Had a dream last night about NetworkManager. It had gotten a cool graphical tool letting you use it as a homing device for your wireless router. So I had this image on screen showing me me immediate sorroundings and then a pulsating laser (kinda like the lasers in the ghostbusters movies) going from my laptop out into whatever place the wireless router was. I remember running around trying to find the wireless router, but I was running to fast so I often missed turns and would have to backtrack. Don’t think I ever found the wireless router before waking up.

Thomas said I needed to get out more when I told him about the dream. Then he goes on to tell Bastien about a dream he had about Bastien having made a record and then blogging about the distributor not getting it out to all stores, and thomas then discovering the record in a local store. And he thinks I need to get out more?

Ellijah and the Metacity team are kicking arse, having put Metacity down to 121 open non-enhancement bugs atm. GStreamer on the other hand is sorta stuck around 140 bugs atm (which is a nice step down from the around 300 we started at, but above the stated goal of reaching 100). Luckily we are at least kicking epiphany’s ass as they are stuck way up on 159 bugs.

The Nautilus team seem to want to get into the game as they have been taking Nautilus down to 799 bugs, which is the lowest in been in years (I noticed I said they where around 1000 when I uttered my first challenge to Metacity and Epiphany) . Still some way to go, but only 40 more bugs and they can call gtk+ a big pile of bugs at least :)

Anyway I still would like to send out a general call for people to get their modules out of the hall of shame. Lets continue towards making GNOME 2.10 the least buggy release of desktop software ever :)

So it seems that its official that Convergence is bankrupt. How they managed to do so it a bit of a mystery, but severe mismanagement seems to be the common theory. For a company that seemed to have the right people and the right technology at the right time, it is kinda tragic that it ended like this.

Opens some new opportunities for Fluendo though, not that we really need them as we seem to have more options available than we have resources to pursue.

Spent quite some time this weekend working on the SVG flag collection. While we have more flags than those on the sodipodi website it has taken time to get everything up on openclipart due to opencliparts use/demand of inline metadata. Having this metadata is a good thing, but it is quite a lot of work to add it to every flag. With my work today I hope than openclipart 0.11 will contain all flags assembled with good high quality metadata fields. Discovered some bugs in inkscape and SVG_Metadata perl scripts though. And Caleb is also fixing one bug found in librsvg. I strongly encourage others who have SVG files which misrenders in either inkscape or librsvg to file bugs as such bugs will be fixed as both teams have the manpower and determination to have first class handling. If SVG is to overtake proprietary formats we need to ensure that all our tools handle it alike and close to perfect. If all SVG renderes and editors developed do things a little differently it is enough to render the standard worthless.

David Neary is working hard on getting a plan for GNOME merchandising in place. This is important as it can give GNOME another financial leg to stand on in bringing in money to help make events such as GUADEC and the GNOME summits even better and help sponsor more developers to attend. Seem to be diverse interests on the board this year which is could cause it means multiple things will be approached and worked on.

Built a new GStreamer based music player called ‘Player‘ today. Its quite nice, especially doing the visualisation inside the header is quite nifty. Ended up working on cleaning up buildfiles and cvs also :) It will be released today or at least very soon.

Also learned that the new vmware uses SVG graphics due to librsvg, neat stuff!

Wim’s patch(es) for fixing threading and glib is now in bugzilla. No instant smackety smackdown from Owen and Matthias which I guess is a good sign :)

Wim did a presentation today of his cvs branch of gstreamer since we have David Gerber here now who is going do some contract work for us on GStreamer.

Btw, I forgot to mention it in last nights blog, but Owen Taylor got elected Chairman (Chairperson to be PC) of the GNOME Foundation board yesterday, so he is now the offical head of GNOME for the year to come. Guess its proof that the possibilty of American leaders who are liked on both sides of the pond is still there :)

Since I now have the licensing advisories as part of our documentation in GStreamer, I felt it was time to get ‘our own’ software licensed correctly. Gst-editor and friends where a natural choice. Luckily it turned out to be only one .c file that was GPL, the rest was LGPL already. So gst-editor is now all LGPL in CVS. Next step is gnome-media. Neither the mixer, the cd player or the gstreamer-properties capplet needs relicensing as they are not using now or likely to ever use any non-free plugins. Which basically leaves the sound recorder, which I guess could use an mp3 encoder plugin at some point. Once Sound Recorder is done I guess I need to hassle Rhythmbox, Totem, Sound Juicer, Goobox and so on. Muine, Buzztard and Pitivi have already done or started a process for either relicensing or adding an exception clause.

Also had a good GNOME board meeting today. Seems I will be part of the working group who is supposed to get the trademarking policy etc. of GNOME in place. So I guess if it doesn’t get sorted out people have a good argument not to vote on me again next year (if I run). The board also set ourselves a strict limit on coming up with some concrete measurable goals for this year. My own two main causes will be some concrete measures to try and invigorate the process towards GNOME3 (not as much since I think a GNOME3 is needed soon, but because I think a clearer goal can help sort of lots of things for how to proceed with GNOME 2.x releases) and a much better process for handling our interaction with commerical companies surrounding GNOME.

Seems to be a good bunch of people on the board and I think that we should be able to pull of something this year that can allow us to approach the Foundation membership next election and point to some concrete achievements. Still think the board is to big though, todays meeting had for various reaons quite a number of people missing which made it much nicer. Not because of the specific people missing, but since the fewer number attending let people get their say without it becominging tiresome.