wingolog

Sup, tubes. Time to talk shop!

about

I should say first that I don't work for Fluendo. There it is! And indeed my longtime readers do know this, but one would not have known it from looking at my about page.

I did my best to sow confusion, noting that though the page was last updated in 2006, that the previous update had been in 2004; but such shadow-facts stuck in folks' minds. So, I have replaced that page with one much less informative.

Two points of continuity remain. One, I am (at this writing) still in Barcelona, a pleasant place on this planet. Two, I still have the good fortune that my current employment shares space with GStreamer folk: Wim and Edward from Collabora Multimedia. Sometimes people ask me about how the job with Collabora is going. Well it isn't!

the hack

Indeed, I don't write much about work, so one can be forgiven for mistaking my work, if such forgiveness were even necessary. The work hack goes well. We have always had customers, since the beginning, but now it really feels like the adoption curve is starting to tick up.

I'm sure the founders and business people are quite pleased about this. As for myself, it is a mixed blessing -- and my technical readers will understand me here. I don't work on the input side of things, so I am free to appreciate their progress, which is indeed wonderful. I work more on the side of the toolkit used to develop spatial applications, specifically on the video integration, and it is a huge challenging scaling problem (limpidity, documentation, orthogonality). The market gapes wide before us, and we race to stuff its maw with digestable API and such; and meet it, mostly, and barely. It is a race.

picture elements

Thankfully some of this work has seen the daylight recently. The novelties that prompt me to write are:

• John, talking at TED this year. I cannot tell you what a privilege it is to work with John. He is how he is in this clip: articulate, verbally and in code, and compassionate.

• My goofy self, on the UK's "Gadget Show". But fortunately, the UK keeps its "Gadget Show" to itself, denying the rest of the world the pleasure of my visage.

  The mechanics of that show were interesting. The presenter and the producer showed up one Sunday, the latter with a simple camera and tripod in tote, and four hours later they had their footage. All that trimmed down to some four minutes for the final cut. The whole thing very professional, but agreeable -- nice folks, doing their job.