Christian Schaller

Can’t help it, but this network card
just appeals to me. The specially designed heatsink and the fact that it runs an onboard version of linux calls out to a geeky side of me I never even knew existed. Unfortunatly the linux host driver are not available yet, but their FAQ promises it sometimes this fall.

Bob Geldoff recently wrote a
essay in one of Norway’s major newspapers repeating how we should not forget Africa in the face of other problems in the world. The Norwegian minister for foreign aid comments on the article mentioning his agreement and points out that the number of people killed in Rwanda during the conflict there meant that for every third hour the same mount of people where killed in Rwanda that was killed in total during this summers Israel/Lebanon conflict.

Two points strikes me. First of all its a bit dangerous to in some sense rate conflicts based on number killed. Taken to the extreme it would mean that you basically ignore any conflict/problem until it reaches top 3 in death numbers. Nobody is arguing for doing so of course, but every time you do argue with number of dead you are in some sense promoting that view.

On the other side there also is the moral question about why the big
butcherings in Africa tend to fall from public interest quickly while relatively speaking smaller conflicts like the Israel/Lebanon one don’t.

A lot of possible answers of course, ranging from historic importance of Israel to a world heavily influenced by Judaism and its two spin-off religions Christianity and Islam. Bob Geldoff in his article also points out that there might be a general feeling in Europe that Africa is a hopeless case, that no matter what is done so are there seemingly always new and bigger tragedies transpiring there. So maybe people haven’t given up in the same way on the Middle-east yet. That said I do seem to feel a bit of fatigue creeping into the European population on the problems of the middle-east.

Been lots of political blogging on Planet GNOME recently, which I don’t mind, but I do feel that the political realism in the blogs seems to be going out the window in favour of slogans and quoting of populists.

First of all are there double standards being applied in the world? Yes, there are. Do the US specifically apply double standards to various issues? Definetly. The sad thing though is that the international leaders who critize the US the hardest for its double standards tend to apply even more extreme double standards themselves. Whats more is that unlike the US they do not tend to allow free critique of their own double standards in their own countries.

Is the US doing thing abroad it probably shouldn’t be? Definetly. But to think the world would be a better place with a US government that totally disenganges from international politics is rather hilarious.

Is the UN security council having permanent members with a veto power ‘unfair’? Sure. But a UN not giving the US, Russia and China at least a veto right would quickly become even more irrelevant and ignored than it is today. Idealism is nice, but sometime one must let a little bit of realism into the picture.

But to end this blog with a little sarcasm in the spirit of the populists quoted on the planet recently. If Ahmedinejad want Israel re-located to the Christian world that is easy to accomplish. Just end the muslim occupation of the Byzantine empire

Update: Just discovered that Chavez has made Noam Chomsky the number one bestseller on Amazon. For some reason I find that quite amusing

Like everyone do sometimes I felt a bit tired today, so I went down to the local shop to buy a bottle of coke and some energy soft drink, both containing Caffeine. For some reason I started thinking about the fact that in the form of Caffeine taken in the form of coffee, tea, cola softdrinks and energy drinks like redbull etc., the world population is on a daily basis drugging itself with what I guess is a form of performance enhancing drug. Combine that with gigantic volumes of weak painkillers based on paracetamol that people are taking to combat headaches and so on I can’t help but feel we have a situation where the world has made itself dependent on drugs to keep going. And while there is of course a big step up to stuff like Amphetamine the principle is the same. Taking drugs to be able to yield/produce more.

Not sure where I am going with this apart from feeling its a bit of a paradox that we have a drug addicted society fighting for ‘clean sports’ and waging a ‘war on drugs’. On the other hand I guess the situation isn’t that different from everyone needing water to survive, yet we still try to help people from drowning

So I have been away for two weeks on vacation. While I figured I needed it I don’t think I realized how much I actually needed it Spent most of my time in Norway offline, partly by choice. Just spending two weeks relaxing either at home or hiking through the Oslo forest or hanging out with friends. I also grew myself a little beard while on vacation, and I think I will try to keep it around for a while

Since my experiment with bringing Norwegian Rakfisk worked our quite will after Christmas I decided to bring along another item of Norwegian food this time. So hopefully later this week I will be able to invite people to a delicous meal based on whale meat.

There is an article on news.com talking about objections from Hewlett Packard to the patent provisions of the GPL3. First of all I hope Hewlett Packard don’t get to much traction on their change suggestion, as their change suggestion looks to me like they make the patent protection provisions of the GPL3 even weaker than those of the GPL2. I think that the GPL is powerful enough at this point to be used as a way to weaken the software patent regime. Bad bad HP.

Dell
On the topic of PC makers, my laptop harddisk broke down yesterday. Luckily we have a on-site support contract with Dell so a technician will be here tomorrow morning to fix it. A bit frustrated that they couldn’t come today, but I guess we are not paying the kind of money to have that kind of availability. By the luck of the gods
I did do a full home area backup Tuesday. So today I am using our spare laptop running from a ubuntu live CD. I will miss my data though, but I guess I can manage until tomorrow.

So I am back after spending the weekend in England attending LugRadio live. Had a great time there, Jono and Stuart for insance are two likeable young lads, but it is a good thing they have older more experienced people like Ade and Matthew to help them.

The conference was a blast, with beer and interesting talks both flowing freely from the early hours of the day.

From a GStreamer perspective it was a great conference with talks on GStreamer projects such as
GStreamer itself,
Pitivi,
Diva,
Lowfat and
Farsight.

Michael Meeks also talked a little about GStreamer in his OpenOffice talk and explained that they are now working on adding GStreamer support to OpenOffice in order to do embedding of audio and video in OpenOffice documents etc., very cool stuff.

The generic GStreamer talk was my own and went ok apart from my demo section getting butchered by power supply issues. For some reason I had trouble getting reliable power out of the UK socket I was using (with my European power plug) so my power went away halfway into demo’ing Elisa. My screen setup was a bit stupid as I had to look at the projected bigs creen myself to see my slides which hampered the ‘look at the audience’ part of doing a talk.

Got to talk to a lot of interesting people, like the internets
Ted Haeger the host of Novell Open Audio who came away from the conference a beard richer.

Also got to discuss a little with Paul Cooper about next years GUADEC which will be in Birmingham. I have some ideas on an addition to draw in a wider audience and grow the community which we will look into the plausability of pulling off.

Due to EasyJet having cancelled our Sunday night flight, me and Edward stayed on until Monday. Luckily Matthew Allum and a very pregnant Sid was kind enough to let me stay at their place for the night. Their two dogs aka the Pugs where a little freaky looking in my view, but they more than made up for it by being very friendly and fun.

Slept very well on their sofa after two days in Wolverhampton sleeping in a sauna-like hotelroom while fighting a constant battle for space. Spent a easygoing Monday with Matthew, following up on some work items and discussing the state of the world with Matthew. Also we did a very nice lunch in the nearby township. Always enjoy talking with Matthew a lot, I think we are on the same page on most issues.

In the afternoon I went off to the airport to hook up with Edward again who had stayed the night at his brothers place. Think we where both rather tired after a great weekend, but we managed to get ourselves onto our airplane for the return to the city by the sea.
A big thanks to Ade, Jono, Matthew and Stuart and the LRL volunteers for organizing a great LugRadio live. Sure to be back next year! P.S. Make sure the Guinness is colder next year

The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone, Henrik Ibsen

It seems leaving Norway is one of the hardest things one could do. The Norwegian government have basically decided that Norway isn’t just a country, its a concentration camp. So even after living for almost two full years in Barcelona the Norwegian government refuse to accept that I have moved and demand that I tax to Norway for instance. Will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Norwegian government comes to accept that I actually have moved.

So having a cold I spent most of the weekend watching movies. Most of the movies I seen before, but I keep reseeing them again and again in order to try to learn Castilliano (using spanish dubbing and subtitles). Anyway one movie I ended up seeing which I hadn’t seen before was Ninette. It a spanish movie I picked up at the FNAC some time ago figuring that I should get some spanish movies too for my learning and it was cheap.
Anyway, what an incomprehensible movie. The storyline seems patched together and the characters are completely unaccessible. When the movie was over I was wondering what the goal of the movie was, was it an attempt to restore self-confidence in the middle-aged Spanish man?
Or was the reason I didn’t get it that I am not intimate with the Spanish historical ideas about France and the french? Anyway the only thing I liked about the movie was Elsa Pataky, the lead accress, she was as hot as they come.

Tonight is X-Men 3 time

Roozbeh, while I can understand your frustration I don’t think its fair to pin this one on Google. I am sure Google’s lawyers are quite good and if they feel that allowing Iranian citizens into the Google SoC program is running afoul with US law then they probably think so with good reason. For Chris DiBona to be able to go to the Google laywers with an opposing view he would need much stronger ammunition than iranian foreign exchange students being unhappy about it and non-laywer reading of the documents in question.

Also in the current US political climate I am not sure Google want to have to fight a potential PR war about wether they are trying to subvert US export regulations or not.

On a related note, was I frustrated when Google didn’t make GStreamer a Summer of Code project? Sure I was. But at the same time I realized of course that its Google’s money and they have the right to spend it exactly how they see fit and give it to whoever they want. Including not giving them to citizens on the US export ban list countries.

In the end Roozbeh you have to face that the US and Iran is not on very good terms. That is neither your or Chris DiBona’s fault, but you both have to deal with it. That might not be ‘fair’, but it is how the world works. Citizens get ‘punished’ and ‘rewarded’ based on the actual or percieved actions of their nation no matter if the citizen in question has any kind of responsibility or influence on the situation or act. Sanctions probably has to work that way or they will be very ineffective.

So while I sympatize with your plight, and I am sure Chris DiBona does too, these blog entries about how evil Google is feels misplaced to me.