Luca Barbato

I'm again mentor, again for the same organizations (Gentoo and FFmpeg), with quite yet another batch of strange ideas and demanding tasks for you.

FFmpeg
With Benjamin Larsson and possibly Kristian Jerpetjøn help we are proposing some tasks about CELL that may be interesting for people that want to try to write something for a _quite_ particular architecture. On my own I took the idea of having swscale gpl bits reimplemented on lgpl to the next level, asking for someone to refactor the whole beast to something more sane.
more ...

Gentoo
Recently I found quite useful Wubi, the ubuntu install-from-windows-with-few-clicks application. There are times in which we do not have possibility to install from cd for a number of reason nor by other common means (network, usb storage, butterflies changing the upper ionosphere...) but we have another operating system already in place. The proposal for this summer is about preparing something on the line of debian.exe or wubi for windows or macosx.
Another task involves finding a way to make seemless for the user having pkgcore or paludis as PM, implementing an emerge workalike for them and a eselect module to switch it. The task may appear simple but can get as complex as possible if syncing configuration is put in the equation.
Something I'd wish to have is improve the cross compile support. I think a reasonable step would be having a target support for emerge and make sure emerge --target=foo-unknown-linux-gnu system does the right thing, but I'm still undecided about it.

I guess that's all about Summer of Code

gcc-4.3 seems to be released and I already started building it (right now spu-elf target being built while the powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu quickpkg is being uploaded to the devspace for the people needing it). I got my alubook back and seems working fine, many thanks to
http://www.pixel.it/ for being that quick in fixing it. Now I'm waiting for the battery replacement and I should be more or less back on business.

The stuff I'm doing at LScube is shaping up nicely and I hope to have the next feng release, sporting the lighttpd and other major changes, out soon (It's nice to have shared configuration across services ^^. Soon I'll update the efika setup and I'll ask you to hammer it again ^^

Looks like the tibook I'm using while the alubook is hopefully being repaired is dying. I'm not exactly sure if the problem is due the disk or the controller, surely that is even more unexpected...

The alubook will be hopefully back in shape in a while (I won't believe till I have it back!)... Meanwhile I'm still thinking about what to get as workstation since this experience made me look for a workstation AND a newer laptop. I'm open to suggestions, right now I'm looking at a
phenom gear for the workstation and a laptop from enface.it

This http://www.enface.it/ita/octave150w.php looks nice for that pricetag, pity the lcd resolution is lower than the one I'm using right now (and it's a tibook! an older than 5 years laptop!). I like durable system, possibly with a decent batter life and that aren't too bulky... Anything you could suggest?

Sigh, I have no reason to overspend for an Apple since it now it doesn't provide an interesting powerpc and building my own laptop out of a powerpc current design could be a too costly exercise...

For a week or more I'll be less than present and active =/

Recently I happened to use the newest adium for few minutes (the time to erase my data from the macosx partition while I'm sending the laptop to repair (more on it once it is back, hoping it is back)

Adium probably is the best IM I ever tried, it works fine, in an unobtrusive way, it has all the gloss you may like (from none, to everything), but has just one defect: works just on macosx (that I don't like that much for developing since I'm not into BDSM).
Now, everybody and his dog knows that adium uses the fine libpurple from the pidgin project, and there is a pretty nice gtk client called pidgin that people usually use...
The problem is that seems that some of its developers spend too much time castrating the UI

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986

NEXT in row: have the chat window unresizable.

PS: no I won't try to hack pidgin, monotone sucks.