Chef de Cambuse

FOSDEM was great!

A much larger embedded dev-room, free bus-transportation from the venue to the train station and even a cloak-room!
Thanks to all the people there for making that event possible.

For someone living in one of Germany’s wine-areas attending the FOSDEM Beer Event is quite a challenge.
I read that this year the bill was a new record, exceeding 10.000,- €.

And it was time for enjoying some other Belgian specialties too - at the best chippy, at least the best that was open on early Saturday morning and in walking distance from the Delirium Café.

Larger View

I had switched from car to plane as I feared a bit the announced snow in Brussels and did not wanted to end in some other 100km traffic-jam driving home on Sunday evening, but not one snow-flake showed up over the weekend.

But that gave Lufthansa the opportunity to serve me another culinary extravaganza on my flights to and from Brussels.

PS: Remind myself next year that the Godiva store near the venue is closed on Sundays.
PPS: Our spontaneous Coherence meeting was a big success too, but more on that in separate post.

The last year has seen an increasing number of DLNA/UPnP devices reach the market - TVs, Gaming Consoles, Audio Players, Amplifiers, Cell Phones,...
DLNA is everywhere; now more than ever open software is needed to bring all these devices together!

2008 was a great year for Coherence:

• no less than five releases
• many new backends like Ampache, Apple-Trailers, BBC podcasts, DVB-Daemon, Flickr, Gallery2, Lolcats, MetaTracker, TED.com videos
• on-the-fly audio transcoding using GStreamer
• unique Totem, Nautilus or Eye-Of-Gnome plugins
• KDE desktop applet that allows you to start Coherence
• many compatibility improvements, and work-arounds for non-compliant hardware e.g. Xbox 360
• DBus enhancements - simplifying the use of Coherence as a service
• device implementations other than Audio/Video, like BinaryLight or DimmableLight
• widely visible on Wikipedia & Freshmeat, even mentioned on Ars Technica

2009 looks to be another promising year:

Coherence has been successfully registered for the French "Trophees du Libre" (Free Software Awards) contest - cross your fingers pls ;o)
A new Youtube backend, opening the door to new online-content.

Comparing January 2008 & January 2009, the number of unique visitors to the Coherence website has increased three fold, now reaching over 6000 per month.

All your contributions bring more and more innovation in the DLNA/UPNP world and help making Coherence a great project.

Thanks all of you for using, participating in and promoting Coherence!