I personally closed 120 bugs in GNOME bugzilla last night.
Ok, maybe not that impressive as I only closed all GMC bugs
as wontfix with a short message that they should use
Nautilus or if they wanted a GMC like filemanager they could
try GNOME Commander. But those 120 GMC bugs showing up in
the GNOME Summary bug status each week had been anoying the
hell out of me. Guess it is an example of a itch getting
scratched.

Was back from GUADEC on monday. GUADEC was as always great fun and my renting a couple of apartments
worked out really well for the most part I think. As for the partying some bars in Seville will never be the same
again
I think :). Another conclusion is that the GNOME community seems to have managed to change the way we work
to be more scaleable now. The entry of first Sun and now Wipro into the community has lead to the GNOME
community slowly changing our style of working and finally Bugzilla for instance is really serving its purpose as a
central part of the development infrastructure. It has seemed to me that even if the number of developers in the
GNOME community has been continually growing over the last three years we have not really scaled the amount
of
work getting done. Sometimes it seemed that our 100 developers of 3 years ago managed to get as much done
as
300 does today. But I feel that with the structural and attitude changes now working their way through the
GNOME
community we are finally getting to a point where it is easy to join and do real development. Of course only time
will tell if its really is our organisation that is working better or just a normal ‘new major release’ type energy boost
taking place.

Me and kmaraas stayed longer than the main crowd and spent 4 days traveling around in
Andalucia. A lot of fun even if we missed Hale Berry by just a day in Caduz.

Got back on monday and spent that day and yesterday getting my day to day life back in working order.
Suprisingly no big crises waited for me back at work and I think I will be able to get back on track with writing the
GNOME Summaries and helping out with GStreamer now.

Also applied for a internal transfer to Oracle China today, guess I have decided that it is my destiny to live in China
for some years :)

I think today is my musings day.
I sometimes wonder if Linux and free software projects
becoming business is a good thing. I mean on the positive
side it does mean people can get to work fulltime on Linux,
GNOME, Apache etc., but on the other hand the reason many
of us enjoyed working on these projects to begin with was
the stressles, only work at what you find fun, situation
that comes with a truly volunteer system like the free
software community mostly was uptil 2-3 years ago.

When I started out I used to read Freshmeat everyday to see
if there was something ‘new and cool’ out, and if there was
I would eagerly compile the 0.0.1 release to test it out.

Today things have moved to a different level and instead of
being excited about the existence of a project to do xyz,
we now have apps that can do xyz in most common cases and
the focus have moved to issues like portability,
accessibilty, usability, release schedules etc. I don’t
really find that as exciting for some reason. So today I
can use Linux and GNOME as a tool to do my job, but I do
sometimes miss the good ‘ol time when it was just a fun
toy.

This being said I don’t really want to go back to
the good old days either. Having fifthy 0.0.1 apps that
could almost do something was fun at the time, but today I
am older and less full of energy and would probably find
those 50 ‘almost’ apps mostly frustrating. I guess it would
be like seeing one of those movies from your youth that you
remember as extremely funny, but seeing in again you just
find it rather stupid and plain.

In case you wonder what made me think about these
issues, well it is not software related at all actually.
What started my thinking about the good ‘old’ days was
meeting again the most beautiful girl of my college years
early last week first the first time since graduation day
10 years ago. She had in my mind since that time always
stood out as the dream girl I wished I could meet again.
Well actually meeting her again was a big wake-up call, not
only had she gotten really old during those 10 years not
even being close to the beauty I remembered, but meeting
her again and talking to her made me also remember the
reason why I didn’t really pursue a relationship with her
back then, she was now as then rather dumb and shallow.
Having gotten my illusion broken I started feeling rather
old myself and that started me thinking about how much
better things where before. Which I rationally know is not
true, things where not better before it is just that you
always forget the trouble and remember the only the good
times. I am sure that in 10 years time I will one day sitt
back and think ‘darn how much better things was 10 years
ago’, no children to feed and take care of, no wife to keep
happy and no giant house loan to strugle with, just me and
all the opportunities the world had to offer <g>

Made the switch to GNOME 2 today for the first time fully. YAY!

It is still a little rough in the edges this beta, but now
it is at least useable. Filed a bunch of bug reports on
different little things. Think I try and join up for the
next bugday to see if I can lend a hand.

I am really exited about the upcoming GStreamer release. Seems
Rhythmbox is quickly getting into a condition where it can
have its first release and same goes for the media player.

Got a hybrid GNOME 1.4 & GNOME 2.0 system running now. Have
yet to make the full switch as I am having some problems
with the GNOME 2 panel that makes it a little trouble some
to use
for me.
Think I will make the full switch at the next beta.

We posted two articles today on Linuxpower.org
on the topic of Unix and Multimedia. The first is done by me,
the second by Chris Pirazzi. Please head over and read them,
think if you are interested in video playback under Unix you
will find them very interesting.

Got two articles that was supposed to be published today, but due to the linuxpower.org server changing
ip-adress
we decided to hold them until next week so dns servers would manage to get updated.

Seems a lot of people are upset at Blizzard for stupidly shutting down a battle.net clone, well hopefully Blizzard’s
stupidity will cure some people of the habbit of doing some even more stupid namely play computer games.

Can’t help but smile but it seems the last days flaming of
Miguel and Mono has had opposite effect of what the flamers
wanted. More developers have joined Mono after the noise of
the last few days. That is poetry in motion.

Cool weekend. Wim Taymans, our resident code wizard on GStreamer made a set of
Tarkin encode and decoder plugins. I think that means that
GStreamer is the first project except the Tarkin project
itself to support Ogg Tarkin.

Good thing of the day:
We released GStreamer
0.3.2 today, it felt good to get it released as we
originally planned it two weeks ago. Making release plans on
a free software project
is rather hard in many ways as you don’t really have a
control of what contributions come in when. The reason we
got delayed was not lack of code contributions, but due to
some much needed changes in the core leading to a lot of
the plugins etc. needing updating before release. So think
we got a good release in the end even if a reliable AVI
format support seems a little elusive. Hopefully we start
bundling the code of Avifile the next time and manage to
beat that snapshot and our plugin on top of it to be rather
sturdy if such a thing is possible with Avifile.
We finally have the mediaplayers working again now under
GNOME 2.0 and hadess seems to be getting
ready to make the first release of rhytmbox.

Bad thing of the day:
Geez, the interview Miguel did with the Register about his
ideas for GNOME and Mono intergration lead to a large number
of comments on Linuxtoday. A large part of them stupid and
rather misinformed as I have started to expect from the
crowd of people who think they contribute to Linux by
posting shit on message boards. Personally I don’t really
know what I think of Mono and its potential, but I believe
in Miguels right to advocate his view and I think he has
shown through his actions that he intentions are just. Of
course taking a reasonable stance is no fun for the crowd of
pundits crowding the message board.