Zaheer Abbas Merali

April and the first week of May flew by. 7th April, Alia’s parents and her brother, Ali were here. We spent our days going and seeing a selection of the sights of Barcelona as well as a trip to Platja Casteldelfells for beach action which turned into a Sitges trip because we got on the wrong train! The nights were mainly spent having dinner at home and a little bit of Wii. Excite Truck seemed to be the most liked game.

Ali and myself playing Wii boxing.

Only two days had passed since Alia’s parents and brother had left and Fawzia, my cousin arrived for a week. Alia and Fawzia spent a lot of time catching up. Fawzia has been living in Dubai for longer than we have been in Barcelona, so it was good for all of us to catch up. This time when going to Platja Casteldelfells, we got on the right train. Wii was also enjoyed, so much so that Fawzia bought a Wii from here (no stock in England anywhere, then and probably now). Wii Play was the order of that week.

The following week after Fawzia had left, my mother came with a friend of hers and my brother, Imran. In their stay, we went to Port Aventura and to an FC Barcelona game. My mother and her friend, as a result of their stay probably know their way around Barcelona better than they do London. My brother got addicted to Wii Sports, especially Bowling.

2 days after they left, Alia and I went to London for the weekend. Mum had gone to Moshi, Tanzania to bring my grandmother to London. We spent the weekend, visiting friends and family. On Monday, we got to spend a little time with mum and my grandma after they came back from Moshi.

And this weekend is the first weekend since we came back from London!

People have asked me about DVB status in GStreamer. The recent release of gst-plugins-bad includes the dvb plugin. The plugin is reliable and stable and is being used in flumotion-dvb, which we are using with great effect on our Flumotion Streaming Platform., Most of the work has actually been on improving our transport stream demuxer (MPL licenced) to support multiple sections and also to provide applications details of what is in the transport stream. Information such as what program numbers are in the transport stream, what types of elementary stream are in that program, what language the audio streams are in, etc. I have also created a dvb-si-1 branch, where the demuxer can provide information about what actual show is on what program, what the name of the tv channel for a program is etc. Also I have recently acquired a Dreambox DM7025and have it booting off an NFS root. GStreamer and dvbsrc runs great on it. Also tmbinc has written dvbmediasinks for it, which take mpeg elementary streams and display them using hardware to decode. What I am currently working on is handling the scrambling tables and pids and to write a GStreamer element that given the ECM and EMM pids from the transport stream and the video and audio streams that are scrambled and decode them by communicating with dccamd (cam module for dreamcrypt) which runs on the box.

A few days before the launch of the Wii in Spain, I picked mine up from Toys R Us here in Barcelona. It is extremely good fun and considering my main gaming in the last 5 years has been almost only Pro Evolution Soccer (am not really a gamer), I keep on wanting to play. I have Wii Sports, Wii Play, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Super Mario Bros (virtual console) and Legend of Zelda (virtual console). The use of the controller in the games is just genius. My favourite game is probably Tennis on Wii Sports, but a lot of the mini-games on Rayman are really good fun. The graphics are better than I was expecting after hearing people slag off the Wii for its poor graphics. I am now looking forward to Tiger Woods and Pro Evolution Soccer on the Wii..

Over Christmas and New Year, Alia, myself and my Mum went to the South of Spain for 2 weeks starting off in Benalmedina (close to Malaga), going through Granada, Cordoba, Sevilla, Faro (in Portugal), Rota (near Cadiz) and Gibraltar and had an amazing time. I plan to put up the pictures soon.

So Alia and I are off to Barcelona tomorrow. Obviously it’s been busy since coming back from Hajj on 15th January.

The plan is to be in Barcelona for 12-18 months and see from there, you never know may stay there. I am going to be working for the good guys at Fluendo on things like Flumotion.

It’ll be hard leaving friends, family, our mosque community and of course Liverpool behind here in London, but we are looking forward to this journey as a new chapter in our life and hopefully some friends and family come and visit and make Barcelona their holiday destination.

Once a bit settled in Barca, hope to get GStreamer 0.10 out of hard mask in Gentoo and work on porting Istanbul to 0.10.