
i also have found a pretty cool sounding name for this photobooth-like application. its name will be cheese, and it may features a nice icon of a piece of.. yes, you know it already. if you are wondering, what im doing, please go ahead and read my proposal:
soc_photobooth.txt
the following is a screenshot of todays version, i will keep you up to date.
ahh.. before i forget: you can get the code from my darcs-repo. but only if you are really wondering, what im doing ;) just do a
darcs get http://home.cs.tum.edu/~siegel/dev/cheese
spring is coming with beautiful days and some beautiful news: my application on googles summer of code has been accepted. very big thanks to everyone, who has helped me, including my mentor, who has helped me a lot with his ideas and suggestions.
just _thinking_ resolves problems, just doing resolves them too.. sometimes, yeah you know.. der bundestrojaner (german)
well, i did it. i cant believe it, but i just passed my fearful expected math-test diskrete strukturen. well i didnt pass it too good, but its quite enough (almost for me here). now theres going to be some big partys and maybe some holidays (if i can place them between my partys and my bed). wohoo! ;)
vim really turns out to be my uber-favourite (for now it was only my favourite)... just try those commands and you know what i mean. and yes, you have to know some books/moviesi (at least one) to understand those things.
:h!
after all, look at those old, longhaired kernel hackers, how fast and nifty they are.
:help 42
:help holy-grail
well...
a new part of my life started. im at university now, or lets better
say at THE elite-university ;). no, i dont want to speak about the
rankings of universities. im in a new city, im a year older and a bit
wiser (at least i hope so ;) ). now its kinda strange to get all this
new stuff, but i begin to like it. time got a new definition and i have
so much time like newer before but also coevally really no time for
anything else. now ive got a few days of relax and then the university-life
will start again. im really happy to have left school (it was soooo boring)
and to handle some things which are much more interesting. now upon the fact
that everything is new, we have a new year etc. etc.. i created this new site
which is under heavy development (as everytime this wont change). hope you like it.
daniel
© 2001 - 2009 daniel g. siegel
this work is licensed under a
creative commons license
optimized for standards.