First day at work without Johan. Office felt strangely empty without him, loosing my only fellow scandinavian co-conspirator. But Johan let himself be seduced by Lambada dancing girls and there was little we could do to measure up to that. Office will soon fill up again though with Wingo and Jan coming onboard. And of course we will get a short fleeing glimpse at Johan again at the Ubuntu conference latere this month.

Had the first encounter in a long while today with Mandrake, installing Mdk 10.1 on a laptop for testing purposes. The experience was a bit mixed. Some things in Mandrake are nice, like their rpmdrake tool, other things like the network config GUI felt a bit kludgy (it did work though). Not sure how big a fan I am of the menu layout either and it seems you get a rather strange selection of software if you choose to install both GNOME and KDE. Fredric was very helpful with getting me started with getting Flumotion installed and I was able to help sort out a few packaging issues. There is still a core issue with overlaying not working, but Thomas promised to look into that. Probably a bug in either the version of python_imaging they ship or with the packaging of the version they use, but we find out soon enough.

Updated everything from CVS and went through our media testsuite and tried playing a DVD with Totem. A couple of more troublesome files in the testsuite is now working and it is starting to look mostly green instead of mostly red on the testchart, and playing a DVD with Totem kinda works, sound is still a bit borked but the image is perfect. Hopefully we can set it up so Ronald borrows one of the laptops we have here in the office to have some realistic usecase to solve those issues which are CPU usage related (currently DVD sound and Matroska playback). The combination of Ronald DVD fixes for Totem and Martin Soto commiting many of his fixes upstream which he made for his python based DVD player called Seamless
it seems we are getting there fast in regards to fullproof DVD playback.