So I am at thomasvs place now. Been a good day so far although I am starting to notice that I got up at 0500 this morning to catch the airplane.

Thomas and Kristien’s appartment is large and nice and perfect for having house guests. Guess I come here often :)

Julien was unfortunatly sick today, but hopefully I see him tommorow.

Currently working on doing a gnome-media release, maybe it will be ready before dinner :)

Discovering a feature I would like to have in Evolution today. And that is a way of linking my email addresses to certain outgoing email addresses. So that when I mail a gnome.org list for instance it use my @gnome.org address.

Having such a feature would be a good way for me to avoid getting mails about my mails getting stuck in the moderation que, since I forgot to choose the correct from address.

A bright spot is that checking up on my E*Trade account has become fun again lately. With the latest increases in stock price for Novell and Red Hat so are my shares very safely in the green again with a 20% positive earning.
After a year of being in the red this is nice. Only wish I had some really money invested so that I could earn some real money. The current investment only has the potentional of paying for some nice vacations through its value increases, not making me rich. I guess my best get rich plan still is winning the national lottery :)

The big CAPS merger happened in GStreamer yesterday and the dust is settling. A few more days and we probably be back where we was before the merger in absolute terms. Played a song for the first time yesterday with Gst-player and the 0.7 branch. Nice to see it back and somewhat working again with the new branch. My guesstimate is that we will have a Gst-player that works better with the 0.7 branch in about a week than it ever did with the 0.6 branch :)

Anyway of I go to see the last episode of LOTR :)

After seeing the discussion referenced here and on other news sites I skimmed through the Userlinux mail archive. Like most such debates where people feel something close to their heart is threatened the arguments where heated and anything that possible could be taken as a sign in their favour where not only mentioned, but brought forth as final evidence to where the world was going. Personally I doubt the exclusion from Userlinux in itself means that much to the KDE hackers; it will probably just be one of many smallish Debian based desktop distro’s out there, and as was pointed out in the threads some of which are KDE based. My guess is that the reason so many of them has gotten so riled out about it is due the the many important edorsements GNOME has gotten lately, which I guess makes many KDE supporters fear that KDE is getting decoupled in the charge towards the corporate desktop. The Userlinux decision was probably just the drop that many them explode.

That said these decisions tend to synergize themselves. Userlinux is meant to be a Linux desktop solution and with Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun and their partners pushing GNOME as their Linux desktop solution then it is natural for a project with the stated aims of Userlinux to hook into that
wave. If the stated goal is to attract a large number of ISV’s to the Linux desktop plattform then the decision of vendors to close ranks behind the GTK+ API’s is the best decision to achieve such a thing. Any other decision would be to replay the old divided Unix desktop scenario. And we all know how successfull CDE and OpenWindows where at attracting ISV’s :)

I think I kinda can understand why people become alchoholics. I mean that feeling of no petty worries you get after drinking a little is kinda nice. On the other hand there is a process where you tend to continue drinking and you end up feeling like I do today. Like a lemming who walked off a cliff.

So while the lull of alchohol can be pleasant, it comes at a price. And for alcoholics that price is a ruined life. For me who only drink alchohol like once or twice a month the price is a headache and a horrible day at work, feeling that I smell like a cheap bottle of vodka.

Of course being out drinking meant no GNOME related tasks for me yesterday.

Wingo do you have an URL for your Guile stuff?

Flamewars have strange sideeffects. A small falling out over maintainership caused me to re-discover a NAS plugin that had been lingering in the mailing-list since May. (who said sort by topic was useless ;). I am trying to integrate that now if only I am able to build NAS so I can make sure it actually works. People who use imake should be spanked to death.

So the good things of today list is:
a) We are getting a new NAS plugin
b) Zeenix also made us a libcaca plugin, so we will soon have coloured asci-art output.
c) And Malcolmn will probably be making his SMIL library public soon.
d)And a team of french hackers want to make a non-linear editor on top of GStreamer as their final year project.
e) And cool things happen with Fluendo.
f) And good things seems to be happening in my private life.
g) And it is Christmas soon.
h) And I will go to Barcelona for new-years to hear a bunch of strangers speak flemish :)
i) And I always forgot, I am buying Ross a new harddisk

You know sometimes life is just all good.

Ok, good news just keeps trickling in Ronald fixed the RGB and seeking issue. Guess we are ready to rock :)

Worked on some of the gnome-media documenation today. Got the GNOME mixer/GNOME volume control documentation to an acceptable level. I also added docs for the gstreamer-properties capplet. But I have a feeling we might need to change it soon so I am not completing the docs until I have discussed it with the other team.

I also cleaned up the documentation categories for GStreamer based apps. So all of them should go to the same place in the yelp now.

To round of I took the following screenshot
of some of the most mature GStreamer apps in action. Time to declare Pax GStreamer :)

Ok, I managed to get a blister on one of my fingertips doing dishes and laundry yesterday; that can’t be a good sign :)

Managed to get GStreamer CVS head compiled yesterday after merging in all the latest changes into the gst-plugins spec file. Unfortunatly it turned out I had forgotten to install the mp3 library which meant no sound for most my movies :)

My plan is to get a nicely working CVS build and then build all the apps available and try and clean up the docs for some of them. The online docs for the mixer for instance currently sucks badly.

Luis managed to ruffle some feathers yesterday, but I think that it actually had some positive effects in terms of increased focus on improving the GNOME integraton modules we maintain. Thomas did a new nautilus-media release and commited his media profiles stuff to gnome-media, Ronald got patching the volume applet and acme to use the new mixer stuff onto his Christmas todo list. And Iain made an unfirm commitment to porting the GNOME cdplayer to use GStreamer during the holidays :)

Video playback is really leaping forward these days and hopefully the remaining basic issues will be quickly resolved so that Julien can get Gst-player up and running towards 0.7/0.8 soon. He has put a lot of work into getting the foundation right, so that he can support video effects and visualizations much more smoothly in the new version.

But now I need to get stuff done here at work so I can go home :)

Wow, just found out about Ettore. For some reason I never really ended up talking with him, but the news of his passing still saddens me. My condolences to his friends and family.

How wonderful life is because you are in the world

thomasvs is trying to scare me with information about New Years Eve being a gathering of The Union of Flemish People in Exile; and me. Well I am not that easily scared, I will prevail ;)