Silverlight/Moonlight on Teleton page

Originally uploaded by markuz

I've entered in the Teleton web page just to know when it started, and my surprise is that they used silverlight/Moonlight to play the teleton transmition.

Finally!!!, Christine, my beloved media player is running on Windows, this is something that I really wanted to do for the next release. I had spend the last nights trying to compile it, first I tried to compile GStreamer, then I realized that there are binaries in the GStreamer WinBuilds project, with a little less work, I tried to compile Christine using cygwin, but it didn't worked. Then using the Python's distutils I compiled the C modules and I created a binary with Py2exe

There it is, running. I still have a lot of work to do, because Christine is written for UNIX and several technologies like Dbus are not in win32, although it seems to be in progress.

I'm running it on a virtual machine and I haven't tested if it really plays something, I'll give a try tomorrow.

For tonight I'm happy :-)

Christine playing videos

Originally uploaded by markuz

I was playing with gstreamer video sinks, I found that using cacasink and aasink you can play videos in ascii mode ;-) funny even when (for me) has no good use.

In ICT Consulting I did a small program that help the support team to create new tickets in the tracking system and keep them updated. In the "update" screen, I put a TreeView to show the comments history.

For Gtk TreeViews are just a "viewer" of the data stored in the "model", but it depends in the way the cell renderer will do its job. The render for text is called.. yes, you guessed: CellRendererText. This item will render the text as it is in the model.

If you are using text with markup (with the pango markup) it will be displayed with bold, italic and many other properties you define in your markup. But this render have a small problem, if you have a long line because the input method was a text box and the user didn't use the return key then you will end with a very very long line in the treeview.

If the line is not too big then the use of the scrollbar may help you, but, if that's not the case, and you or your user have to check more and more lines like that, using the scrollbar is tedious.

The fix: make the column usually big to wrap the text.

The trick is know the size of the window, and compute the space left by other columns then, set the
wrap_width property of the cell renderer according to the space left. That's what the "resize_wrap" function do.