Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

Before it is too late for a post-GUADEC post

I am complete back in sync with my time zone now, I can write about GUADEC :)  It was my first GUADEC ever, and my second conf ever (the first being the excellent FOSDEM).  It was wonderful, I met lots of nice people and learned a lot.  The most promising projects I’ve seen were libcanberra (new sound library), Soylent and Banshee (I hadn’t tried the 1.0 release yet).

I seem to always be a bit depressed the first week after a conf.  As one of my fellow traveler said, it is as if we were in a summer camp for a week: living close, eating, traveling, doing all together… no wonder I feel a little depressed back home!

Istanbul was unbelievable.  It holds so much history, more than I even expected.  The food was exquisite, in all the restaurants I’ve been.   The language was too bad, given that I had a small handbook and barely left the tourist neighbourhood. I certainly plan to visit more of Turkey someday.  You can see my pictures here.

Having some Python+clutter fun

Now that I have a nice camera, I should display my pictures on my computer’s screensaver.  But I am unsatisfied with the current selection of photo screensaver.   So I though, there’s the Apple TV’s screensaver which is quite cool and allow a lot of pictures to be displayed at the same time, I should try to reproduice it.

Clutter came as a natural choice since I had already played with it back in the 0.2 days.  But I though that writing C was too much hassle for such project: I went with Python.

I did have difficulty to find documentation on how to get started at first.  After only some hours, I had a working version that provides reasonable performance and looks.

I don’t wish to recreate the whole scene rotation thing, but I am looking for help on improving it (add flickr support, better performance, turning it into an actual screensaver)!

So here is the code, GPLed: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/pierlux/savr.git;a=summary

Have fun!  You can also come and see me to talk about it at GUADEC 2008, I will be there (I am actually already in Istanbul)!