The midnight sun up here is driving me nuts, and giving me big problems sleeping well. It is so strange having the Sun up in the sky shinning down on you 24 hours a day. Returning to Oslo this evening, will be nice to get back on track with what has been happening in the world :)

I am in Northern Norway on a work assignment these days, yesterday I went out to eat and decided to try a local speciality, seal meat. Not sure what I think of it, the taste wasn’t really bad, but I can’t say that I think I will order it again either.

Gman: No, I was very happy when Sun joined the fundation. The two cases can not be more different. Sun said that they would contribute to GNOME development using GNOME technologies and using the GNOME licenses for their contributions.

Real on the other hand is wants to present software not using any GNOME technologies, not integrating with GNOME in any way and which uses a license that is not compatible with ours. In fact the difference between having Microsoft come and present their streaming media server and having Real doing their presentation is marginal in relation to GNOME.

But I guess if Real is joining the GNOME Foundation (or sponsoring GUADEC directly) I guess letting them talk is fair enough, especially considering how dry the sponsor money has been this year.

Gman:
Can’t say I find it exciting at all. Considering that even bigger and more important companies or people are willing to come and talk even when the audience is just a small LUG I don’t see why it is so thrilling to have Real come to pedle their shitty software with a shitty license at GUADEC.

And since their shitty server software is available under a free to use license their gift of licenses is not very exciting either, unless the plan is for the GUADEC talks to be streamed using their non-free codecs, which would be real poetry.

I sometimes wonder if the community around free software has a future in its current form. To me the reason I started to get involved was because I wanted the infrastructure of tommorows world to be free and open, as I saw it as a fundemental requirement for our society to remain free.

Yet I am not so certain anymore that the Linux community or anyone can really provide this anymore. The problem is simply that as the popularity of what we do increase, more and more people start depending on it for their income and due to that the welfare of themselves and their family. And when ideals cross swords with practical real-world issues like getting money to pay for food, medical bills and so on then ideals then to loose of whenever there is a conflict.

So while the community has always featured persons with varying beliefs and ideals, there has been enough basics agreement among a large enough percentage of the community to keep the train moving in the right direction, with the old Qt free edtion story being the only major derailment so far. But as the commercial interests increase the priorities of the members of the community start to change which in turn is slowly moving the underlaying values and priorities of the community.

I am probably painting the picture bleaker than it actually is, but I do think I see signs of this development many places. I like to note however that this is not really a corporate conspirency theory, more a feeling of resignation when facing the reality of human nature.

Spring, such a two headed beast. On one side it is a wonderful part of they year with the world coming alife again after being in a stasis under the snow.

On the other side it is also the time of year when I feel rather tired and worn out due to allergy. I am far from being among the worst luckily, I do not need to take any medicine and apart from blodshot eyes and the total lack of energy I am fine. It seems my working out all through winter has helped somewhat, I am less beaten this year than I use to be, but I still notice that every breath I take this time of year is heavier than it was just 3-4 weeks ago.

I even managed to get out a new GNOME summary today, but I really had to fight with myself to find the energy for it.

Been working like a madman for the last 5-6 days trying to move the two projects I am working at work on to completion.
The few hours I have had at home I have had to not spend in front of a computer, due to growing psychical pains in my eyeballs. Think I need to ask my boss that I get a few days of to recover, because I am even having trouble focusing properly when driving to work in the morning.

Got Majesty for Linux in the mail on friday, spent the weekend either playing it or doing work related tasks. I do enjoy playing Majesty a lot, it is in many ways Heroes of Might and Magic as a realtime game, and they have managed to do the playsystem well. For instance I am bored out of my mind of the Warcraft/Starcraft engine, but Majesty is different enough to make things fun again.

Of course this weekend is an example why I tend to try and stay away from games, they suck up a lot of time, while not really giving me anything useful back. I mean time spent on games doesn’t really move my life forward in anyway; playing games don’t really teach me anything, doesn’t improve my social skills, do not promote my career or any other variable that I feel is an objective plus. They do entertain me; which is why I did spend so much time this weekend playing it, but there are other things I can do that I feel are entertaining which also has other positive effects.

So hopefully I will manage to let Majesty rest today and do something more productive ;)

Continued my build script work today. I wasn’t quite as finished as I thought yesterday. Today I needed to figure out stuff like how to rename files by adding a variable to the name and get Make to package that and how to add new options to configure to set those variables. Todays helpers where thomasvs and cinamod

My final bonus issue is running some apps as a specific user, not root. Luckily jrb is checking out that question for me.

Anyway when this is done I have a really nice rpm for our customers running Oracle Applications on Linux. This rpm integrates the stopping and starting of Oracle processes with the init.d stuff of Red Hat, meaning that you see stuff as ‘Starting Oracle Database OTEST’ [OK]. The package also adds all the Oracle Admin tools to your GNOME menu and installs a set of easy to use crontab scripts for making backups.

The by changing two parameters in the SPEC you can make parallel installable RPMS for each instance you are running. So if you have two Oracle Applications systems on one machine, then you can build and install both RPMS with no conflict.

Of course the job is not fully done yet, I mean I have the build system going now, which was the unchartered territory for me, but I still have quite a lot of simple labour to do making little scriplets to stop and start all the different processes that is part of Oracle Applications.