My first article for some time will go up on Linuxpower as
soon as katzj finish editing it. I also
have some cool interviews in the works, especially the
Berlin-project one I think will be great.

It seems that the fun and cool hack factor is once again
resurfacing in the Linux community, after a long period now
where such stuff has been put aside in favour of corporate
or ‘pragmatic’ agendas. While I think the coporate support
is great and important to bring Linux to the masses, I think
that the cool hacks like the recent ‘ORBit to kernel’
or ‘GNOME to Windows’ ports is what makes it fun to be part
of the
linux community, ‘the expect the unexpected’ feeling is I
think in some ways fundamental in building an online
community like the Linux community.

Also cool to see that ErikLevy has started
to work for a Norwegian company, strange how small a world
this is.

Having read the recent evolution vs. creationism debate I
just had to post the universe flicker hypothesis I have been
mulling over. Not directly related to the ongoing discussion
though,since that it is not a debate I can even relate to
since I have yet to meet a person here in Norway who
seriously would try to deny the corectness of Evolution
having taken place.

So over to my flicker idea, it might be that it is something
I have unknowingly stolen, many ‘original’ ideas probably are.

My idea is that the Univere ‘flickers’ in and out of
existence sort of like the light in a neon sign about to
break. The reason this happens is due to two opposing
impossibilities, the impossibility of existence and the
impossibility of non-existence. So what I think happens is
that for some time nothing exists until the impossibility of
that situation culminates in a great explosion where things
come into existence. This explains ‘the big bang’. This
situation then continues for a while until the imposibility
of something existing negates everything. And
so the cycle continues into eternity.

To make it clear, the rate of the ‘flickering’ is in
human measurement extremly long periods of time, but for the
universe itself human time is inconseqential and therefore I
think the ‘flickering’ visualisation is good.

I have been loosely following the GNOME print project for
some time now and have as part of that been getting more
and more suprised at the multitude of solutions for
printing under Linux/Unix that are developed in
competition/ignorance of eachother.

The only consolidation that I have seen currently seem to be
on the idea or talk stage. Most noteably there has been
talk during the last 3-4 months about integrating Gimp-
print, the IBM drivers project, Ghostscript and VA printing
development with GNOME Print. The level of integration
between these modules are yet to be determined and it seems
politics as much as technical issues will determine the
final outcome.

Another printing project with which integration as been
discussed is CUPS, but it seem like many people dislike the
business model behind CUPS, combined with low printing
quality.(Never tested personally so I have no knowledge of
correctnes of printing quality claims.)

Another printing project is called Xprint, which SUN is
backing. Don’t know much about it though, but it seems
pretty basic (aka Postscript output only) to me.

In addition to these projects there are a host of
others, personally I hope most of these projects will merge
into
one hell of a great system over time instead of resulting
in a multitude of low quality/low amount of drivers
solutions.

Disclaimer: I use the work integration is a very
loose sense here :), including just adding support for
library this or that.

Waldo I had similar troubles and it seemed
that having a dos extended partition was causing therouble.
In order to make this to work smoothly try installing
Windows first, in a primary partition. Then RH7 next in
another primary partition. RH should then automatically add
you windows partition to lilo and everything should run
just fine.

Just heard that a friend of mine was commited to the
hospital due to a drug overdose. [Update: he died this
evening]
Not that he was a very close friend, but he has sort of hung
out with the same crowd of people
that I have for the last 10 years.This is the second person
that I knew well enough to call a friend to have fallen
victim to drug abuse, the first one dying due to it a couple
of years ago.

Looking at them now I can sort of see many similarities
between the two; low income, failed at school and
meeting a lot of dead ends with their careers. Wether the
drugs or problems came first for my two friends, I don’t
know, but I guess they lead into a evil circle where the
drug problems feed the social problems and vica versa.

Guess it doesn’t make me a very good person, but my
dominant feeling when thinking about my two friends is
not compassion for their problems, but more a relief that I
have myself escaped such problems and hardships in
my own life.

There is an fun discussion between RMS and the leader of the
Crystal Space project to be found here.
What makes it sort of funny is two things, the fact that the
CS guy simply doesn’t understand what RMS means by free
software at all in the beginning and not understanding why
RMS
don’t want to discuss OpenSource software and RMS on the
other hand is so completly ignorant of stuff like what a PS2
and DirectX is that that also causes some confusions.

As always RMS gets a lot of criticism on ‘popular’
discussions
sites for not being willing to compromise. Personally I have
big trouble by seeing why people hold up compromise as some
sort of higher ideal. Sometimes holding to a firm belief is
more appropriate,
unless you want to be a complete idiot who stands waving a
worthless compromise agreement while uttering words like
‘Peace in our time’

mathieu just put up a list of people he
would like to see elected to the GNOME Foundation board and
I think it is a good list. My first thought was to put up my
own list of candidates too, but starting with Matheiu list I
had a hard time deciding who to delete, I guess I have some
hard decisions to make before casting my vote :)

So I will instead just make some extra recomandations:

• First of all I suggest altering the list so
  that Martin Baulig and Miguel de Icaza both
  gets on the board.

• I also suggest adding Michael Meeks to the
  list.
  Michael has been one of the core Gnumeric hackers and is
  currently doing some great work on Bonobo. Michael is
  working for HelixCode and is located in England.

• The third candidate I would like to see is Bertrand
  Guiheneuf a long time GNOME contributor (ObjC bindings
  and early incarnations of Evolution.) and founder of
  Henzai, a company which
  is making GNOME run on handhelds etc.

As mentioned I haven’t really decided who I am going to
remove from Matheiu original list to make room for these
candidates, but
I want to say that since all these alternative candiates are
coders, if you decide to add them your own ballot list, you
probably should replace some of the other coders. Currently
there are only two people on the list who aren’t primarly
coders and I think decreasing that percentage even more
would be a bad thing.

There is a term called ‘Fall depresion’ which is commonly used here in Norway to describe the often seen
phenomenon that people tend to get a little down when fall sets in and the hours where we have light is getting
fewer. I think I have been struck by ‘Fall depresion’ these last couple of weeks. It is not as much that I have been
depressed, but more like feeling like my battery is flat. The last two weeks have been very unproductive, I have
even watched a lot of television, something which I see as the biggest waste of time possible.

Yesterday I finally managed to shake it of and do something productive, the irony is that what made me shake out
of this period of inactivity was waching an episode of Ally McBeal. The comment that got me back on track was a
piece of advice one of the characters gave Ally, which wass along the lines ‘all the good ones are taken, so if you
want a good one you have to steal him’. Well, thinking about this I thought, hey that is a good point, so I called
a
girl I hadn’t spoken to in a while, but who I until now hadn’t wanted to invest to much energy into pursuing due to
she already having another involvement. Well, I think calling her was the smartest thing I have done in a while.

So back to my ‘fall depresion’ thing, well
there nothing better than a romantic interest to get your batteries recharged. The energies such things produce
enables you to get a lot of things done, including those related to work and hobbies. So my conclusive advice to
all the Advogato hackers, when you are feeling burnt out and need to get your work
stamina back on track, pick up the phone and call someone you are attracted too :)

Julian I still hang out at #linuxpower and
#gnome, and I was online quite a lot last week, but mostly
during Norwegian daytime due to being on an out of town work
assignment which left me unconnected in the evening. This
meant that most of my time online was early early in the
morning for you guys :). Nice to see that you have UTF-8
Suport in Gabber now,
hope it means the end of Gabber
chocking on å,ø,æ.

Important message to all Advogatoes, check out the music of
Norwegian band Briskeby it is really cool (and with
English lyrics :). You can try out their music with Gnapster
since I expect that for non-norwegians the album might not
be to easy to get hold of.

Okay, now I had it with Slashdot. I know most of you will
probably say ‘welcome latecomer,’ but what pushed me over
the
edge was the
posting of that story from the TurboLinux guy about just one
commerical distro in the future. No problem with the story
itself,
what made me really pissed of was the stupid RedHat attacks
the submitter had added to the post, comments which the
Slashdot editor had let pass.

And while I think it is wrong to fault Slashdot for stupid
shit being posted in the discussions, I feel that Slashdot
can very much be faulted when they post crap like that in
their headings.

So I hereby swear that unless I hear that Rob Malda
appologizes and calls it and editorial slip, I will stay
away from Slashdot and the bunch of degenerates that seems
to make up the Slashdot crowd these days.