We had a real nice time in Gent. thomasvs showed us around and found us some good food to eat - his flatmates were friendly too.
GStreamer
I haven't been doing much for the last month or so. I've been too wrapped up in finishing my job and getting ready to leave the country. But now I've pulled finger and got the media info table showing in gst-player. I've only got 1 week of broadband access left so I'll have to make the most of it.
Yawning Chasm of Uncertainty
When I get back to NZ I intend to try my hand at consulting/contracting. I have no idea how its going to work out but right now I'm really motivated to make it viable. I need to get in touch with every industry contact I know in Wellington to see if they have any contracting work. Longer term I need to build up my marketing skills to sell myself as an independent consultant. This is all quite scary but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
Database abstraction
I've been playing with PostgreSQL, SkunkWeb and PyDO recently as an excuse to learn Python. I have developed web applications with many frameworks and languages and SkunkWeb is most definitely the nicest one I've ever used.
As for PyDO I still have mixed feelings about object abstractions of relational databases. Having spent the last 2 years coding applications using WebObject's Enterprise Objects Framework I'm not convinced that it is always a good way to go. Unfortunately EOF tries to hide too much complexity, resulting in a lot of chicken waiving required to do anything slightly unusual. PyDO doesn't make the same mistake but it currently the API seems to lack maturity to produce large lists of objects. I might code up some ideas to fill this gap.
On the other hand I might look further into GNU Enterprise's gnue-common package to get it working with SkunkWeb. I might even create an HTML presentation layer for gnue-forms. AFAIK the only HTML presentation layer at the moment is written in PHP, and we can't have that ;)