This release of scikit-survival adds two features that are standard in most software for survival analysis, but were missing so far:

1. CoxPHSurvivalAnalysis now has a ties parameter that allows you to choose between Breslow’s and Efron’s likelihood for handling tied event times. Previously, only Breslow’s likelihood was implemented and it remains the default. If you have many tied event times in your data, you can now select Efron’s likelihood with ties="efron" to get better estimates of the model’s coefficients.
2. A compare_survival function has been added. It can be used to assess whether survival functions across 2 or more groups differ.

We are laboring on getting Fedora Workstation 31 out the door next Month, with the beta release being made available last week. So here are some of the highlights of this upcoming release which I and the team hope you will enjoy. Many of these items I already covered in my June blogpost about Fedora Workstation 31, so if you read that one consider this one a status update as there will be some repeats.

Wayland improvements
Fedora has been leading the migration to Wayland since day one and we are not planning to stop. XWayland on demand has been an effort a lot of people contributed to this cycle. The goal is to only need XWayland for legacy X applications, not have it started and running all the time as that is a waste of system resources and also having core functionality still depend on X under Wayland makes the system more fragile. XWayland-on-demand has been a big effort with contributions from a lot of people and companies. One piece of this was the Systemd user session patches that was originally written by Iain Lane from Canonical. They had been lingering for a bit so Benjamin Berg took those patches on for this cycle and helped shepherd them over the finish line and get them merged upstream. This work wasn’t a hard requirement for Wayland-on-demand, but since it makes it a lot easier to do different things under X and Wayland which in turn makes moving towards XWayland-on-demand a little simpler to implement. That work will also allow (in future releases) us to do things like only start services under GNOME that are actually needed for your hardware, so for instance if you don’t have a bluetooth adapter in your computer there is no reason to run the bits of GNOME dealing with bluetooth. So expect further resource savings coming from this work over time.

Carlos Garnacho then spent time going through GNOME Shell removing any lingering X dependencies while Olivier Fourdan worked on cleaning up the control center. This work has mostly landed, but it is hidden behind an experimental flag (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "[...,'autostart-xwayland']") in Fedora 31 as we need to mature it a bit more before its ready for primetime. But we hope and expect to have it running by default in Fedora Workstation 32.

One example of something that was still requiring X that is now gone is the keyboard and mouse accessibility features in GNOME 3, which Olivier Fourdan got re-implemented and improved for this release. So if anyone out there reading this rely on the hover click accessibility feature then that is actually a lot nicer in Fedora Workstation 31. As seen in the screenshot below you now have this nice little pie animation filling up as it prepares to click which is a huge improvement over how it used to work.

Click on hover in action

Another item we feel is an important part of reducing the need for XWayland is having Firefox running natively on Wayland. Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working tirelessly on trying to ensure Firefox works well on Wayland and in the Fedora 31 Beta it is running on Wayland by default. However there are a few bugs discovered that Martin and Jan are trying hard to fix atm so we can keep this default for the GA release, but if they miss the deadline we will ship the X backend version in F31 and then move to the Wayland version later on.

In Fedora Workstation 31 Wayland is still disabled by default if you use the Nvidia binary driver. The reason for this is due to lack of acceleration under XWayland, meaning that any application depending on GLX, like a lot of games, will just get software GL rendering with the binary NVidia driver. This isn’t something we can resolv on our own, Nvidia has to do the work since its their closed source driver, but we been discussing it regularly with them and we been told now that they are looking at the work Adam Jackson some time ago which was specifically aimed at helping them bring their X.org driver to XWayland. We don’t have a timeline yet, but it is being actively looked at and hopefully a proper date can be provided soon. I am actually running Fedora Workstation 31 using the NVidia driver myself at the moment on this laptop, and for those interested in helping dogfood this setup, in preparation for hopefully being able to enable Wayland on NVidia in Fedora Workstation 32, it is fairly simple thing to do. Under /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/ you find a file called 61-gdm.rules, just edit that file and comment out (#) the line that reads ‘DRIVER=="nvidia", RUN+="/usr/libexec/gdm-disable-wayland"‘ and you will revert to a standard setup where your standard session is a Wayland session, but with a x.org session available as a fallback. The more people that run this and report issues the better as it helps us make this rock solid before releasing it upon the world.

Atomic kernel modesetting
Jonas Ådahl has been hard at work this cycle on adding support for atomic mode setting. This work is not done, but the first parts of it has landed, but it has major long term advantages for us. I asked Jonas to provide a short description of the work and what it will eventually achieve as I don’t we articulated that anywhere else yet:

There are two ways for a display server to control the configuration and content of monitors – the old classic Kernel Mode Setting (classic KMS), and newer atomic Kernel Mode Setting (atomic KMS). The main difference between these two modes of operations is that with atomic KMS, the display server posts transactions containing configuration KMS that are then processed atomically by the kernel, while when using the classic KMS, the display server posts configurations command by command, where each monitor is configured by posting multiple commands. The benefits with atomic KMS are for example that the display server will up front know whether a configuration is valid (e.g. enough memory bandwidth), or that the display server can configure multiple aspects of the hardware atomically.

During the cycle leading up to Fedora Workstation 31 the foundations for how mutter (the window manager powering GNOME Shell) can make use of the new atomic KMS API was put in place. What was done was to introduce an internal transactional API for configuring monitors. This will eventually allow us to have much more control over how more advanced monitor features are utilized. For example it will be possible to place client windows directly in hardware overlay planes, meaning we can more often completely bypass full frame compositing when only the content of a single window changes. Another example for what this enables us to do is with color management; we will be able to do seamless switching between managing window color profiles using OpenGL and for instance gamma ramps. Yet another example of what this work opens the door for is framebuffer modifiers, which will among other things potentially result in higher performance with very high resolution monitors.
Finally an important aspect of the work done related to the new internal KMS API is that it aims to be thread safe, meaning eventually it will be possible to put KMS processing completely in a separate thread. This means that together with e.g. moving input device processing to its own thread it will be possible to get very short latency between mouse movement and the cursor
being moved on screen.

QtGNOME improvements
Jan Grulich has continued improved the QtGNOME module to make sure Qt apps integrate as well as possible into Fedora Workstation. His latest updates ensures that the theming keeps up to date with latest upstream changes in Adwaita, that we have a fully working dark theme, that accessibility theming work and that it works with Flatpaks. Below is a screenshot showing Okular running allowing you to see how the QtGNOME module affects the look and feel of Qt applications.

Firmware improvements
The LVFS firmware service keeps going from strength to strength. Richard Hughes presented on it during the Open Firmware Conference recently and was approached by a lot of vendors afterwards both thanking him and Red Hat for the effort, but also asking about getting more of their hardware supported. New vendors are coming onboard at rapid pace, for instance Acer joined recently and are planning to support more of their hardware on the LVFS going forward. It is also worth mentioning the GNOME Firmware tool that can now be downloaded from flathub and which works great on Fedora Workstation 31.

OpenH264 Greatly Improved
The much improved version of OpenH264 will be available soon for Fedora users. This new version adds support for the High and Advanced profiles of H264 which is what most videos found online or produced by your camera would be using. This means you can add H264 playback support to your Fedora Workstation without having to search online for 3rd party repositories like you have had to do up to now. We also are trying to ensure this will be usable by Firefox for video playback eventually. This was work we partnered with Endless, Cisco to hire the multimedia experts at Centricular to do, so another great example of cross company collaboration to bring improved functionality to the community.

Fedora Toolbox
Debarshi Ray has been working on many small improvements and better robustness for Fedora Toolbox going into Fedora Workstation 31. Fedora Toolbox for those not aware of it yet, is our tool to make doing development using pet containers simple and convenient, providing ease of use features on top of traditional container tools and integration with GNOME terminal and the GNOME Shell. The version shipping in F31 will be the last shell script based one as once Fedora Workstation 31 is out we will be going all in on rewritting Fedora Toolbox in Go, in preparation for future development and expansion. I strongly recommend trying it out as it will help open your eyes to the possibilities that using pet containers for development gives you. For instance you can easily set up a RHEL based pet container on your Fedora system to do development work that is mean to be deployed on a RHEL system or grab our special AI/ML development container for easy access to TensorFlow and similar tools.

Improved Classic mode
Another notable change in this release is the updates to GNOME Classic mode. GNOME Classic mode is a set of extensions to GNOME 3 that makes it look and behave a lot more like GNOME 2, which still has many fans out there. With this release we collected feedback from a group of Classic mode users and tried to improve the experience further, mostly be removing some remaining GNOME 3’isms that didn’t really fit the GNOME Classic user experience, like the overview and the hot corner. The session manager is now also easily accessible in the bottom corner. The theming also got cleaned up a little to remove the last bit of the ‘black’ GNOME 3 theming. That said I think it is important to remember that this is still GNOME 3 in the end, we are really just showcasing the power of extensions to tweak the user experience in quite fundamental ways here.

Improved GNOME Classic mode

Fleet Commander
Fleet Commander 0.14.1 is out just in time for Fedora Workstation 31. Fleet Commander is a tool for doing large scale deployments of Fedora and RHEL workstations, allowing you to set system wide profiles. So for instance if you have a GNOME Shell extension everyone in your organization or a specific team inside your organization should have enabled, you can deploy a profile with Fleet commander ensuring that extension is enabled for those users. Basically any setting within GNOME can be set using this, including network configuration options. There is also support for Firefox and LibreOffice settings in Fleet Commander. The big feature addition of 0.14.1 is that Fleet Commander now can be used with Active Directory, which means that even if your company or university use Active Directory for their user management, you can now deploy Fedora and RHEL profiles without needing FreeIPA. Fleet Commander is pretty much finished at this point, at least as far as any piece of software can ever be finished. Oliver Gutierrez Suarez is working on finishing up some last bits of Firefox support currently, but we don’t have any major Fleet Commander items on his todo list after that, so if you been waiting to test it out there are on new major features you need to wait on anymore, it is all there. If you are doing large scale linux desktop deployments I definitely recommend checking out Fleet commander. You will find that Fleet Commander definitely makes Fedora a great choice for doing large scale Linux desktop deployments.

Pipewire
We are not doing a lot of changes to Pipewire for Fedora Workstation 31. Mostly some bugfixes and minor improvements to the video infrastructure it already provides in Fedora 30 for Flatpaks and web browsers. We are planning major changes for Fedora Workstation 32 though, where we in fact plan to ship Pipewire as a tech preview for both Jack and PulseAudio users. The way it will work is that the system will still default to PulseAudio, but we will provide either a script or a UI option to switch over to Pipewire (and back again). There is also a plan to have a core set of ProAudio applications available as Flatpaks for Fedora Workstation 32 tested and verified to work perfectly with Pipewire, the current apps planned to be included are Ardour, Carla, a2jmidid, Hydrogen, Qtractor and Patroneo, but if there is interested contributors joining the effort we could have even more. Then for Fedora Workstation 33 the idea is to ship with Pipewire as the default audio handler, but with some way for users to switch back to PulseAudio if they have a need. Not unlike how the setup is currently with Wayland and X.org in Fedora. Wim Taymans will also be attending the Sonoj conference in Cologne Germany at the end of October to discuss Pipewire with many members of the Linux ProAudio community and hopefully help prepare them for a future where Fedora Workstation is the perfect home for ProAudio users and developers.

Sysprof
Christian Hergert spent some cycles this round on improving the Sysprof tool as it was becoming clear that to keep improving GNOME Shell and general desktop performance going forward we needing better data and ability to find the bottlenecks. Tools like sysprof often ends up being the unsung heroes of the system, but as we continue improving the overall GNOME performance and resource usage of the next few years the revamped sysprof tool will be a big part of that story.

Much improved Sysprof tool

Silverblue
A lot of the items we work on are part of our vision around Silverblue, a Linux desktop OS built on the idea of an immutable core image. We often mention the theoretic advantage that such a setup with an immutable OS brings, but actually as I upgraded from F30 and F31 beta on my RPM based laptop (I got a separate machine where I run Silverblue) I hit the exact kind of issue that Silverblue can help us and our users avoid. What happened was that after my upgrade I suddenly had no Wayland session anymore, just the fallback X.org session. After quite a bit of fault searching I discovered that the reason for this was that I had been testing Valves ACO shader compiler on F30. These packages had a newer version number than the F31 packages and thus where not overwritten as part of the upgrade. Unfortunately the EGL package that came as part of that repository did not work well on F31 and thus the Wayland session failed. Once I did a distro sync and forced all packages to be the actual F31 versions things worked correctly, but it did illustrate the challenges with systems where different parts of the core can and will get updated at different times. With a single well tested core OS image these kind of problems will not happen. That said being able to test such things as ACO is valuable and useful and luckily OStree and Silverblue do offer functionality for installing such things in a clean and non-damaging way through what is known as package layering. When you install new packages like that on using package layering they will only last until your next reboot, after you reboot your back to a clean original state system. Of course if you really want to keep some experimental packages around there are other things you can do too, like overriding, but for simple testing like I did with ACO, package layering will provide you with a simple and safe way to do that.

We realize that Silverblue is a major change in how a Linux distro is ‘supposed’ to work, so we are taking our time with it to ensure we do it right and that we have made sure applications and tools work in a way that functions well on an immutable OS. So if you are interested I do recommend that you grab the Fedora 31 Silverblue image and give it a spin, but we are still working on polishing the experience so don’t expect it to be a seamless experience at this point in time. Of course as things like Flatpaks, Fedora Toolbox and a host of smaller issues get improved upon we do believe this will be such an overall improvement over an ‘old fashioned’ linux distro that you will be asking yourself why the Linux world didn’t do this years ago.

Improved performance
A lot of work has gone into improving the general performance of GNOME 3.34. The GNOME shell team has been very active and is a great example of a large numbers of developers working together from different backgrounds. So this release features a lot of great performance work by Daniel van Vugt from Canonical and by Georges Stavracas from Endless for instance. The Red Hat team has focused on providing patch review and feedback and working on bigger long term changes and enablers, like Christian Hergerts work on Sysprof, Jonas Ådahl work on atomic mode setting and Benjamin Bergs work on systemd-user session support. All in all I think you will find that Fedora Workstation 31 with GNOME 3.34 provides a faster and smoother experience, an experience we will continue to build upon going forward as some of these long term efforts starts paying off.

Performance is better than ever

Summary
So this has been a roundup of some of the core items you should look forward to in Fedora Workstation 31. There are other items coming too in this release, like the Miracast GNOME Network Display application that Benjamin Berg has written, more Fedora Flatpaks available than ever before and more. We also have a lot of interesting items coming up in Fedora Workstation 32 like Bastien Noceras work improving low memory handling. So stay tuned.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first bug fix release in the stable 1.16 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.16.x.

See /releases/1.16/ for the details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

Download tarballs directly here: gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-validate, gstreamer-vaapi, or gst-omx.

GStreamer Conference 2019 in Lyon France

GStreamer Team at GUADEC Copenhagen in 2001 (we all looked slightly younger and fresher back then.)

Of course the conference is not going to be focused on the past, as there is a long line up of great talks talking about modern streaming with DASH, HDR support in GStreamer, latest developments around GStreamer and Rust, Virtual reality, Vulkan and more. Actually on the ‘and more’ topic, Wim Taymans will also do a presentation on PipeWire, the next generation audio and video server, at the GStreamer Conference this year, hopefully demoing some of the great improvements in things like our pro-audio Jack emulation support.
So if you haven’t already, make your way to the GStreamer Conference 2019 website and register for the 10th annual GStreamer Conference!

For those going be aware that there will also be a joint GStreamer fall hackfest and PipeWire hackfest in the two days following the GStreamer Conference. So be sure to sign up for those if interested. They will be co-located with participants flowing freely between the two events.

The GStreamer Conference team is pleased to announce that the full conference schedule including talk abstracts and speaker biographies is now available for this year's lineup of talks and speakers, covering again an exciting range of topics!

The GStreamer Conference 2019 will take place on 31 October - 1 November 2019 in Lyon, France just after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE).

Details about the conference and how to register can be found on the conference website.

This year's topics and speakers:

• GstTranscoder: A High Level API to Quickly Implement Transcoding Capabilities in your Applications
  Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• GStreamer State of the Union
  Tim-Philipp Müller, Centricular
• Dashsink plugin to complete the GStreamer offering
  Stéphane Cerveau, Collabora
• GStreamer Bug Extermination Techniques
  Vivia Nikolaidou, Make.tv
• GStreamer & Rust: An Update
  Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• Introduction to Validateflow
  Alicia Boya García, Igalia
• Enabling a Different Piece of Hardware, a Story
  Guillaume Desmottes, Collabora
• HDR: Seeing the World As It Is
  Edward Hervey, Centricular
• The Rise and Fall and Rise of JPEG2000
  Aaron Boxer, Collabora
• Home Automation with GStreamer
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Video Editing: Targeting Professional Post Production Use cases
  Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• Room Scale VR Tracking with OpenHMD
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• The First Stable libcamera Release: A Call for Public API Review
  Jacopo Mondi & Laurent Pinchart
• PipeWire
  Wim Taymans, RedHat
• GStreamer, PulseAudio and Compress Offload
  Arun Raghavan, nilenso systems
• Implementing a Trickmode Player with ONVIF, RTSP and GStreamer
  Mathieu Duponchelle, Centricular
• Building a Crowdsourced News Service with GStreamer
  Paul Calleja, GlobalM & Mart Raudsepp, LeioTech
• Extending Cerbero to Build and Package Products based on GStreamer
  Pablo Marcos & Andoni Morales, Fluendo
• Revisiting RTP Jitter Buffer Timers
  Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• Changing Playback Rate Instantly
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) support on GStreamer
  Andre Guedes & Ederson Desouza, Intel
• GStreamer and the Faster Than Light (FTL) Streaming Protocol
  Francisco Velázquez, Make.tv
• 20 Years of GStreamer
  Wim Taymans
• GStreamer and Multi-project Continuous Integration Pipelines
  Jordan Petridis, Centricular
• Karapulse - Writing a Karaoke Application in Rust
  Guillaume Desmottes, Collabora
• GStreamer Video Analytics: Optimizing inference across HW targets
  Neelay Shah, Neena Maldikar, Mikhail Nikolsky & Ilya Belyakov, Intel
• PipeWire in the Automotive Industry
  George Kiagiadakis, Collabora
• GStreamer, Windows UWP, and Firefox on the HoloLens 2
  Nirbheek Chauhan, Centricular
• 3D Cameras in GStreamer: RGB-D Camera Support and Depth Video Compression
  Raphael Dürscheid, Aivero
• TV Broadcast compliant MPEG-TS
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Low Latency in Video Surveillance System with SRT
  Justin Kim, SK Telekom
• AV1 Overview: Codec and Ecosystem
  Luca Barbato, Luminem SRLs & VideoLan
• NVCodec plugin improvements
  양승하 Seung Ha Yang, Naver Corp
• Which Network Streaming Protocol Should I Pick?
  Olivier Crête, Collabora
• Google Transport-wide Congestion Control
  Håvard Graff, Pexip
• GStreamer Vulkan
  Matthew Waters, Centricular

Lightning Talks:

• Raising the Importance of the V4L2 plugin and Challenges
  Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• WebKit-powered HTML overlays in your pipeline with GstWPE
  Philippe Normand, Igalia
• Detect a metal can using GStreamer/OpenFoodFacts
  Stéphane Cerveau, Collabora
• A new GStreamer RTSP Server
  Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• A brand new documentation infrastructure for the GStreamer framework
  Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• GStreamer on Windows: Everything New
  Nirbheek Chauhan, Centricular
• An Improved Latency Tracer
  Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• Using Bots to Improve the Gitlab Workflow
  Jordan Petridis, Centricular
• GNOME Radio
  Ole Aamot, GNOME
• SCTE-35 support in GStreamer
  Edward Hervey, Centricular
• Closed captions, AFD, BAR
  Aaron Boxer, Collabora
• ...and more to come
• ...
• Submit your lightning talk now!

Many thanks to our sponsors, Collabora, Pexip, Igalia, Fluendo, Centricular, Facebook and Zeiss, without whom the conference would not be possible in this form. And to Ubicast who will be recording the talks again.

Considering becoming a sponsor? Please check out our sponsor brief.

We hope to see you all in Lyon in October! Don't forget to register!

My family had bought many years ago a Panasonic VHS video camera and we had recorded quite a lot of things, holidays, some local shows, etc. I even got paid 5000 pesetas (30€ more than 20 years ago) a couple of times to record weddings in a amateur way. Since my father passed less than a year ago I have wanted to convert those VHS tapes into something that can survive better technologically speaking.

For the job I bought a USB 2.0 dongle and connected it to a VHS VCR through a SCART to RCA cable.

The dongle creates a V4L2 device for video and is detected by Pulseaudio for audio. As I want to see what I am converting live I need to tee both audio and video to the corresponding sinks and the other part would go to to the encoders, muxer and filesink. The command line for that would be:

gst-launch-1.0 matroskamux name=mux ! filesink location=/tmp/test.webm \
v4l2src device=/dev/video2 norm=255 io-mode=mmap ! queue ! vaapipostproc ! tee name=video_t ! \
queue ! vaapivp9enc rate-control=4 bitrate=1536 ! mux.video_0 \
video_t. ! queue ! xvimagesink \
pulsesrc device=alsa_input.usb-MACROSIL_AV_TO_USB2.0-02.analog-stereo ! 'audio/x-raw,rate=48000,channels=2' ! tee name=audio_t ! \
queue ! pulsesink \
audio_t. ! queue ! vorbisenc ! mux.audio_0

As you can see I convert to WebM with VP9 and Vorbis. Something interesting can be passing norm=255 to the v4l2src element so it’s capturing PAL and the rate-control=4 for VBR to the vaapivp9enc element, otherwise it will use cqp as default and file size would end up being huge.

You can see the pipeline, which is beatiful, here:

As you can see, we’re using vaapivp9enc here which is hardware enabled and having this pipeline running in my computer was consuming more or less 20% of CPU with the CPU absolutely relaxed, leaving me the necessary computing power for my daily work. This would not be possible without GStreamer and GStreamer VAAPI plugins, which is what happens with other solutions whose instructions you can find online.

If for some reason you can’t find vaapivp9enc in Debian, you should know there are a couple of packages for the intel drivers and that the one you should install is intel-media-va-driver. Thanks go to my colleague at IgaliaVíctor Jáquez, who maintains gstreamer-vaapi and helped me solving this problem.

My workflow for this was converting all tapes into WebM and then cutting them in the different relevant pieces with PiTiVi running GStreamer Editing Services both co-maintained by my colleague at Igalia, Thibault Saunier.

What’s the deal with the Rothschild vs GNOME Shotwell patent litigation case that the GNOME Foundation must defend against, and why does it matter for protecting the Free & Open-Source software community at large? Here’s my personal attempt at explaining the matter with a short video.

Please note that this video represents my personal opinions, I am not a lawyer nor a representative of the GNOME Foundation, etc. That said, please feel free to share far and wide

The post Understanding the Rotschild vs GNOME case in 12 minutes appeared first on The Open Sourcerer.

Over the years, some people have asked me how I manage so many projects—short and long—without forgetting anything, without breaking promises and commitments, all while looking like a zen buddha. A few observers also remarked (often in mockery) that I tend to take a note of everything, that I document an outrageous amount of seemingly mundane details in my professional and personal life.

In the battlefield of the modern world’s incessant demands and boundless opportunities, I survive “seemingly effortlessly” by being methodology-intensive and adhering to a particular cognitive philosophy that acknowledges the limitations of the human brain—and works around them. This way of life lets me keep track of the big picture without being paralyzed by the daunting nature of a project:

I do procrastinate sometimes (and spend a long time juggling and incubating ideas), but this is not the same thing as being paralyzed by the anxiety of a restless mind, which is what, I posit, plagues many knowledge workers today.

• My procrastination is often the result of the context and timing I find myself in: prioritizing other emergencies, or having no energy left for certain types of tasks, needing to find some long blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on a complex task, or simply needing additional tools or information.
• When I’m fed up from “incubating” a task long enough and need to force the creation of “focused time”, I can always shut down my email and chat clients and blast out a State of Trance. That sometimes help get into the state of flow.

But surely, listening to Armin van Buuren’s playlists is not the primary gateway to productivity, is it? There has to be more to why I virtually don’t experience stress and anxiety!

So here’s a little secret I’ve been harboring for the last ten years: I’m a hardcore GTD practicioner. It basically governs my life.

In geek terms, that means I’m a cyborg who outsources part of his brain to an external memory system so that he can have all his CPU and RAM available for focused processing.

I could write an unbearably long blog post on the matter and try to explain GTD without forgetting anything, but I thought I’d make a quick overview video instead, which summarizes the core concept for you:

(By the way, hi, I have resurrected my YouTube channel! Feel free to subscribe as that will encourage me to publish more content)

David Allen’s GTD is certainly the single most transformative personal productivity book, bar none, that you should read, if you care about efficiency and stress reduction. It changed my life: it helped me throughout my university studies, through the jobs, through the Free & Open-Source software projects, and the personal day-to-day (things get a lot more complicated when you juggle career with projects, finances, home improvement, continuous learning, and a fat corgi dog).

This methodology and philosophy works best for those I would call “organized chaos warriors”. Stay tuned for the next two blog posts this Wednesday and Friday, which will present my “typology of workers” (where I define the chaos warriors) and my favorite Free and Open-Source tool for Getting Things Done.

P.s.: I linked to the 2001 edition of the book (which is the one I had read) because, according to some reviewers’ comments on the 2015 remake, the 2nd edition is much longer for no real gain other than to mention digital tools rather than a paper-based workflow).

The post A secret to productivity for busy individuals with chaotic contexts appeared first on The Open Sourcerer.

As I’ve spent a number of years working for various organizations, big and small, with different types of collaborators and staffers, I’ve devised a simple typology of workers that can help explain the various levels of success, self-organization, productivity and stress of those workers, depending on whether there is a fit between their work type and their work processes. This is one of the many typologies I use to describe human behavior, and I haven’t spent years and a Ph.D. thesis devising this, this is just some down-to-earth reflections I’ve had. Without much further ado, here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

The first type of worker is what I call the “chaos warrior”: this includes the busy managers, professional event organizers, executives, deal-with-everything assistants, researchers, freelancers or contractors.

In my view, “chaos warriors” are the types of workers who—from a systemic point of view—have to deal with constantly changing environments and demands, time-based deadlines, dependencies on other people or materials, multiple parallel projects, etc.

• Chaos warriors, in their natural state, very rarely have the luxury of single-threaded work and interruption-free environments (though those certainly would be welcome, and chaos warriors sometimes have to naturally retreat to external “think spaces” to get foundational work done).
• Chaos warriors don’t necessarily enjoy the chaos (some of them hate it, some of them crave it), but it’s part of the system they find themselves in, so they have to structure their workflow around it—or risk incompetence or burning out really fast. They have to become “organized” chaos warriors, otherwise they’re just chaos “victims”.
• The in-between state, the somewhat-organized-but-not-zen chaos worker that many freelancers experience, is what I call, “Calm Like a Bomb”.

Note that the chaos I am referring to is cognitive, not physical; firefighters, paramedics and ER nurses, the police and military, are “emergency” workers, not warriors of cognitive “chaos”. They are beyond the scope of what I’m covering here (and what’s coming in my next blog posts). They don’t need a “productivity system” to sort through cognitive overload, they deal with whatever comes forth as best as they can in any given situation.

The ultimate embodiment of a chaos warrior is the nameless heroïne in the 4th DaiCon event opening animation from 1983: you can’t get a better representation of triumph amidst chaos than that!

The second category of workers is what I call the “goldsmith”—that is, people with a very specific role, who work in a single regular “employment” type of job, often with set hours, and possibly on-site (in an office/warehouse/shop/etc.).

This may include most office workers, public servants, software design & development folks who make a sharp separation between work and personal life, construction subcontractors working as part of a big real estate project, waiters and bartenders, technicians, retail sales & logistics, etc. I’m vastly simplifying and generalizing of course, but here I sketch the picture of someone who comes in in the morning, looks at the task list/assignments/inbox, works on that throughout the day, and then leaves their work life behind to enjoy their personal life; then the process resets on the next day.

• “Pure” goldsmiths do not track work items outside of the workplace, and usually do not need to track personal items while at work (or aren’t allowed to). As such, in both settings, their mind is focused and clear. You arrive at context A, you work on context A’s items that are in front of you. You arrive at context B, you relax or deal with whatever has come up in your home “as it happens”. Arguably, from this standpoint of work-life separation, you could put some “emergency workers” in this category.
• The goldsmith may have a simpler life, which is kind of a luxury, really: they can more easily have a tranquil mind, without the cognitive weight of hundreds of pending items and complex dependency chains governing their tasks. You do the job, you move on.
• When they are asked to “produce” output in their area of expertise, those are often the type of workers that would benefit from a quiet, interruption-free work environment. There’s a reason why Joel Spolsky designed the FogCreek offices to allow developers to close the door and work in peace, instead of the chaos of open-space offices (that’s a story for another day).

Some specialized “creative” goldsmiths have a hard time separating work from personal life; even when they are home, they can’t help but think about potential creative solutions to the challenges they’re trying to solve at work. In that case, those may be “chaos warriors” in disguise.

In my view, personal productivity methodologies like GTD cater first and foremost to the “organized chaos warriors”, rather than the goldsmiths, who may have little use for all-encompassing cognitive techniques, or who may have tools that already structure their work for them.

Notably, in some industries like IT or the Free & Open-Source software sub-industry, we have done a pretty good job at externalizing (for better or for worse) the software developers and designers’ todo list as “bug/issue trackers”, and their assignments may often be linear and fairly predictable, allowing them to be “goldsmiths”. Most of the time, a software developer or designer, in their core duties, are going to deal with “whatever is in the issue list” (or kanban board), particularly in a team setting, and as such probably don’t feel the need to have a dedicated personal todo list, which might be considered duplication of information and management overhead. Input goes in (requirements, bug reports, feature requests), output goes out (a new feature, design, or fix). There are some exceptions to this generalization however:

• When your issue tracker (bug inventory) is not actively managed (triaged, organized, regularly pruned), you eventually end up declaring “bugtracker bankruptcy”, or, like Benjamin Otte once said to me on IRC, “Whoever catches me first on IRC in the morning, wins.”
• Some goldsmiths may have more complicated lives than just their job duties and might be interested by this approach nonetheless.
• Sometimes, shared/public/open bug trackers are a tyranny on the mind, much like a popular email inbox: the demands are so numerous and complex (or unstructured) that they are not only externally imposed goals, they become imposed chaos—in which case the goldsmith may find that they need to extract a personal subset of the items from the “firehose” into a remixed, personalized, digestible task list for themselves.

Do you recognize yourself in one of these categories I’ve come up with? Or do you fit into some other category I might not have thought about? Did you find this essay interesting? Let me know in the comments!

If you’re a chaos warrior, or you fit any of the goldsmith’s “exceptions” (or if you’re interested in the field of personal productivity in general), you’ll probably be interested in reading my next article (coming up this Friday!) on (re)building the best free & open-source “GTD” application out there (but before that, if you haven’t read it already, check out my previous article on “getting things done”).

The post The goldsmith and the chaos warrior: a typology of workers appeared first on The Open Sourcerer.

Now that you’ve been introduced to the overall concept of Getting Things Done with the video in my previous blog post, let me show you the secret weapon of chaos warriors who want to follow that methodology with a digital tool they can truly own.

Your secret weapon: “Getting Things GNOME”

“Getting Things GNOME” is a native GNOME desktop application that is entirely free and open-source (licensed under the GPL) and runs locally on your computer.

Here’s how it looks like on my computer (and yes, I do have over 600 actionable tasks at all times lately):

Getting Things GNOME is one of the most well-made productivity apps of the decade. It has:

• A mature codebase with almost a decade of work that has been put into it
• A nice GTK interface (GTK2 in the stable version, GTK3 in the development version, as seen below), with a flexible free-form text editor for
• The ability to quickly defer tasks (ex: “do it tomorrow”, “do it next week”, “do it next month”, etc.)
• Natural language parsing (you can tag things while you type the title, and you can use dates such as “Tomorrow”, “Thursday” in addition to the standard “YYYY-MM-DD”)
• “Work view” mode for displaying only “actionable” tasks so you can focus on your work
• The notion of sub-tasks and dependencies
• Tags, which can also be made hierarchical (ex: “@phone” can be a child of “@work”) and can have colors and icons
• Search and “saved searches”
• Plugins!
• Works offline, owned by you with no restrictions, no licensing B.S., software “by the people for the people”

This is what the Git (development) version of GTG’s UI currently looks like, showing my personal tasks (it needs some improvement, but it’s already impressive):

Here are some more (old) screenshots:

Historical context

Unfortunately, the previous maintainers never developed a business model to sustain development, and, after a long period of development hell, abandoned the project as they moved on to get various jobs.

This is understandable and I can’t fault them… however, I still need a working and maintained application that will continue working working throughout the years as our technological landscape evolves (the Linux platform is pretty ruthless on that front). Otherwise, you risk having your Linux distribution suddenly stop packaging the app you dearly depend on.

If anyone was wondering if all Free and Open-Source software can continue as a side-project forever, this is a prime case study. This is what happens when software goes unmaintained.

Meanwhile, in the world of proprietary software and software-as-a-service, countless people are paying a big one-time, monthly or yearly licensing fee to use to-do software applications that they don’t own, and for which they can’t be 110% certain that the software respects their digital rights. Depending on these raises fundamental questions when it’s something as long-lived and all-encompassing as a personal productivity system: Can you trust that cloud service? Or that this proprietary app isn’t profiling what’s going on in your OS, or uploading your data if it sees certain key words? That the licensing fee won’t increase? That the whole thing won’t change when the parent company becomes part of a merger, acquisition or bankruptcy? That the app will keep functioning throughout the years as you upgrade your operating systems, that it will work on more than one or two “authorized” computers?

All these questions are relevant when you’re depending on proprietary software.

This is not The End?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

What if we could bring “GTG” back from the dead, finish the job, and sustain it forever more so that we can all benefit from it?

There are two ways this can be done (which are not mutually exclusive, I might add):

• From the existing userbase, reform a completely new team of software developers that will be willing to come together and “finish the job” to get a new release out of the door. I have obtained administration rights to the GitHub repository so I can, in practice, play “project manager” and help volunteers get on board. We could have a status analysis and brainstorming session to establish a roadmap with the shortest path to releasability, and beyond, and then work together for the months and years to come to accomplish our goals
• Someone with enough freedom and time (it could be me, it could be someone else, it could be multiple people) gets paid to be day-to-day maintainer(s), the one(s) doing the majority of the core “boring” work to get everything back into shape and mentors the part-time contributors who contribute opportunistic (“drive-by”) patches and merge requests.

The two options are viable, but require enough public interest to happen. This is why I’m making a survey, linked below, to evaluate the potential for such an initiative. Are you interested in GTG coming back in full force? Whatever your answer, let me know through this 5 minutes survey. Your input is very much appreciated:

• It is much more efficient to run this survey (and share results here) than to spend months preparing a campaign only to find out that there is or isn’t enough demand.
• It also lets me raise awareness and hopefully assemble a team of new contributors (because you don’t just make them appear out of thin air); if enough volunteers show up (with a lot of time and passion to share) we can get started without much delay, get together and create momentum.

Help me evaluate how we can bring it back to life, with this 5 minutes survey

The survey can be found here: https://gridd.limequery.com/881429

Filling this survey should take 4-6 minutes at most.

Let’s be clear: I’m not doing this for myself (just grabbing a proprietary app package is much easier and would let me move on to MUCH more lucrative opportunities), I would be doing this for the greater public good, because it breaks my heart to think that GTG would die when it’s such a great piece of software.

There is no sane FLOSS native desktop alternative for Linux users, and open-source software should be worth more money than proprietary software, not less: you are getting better value out of it, with an implicit guarantee that the software respects your rights and privacy, and that it will remain available forever as long as there is someone on the planet willing to maintain it.

On the other hand, spending time creating software costs money; the alternative is not caring and pursuing a lucrative career, so the software remains unmaintained and everybody loses. So I need to know that nursing GTG back to health would be worth the effort, that the application would be used by many (not just a handful) of people around the world. I seek “meaningful” work.

Help me determine if this is worth my (or anyone’s) time by filling the survey today, and please share it with those around you, and elsewhere on the interwebs. Thanks!

The post Survey: making Getting Things GNOME sustainable as a productivity app for public good appeared first on The Open Sourcerer.

Thanks to our partners at Ubicast the recordings of this year's GStreamer Conference talks are now available online.

You can view or download the GStreamer Conference 2019 videos here.

Talks:

• GstTranscoder: A High Level API to Quickly Implement Transcoding Capabilities in your Applications - Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• GStreamer State of the Union - Tim-Philipp Müller, Centricular
• Dashsink plugin to complete the GStreamer offering - Stéphane Cerveau, Collabora
• GStreamer Bug Extermination Techniques - Vivia Nikolaidou, Make.tv
• GStreamer & Rust: An Update - Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• Introduction to Validateflow - Alicia Boya García, Igalia
• Enabling a Different Piece of Hardware, a Story - Guillaume Desmottes, Collabora
• HDR: Seeing the World As It Is - Edward Hervey, Centricular
• The Rise and Fall and Rise of JPEG2000 - Aaron Boxer, Collabora
• Home Automation with GStreamer - Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Video Editing: Targeting Professional Post Production Use cases - Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• Room Scale VR Tracking with OpenHMD - Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• The First Stable libcamera Release: A Call for Public API Review - Jacopo Mondi & Laurent Pinchart
• PipeWire - Wim Taymans, RedHat
• GStreamer, PulseAudio and Compress Offload - Arun Raghavan, nilenso systems
• Implementing a Trickmode Player with ONVIF, RTSP and GStreamer - Mathieu Duponchelle, Centricular
• Building a Crowdsourced News Service with GStreamer - Paul Calleja, GlobalM & Mart Raudsepp, LeioTech
• Extending Cerbero to Build and Package Products based on GStreamer - Pablo Marcos & Andoni Morales, Fluendo
• Revisiting RTP Jitter Buffer Timers - Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• Changing Playback Rate Instantly - Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) support in GStreamer - Andre Guedes, Intel
• GStreamer and the Faster Than Light (FTL) Streaming Protocol - Francisco Velázquez, Make.tv
• 20 Years of GStreamer - Wim Taymans
• GStreamer and Multi-project Continuous Integration Pipelines - Jordan Petridis, Centricular
• Karapulse - Writing a Karaoke Application in Rust - Guillaume Desmottes, Collabora
• GStreamer Video Analytics: Optimizing inference across HW targets - Neelay Shah & Neena Maldikar, Intel
• PipeWire in the Automotive Industry - George Kiagiadakis, Collabora
• GStreamer, Windows UWP, and Firefox on the HoloLens 2 - Nirbheek Chauhan, Centricular
• 3D Cameras in GStreamer: RGB-D Camera Support and Depth Video Compression - Raphael Dürscheid, Aivero
• TV Broadcast compliant MPEG-TS - Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• Low Latency in Video Surveillance System with SRT - Justin Kim, SK Telekom
• AV1 Overview: Codec and Ecosystem - Luca Barbato, Luminem SRLs & VideoLan
• NVCodec plugin improvements - 양승하 Seung Ha Yang, Naver Corp
• Which Network Streaming Protocol Should I Pick? - Olivier Crête, Collabora
• Google Transport-wide Congestion Control - Håvard Graff, Pexip
• GStreamer Vulkan - Matthew Waters, Centricular
• Closing Session

Lightning Talks:

• Raising the Importance of the V4L2 plugin and Challenges - Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• WebKit-powered HTML overlays in your pipeline with GstWPE - Philippe Normand, Igalia
• Detect a metal can using GStreamer/OpenFoodFacts - Stéphane Cerveau, Collabora
• A new GStreamer RTSP Server - Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• A brand new documentation infrastructure for the GStreamer framework - Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• GStreamer on Windows: Everything New - Nirbheek Chauhan, Centricular
• An Improved Latency Tracer - Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• SCTE-35 support in GStreamer - Edward Hervey, Centricular
• Closed captions, AFD, BAR - Aaron Boxer, Collabora
• Applying a new streaming protocol to an old version of GStreamer - 서희경님 Heekyoung (Lina) Seo, SK Telekom
• Embracing CI for GStreamer codec acceleration on Intel platform - Haihao Xiang, Intel
• More Windows supports, Direct3D11, DXVA2, and Media Foundation with GStreamer - 양승하 Seung Ha Yang, Naver Corp
• Utilizing the Conan package manager for development and deployment - Niclas Moeslund Overby, Aivero
• GStreamer on the Magic Leap One - Olivier Crête, Collabora

When talking to various people at conferences in the last year or at conferences, a recurring topic was that they believed that the GTKRustbindings are not ready for use yet.

I don’t know where that perception comes from but if it was true, there wouldn’t have been applications like Fractal, Podcasts or Shortwave using GTK from Rust, or I wouldn’t be able to do a workshop about desktop application development in Rust with GTK and GStreamer at the Linux Application Summit in Barcelona this Friday (code can be found here already) or earlier this year at GUADEC.

One reason I sometimes hear is that there is not support for creating subclasses of GTK types in Rust yet. While that was true, it is not true anymore nowadays. But even more important: unless you want to create your own special widgets, you don’t need that. Many examples and tutorials in other languages make use of inheritance/subclassing for the applications’ architecture, but that’s because it is the idiomatic pattern in those languages. However, in Rust other patterns are more idiomatic and even for those examples and tutorials in other languages it wouldn’t be the one and only option to design applications.

Almost everything is included in the bindings at this point, so seriously consider writing your next GTK UI application in Rust. While some minor features are still missing from the bindings, none of those should prevent you from successfully writing your application.

And if something is actually missing for your use-case or something is not working as expected, please let us know. We’d be happy to make your life easier!

P.S.

Somepeople are already experimenting with new UI development patterns on top of the GTK Rust bindings. So if you want to try developing an UI application but want to try something different than the usual signal/callback spaghetti code, also take a look at those.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the second bug fix release in the stable 1.16 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.16.x.

See /releases/1.16/ for the details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

Download tarballs directly here: gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-validate, gstreamer-vaapi, or gst-omx.

Once again this year I attended the GStreamer conference and just before that, Embedded Linux conference Europe which took place in Lyon (France). Both events were a good opportunity to demo one of the use-cases I have in mind for GstWPE, HTML overlays!

As we, at Igalia, usually have a …

• Has a D-Bus interface to propagate low memory conditions
• Requires Linux 5.2's kernel memory pressure stalls information (Android's lowmemorykiller daemon has loads of code to get the same information from the kernel for older versions, and it really is quite a lot of code)
• Written in a compiled language to save on startup/memory usage costs (around 500 lines of C code, as counted by sloccount)
• Built-in policy, based upon values used in Android and Endless OS

A new version of the GStreamer Rust bindings, 0.15.0, was released.

As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs release, and a new version of the GStreamer plugins written in Rust was also released.

This new version features a lot of newly bound API for creating subclasses of various GStreamer types: GstPreset, GstTagSetter, GstClock, GstSystemClock, GstAudioSink, GstAudioSrc, GstDevice, GstDeviceProvider, GstAudioDecoder and GstAudioEncoder.

In addition to that, a lot of bugfixes and further API improvements have happened over the last few months that should make development of GStreamer applications or plugins in Rust as convenient as possible.

A new release of the GStreamer Rust plugins will follow in the next days.

Details can be found in the release notes for gstreamer-rs and gstreamer-rs-sys.

The code and documentation for the bindings is available on the freedesktop.org GitLab

• GStreamer Rust Bindings (documentation)
• GStreamer Rust FFI Bindings (documentation)

If you find any bugs, missing features or other issues please report them in GitLab.

Today, I released a new version of scikit-survival which includes an implementation of Random Survival Forests. As it’s popular counterparts for classification and regression, a Random Survival Forest is an ensemble of tree-based learners. A Random Survival Forest ensures that individual trees are de-correlated by 1) building each tree on a different bootstrap sample of the original training data, and 2) at each node, only evaluate the split criterion for a randomly selected subset of features and thresholds. Predictions are formed by aggregating predictions of individual trees in the ensemble.

For a full list of changes in scikit-survival 0.11, please see the release notes.

Espacio de Datos is a site-specific, immersive audiovisual installation, consisting of a fulldome projection and a spatialized audio track that I created in collaboration with sound artist Mene Savasta for the +CODE 2018 festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was originally comissioned by Cristian Reynaga and Merlina Rañi, organizers of the festival. Espacio de Datos was also shown at the 2018 edition of the Domo Lleno festival in Bogotá, Colombia, the 9th International Festival of Science Visualization in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2019, and finally at the Elektra Festival XX in Montréal, Canada, in June 2019. This blog post goes in more depth into the background for this project, and the process we followed to create its images and sounds.

Data performance

Our motivation for this piece was the emergence of new observational devices (interactive visualization, dimensionality reduction) that allow us to explore vast data spaces and discover new information structures. Even though the immediate materiality of data is intangible, we can make it tangible through visualization and sonification. This is why we have decided to draw a parallel with astronomy and the celestial constellations as a representational metaphor for the relationships found in the data. By giving shapes and textures to those relationships, we were able to create the audiovisual landscapes that constitute the experience of our performance.

Dimensionality reduction methods such as t-SNE became very useful tools to visualize large datasets.

For this piece, I converted a custom visualization software I developed earlier for my own scientific research, Mirador, into a “data performance” tool. Working with Mirador to explore scientific datasets as part of my research made me consider how data exploration software work as observational devices of large abstract data-spaces. Eventually, I implemented a generative algorithm that turned the visualization interactions in Mirador into “constellations” or “asterisms” in data space. The idea of this data performance was to take the sequence of user operations in Mirador and transform it into a representation of how the user is navigating through “informational space”. Each variable in the dataset becomes a point or “star”, and the distance between each pair of stars is the statistical correlation between the variables, quantified by their mutual information. As the user explores a dataset in Mirador, some “stars” are no longer visible, and new ones come into view, while their distances change based on modifications they apply through Mirador’s UI – for example, by filtering out some data points based on the range of a variable, which in turn can affect the association between the rest of the variables. The video below shows that process, with Mirador on the left and the resulting “meta-visualization” on the right, with a fish-eye filter applied to it for projection on a semispherical dome surface.

After observing these “meta visualizations” of search trajectories in dataspace, can we find constellations unique to each dataset and/or user?

Sonification

A major challenge was to synchronize a workflow between the two of Mene and I. We did not know each other beforehand, and were separated by thousands of kilometers (Andres in Boston, Mene in Buenos Aires). Through many video calls and exchange of references we agreed on how to approach this project in a “deterritorialized” manner.

Mene performing live.

Mene applied an “artisanal” process for the sonification. I provided video renders, and Mene assigned specific sounds to each movement. This was a linear and meticulous work, that allowed Mene to handle the sync at the frame level. As in a Foley exercise, the audio rhythm is proposed by the dynamics of the visible.

The sound palette was informed by the thematic field of the data, which contained anonymized clinical information of patients affected by Lassa fever, a virual hemorrhagic fever endemic in West Africa. The tragedy of a deadly disease, reduced to indices and values that are then visualized in a cosmic and minimalistic vision. Mene considered these aspects to construct a noisy and glitchy while simultaneously clean palette, where the tragic element is manifested in the dynamic range, such as contrasts and accumulation.

Visual script

The narrative arc was built around the exploration of a dataset from the initial moment in which the data has no specific form yet, passing through a stage of structure search, and ending with the identification of correlations and the selection of a final hypothesis. The original script for Espacio de Datos included three parts:

• Intro (“Data Bang”) ~ 1 minute: Starting blank, you begin to see “data filaments” with no defined structure yet, at the end of the intro these filaments are grouped in points, which represent the variables in the data

Variables in a dataset represented as constellations.

• Main Sequence (“Shannon’s Asterisms”) ~ 6-7 minutes: Once the variables have been formed, there is a back and forth between the traces of these variables in dataspace, and the “constellations” of points when the user/viewer zooms in to study each pair of variables more closely. The two visual modes (traces and constellations) would be repeated a couple of times in a kind of loop (1 ~ 2 min per cycle).

A pair of variables in the dataset seen as a star binary system.

• Outro (“Hypothesis Crunch”) ~ 1 minute: The orbits that started in the previous section start to cover the visual field completely, and there is a final transition to a 3D view, where the orbits define a sort of upwards tunnel at the end, which converges into the final result of the data search, and then to black.

Screening of Espacio de Datos at the Satosphère at SAT in Montréal, during the Elektra XX festival.