drboblog

I have been led to believe I started this model matchstick train nine years ago (when I was eight); a present from my grandmother. I’m pleased to say it’s now finished!

Of course, that wasn’t nine years of hard work. Anybody would be hard-pressed to get me to do that; it was an initial spurt of activity, followed by years of bits of the model just sitting on a shelf. I picked up construction again last year, and I’ve been working on it on and off since then.

Unfortunately, it’s not as well-built as it could be, with several of the structural parts of the model not being square (or even flat, in places) due to mistakes I made all those years ago. Still, I think it’s turned out OK!

Next, I think I’ll finish off all those Airfix models I’ve neglected over the years. There are about three helicopters in various stages of misassembly or decay waiting for some love.

In GNOME news, I’m hacking on getting YouTube upload support into Conduit, with the eventual aim of adding a Conduit plugin in Totem to allow video upload to any supported video website. I’ve been having awful trouble with the Python GData API (again), but I think it’s just about sorted now. I got the first video uploaded ten minutes ago, and it’s cleanup from here on!

It took a little longer than I’d have liked, considering the simplicity of the patch, but I’ve finally added support for high-resolution videos in Totem’s YouTube plugin.

Compare:

On the top is the old, low-resolution video, and on the bottom is the spiffy new high-resolution video, automatically downloaded using YouTube’s fmt=18 option if your connection speed is set to 1.5Mbps or higher. As per Bastien’s testing, we can’t use the fmt=6 option due to it not being supported for many videos.

The difference may not be immediately obvious due to the window being so small for the screenshot, but it is visible — just look at the left-hand side of the hut’s roof. Enjoy.

YouTube has come to Totem…

…in the form of a plugin I’ve written which allows you to browse YouTube from the comfort of everyone’s favourite movie player. It allows searching for videos, and when you play a video, it displays its related videos.

The feature I’m most proud of though, is the fact that it automatically paginates when you scroll down the search results, loading more results as you go down. With a hint from Patrys in the comments in my blog post on it (and thanks to the other guys who left comments ), it works by loading results immediately if you scroll 80% or more of the way down the treeview with the mouse or keyboard, or if you let go of the scrollbar handle more than 80% of the way down when moving it with the mouse. Query pages are loaded in a separate thread, and then the results are brought in with an idle function. This isn’t quite as lag-free as I’d've wanted, but I can’t see much more I can do to improve things.

Anyway, try things out by downloading and compiling SVN Totem, then enabling the “YouTube browser” plugin. You’ll need the GData Python library (that’s what the YouTube API uses, PyGTK 2.12 and Python 2.5. Before anyone asks, there’s no way to sanely support video uploading yet, as Google unfortunately haven’t yet exposed a public upload API.

Oh, and the cake is a lie.