Inaugural Post

Whew - things have been hectic this year so far. I have just finished co-lecturing a course at my university, so hopefully things will calm down - just the exam on the third of June to invigilate and mark.

I have created this blog in order to share my progress made in my Google Summer of Code project, but first I will give my readers a bit of background information.

I'm currently studying a Masters of Science Engineering at the University of Cape Town (in the beautiful land of South Africa :). I finished my B.Sc. Electrical and Computer Engineering last year, and decided to carry on studying.

I'm currently conducting research in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for Next Generation Networks. It is a telecommunications framework designed to allow rapid development and deployment of new services. For my undergraduate thesis I worked on a simple IPTV broadcasting system over the IMS framework, and currently I am researching different ways of conducting video conferencing utilising the specific control signalling that the IMS supports (an extended version of SIP).

These two projects lead me to becoming involved with the GStreamer community as I used the GStreamer Multimedia framework to handle all my audio / visual needs for my IPTV system. More recently, I have begun to incorporate the Farsight 2 work into my research, and have been using it extensively to create a video conferencing system.

This collaboration (or rather, me asking questions and getting answers) has lead me try and contribute to the GStreamer/Farsight cause, which has resulted in my acceptance to the Google Summer of Code Project.

My GSoc 2008 project aims to take the old unmaintained plugin for the MSN webcam protocol and recode it for the Farsight2 API, as well as integrating it with a Telepathy connection manager. The end result of this project will consist of a plugin developed for Farsight2 (written in C) together with the necessary documentation and several examples in order to enable other developers to utilise it easily and successfully.

Well, thats the goal - I hope I can complete it successfully. I'll try to update this blog with my progress - we will have to see how that works out :)