Once again Christmas is upon us. Personally I be spending it with my family so I probably be offline until 3rd day of Christmas. So I want to wish everyone, who celebrates it in one form or the other, a very happy Christmas!

Finally got my new
digital camera just the other day. Very happy with it so far, worked like a charm under Gtkam, just plug it into the USB port and chose the model, now I only need to get Gnocam to work. Put it to good use yesterday to take photos of the cabin I have rented for the GNOME Multimedia Summit in Oslo, March.

The summit is looking good, we have just started to get participants to sign up, but I think we will easily reach the 20 needed and probably hit close to the 30 we have room for. Going to send out a formal invitation tommorow to the gnome-multimedia mailing list and select other addresses.

Personally I think there is way to few events like this happening in the wider linux community. We often talk about being a community, but I feel that to often the definition of that community is ‘cvs commit’, something which falls way short of a real community in my mind.

Also decided to strenghten my more job related knowledge this week so I bought the O’Reilly book ‘Oracle XML Applications’, so far I like it very much. My boss also told me it would be ok for me to ask for a refund from work for the price of the book, which was nice as I had bought the book on my own initiative.

A bit frustration the last few days. First of all so did a workproject I planned on being done with on Sunday not end for me due to bugs, so now I am still strugling with it.

Secondly I tried mailing ACS once again to see what was happening with my immigration assessment. To my suprise I got a reply almost immediatly. It stated that my request was received and forwarded to the consultant that handled my case, even got the email address of that consultant. After not hearing anything for 5 more days I mailed her directly. Got a autoresponse that she was away and would not return before the 12th and that all mails recieved while away would be deleted, aaargh. 8 to 10 weeks their homepage says, I am getting close to 20 now.

Thirdly I ordered a digital camera last week, to be delivered to my door my a messenger company. Still no camera seen.

On the postive side we managed to get a new GStreamer release out with a big thanks to thomasvs,
secondly I think I have enough material to do a nice summary this weekend.

We are planning a little GNOME Multimedia gathering. It will be here in Norway in a cabin in the forest outside Oslo. The planned time is now the second week of march.

I was out looking at the cabin we can rent today and it was wonderful. There where a full 30 beds in the cabin and the living room was huge so even 40 people would be possible I think. Electricty seemed goods for the laptops and the kitchen
had lots of big pans and things like that.

Everything was well kept in the cabin and things looked clean.
I think this gathering gonna be a lot of fun. Only thing I am curious about is getting everone to the cabin as it is approx a 2 kilometer walk from the nearest road through deep snow and rough terrain, and hackers aren’t exactly known for their sportive habbits :) Hopefully I be able to get snow shoes for everyone

Getting the keys to the cabin was fun. The cabin is owned by an association who works to promote outdoor activities like forest walks and forest skiiing. They do this by marking trails, prepping skitracks and renting out cabins like this.

Anyway to get the key I walked into their office down in Oslo center and said that I would like to borrow the key to take a look. The lady I talked to said, ok, that is a 40 Euro deposit for the key. I paid and got the key. No asking of name, no signing anything. I guess they figure a thief wouldn’t bother trying to get the key anyway :)

Working from home these days is rather pleasant, longer days it tend to foster, but a lot less stressfull.

On the GStreamer front it seems we might be making some progress on the threading issues as Wim threw himself into the battle, they fixed some issues yesterday and hopefully more today. Between him, David Schleef, David I. Lehn and thomasvs
I think they should be able to clear the issues. If I understand it they are currently looking into glib as it might be that our bug is in there.

bg commented on trommey question about relative success of gcj and mono. I doubt it
is the policies of Sun that has hampered gcj, as Microsoft has
much less of a standing in the community.

Personally I believe it has to do with who and how the projects are run. Mono has been running with a high profile, with a very energetic leader (miguel) who is very good at getting other people involved and motivated. Mono has also furthered itself by its association with GNOME and Ximian.

gcj on the other hand has been developed with a much lower profile (do it even have a website/webpage of its own?
It has not assosiated itself to a high mindshare project (yes, I know gcc is what everyone uses, but the number of people checking up on GNOME news on a daily basis is a ‘gazillion’ times higher than those who go looking for gcc news on a daily basis. I have no idea of the style of maintainership on gcj, but I would guess that the maintainer (trommey is it you) do not have that flare of miguel that tend to get people motivated and interested.

I think with the pletora of free software projects struggling for attention these days, then good code is only half the story behind free software success story.

That said I have not written gcj off as a dead project, in my opinion it is more probable to be a sleeping giant.