A Brief Update
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: BBC, Holiday, IBC, Ingex, Journal, Open Source, Tapeless, Tech, WorkIt’s been so long since I posted that my friends are complaining about it through their Facebook statuses. How sad is that? I’ve been very busy, and while I have a couple of interesting (at least to the techies) posts up my sleeve, I thought I’d briefly let you know what’s going in my world.
The summer has flown by, and it seems barely days ago that I was at John Mayer, Bon Jovi and Jason Mraz gigs. Since then I’ve mostly just been working. The Ingex project has been keeping me very busy indeed, and I’ve also been preparing for my next project, starting towards the end of this month. More details soon hopefully…
I’ve largely completed my work on a monitoring interface for Ingex, with just a few new features to add. Excitingly, it’s been released on SourceForge, so if you really want to set up your own video capture and transcode system, you can check it out of the CVS repository and have some fun with it. With only 3 weeks to go before I finish my time on this project, I started the mammoth task of a whole new bit of web interface for production logging. The theory goes that instead of a PA (Production Assistant) noting down all the take details, comments and notes on paper, they can enter them directly into Ingex. This allows information to be related directly to source footage, as well as other features such as automatic control of the recorders, so when you note the start of a take, it starts being recorded. This is turning out to be what is technically known as a bitch of a task, involving user interface elements never before known to man and complicated data synchronisation problems. I’m hoping I’ll at least manage a bare-bones implementation by the time I leave at the end of next week.
This weekend I’m off to IBC, the International Broadcast Conference. I’ll be popping in to the exhibition on Friday and Saturday, as well as taking the opportunity for a few beverages in Amsterdam, where it’s held. It should be good fun, I just hope I can shake the cold I seem to have right now. I’ll also be attending some meetings with partner organisations to do with my next project which is quite exciting, but can’t say much more until I’ve been a good boy and checked with my new manager as to whether it’s OK for me to blog about it.
Between finishing on my current project and starting the new one, I’m off for a week’s sailing in Sicily with my parents. I can’t wait, as I badly need the break so I think a little sun, sea and gentle breeze should do the trick nicely. We’re sailing a Hanse, which is a yacht I’ve never sailed before, so that should be fun. I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it when I return.
Outside of work and international jaunts, I’ve been up to some fun things, from playing twister with friends (can you believe I’d never played it before?) to trekking up to York for the bank holiday weekend for a barbecue and a trip up the river on a little drive-it-yourself “Red Boat”. A highlight was my nephew Sebastian’s first birthday last weekend, where I had much fun playing with his new toys, of course. I shan’t gush about how lovely he is, but suffice to say he’s the cutest baby in the world, some kind of child prodigy/genius etc etc etc…
So there we go. It wasn’t exciting, or even particularly interesting. But consider yourself informed. I shall endeavour to post something more thought-provoking soon!