Netzflocken

Bonjour from Paris.

This morning we - Philippe, Erwan, Adriaan, Bart, Benjamin and myself - meet at the offices of Mandriva, who kindly offered to host the sprint

and started with our work to integrate Coherence into KDE, mainly to create a kio network slave and an Amarok plugin - both connecting to Coherence over DBus.

Over the typical French lunch break there has been some serious discussion between Adriaan, Bart and Erwan about French cheese.

I now own too the certificates to operate a pleasure craft on rivers and on the largest lake here in Germany - the Bodensee, or Lake Constance in English.

Now what’s missing is the yacht.

Coherence is one out of four finalists in the category “Media”
of this years Trophées du libre.

Kudos once more to Erwan Velu for his magnificent promotion!

Thanks to the assiduous work of Erwan Velu, Coherence is one of the participants of the Trophées du Libre 2009 contest in the category ‘Media’.

The finalists will be announced April 22nd - please keep your fingers crossed.

Yesterday I successfully passed the exams for the

International certificate
for operators of pleasure craft
on the waterways navigable by sea-going ships

Thanks a million to Dirk from sail & more for his excellent preparation and training!

I stumbled upon these two thinks the last days, which both I’m immediately ready to sign.

Even if they are - but only on a first glance - a bit contradictorily.

• Manifesto for Software Craftmanship
• The Cult of Done Manifesto

FOSDEM was great!

A much larger embedded dev-room, free bus-transportation from the venue to the train station and even a cloak-room!
Thanks to all the people there for making that event possible.

For someone living in one of Germany’s wine-areas attending the FOSDEM Beer Event is quite a challenge.
I read that this year the bill was a new record, exceeding 10.000,- €.

And it was time for enjoying some other Belgian specialties too - at the best chippy, at least the best that was open on early Saturday morning and in walking distance from the Delirium Café.

Larger View

I had switched from car to plane as I feared a bit the announced snow in Brussels and did not wanted to end in some other 100km traffic-jam driving home on Sunday evening, but not one snow-flake showed up over the weekend.

But that gave Lufthansa the opportunity to serve me another culinary extravaganza on my flights to and from Brussels.

PS: Remind myself next year that the Godiva store near the venue is closed on Sundays.
PPS: Our spontaneous Coherence meeting was a big success too, but more on that in separate post.

The last year has seen an increasing number of DLNA/UPnP devices reach the market - TVs, Gaming Consoles, Audio Players, Amplifiers, Cell Phones,...
DLNA is everywhere; now more than ever open software is needed to bring all these devices together!

2008 was a great year for Coherence:

• no less than five releases
• many new backends like Ampache, Apple-Trailers, BBC podcasts, DVB-Daemon, Flickr, Gallery2, Lolcats, MetaTracker, TED.com videos
• on-the-fly audio transcoding using GStreamer
• unique Totem, Nautilus or Eye-Of-Gnome plugins
• KDE desktop applet that allows you to start Coherence
• many compatibility improvements, and work-arounds for non-compliant hardware e.g. Xbox 360
• DBus enhancements - simplifying the use of Coherence as a service
• device implementations other than Audio/Video, like BinaryLight or DimmableLight
• widely visible on Wikipedia & Freshmeat, even mentioned on Ars Technica

2009 looks to be another promising year:

Coherence has been successfully registered for the French "Trophees du Libre" (Free Software Awards) contest - cross your fingers pls ;o)
A new Youtube backend, opening the door to new online-content.

Comparing January 2008 & January 2009, the number of unique visitors to the Coherence website has increased three fold, now reaching over 6000 per month.

All your contributions bring more and more innovation in the DLNA/UPNP world and help making Coherence a great project.

Thanks all of you for using, participating in and promoting Coherence!

If you want to talk a bit about Coherence or DLNA/UPnP in general, get in touch or ping me on irc.

I'll have the pleasure to talk about Coherence at the FOSDEM 2008.

The talk will be on Sunday afternoon at 16:40 in room Ferrer and will have a special focus on the UPnP integration in Rhythmbox.

So if you are in Brussels, be sure to drop by and do not miss it. :-)

If you want to meet me, speak about DLNA/UPnP in general, or have a revolutionary idea for Coherence, please ping me on irc.