Last week I could not work full-time because I had to learn for my last exam on Friday. Nevertheless I managed to accomplish important milestones:

• I restructured Memphis: Removed all global variables and made it thread safe.
• Refined the new GObject based api on top of it.
• Added tile rendering capability that implements the 'slippy map' specification (used by Mapnik and Osmarender).
• Created a demo application that renders png image tiles of the area that contains data in an xml map file.

Memphis is now close to the state that it can be used in libchamplain. Only some minor features are missing (e.g. dynamic resolution) and some parts need a cleanup and better input sanitation.

Finally, I found the time to blog about my GSoC Project. Better late than never! ;-)

The goal of my project is the implementation of local map rendering of OpenStreetMap data in libchamplain. My mentor is Pierre-Luc, the maintainer of libchamplain. The first official week of the SoC has passed, but I still had to attend lectures and exams. That's why I have not much to report yet:

• I re-evaluated the rendering library. I originally intended to use Mapnik, which has the drawback of heavy C++ dependencies. The new selection is Memphis, which is based on eXpat, GLib and Cairo. It is not as mature and feature complete as Mapnik, but I think it will be the better choice in the long run.
• Read about the beauty of GObjects.
• Created a GObject based API for Memphis.
• Started to refactor Memphis into a library.

My overall progress can be tracked here: http://foregroundnoise.wordpress.com/gsoc-2009/

Video editing support is still very poor on Linux. Until Kdenlive or Pitivi mature you should give Blender a try. Even if you are not into 3D.

Check out this presentation by Bassam Kurdali (ogg) at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009. He shows how to setup the interface, split and merge clips and use filters and transitions.

Hello World! Yet another blog to increase the web pollution. Enjoy!