Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ‘07 together.

My favorite bits:

• Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
• There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
  • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
  • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
  • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
• And my favorite sessions:
  • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
  • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
  • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
  • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
  • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
• The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

Just as a quick update, Bertrand Lorentz has put together a second release of the alarm plugin, v0.2.  For those of you who love Banshee so much that you want to hear it first thing when you wake up in the morning, this plugin is for you!
We’re moving unofficial Banshee stuff like this to a Google Code project, at http://code.google.com/p/banshee-unofficial-plugins.  With the use of the fabulous svnsync tool provided by Subversion 1.4, I’ve migrated the entire repository (history included) that was on svn.banshee-project.org to the Google Code project.

If you are ever looking to start a Banshee plugin, or want to see some random hack plugins, check it out.  I’m also happy to give SVN access to anyone who wants to make a commit or add their own module.

Happy hacking!

Howdy folks,

The guide that used to be at http://tricky.vanstaveren.us/Projects/Open_Source/Banshee/MTP has now been moved to the Banshee wiki at http://www.banshee-project.org/Guide/DAPs/MTP.  All the subpages have been moved accordingly.  My site has all the pages set to forward to the Banshee site, so update your bookmarks now :)
MTP progress has been busy as of late and with the recent release of libgphoto2-sharp 2.3.0, I’ve seen quite a few people trying to get their MTP devices working with Banshee and I’ve also been busy writing a lot of code.  Hopefully in the next few days I can tie up a few things and commit my local changes which include playlist support - yes folks, full playlist support.  It’s still a bit buggy tho, so I need a few more days to hack at it :)

libgphoto2-2.3.1 was released this past weekend, be sure to grab it for optimal MTP use!  It has a new hack to increase initialization times by factors between 10 and 100 times because of sped up metadata reading.  Naturally, this is hella-good :)

After an age or two of waiting, pondering over licensing issues, and doing bits of maintenance here and there, the Mono/.NET bindings for libgphoto2 have now been released!

One can now play with libgphoto2 compatible devices out of a Mono application. Why is this important? Because Banshee likes DAP’s (Digital Audio Players), and uses this library to access MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) compatible devices. It brings us one step closer to having good, clean, easy-to-use MTP access on your open-source box.

If you have one of these MTP devices and want to know more about how to access your device with Banshee, read my guide!

A big thanks to Larry Ewing of the excellent F-Spot project for licensing the original copy of libgphoto2-sharp under the LGPL; without this, I’d be lost.

So…it’s been a while since I’ve worked on this one, but I figure with Banshee 0.11.0 right around the corner, and plugins making their way into the portage tree, it’s time for a release!

So, without further adeiu, I give you banshee-alarm-plugin-0.1. This page will be the home of any further releases. You can also subscribe to the feed category alarm-plugin to hear about any updates or releases.

Cheers!

So what’s lirc-sharp, anyway?

lirc-sharp is a set of Mono/.NET bindings for the LIRC Client Library.

LIRC is a piece of software that enables users to use infrared remotes with their computers, as well as use an infrared transmitter on a computer to communicate with other devices. One practical use is for making a media remote control, for controlling things like playback in music players and movie players that we often use when not sitting at the desktop.
This is a pre-release of what will be lirc-sharp 0.1.0…as of now I don’t plan to add any more features to it until post 0.1.0. Right now I’m chasing down some bugs in it and plan to smash it bit more here before I call it a 0.1.0 release. The API has changed quite a bit since I first published this module in my subversion repository and if you did try using it before, you’ll find that it makes a bit more sense now than it did.

So why am I writing this? lirc-sharp will enable any developer on a Mono/.NET language to very easily connect to the LIRC daemon, parse the lircrc config files, and be listening for commands. In just a few lines of code, one can be listening for specified LIRC commands!
I am developing this for an Mono application that will relay LIRC commands to D-Bus enabled applications; initial support will be for Banshee and Muine but it will be easy to add your own application. More to come on this!

As always, visit the project page for the full details, and a download link.
If you develop an application using these bindings, please contact me and let me know!