Some days I feel like work is intending to kill me. You people have no idea how tired I am of dba’s and unix admins who don’t know anything. I am so tired to having to explain to people how their own network functions, how their backup systems work, how to add something to the Unix path, how search for something on the web, how the browser proxy settings work and so on. I don’t mind explaning such stuff to an end user once in a while, but it frustrates me beyond belief when I have to explain such incredibly basic things to people who are supposed to be system administrators.

Today I had to deal with just to many of these people. One even had the nerve to phone my project manager complaining that I where not available to help him with his job. Who the hell do he think he is? I am part of a project team working on a fixed price project which is supposed to be deliverd on record time. Yet this guy has the nerve to complain when I don’t have the time to help him with a task not related to the project we where hired in to do and which has nothing to do with what I am supposed to know and everything about what he is supposed to know.

Or this other guy calling me around 10 this evening because he can’t find ‘unzip’ on his UNIX box!! What friggin kind of Unix sysadmin is unable to download and install unzip on his own friggin server. And when he fails he has the nerve to call me at home in the evening asking about it. Have people no shame anymore?

Or this idiotic support person who had the nerve to suggest that I reboot the machine to ‘activate’ the new lines I added to the host file. Even when I told her I was able to ping the entries added to the host file did she insist I reboot the machine. Even when I explained exactly what the problem was she continued to insist I rebooted.

aaaah, this a just a small sample of the lovely people I had to deal with TODAY.

Biting my teeth together and refusing to join Orkut. Some times strenght of character is shown when refusing to follow the herd :)

Stressfull days at work with added pressure since I am going away in the middle of a intensive project and are also overbooked. Didn’t help that my ‘1 day a week’ project had a major breakdown which meant I had to go there instead of staying at my ‘4 days a week’ project, which in turn has turned up the pressure in regards to that for tommorow.

I am so happy I am getting away from it on Friday, but I have a feeling it will be a rough re-entry into hell on Wednesday.

Cool to see how company has brought forth his code scimitar and slashing of memleaks in GStreamer left and right, maybe 0.8 will keep its memory use in check even :)

So it seems Steve Lhomme is making good progress on porting GStreamer to Windows with it compiling today, curious to see what will be the effect of that port in terms of developer interest and similar.

Meanwhile there has been a great deal of general bugfixing done today in preparation of a new GStreamer release. Seems a lot of stuff is really starting to come online now, so while 0.7.4 will not have every format working there will be enough for us to feel confident that the basics work.

I also managed to get my system upgraded to latest Fedore Development tree. Lots of nice improvements in GNOME 2.5, I am especially impressed by the speedups in yelp.

Spatial Nautilus is going to take some time getting used to. The lack of the sidebar doesn’t really bother me since I never used it anyway, but the removal of the navigation buttons will take some getting used to. It was very fast though so I guess I will get to like it after a while.

And of course seeing the SVG’ified games made my heart sing with joy :)

And not to be forgotten I am happy to see Planet XFCE online. Some people see XFCE as a GNOME competitor, but personally I see them as an asset to GNOME. They use GTK+ too and they offer a good alternative to GNOME for people who want a lighter alternative or who just like the way XFCE works. Alternatives that help promote and develop the platform is only a good thing. Keep on blogging guys!

So I spent much of the day at my mothers place trying to get her wireless network up and running. The SMC Barricade Wireless router worked as a charm and so did the CNET PCI card. The hard piece of the puzzle was the standalone SMC Wireless Print Server. Having experience with the Barricade I figured it would be a piece of cake to configure using the webinterface, but no. The print server is definetly not the big volume products that the barricade is for SMC and the interface showed it. It took me quite a long time to actually get the wireless part of the print server to work to begin with. Part of that was both the obscureness of configuring it and the fact that it seems you need to cycle the power of the print server frequently as part of configuring it.

Having gotten that working evertually I was on to the job of getting the printing to work. My mother uses WinXP on her machine, and the SMB based printing I got working after 30 minutes of fiddling, seemed to freeze the computer while the printing was going on. The docs suggested I use LPR based IP printing, but the tools included did not really work at all.
One more hour+ of fiddling and suddenly it started working. Sad part is that I am still not sure what I did in the end that made it work, but now it prints fine without freezing the windooze gui so hopefully everything will be fine from here. Not sure I am ready to recommend the print server to anyone. I mean it definetly works now and hopefully will keep working, but it was a pain to get there. Both the web gui and the included windows GUI tools seemed half developed and many of them simply did not work. I think that if SMC want to start shipping those things in numbers the price need to fall with at least two thirds and make the setup smoother.

The next step in the masterplan is to get the linux based laptop at her place working within the wireless network. Then she we hopefully use that to get aquinted with Linux and GNOME and I will also have a solution where I can get sure that moving her to Linux will not give me an increased support burden.

My GStreamer article put me back in a writing mood and I have some more stuff on my table I want to do now. Including some interviews and a couple of feature articles. Hope to get started/done with at least some of it during this upcoming week and also mail thomasvs to arrange stuff for leaving the crap web hosting service I use today.

Had a discussion with cinamod and donscarletti over my previous blog entry on SVG and how to handle it. My solution of not implementing something which when used reduced speed was not so popular :). Instead we agreed to try and write some documentation for artists as stuff got implemented with suggestions and advice about the cost usage of certain things. So when an artist want to make a icon theme he/she can check out this doc and get some ideas about what to do/not to do to keep GNOME humming along at top speed when people use their theme. Writting this docs will also hopefully push me into writing some more full docs on icon themeing in general. But for now I am waiting on GTK 2.4 as stock icon themeing will change there. So I want to see how that works out before making the docs.

Now on to apt-getting myself latest Fedora development packages :) Thanks hadess!