All posts by silvia

Google summer of code

code, Digital Media, Open Source

If you’re a student and keen to get more open media technology to the Web, apply for a Google summer of code project with Xiph. There are also a few Annodex-style projects in the mix, which bring annotations and metadata to Ogg.

Your interest could be with javascript, ruby, php, XML, or C no matter – you will find a project at Xiph to suit your favorite programming language.

Of the list of proposed projects, my personal favorite is OggPusher – a browser plugin for transcoding video to Theora. Imagine an online service for transcoding video to Ogg Theora without having to worry about having all the libraries installed.

You also have the chance to propose your own project to the Xiph/Annodex guys – you just need to find somebody who is willing to mentor you, so hop on irc channel #xiph at freenode.net and start discussing.

Incidentally, Google is providing a financial reward for successful conclusion of a project – but don’t let that be your only motivation. If you’re not in it with your passion, don’t do a GSoC project. This is about interacting with an open source community whose goals you can identify with. Become involved!

Choosing a Web charting library

analytics, Open Source, vquence, , ,

At Vquence, until now we have used the Thumbstacks chart library for our graphs. TSChartlib is a simple open source charting library that uses the HTML canvas and an IE hack to create its graphs.

Vquence is now getting real serious with charts and graphs and we were thus looking for a more visually compelling and more flexible alternative. If you do a google search for “online charting library“, you get a massive amount of links to proprietary systems (admittedly, some of them offer the source code if you pay a premium). I will not be listing them here – go find them for yourself. However, the world of decent open source charting libraries is relatively small, so I want to share the outcome of my search.

There is the Open Flash Chart libary, which provides charting functionality for flash or flex programmers. The charts look rather nice and have overlays on the data points, which is something I missed thoroughly from TSChartlib.

There is a open source flex component called FlexLib which only does line charts, IIUC.

There is PlotKit, a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support and looks quite sexy.

Then there is JFreeChart, a 100% Java chart library that makes it easy for developers to display professional quality charts in their applications. Another Java charting library is JOpenChart. Incidentally, there’s a whole swag of further Java libraries that do charts and graphing. However, we are not too keen on Java for Web technologies.

Outside our area of interest, there are also open source chart libraries in C#, but C#/.NET is not a platform we intend to support, so these were out of the question.

Our choice came down to the “Open Flash Chart” library vs “Plotkit”. Of the two, the Flash library and technology seems more mature, easier to use, and creates sexier charts. Also, we can sensibly expect all Vquence users to have Flash installed, while we cannot expect the same to be true for SVG. However, I was fascinated by the flexible use of SVG and HTML Canvas and will certainly get back to it later, when I expect it to have matured a bit more.

Our choice of the Open Flash Chart was further facilitated by a rails plugin for it. Score!

Of course: I might have totally missed some obvious or better alternatives. So, leave me a reply if you think I did!

Australian Startup Carnival – Winners Announced

vquence

As mentioned earlier, Vquence took part in the Australian Startup Carnival and winners are now announced.

The feedback we got from the judges is encouraging. It’s great to see that Vquence is indeed providing a useful tool. But we are also aware that the service offering is not complete and needs a lot more tech development.

I’d like to address the concern of one judge that we are dependent on YouTube’s goodwill to keep their access open. This is not the case. Not only has YouTube just in the last days opened up their API even further, so I don’t think there’s a risk there. But in general: closing access to content is not what the Web is about – on the contrary – Yahoo is just opening up their search platform and Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web will enable an even more open exchange of data between different sites. However, Vquence does not rely solely on the availability of such data interfaces. That would be dumb. Where we cannot use APIs or RSS feeds or other data interfaces, we can always parse plain video Web pages, just like Google’s search engine parses Web pages. In short: our life would be harder without open interfaces, but not impossible.

As for the position that Vquence achieved in the Australian Startup Carnival: Vquence came in 5th position out of 28 participants, which is great, in particular since we are currently in a transition phase towards video metrics.

Xiph Mime Types and File Extensions

Digital Media, Open Source,

Late last year at Xiph we worked over our mime types and file extensions for Xiph content. The new set avoids using .ogg for everything and gives the different Xiph audio files a .oga (audio/ogg) and the Xiph video files a .ogv (video/ogg) extension, while using .ogx for more generic multiplexed content in Ogg. It’s important to separate between audio-only and video files – the codecs inside don’t really matter as much to select the appropriate application to start for using the file.

Today I read Fabian’s blog entry – one up for Ubuntu for getting behind it: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/201291 rock!

Extended Blog and Content

Stuff, ,

I have spent this weekend giving my Blog a work-over and extending the page set about myself – something I have been putting off for 5 years!

I now have a proper Website for Gingertech and I finally have the list of my publications up.

I have quite an extensive list of publications, so have been wondering for a while how to publish them such that it will be easy to manage. I have used a nice little WordPress plugin called “List Subpages” to get the hierarchical set of pages onto the site in a nicely structured way. I’m actually missing a RSS feed of these pages, but that’s not a major problem. I’m happy with what this provides for now – it’s a good start. It will make those people happy that have been bugging me for my publications and to whom my sad reply has always been to send them an extract of my CV.

I still need to add some of the abstracts of the publications into the posts, and complete the links to where you can download them. More work for further weekends. This is a good start for now and I am happy with it.

Technical Reports