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After a few hours of hacking using a wigdet that Michael and a few others pointed me at, I now have a working Banshee.OpenVP extension!

Much work still remains to be done, but what I have is a pretty stable foundation. Both the OpenVP 0.0.1 branch and Banshee.OpenVP are available over at the Google Code repo. They should both be stable enough to test, but since the build system isn’t in place yet I’m not asking the general public to try it out yet. But if you know your way around MD, autotools, and Banshee you might be able to get it working. (Please don’t ask for help with that part yet. If you get it working and hit a bug please let me know though.)

Banshee.OpenVP is on hold indefinitely until a stable GTK+ widget providing an OpenGL context is available. All of the wrappers I have tried have serious issues that prevent this project from even making minimal headway.

I’ve been working with several Banshee people this week and we finally got my patch committed. All this patch does is provide a managed event that acts as a PCM and spectrum data source. While simple, it is a required building block for the upcoming OpenVP extension.

Right now I am getting ready for the 0.0.1 release of OpenVP. The version number is intentionally scary; the API is far from stable and will be changing rapidly. The purpose of this release is to provide a stable target for the Banshee extension. Hopefully getting this in Banshee will generate interest in OpenVP, as well as giving Banshee some cool eye-candy. Everybody wins!

My understanding is that after OpenVP 0.0.1 is released and the Banshee.OpenVP extension is finished (it’s proof-of-concept quality right now) it will be absorbed into the Banshee source tree and maintained over there. Which means it will likely come with Banshee 1.4 by default. Awesome.

(Oh, and OpenVP has migrated from my personal Subversion repository over to its own Google Code project.)

It’s been just about a year since I started working at Ontario Systems. I’d always been lacking evidence that it’s a pretty fun place to work. Well now I have a few pictures of some of the more subtle goings-on.

Here are the present contents of the album, sure to grow as our shenanigans continue:

We use an XML editor named Epic (well, I don’t but other people do). I saw a few books on the bookshelf and couldn’t resist.

There’s been this hole by the baseboard of a wall here. Jason finally did something creative with it. (And I captioned it.)

The new version of del.icio.us (complete with a domain name change) was released yesterdayish and looks a lot nicer. Oh, but wait. About two out of three page loads: “Sorry, you’ve been temporarily blocked for accessing Delicious too rapidly.”

Did Delicious hire the Twitter engineers, or what?