I ended up being one of the five selected to the Finnish Google Summer Of Code equivalent Kesäkoodi, or Summercode in English.

This means next summer I will be paid for hacking on Ardour for three months. My work will consist of renewing Ardour's Export dialog while adding functionality to it, and adding meta data and tagging support to Ardour. More information can be found in my project plan.

Well, the title tells it all. I made it to the summercode finals :)

The next selection phase requires me to write a detailed project plan and make a presentation for the finals, which will be held the 28th of march.

I've also lately got some job interview offers, so I'll have a lot to think about concerning next summer...

"Summercode Finland is a yearly project organized by FILOSI (the Finnish Linux and Open Source Initiative), which aims to support Finnish participation in significant open source projects and to strengthen the open source competencies that companies need."

The project has been held three times, but I heard about it for the first time this year and applied. The deadline for applications just passed, so I thought I could put up my application for people to see. All constructive comments are welcome!

My proposed project is to renew Ardour's export dialog and add tagging/meta data support to it. Thorsten Wilms has created an extensive document about renewing the export dialog which will be the basis of my work if I get selected.

The finalists shall be published on March 10th and the finals will be held the 28th, so for now I'll just have to wait...

The last few couple of days I've been working on my Ardour session merger, which will hopefully eventually be a part of Ardour. I got a lot done, but much still has to be done.

I've never really liked GUI-programing, and gtkmm doesn't seem like too much fun either. Nevertheless, I got a basic implementation done, which is capable of importing locations from a session file to the currently open Ardour session.

See the project page for a screen shot and more!

So, yesterday I bought myself a nice new 24" wide screen monitor, but unfortunately it took me many hours to get it to work with full resolution. With a default setup I could only get a resolution of 1600x1200. After a little of googling around I found out that nVidia cards have problems with EDID information, but it is also not uncommon for screens to give false information.

Well, whatever the cause was, I finally got it fixed. After trying various options, it seemed that the only problem was the maximum pixel clock value. Everything else was fine, so using the nVidia Linux driver I only had to add the following line into my xorg.conf under the "Display" section:

Option "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck"

Now I can enjoy 1080p HD-material
...as long as it is low quality enough. It seems my 2,8GHz pentium4 has problems decoding too-high-quality video. I'm afraid I might have set up a cycle of upgrades to my computer :/