Hmm, made a little mistake today, managed to send out the summary announcing art.gnome.org to be up before checking if star and aldug had actually managed todo so after I had to leave for the airport yesterday. Hopefully they get it going today to make me look a little less the fool :)

Currently spending time surfing waiting for a 200MB patch to download so I can do what I went here to do :(

When you have lots of time like this you start reading a lot of articles and discussions one usually don’t bother with reading. The United Linux release being one of them, and one repeated issue debated in that regard is the Caldera/SCO rename. Some people seem to argue that using the SCO name and focusing on that product portfolio is a great move because there are so many SCO customers out there and
Caldera/SCO got such a nice VAR network from the SCO aquisition. My question is then is, if a) there are so many SCO user out there interesting continuing being that for the foreseeable future and even wanting to increase their use of SCO and b) there are all these great SCO VAR’s out there who brings in so much business; why did the original SCO go down the drain and end up selling these assets to Caldera?

To answer my own question above. a) most of these customers are using SCO for systems which will not use SCO when eventually they are replaced and b) That incredible VAR network isn’t all that the marketing people pretend it is.

Conclusion Caldera/SCO isn’t the wave of the future, it is just a gang of people milking a dead cow for its last drops of milk.

nymia if you are interested in working on Flash you should check out libswfdec which is being developed by David Schleef. It is a LGPL flash decoding library that already works very well for non-interactive flash animations.
You find it at Comedi.org ftp site.

You can find David online in the #gstreamer irc channel on irc.openprojects.net using the nick ‘ds’.

Long boring day at work. One day job that ends up taking 3 is very frustrating. Thinks seems to finally work now however so hopefully when I leave today I can fell secure that things are in a better state than when I arrived.

Discovered yesterday that cinamod is working on a very cool little sideproject atm. Think it will be my main story for the next GNOME summary :)

I also find the Apple Rendezvouz stuff interesting, and I guess I am not alone as I discovered that julian is already on the Rendezvous mailing list. Maybe we will get Rendezvous support in Gabber just like in the apple iChat.

We released the new 0.4.1 version of GStreamer last evening.
Getting more and more proud of this release as I see that the bug reports that has come in afterwards are relativly obscure. Not that we shouldn’t fix obscure bugs, but I take it as a sign that we are starting to iron out the most important issues. Think it was also telling that the two people we needed to help build GStreamer on IRC last night was using MacOS X and Gentoo (not to say anything bad about Gentoo, but I do feel it says something that 9 out of 10 people which has problems building GStreamer on Linux seems to be using it, considering the relative market share of Gentoo I think that hints at something.)

That Jacob was able to build and use GStreamer of MacOSX last night with only minor tweaks makes me very happy cause it is something of a proof of concept that we have managed to keep things portable.

I added icons, desktop files and code to add appicons to most of the in-house GStreamer applications yesterday. Since I don’t know shit about about coding (I have a degree in Marketing and Finance) it took me some time and help, but I did it. Anyway I think such smalls things adds a lot of polish and makes thing look a lot more mature.

Had to log of early last night and go to my mothers place to feed both myself and the cat. I am house and cat sitting this week :).
Anyway this led to me watching a television documentary on the Norwegian emigration to Netherland during the late 1700 and early 1800. Rather interesting, especially the part about what things those who returned brought back in terms of cultural impulses and linguistics. For instanse there is a saying in Norway that goes like ‘Jeg skjoenner ikke et doeyt’, which means ‘I don’t undersand a bit (of what your saying)’. That last part of that saying, ‘doeyt’, is a word that has had no special meaning to me, but it turns out that it is the name of a dutch coin that is worth next to nothing. Another expression is ‘hulter til bulter’ which is a term used when something is a mess, seems this is also a term from that term and is actually a dutch term. There where other terms mentioned to, mostly nautical expressions.
(Over half the people who emigrated did so to become sailors in the Dutch fleet.)

Anther important thing the documentary reminded me of is how
important part of Norwegian history emigration is. Being a land of extreme weather and relativly little farmable lands has through our history lead to a lot of people emmigrating from time to time. This goes as far back as the settling of Iceland, Greenland, Shetland Islands and attempted settling of North America by the vikings. To the emigration to Netherlands this program described and most recently with half the population moving to North America during the colonial era (with a large percentage ending up in Minesota).

Raph actually Abiword isn’t just using libart for their SVG support, their using your rsvg library. Cinamod is even activly hacking and improving rsvg atm.

On the GStreamer front I commited a patch that adds license information to each plugin. I did this after we/I had some mail discussions with RMS about avoiding potentional GPL infringements. By looking at the license field people can now easily determine if the plugin they are trying to access is under the GPL. We have some loose plans to extend this so that applications have to activly tell GStreamer that they are GPL compatible in order for the autopluggers to give you access to
the functionality of GPL plugins.

I have to admit that my first reaction was that this was a bit zealotly, but then I came to the realisation that many of the authors who have licensed their code under the GPL did this with a clear intent, and for us not to make sure that their wishes are respected would be disrespectful and morally wrong.

Judging by the ammount of traffic the GNOME Multimedia mailing list is a success. There is some disagreements on the nature of the simple utility library we plan to offer, but hopefully we be able to sort that out in a way that leaves everyone at least content.

Have also been looking into the issue of out of box support for multimedia keyboards, like the logitech itouch.
hadess have this neat little application which is called Acme which runs as a deamon and catch the calls of these special keys. I mailed my proposal to Bastien
last night for how I thought it should evolve, and Bastien being the great person he is responded, not by telling my how stupid my solution was (even if it was), but instead by explaining how he thought it could be solved easier and cleaner. He was even courteous enough to ask if I thought his alternative proposal was a good idea at the end of the mail. Think I owe Bastien some free beer at the next GUADEC. (hmm, my list of people I owe beer is starting to grow very long :)

We where planing on making a new test tarball today of GStreamer, but it was decided that we wait a few more days since there a many issues we want to resolve before making this release. Everyone seems to be in a good hacking mode however so I think we will get these issues resolved pretty fast. The good thing about the delay is that it will increase the chance of the flash and asf plugin getting included.

Also decided to move my personal life forward by changing some rules. My life philosophy is that you never get a bad hand of cards, you are just playing by the wrong (usually self imposed) rules. More on that later :)

Been sick since friday which sucks. Good part is that I spent the time I have been feeling well enough, doing small GStreamer related tasks. We are preparing for a 0.4.1 release sometime during next weekend with a first pre-release on thursday. Lots of fun things happening with Owen Frasier-Green
having started on ASF support for us and DS continuing his work on flash support and browser embeding.

But the new release will mostly be about bug-fixes and polish which maybe is a little less glorious than adding features, but which probably is twice as important as adding features. We are already starting to have a lot of people trying to build apps with GStreamer and us responding quickly to fixing the issues they encounter is a extremly important task in my opinion for some who develops a library like we do.

thomasvs is continuing to put love and care into our buildsystem. I think we are at a point where most people should be able to build GStreamer easily or at least get a understandable error when it fails to build.

Also learned today that Sun has dedicated 3 engineers to work on printing solutions. Hopefully they will get involved and help Chema with gnome-print soon.

Argh, grumble. Got something I interpret as getting turned down asking this girl out. If she only knew the mental pains I went through getting myself to call in the first place.

I will actually give her one more chance, but I am not to optimistic about it.

Well good thing is that at least I never have to wonder now about wether I should have asked her out.

Question I need to ask is: is it time for me to get myself a mail-order bride? <g>

Writing this with a bit of a hangover. We had a 10-year aniversary party for my high-school class yesterday. It was great fun and I got to meet a lot of people again that I haven’t seen since we graduatet 10-years ago. Many strange suprises, like the girl I considered a bimbo back then who now had just completed here education as a doctor.

Also meet again a girl I had regrettet that I didn’t ask out back then and she still looked stunning. Even better she was single atm, so I am not making the same mistake twice :). Got her email address and have just mailed for her phone number (I think asking someone out over mail is a bit to lame, so I need the phone number.)

Ok, going out with the GNOME.no guys sailing today so I have to run.