Zaheer Abbas Merali

Yesterday was a very special evening for me. It marks the 1 year anniversary of the European Cup final of 2005, the greatest final ever. It happened in Istanbul at the Ataturk stadium and Liverpool won the match on penalties after a miraculous comeback from 3-0 down.

So it was fitting that this year, the year I moved to Barcelona, Barcelona were in the final and beat Arsenal. What spoilt it was that the Norwegian referees and linesmen were blamed for losing Arsenal the game. Last night in Barcelona however, there were fireworks, cars hooting and people screaming not only when Barcelona had won the game but also after each goal that was scored. The city as a whole was living the game. Having lived in a suburb of London, all my life until this year, this was a new experience. Everytime FC Barcelona or Espanyol win, there are fireworks and general expressions of joy in the streets.

Later on in the night, Alia and I watched “One night in May” a documentary about the final in Istanbul last year and I was in tears remembering how it felt to be there that night recalling all the celebrations that night.

A few people have contacted me about the Ruby bindings for GStreamer 0.10 and want to play around and try them out. They are at: https://trac.luon.net/ruby-gstreamer0.10/. I have comitted a few sample programs in there:

• gstfile.rb: Discovers information about a media file and outputs the result. The python bindings contain a similar example. Example output:
  

  Mime Type : video/quicktime
  Audio length: 0m 29s 963ms Video length: 0m 29s 963ms
  Video :
     320 x 240 @ 29969/1000fps
     Codec: H.264 / AVC
  Audio :
      2 channels(s) : 48000Hz @ 16bits
      Codec: MPEG-4 AAC audio
  Additional information :
  title: Liverpool (Luis Garcia) Vs Juventus DOGG aka john smith
  

• gstthumbnail.rb: Creates a png snapshot from a media file at a user given time in the file. This uses gnlfilesource from gnonlin which allows the application to say i want frames from time x for a duration of y

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