Working on a Saturday sucks, especially when I could have been out sailing in the sun instead.

Otherwise a fun week, the StarOffice announcement took me by suprise, especially since StarOffice has limited
KDE support at the moment and no GNOME support. Well, nice to see them wise up.
Since Caldera owns Openoffice.org and their relationship with Sun I wonder if this also means a new direction
from
them, yet another convert to the free software camp would be nice.

My Linux work has really suffered the last couple of weeks, no articles written for Linuxpower and no work on
getting my GNOME-python skills moving. Have found myself an even easier learning project than the icewm
gnome-capplet thingie though. A wrapper script for gtkyahoo which lets you configure username and password
through a Gtk\GNOME gui. Simpler than that I think would be difficult to find :)

Seems like my first USA trip is coming up. I am going to
San Jose/San Francisco to join Jeremy
Katz in staffing the Linuxpower booth at LWE. Hopefully
I will get to see some of San Francisco too when I am there,
and even find some fun way to celebrate my birthday on the
15th of August.

Noticed that Trebinor
has pretty much decided to take my suggestion of looking at
Xtraceroute. Just shows how much can be accomplished when
hanging out at #linuxpower.

Hasn’t had the time to work much more on learning to program
with Gnome-python, but expect to get some time to spare
during next week. If anyone has some nice example
gnome-python code for making a control-center applet, please
send it to me.

My editorial
on the Linux desktop future was well recieved, I almost
didn’t even get flamed at all, hmm. Hope that doesn’t mean
that I have become to edgeless in my editorials. Some people
was unhappy with my use of the word war etc., but I think
that if you are to keep an editorial interesting and
eyecatching you need to wrap it in words and sentences that
gives some feeling of action and urgency.

I started looking into programming with the GNOME python
bindings today. I actually think I finally will learn to do
some
productive coding using these. My first project is creating
a GNOME
control center applet for configuring IceWM. Just wish that
there was some easy way to make the control center only show
the configuraton entries for the windowmanager currently
used.

I also use CodeCommander as my IDE, this is another great
app.

Cleaned my appartment today in a big way, funny how nice it
is
to be in an appartment that is clean and tidy, to bad it
will
not stay this way for long :)

I also got an Enlightenment article
edited and sent of
today, will probably go up on Linuxpower
monday.

Techrepublic did a review of the Helix GNOME install. I
always thought that
GNOME would dominate the Linux desktop
as a result of being
technically superior, but after seeing
the response to the Helix
installer I have come to the
conclusion that the ease of use and
install that Helix
provides will probably be a bigger success
factor for GNOME
that the technical qualities.

Of course ease of install isn’t
worth much if what you
install is crap so the qualities of GNOME is
not
unimportant, but I am quite sure that the mass adoption and
migration to GNOME
we see these days, wouldn’t have come
about without the Helix
installer.

Speaking of success, I think the recent annoucement by Troll
Tech to alter their
QPL license, is a direct response to the
tremendous response of
GNOME 1.2, just like the QPL was a
direct response to the
threat posed by Harmony.
This time it will get them nowhere however,
actually wonder
how long it will take before Troll Tech gets desperate
enough
to LGPL Qt, or maybe they decide that the desktop war
is a lost
cause and that they will never own the Linux
desktop anyway.