Antimatter Concert

I went to an Antimatter concert, in Braga. I only have a phone with crappy camera, so here's the only photo I have:

In the photo, Duncan Patterson (in black) and Mick Moss (in white), getting ready for the Antimatter performance. It was all acoustic, and it was fantastic. Also it was much more crowded than I was expecting.

Dark Tower

Today I finished reading the last of the 7 books in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It has been a wonderful journey and I loved the ending (I read it even though the writer tried to shy me away from reading the ending).

Overall I found the books very well written, with very enjoyable story telling. I loved most of the Mid World parts; they are full of the right mixture of fantasy (The Lord Of The Rings style) and science fiction (references to Asimov robot stories). Yes, I know it's weird mix of fantasy and scifi, but he manages to pull it off. I did not like so much the overly long and predictable Wolves of the Calla, nor did I enjoy so much the frequent switches to current New York city and the latter books, as it kind of breaks the rhythm and mood.

Next on my list is book two of Bridei Chronicles. More fantasy, but this time with no scifi and with more realism (it is inspired by historic events from ancient Celtic Scotland). After that, who knows, I'll need to do more online shopping to find out...

Transcoding media files for the PS3 from Linux

While there are some good tools in Windows world for transcoding video files so that they can be played on a PS3 (optionally adding subtitles), in Linux I could not find any good instructions, after much googling. It turns out that 'mencoder' can do the trick wonderfully well (easier than the Windows GUI-based tools mkv2vob and VirtualDub), but you have to know the options to use, through some experimentation.

In case anyone else has the same problem, here's the script I am using. Besides converting to a PS3 playable format, it optionally prints subtitles into the video if a .srt file is found with the same base name as the input video file.

PyBindGen 0.9 released

Get it while it's hot:

http://code.google.com/p/pybindgen/

It's far from perfect released, but API should become more or less stable starting with this release, and NS-3 is using this code with success. Also most features that I need are there.

Oh, and here's the NEWS related to this release:

=== pybindgen 0.9 ===
    - Fix GCC 4.2 compilation warnings;
    - Works with some GCCXML 0.9/cvs snapshots (tested with 2008-04-20),
      in addition to stable 0.7;
    - Support for overloaded virtual methods;
    - Add 'ignore' annotation support, allowing to ignore functions
      and methods;
    - Generally work hard to make sure the generated code at least
      always compiles, even if we have to disable generation of
      certain wrappers;
    - Add support for protected methods and constructors;
    - Preliminary support for templated classes/methods/functions;
    - Add more type conversions, such as uint64_t and uint16_t;
    - Support implicit conversions also for pass-by-reference parameters;
    - Add supported for nested (i.e. defined inside a class) enums and classes;
    - Add support for adding manually written custom method or function wrappers;
    - Split the gccxmlparser.ModuleParser.parse() method into several
      smaller methods, to allow greater customization and flexibility;
    - Add support for customising C++ class instance creation code;
    - Much improved support for wrapping pure C code;
    - Support std::ostream << myobject mapped as str(myobject) (Mathieu Lacage)
    - Support default values in parameters;
    - More intuitive API (thanks Mathieu Lacage for feedback)
    - Support generation of a Python pybindgen script from scanned API;
    - Support splitting of generated python script and/or C/C++ module into several files;
    - Lots of small bug fixes, and other features I probably forgot;
    - New tutorial (thanks Mathieu Lacage), and API docs.

PyBindGen has new home page

PyBindGen finally has a home page: http://code.google.com/p/pybindgen/

Why it needs a home page:

• Launchpad does not directly provide downloads, it only mirrors existing downloads;
• Launchpad has no Wiki;
• Launchpad does not allow me to host documentation.

So I decided to use Google Projects for hosting PyBindGen. So now we have:

• Documentation is hosted in the google project. I upload it via subversion (slightly painful but doable), and users can browse the svn http url directly to view the documentation online;
• Wiki pages are always useful and google project has a good wiki system;
• Downloads in google project.. currently no downloads, but I'll put them up some other day;
• Bug tracking and code hosting are still handled by launchpad, as usual. Thankfully google project allows me to override the Source and Issues tabs, to redirect users to launchpad instead.

In other news, pybindgen based python bindings for NS-3 have finally been merged!

NS-3 released first stable version

Finally, the "1.0" version of NS-3 has been released! This work represents a huge amount of effort by some very talented people.

GnomeOSD on Euro 2008 pub

I received an email asking for some help with multihead in GnomeOSD. It started like this:

First, I would like to thank you for your work on gnome-osd, I am currently using it for displaying Twitter messages (with users being able to post the messages for commenting the game) on top of football games of the euro08 in an Austrian pub, and it works fabulously.

Ha! Amazing and that my pet project of the past has been put to such a fun use :-) Strangely this makes me feel some kind of regret for not hacking GnomeOSD in a very long time. But I guess it's life... so much to do, so little time... :-/