CRM
Discovered the LUGradio planet today. Was quite fun to see that Jono is not looking into CRM like I was a while ago. His greatest frustration with Sugar was the same one I had, that it was lacking in existing client support, which caused me to start looking into opengroupware and Noodle, which in the end lead to my effort stranding a bit.

Office cleanup
After buying a truckload of new hardware Thomas ended up cleaning up the office today in terms of getting cabling more sane. I ended up going out to buy more power extension cables which means that Edward and me can stop fighting over power sockets as a scarce resource. Between 3 laptops, 2 cell phones, my usb mouse dock, firewire cameras and a printer, 5 sockets was simply to little. We also got a new 64 bit server which enabled us to merge a 64 bit fix from Zaheer into Flumotion and verify it worked. Yay Zaheer!

Norwegian taxes
Did my Norwegian tax declaration yesterday. Not that it was much to do as the Norwegian system is very highly automated these days. The government collects all data about you from your employeer, banks, stock traders etc., then sends you a report which you either accept as correct or edit if there are some mistakes. If you are ok with the version they send you (and you are legally responsible for it being correct) you can just send a SMS to a specific number with a pin code that came with your declartion and you are done. Or you can do what I did and submit it through the tax authorities web page. (snail mail is also possible for those not into modern technology :) Happy to find that according to the government estimates they will pay me back 11 000 kroners in June.

Barcelona
Temprature is increasing quickly here now and daytime temprature is going above 20 almost every day now. Since the legendary Ralph Giles is moving into my appartment with his familiy in June I have been trying to find a suitable place for myself to stay while they are here (my place is to small for 4 people). Found one on Wednesday, with a young couple here in Barcelona. If I don’ t find something else before middle of next week I will take that (the reason I am still looking is that it will probably be more fun to share an appartment with someone for a month who do not have a small infant kid). Not that I don’t like kids, but they are not the most suitable companions for going to bars and getting drunk.

GUADEC
Put some work in to clean up the GUADEC speakers page, now you can look at it without the text jumping up and down as the images load and all the images are the same width. There are even images of Wim and Ralph there now.
Think we have a good set of speakers for GUADEC this year and I am sure we will manage to have as good a time as we had earlier years. Some unhappines on my own part and others due the way the fee system is set up, but hopefully everyone will get the message that they can register as hobbyists if they want and that for next year we can make sure the pricing and presentation has a clearer message.

GUADEC flight in order
Edited, seems we got screwed over by Lufthansa on the tickets. Withouth warning they cancelled our tickets, forcing us to rebook at a much higher price. So we got the GUADEC rebate, but not only for some expesive tickets. Anyway thanks to Tim for quickly sending us the needed document so we could prove to Lufthansa we where going to GUADEC (which they demanded to give us the rebate in the first place.

Patent madness
There have been some hope that the patent review process that the US senate is starting will fix some of the worst deficiencies in the system. Unfortunatly it seems things might instead just get worse, according to this article California Senator Dianne Feinstein considers wanting to make patents last beyond 20 years. I urge all Californians who voted Democratic to contact Dianne and clue her up.

Wine and Cheese
With Edward now working at Fluendo we have a fresh inflow of french culture in the company. So when Edward celebrated his 25th birthday yesterday we got a wide selection of wine and french cheeses. The cheeses had to be good cause even Wim who is an announced cheese hater seemed to eat them.

Sending Wingo into exile
We had to send Andy back to the US today as he needed to get his passport stamped in order for his spanish work visa to go through. Hopefully being back there with access to grits and french…eh…freedom fries will not cause the demise of his plans to return in 10 days.

Totem for older distros
Ronald made a patch yesterday backporting Totem 1.0.1 to work with GNOME 2.8. Thomas have already made packages of that and put into the GStreamer’s apt/yum repository so that people running not so bleeding edge distro’s can get access to all the nice improvements in Totem. Nice work Ronald!

In the good old days the rule was that JPEG was free and GIF was not free. Today it seems like GIF is free while the freenes of JPEG is under fire. Forgent is trying to use an overly broad patent to assert patent rights on JPEG. Our unlikely champion in this case is Microsoft who is taking them to court trying to get the patent found invalid.

Feelings on the subject is mixed. As someone who is against software patents I have no love for people like Forgent who leech on the industry through patent blackmail. On the other hand if Forgent is sucessful in their lawsuit then it could help push PNG forward and also work as another wake up call for the world about the problems of software patents. I think Microsoft and its owner would ake up on the beauty of software patents if they are forced to shell out billions in the Eolas and Forgent cases.

Ubuntu keep on rocking

Even though I am still not a Ubuntu user myself I have to admit those people doing some cool stuff. The setup where Hewlett Packard will provide a special Ubuntu versions with many of their laptops, making sure everything works (ACPI, bluetooth, wireless etc.) is smashing good news. Check out the story in Heise Online.

Jeff and Pia Married

A big congratulations from me to the happy couple! Apart from being very cool people in general, they made me the best barbequed kangaroo I ever tasted.

Musicbrainz

I know some people in the community have been a bit sceptical to Musicbrainz. The software might be open and free but it was tied to a server service which was not. Well seems the MusicBrainz people are trying to remedy that. Lawrence Lessig mentioned in his blog that they now launched Metabrainz, a nonprofit foundation to run the service.

Clipart

Seems there are some increased activity on getting the openclipart content management system going forward again. Really looking forward to that as it will allow me to make the SVG flag collection on there much nicer. Currently there are still some broken metadata on some of the flags which cause many of the flag pages to not display any metadata at all.

NetworkManager

NetworkManager is one of those things which could be insanely cool, but currently is more insanely frustrating. Filed two bugs against it today, the first about DNS stopping to work after a while and the second about the fact that I never been able to connect to an encrypted network with it. Trusted old system-config-network works, but its a pain when you switch between networks like I do.

Old sayings

When you have a lot of things happening its a common expression to say that you have many balls in the air. Of course the same expression could mean you are on a nudist beach.

Flumotion

I did some work today to make sure we had some nice screenshots of Flumotion in action. I think the resulting page turned out quite nice. Used the Clearlooks theme for the shots and it made things look really nice.

Hacking jobs at Fluendo

We still have an open position for a python hacker at Fluendo, as we think we have found a good candidate for one of the two open positions. So if you have any python hacking friends looking for a job and who are willing to move to Barcelona, make sure to put them in touch with us. People from Europe are prefered as it makes work permits so much easier, but we are willing to make the effort for good candidates from elsewhere too.

Software patents
Got an article I wrote on the topic of software patents published on osnews
today. It discusses the issue of patents from a viewpoint that I think differ a little form the standard way free software advocates tend to approach the issue.

Gmail

Due to some problems with our smtp server getting blocked I had to send out a mail with a webmail client. Since my old yahoo and msn accounts had expired I got Edward to give me an invitation to Gmail. Even thought I will still not be using Gmail or any other webmail as my primary mail client, I have to say that for a webmail system Gmail is very nice.

Mono based GStreamer stuff

Discovered there is another GStreamer based music player out there called Sonance written with Mono. Although the gst-sharp bindings are only available from CVS as far as I know there already seems to be 2-3 projects using them. Reminds me that we there needs to be a Mono software Fedora repository set up as we are missing out on to much nice stuff now with Red Hat refusing to ship mono.

Office suites

Alan Horkan and Nicu Buculei replied to my OpenOffice vs GNOME Office musings as can be seen on Planet OpenClipart. And Hubert chimmed in on Planet GNOME. Not sure we all disagree that much on the topic at hand, maybe more on where to put the emphasis. On that note I had an MS office document today which crashed OpenOffice when I tried saving it, so I ended up using Abiword to edit and save it. Worked although Abiword seemed to replace the checkboxes with dots for some reason. (while OO showed the checkboxes, but didn’t let me check them. So in both cases I just ended up deleting what was there and putting a X there instead.

Visions

Discovered NASA’ s vision statement is ‘To improve life here, To extend life to there, To find life beyond.’ Not sure if I think its cute or just cheesy. It definetly sounds like something written by a comitee.

Lederhosen

Also learned today that Wingo had never seen lederhosen before. So I think I need to dig up some old photos of me wearing lederhosen to put onto my webpage. Maybe I can get Julien to get us all Fluendo lederhosen for GUADEC in Stuttgart, would make people really notice the Fluendo team at GUADEC. I know lederhosen even come in female cuts these days, so even Kristien and Noelle could get them.

OpenOffice and GNOME Office

The issue of Open Office and GNOME office is a hard one. On one side you have a huge lump of code called OpenOffice which have a everything you normally need, but being big and bloated and while improving the GNOME integration still have some way to go. On the other side you have some mean and lean and tightly GNOME integrated applications like Gnumeric and Abiword.

Problem with GNOME Office is that its still missing some critical componets, a presentation program being the killer for me and they are not really integrated with eachother as much as you expect from an office suite (cross application embeding for instance).

Maybe its time for GNOME Office to trying to be an alternative to Open Office and instead being alternatives for the specific sub components in Open Office. I mean if Gnumeric get the same suite integration features with the other Open Office applications that OpenCalc have then it could mean that a distribution maker could decide to ditch OpenCalc and go with Gnumeric instead, and still offer an integrated Office suite.

This would of couse demand some heavy work, I would think that UNO would need to be split out in a separate library so Gnumeric and Abiword could utilize it for instance. On the other side componentizing Open Office is something already on the todo list. And with Novell having people like Jody Goldberg and Michael Meeks working in the office suite space it could be a task worthwhile for them to undertake.

On the other side I have no clue what would be involved, so going this route might be mission impossible :)

Ubuntu and Nautilus

As someone running Nautilus Plus so that I got a GUI option to switch to the exact behaviour Ubuntu is now using by default I might be disqualified from making a comment.

But if I do make one anyway I am not sure if the high level of indignation felt by some people is warranted. Yes, it would be nice if GNOME behaved the same accross distributions, but if changes are to be made to GNOME by distributions (and I think there will always be such changes being made) it is relativly small/mild IMHO. I thought the KDE community where whiners when they complained about the behaviour changes Red Hat made to KDE some time ago, and I think the GNOME community is whiners when they now complain about the change made by Ubuntu. Free software means giving up control, live with it.

I was writing up a list of GNOME Foundation members who I new worked for a company on GNOME for a friend the other day. The end result was 85 people. What struck me was that its a rather sizeable number, don’ t think its many other open source projects that can claim more fulltime people, and what is even more amazing is that the number 85 doesn’ t even include all people as I know there are many people working on GNOME as their job, but who are not members of the Foundation.

Zeeshan’ s new job

Speaking on working on free software. Zeeshan announced in his latest blog that he got a job with Movial, which will among other things include GStreamer hacking. Congratulations Zeeshan!

He also left it to me to say why he got the job. Not working at Movial and only having talked briefly with them I don’ t know their actual reasons of course.

But the fact that Zeeshan have managed to overcome the hurdles of coming from one of the least developed areas in pakistan, the language barrier and the culture gap to participate in GStreamer development says a lot of really good things about Zeeshan.

On top of that I think that in general participation in open source indicates a person with initiative and good ability for self motivation, which are truly valuable skills in the eyes of any company looking for people to hire.

Fluendo marketing

So since Fluendo is a fast moving company we need to be associated with fast moving things. If you are into racing make sure to look for this beauty on the tracks in June(final design might wary a bit from that image).

Fedora Core 4 first impressions

Installed Fedora Core 4 (test2) on my laptop yesterday to get with the times in terms of having an updated GNOME evironment and to see what the Fedora team had been up to. Mostly a pleasant suprise. The bugs I filed during Fedora 3 had mostly been merged, so that I had a correct monitor setting to choose from in the resolution capplet and my USB bluetooth mouse worked out of the box. Also turned out the driver for my wireless card is now included so I just needed to install the firmware rpm instead of the full kernel module.

Only negative thing so far is that the built in soundcard of my laptop do not seem to work with this new release. Filed a bugzilla entry yesterday for it so hopefully it will be resolved before Fedora 4 final version.

Apple and OpenAL

After seeing the story about Apple Tiger release I clicked in on the Core Audio link to learn a bit more about it. Working on GStreamer I have a general interest to see what Apple and others are doing in the area. Anyway one thing I noticed on the Core Audio website is that Apple is using and promoting the use of OpenAL as the sound architecture for games. This is great news (or maybe not news, just me be ingnorant on Apple stuff) as it means that game makers have even more API on common between Apple and Linux/BSD. The combination of OpenGL and OpenAL should make a port to Apple or Linux/BSD even simpler for developers after they have targeted one of the platforms.

USB Soundcard

I did try my USB soundcard on Fedora 4 last night and it worked as well as it did before on Fedora 3. Didn’ t get around to testing it hard, but it might seem like the bug causing the keyboard to stop working when unplugged is gone, but I didn’ t get around to testing it firmly enough to figure it out.

I have not decided yet how I want to try to set up my USB soundcard to make it practical to use. My current setup is a asound.conf file which I move away when not using the USB sound card, which is a rather sucky solution.

I guess the real solultion until a GNOME provided solution comes along is to have the USB soundcard set up as a second sound card and then I switch my applications over to it when its connected. Lots of manual work needed for that solution too, but still.

Clipart planet

Seems I am now syndicated by a new planet, planet Open Clipart, which is the home of people involved with the openclipart.org project and also Inkscape. Hopefully we get the new system for openclipart going so I can fix the remaining problems with the flag collection on openclipart. Guess I could suggest that Caleb and Dom gets added to the clipart planet too as their librsvg work is clearly related.

Fluendo

Working on fleshing out parts of our business plan currently, or rather fix pricing systems and levels. I think setting prices is one of the things that feels very easy in theory, but quickly gets complicated when you actually are to do it. Various pricing methods upstream doesn’t make it easier of course and there is the question of what sort of customer behaviour you want to ecourage. When your software is designed differently than your competitors you for instance want a pricing model which encourages use in ways that fits your design instead of pricing that encourages use which nullifies some of your advantages.

homelife

Been doing some spring cleaning over the last few days to prepare for gettting some friends from Norway over next weekend. Incredible how nice the appartment looks when everything is clean and ordered. Was also feeling less than optimal this weekend, which lead me to skip going to a party. I found out later that the party was actually not just a party, but a birthday party, which made me feel bad about not pressuring myself to at least make an appearance.

One thing I had decided with myself moving to Spain was to try and improve my diet, by doing away with frozen pizza and similar. To some degree I have succeded as my consumption of frozen pizza is very low now. That said I haven’t managed to make my diet more varied which was the reason for my inital decision, I just replaced the frozen pizza with spanish sausages and similar food. Think I need to buy myself a cooking book and do one dish per day in order to get my diet to be as varied and healthy as I want.