Had a effective day yesterday where I managed to both add
nautilus mime-type support to Gst-Player and also fix many buglets in the GStreamer RPM SPEC files. I also wrote a new GNOME summary which I need to proof-read today and send out.

Still feeling a bit stressfull as my schedule for the next days are a tad full and the planned items don’t mix to well.

Could also get stuch in Tromsø on a work assignment for a couple of weeks which is definetly not a good fit with my other plans, but in these times and days I guess I should just be happy to have a job.

Learning the downside of a networked world at work currently. All our fileservers and businness process systems are moved to US HQ. Unfortunatly our ISP went bankrupt and we (500 employees) share one ISDN line now, until the new ISP setup is ready next month. It means that due to network latency a 5 minute job can take up to 2 hours.

Today I finally discovered how to remove the bug tracker from the GStreamer sourceforge site. Since GStreamer now use GNOME bugzilla this was just annoying having active. Not sure how to access the few bug reports there now that where still unresolved, but I know it is possible.

My little secret programming effort has not moved forward much during the recent days, I do however start to feel that my understanding is increasing somewhat. If I do end up being sent to Tromsø I guess I will have some spare time in the evening that can be well used to work on my secret project.

Ok, going Rafting later this evening and will be gone all weekend. Just hope I manage to get my small additions for gst-player commited to CVS first. Ripped them out of hadess Totem player which amuses me quite a bit :).

Finally got my act togheter and put out a new GNOME Summary yesterday. Needed something to kickstart me and David Schleef having made a new library for rendering flash animations and a flash plugin for gstreamer based on it was just the news I needed to get into summary mode. Lots of little things going in for GNOME 2.2 which makes me really excited.

Wim Taymans of GStreamer fame and his very nice girlfriend Michele have been staying at my place for a few days as part
of their vacation on Scandinavia. I have taken them for a long forest walk and out sailing in the Oslofjord while here. Yesterday they traveled onwards to visit Stockholm, but they will be returning to Norway next weekend to join me on a rafting trip. They will also go glacier walking the day after.

My little programming project (my secret GNOME2 porting attempt) has sort of been on hold while they where here, but I plan on getting back into the hacking mode tommorow. I hope I manage to understand enough to actually get it to compile :)

Interesting week full of little tidbits. The week started with a email from ACS telling my they where reviewing case. This is the first step in getting my .au work permit so I hope it turns out ok.

Secondly I tried out the new OEOne Homebase desktop. It is an interesting concept and with just a little more polish I think it could be a good sell to people who are not very affinite with computers yet. Currently however I got hit by some rather nasty bugs. Another sad point is that they have replaced their
GStreamer based mediaplayer with something else. Not sure what exactly that something is, but it didn’t work very well. I mean I can understand a systems integrator or developer choosing something more mature than GStreamer (say xine-libs) or something to have something stable and full featured faster (while I do understand, I still think their efforts would be better spent at porting things like asf and wmf support to GStreamer instead), but replacing GStreamer with something that don’t work is just weird.

Have trying to do a small license audit on GStreamer and have due to that tried mailing around asking people if they would be willing to relicense under the LGPL for us (instead of using the GPL.) The effectv people where very kind and not only let us relicense their code, but also got the permision to do so for some code they had gotten from someone else. Thanks a lot!
More problems with the rest of the permission or rather problems reaching the authors. I also doubt we be able to relicense some of these projects even if it is ok for current maintainers as they have been around for a long time and due to that have code from to many people inside, people who are next to impossible to get hold of. The Mozilla people are a good example of how hard it is to relicense a big project that has been around for a while.

And last but not least, I turned 29 yesterday :)

Started my Nth teach-myself to code project this week. The project is taking a ‘simple’ GTK 1.x application and trying to port it to GTK 2.x. Gotten further than my previous attempts already, but I have to admitt I have spent more time getting the build system cleaned up than I have looking at the actual code.

So even if also this attempt at learning to code fails at least I have learned much about the GNU build scripts. I have to admit that before this attempt the autogen.sh, Makefile.am, Makefile.in, Makefile, Configure.in, configure and their relationship with eachother was somewhat voodoo to me. Can’t call myself a buildsystem master like thomasvs yet, but at least I have some understanding on how they all relate now. Havoc’s book on GTK+ and GNOME developer featured a nice chapter on it which got me started and if there are others out there wanting a quick intro on the GNU buildscripts I suggest checking out that book (it is available for free in html format from developer.gnome.org).

Anyway having spent some time now fixing the buildtree and buildsystem I have now gotten to a point where the application is actually trying (and somewhat succeding to build against gtk+ 2.0). Hopefully I manage to get it to compile fully by the end of the week and through that process have gotten a little more understanding of how GTK+ coding is supposed to be done.

Went out to town only to remember why I hate going out on a saturday night. Keywords: Overcrowded, cramped, to loud and to many lowbrows around.

Much prefer a going out to a pub or similar on a normal weekday with smaller crowds and music at a level where conversation is not defined by screaming your lungs out into someones ears.

Hmm, back from vacation. 16 days of no work, no computers and no stress. Feel more energized than I have for a long time.

Managed to send the letter to ASC to get the process of me getting a Australian work permit started. Hopefully it will give me a work permit and a job within the next 6 months.

Even though I am back I think my GNOME and GStreamer contributions will continue to suffer for a few weeks as my schedule is pretty booked up also privatly with family get-togheters and baby sitting being among the components.

I do hope I will be able to at least get a new GNOME summary out next monday as it has been to long since the last time.
Think I will also make mini-summaries containing the statistics for the weeks gone by without a proper summary.

8 more days and I am 29, scary. I mean just one year left of being a young person in my twenties before becoming a old man above 30 ;)