The norwegian music copyright authority is celebrating their 75th anniversity by offering around 40 000 norwegian songs for free download. While it sounds cool it is rather limited actually, with only format being WMA and you can only download using IE5. Anyway it gave me an opportunity to download a lot of cheesy old norwegian songs. It actually got me started songwriting on my own:

Min kjære stakk sin fot opp i mitt arsle;
jeg ble litt forskrekket, men hvem skulle jeg vel varsle
Det er jo slikt som kan skje;
når man utforsker det å elske.

Managed to do a GStreamer 0.7.2 release yesterday. Well kinda, got the files out on GNOME ftp, but there is still tasks to do to get the files everywhere they should be, make proper release notes, update freshmeat and icewalkers and so on. Doing release management for a big project like GStreamer is actually quite a lot of work.

I am quite happy about the release cause it contains lots of very visible changes. It adds full support for wma and aac. And it adds some support for wmv and quicktime. The release also includes a Real demuxer, but that needs to be hooked up to a real decoder to do something usefull.
Hopefully by the next release the issues hindering wmv and quicktime to work reliably will be solved and we manage to hook up a Real decoder, either using ffmpeg or by a wrapper for the Helix binaries.

Wheels is also hard at work porting Kabodle to GStreamer which I think will be a major step forward for the use of GStreamer in KDE.

Combined with dolphy and thomasvs working to get the new GStreamer company Fluendo going so am I very positive about the future.

That said so is there major still some major obstacles on the road ahead. For instance so are there still some major bugs both in the current autoplugger and in the current scheduler. But that said the list of tasks needing doing seems much more manageable than it ever did before. I mean there will always be a long todo list, the important thing is how urgent the items on that list is. As long as we are at a stage where it isn’t a crisis if a certain change will not hit CVS before 4-5 months then we are to be considered 100% production ready IMHO.

Think I am over the worst at work for a while. Found I had some energy for free software stuff again this weekend. Did a lot of little things like keeping atop the Sodipodi flag collection, updating gnome-themes-extras, writing lots of mail and trying to get Gstreamer CVS head to build. Some irritating bug in Fedora Core 1 that makes our docs build spew crap atm.
Also managed to do the promised librsvg bugzilla work I promised Dom.

I am really positive about the week ahead, thinking that I will feel that I accomplished at lot in it :) Time will tell.

Lots of good hacking in both Sodipodi and Inkscape going on. Think the fork actually was a good thing as disagreements where really hurting development motivation for the people involved.

Really glad to see IBM starting to get behind GNOME. Think it makes my little business plan even more viable :)

Managed to get out the first release of the SVG flags package today. Around 215 different flags which I think is rather impressive :)

Reading the excerpt of an interview with Steve Balmer I realized that there is a real sign that Microsoft is in big trouble. In almost every interview they are giving these days they are forced to answer questions about Linux. This is just what happened to all their competitors who they crushed, the competitors ended up having to talk almost more about Microsoft than about their own product, and from there you can only go down.

The sad news of Chema’s passing struck me hard today. As others has said he was a wonderful person. He was one of the few people who was good about regularly sending me news stories while I was doing the GNOME Summaries and he was always forthcoming with information and help when I mailed or chatted with him. I had the pleasure of meeting Chema in Barcelona in September when he, Nat and Miguel was there for the Novell conference.
There is this one episode I remember especially about Chema from meeting him in Barcelona; we had all gone to a bar and after being there for a while I stepped outside for a few minutes to grab some fresh air;I hadn’t been talking to Chema for a little while then, but he saw me walking out and came out after me to check if I where ok or leaving. I really appreciated that gesture and I think it shows what kind of person Chema was. You will be dearly missed Chema.

Life consists of two main components; what you plan on doing and what you actually end up doing. Personally I make lot of plans and few of them actually ends up happening, personally I don’t see that as me failing, just that while working towards my goals other opportunities arise which I decide is just as good options as my original plans. That doesn’t make plans irrelevant however, in fact they are highly important as working towards them is what tends to give me these other opportunities.

Anyway, frustrated with how slowly my plans on emigrating from Norway is moving I have decided to move on some local opportunities that has arisen instead. I decided that my strategy, of not doing anything to improve my current life, because I plan on doing something else in the semi-near future, doesn’t really work out.

So now tommorow I am going out for a beer with some guys who hinted about increasing my salary 25% percent of I come working for them. I am also going to go on a date with a beautiful girl next week that my sister introduced me too. While I claim to have international dreams I have to admit being a sucker for crystal blue eyes and plantinum blond hair, especially when it is real :)

But today I am just stuck in what could turn out to be Norways next Olympic city. Not to bad, except I do feel somewhat guilty about not being able to update the Sodipodi flag database with latest additions, so that we can announce over 200 flags.

Bryce and co. announced Inkscape the other day. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, I have to admit being rather frustrated with the low level of GNOME integration in Sodipodi, so this fork might be a good thing.

Also realized I am really not keeping up with stuff in GNOME as well as I used to; since I was taken by suprise by the Novel Suse buyout. Guess not knowing kept me from doing some insider stock trading, which I guess is somewhat of a good thing :)

Update: Ok, so I decided to go with the flow. I sold my last lot of Sun shares and bought Novell shares instead. Don’t let me down.