I installed Solaris 10 on a extra machine at work in order to be able to do some tests in regards to a customer of Fluendo. The experience so far has been mixed. The main issue is the utter lack of drivers bundled with Solaris, especially since this includes network drivers this is a pain. There is actually a large driver writing community around Solaris, but Sun doesn’t seem to bother pulling those drivers back upstream. So after a lot of extra effort spent downloading drivers, compilers and so on, burning cd’s and getting the driver installed I also found that Solaris features absolutely no tools for configuring anything. So getting my new network driver to work was about creating lots of files in /etc using online howto’s.

The pleasant experience is that JDS on Solaris is fast, much faster than GNOME is on my GNU/linux system. So either there are patches in JDS optimising some stuff (like the gnome menu always snapping open with all icons instantly) or its just some underlaying Solaris processes being better able to drive GNOME.

A point of frustration now is the lack of an update tool. Nothing like apt-get, yum, red-carpet or redhat-agent.

So if Sun manages to get more drivers included in Solaris, get some configuration tools working (like port the GNOME Setup Tools) and integrate one of the many update tools out there then Sun could have a winner on their hand.

Making product and sales materiel

Been working this week mostly on writing some kick as product brochures and leaflets. People are constantly writting us asking for information about our current and upcoming products and the information materiel I have had so far hasn’t been as nice as I wanted it, nor as informative. Been a suprisingly fun thing to do as our products and goals materalize very well through the process too.
It can be compared to when Dom asked me about GStreamer 0.10 last week, listing the improvements up for Dom helped me ‘remember’ how much nice stuff we have actually got into GStreamer 0.10 (plan on doing a proper writeup soon). And writing these brochures helped me ‘remember’ how much great stuff we have done in Flumotion for instance, it is easy when you are closely involved with the development to get overly focused on the bugs being worked on or features you have planned, instead of lifting your eyes and seeing the beautiful landscape of what have already been acomplished.

Maybe something a lot of people both in GNOME, but also in the community at general should do. Take a look up from their day to day hackery and see what great things we have achieved already.

Moosecock

Every group of people have their core topics. In our little social group the topic of eating cheese and the topic of eating moosecock seems to resurface at regular intervals. As mentioned in an earlier blog my uncle is in town these days for the annual meeting of EU vetrinarian group for poultry. Having worked with Norwegian food production all his life he can get hold of almost any kind of food. So he brought a box of moose-cheese which I had the pleasure of handing over to Wingo today.
So the next time he tells the joke about the two hunters the answer will not be moosecock, but moosecheese.

We have Tim Müller staying and working with us here in Barcelona since yesterday. We have been doing some focused hacking and testing with the result that we have Flumotion working with GStreamer 0.9 now and a new release is imminent. Currently we are doing a Totem hacking and testing session. With latest CVS most of the files in our testsuite plays with Totem. Some stuff remains though, mostly adding seeking support to the demuxers and porting a couple of more plugins to fill out the format support. Hopefully we can within a couple of weeks start asking the wider community to start hammer the media playback in Totem.

Only area which is mostly unported yet is DVD support and I think we might end up with GStreamer/Totem not supporting DVD’s in the next GNOME release. Of course it being Free Software we never know what will happen, maybe someone will appear and start porting over the DVD plugins.

Brian Cameron is already working on porting the SunAudio plugin so hopefully GStreamer 0.10 will be a good story also for OpenSolaris users.

Also got a nice reply today to a mail I had sent Michael Roitzsch of Xine fame. Hopefully we can find ways to work togheter to the benefit of the members of both projects.

My plan is to spend a lot of time next week making some really nice brochures and information pdf files for customers intersted in either Flumotion or the Flumotion Streaming Platform. Hopefully we can also move a bit forward on our beta program so we can start having people test our GStreamer plugins.

So I travelled to San Fransico with Julien and Pascal last week to have some customer meetings. It was the first time I travelled to the states on business class, and it was a rather pleasant experience compared to coach. So how was it you say?

Well coming onboard I found that my seat was in that little second floor room they have on the Boeing 747 planes. The seat is one of those where you can lay it down horizontally to have something where close to a bed, and there is a wall you can put up between you and the seat next to yours, so you almost have your own little cubicle. The rest is what you expect, you sit around chatting with the rest of the social elite, exchanging fun stories about horrible experiences with the proletariat, ie. the people traveling on coach.

The best part though was the sing-along we did. The tune was theme song from Annie, ‘It the hard-knock life’ but the lyrics was improved. Here is a small sample for you:

[PASSENGERS]
It’s a bourgeois life for us!
It’s a bourgeois life for us!

[CREW]
‘Steada working,

[PASSENGERS]
We get pampered!

[CREW]
‘Steada water,

[PASSENGERS]
We get Champagne!

[ALL]
It’s a bourgeois life!
Got to many servants to speak of, so,
It’s a bourgeois row we how!

And so it went on, it was a beautiful experience.

In San Francisco our customer meetings went very well and I also got to hang out a couple of evenings with the legendary David Schleef. San Fransico seems like a very nice city and I would love to someday spent more time there, all my visits so far have always been for just a few days with a heavy program. David celebrated his birthday while we where there, so Julien treated us to a nice meal at a local french resturant.

Was a hectic last week with a visit to Helsinki from Wednesday to Friday. It was Wim and I who traveled from Barcelona up north and it turned out we where not the only ones there. Mikael Hallendal, Richard Hult and Tim Jannick from Imendio had by coincidence also some meetings with Nokia. Since Nokia is gearing up to start selling the 770 soon we discussed areas of cooperation for future software and hardware upgrades. Can’t of course blog about the details, but the meetings where positive and I think some exciting things will come out of it for everyone involved, including the community of course.

Also meet Zeeshan for the first time outside IRC. He seemed to have managed to adjust to life in Finland quite fine and seems happy with his job at Movial. Introduced him to the magic of Guinness beer, which I think he still needs a couple of more months to fully appreciate. It was fun meeting him, and hopefully Wim and I didn’t come of as too boring :)

Talking about boring, the Imendio guys are growing old and tired I think. The first night we didn’t get them to come out at all, and the second night they ran back to their hotel right after dinner. Could of course be my deoderant being bad or Mikael getting nervous after our discussion about the uses of baby oil, but I think its mostly that its natural for Swedes to grow old and frail quickly. In fact I think I noticed Mikael having grey hair above his ears now. I think for GUADEC here in Barcelona next year I will buy both him and Richard a walking chair each, so they can manage to get around and see a little of town.

It seems Michael Meeks will be in town tomorrow. Hopefully Novell Brainshare will not slurp away all his time so we can meet up for some good tapas and catching up. I don’t know about brainshare, but I guess it might be unrelated to Gandhi saying ‘Better with braindrain than brain in the drain’.

First entry after moving my blog

librsvg and Cairo

The Cairo backend for librsvg is quickly taking shape now that Dom, Caled and Carl and collaborating on it. Even though Cairo is quite unoptimized yet we are seeing some great effects compared to the libart backend. The gearflower.svg file for instance renders 6 times faster with librsvg-cairo than it does with librsvg-libart. As Cairo gets optimized the difference will increase even further.
Cool stuff!

GStreamer 0.9

Good progress being made on all fronts with GStreamer 0.9 (maybe apart from making a new release from CVS :). With Ronald’s patch from bugzilla I was able to play Ogg, Avi and a Real file in Totem today. Only the Ogg near perfect, but still its nice to see things coming together. The new CVS Totem looks nice, great work from Bastien and Ronald.

SCO of the literary world?

I quite some time ago blogged about my impression of the DaVinci code (and my general lack of being impressed by it).
Anyway there was/is a copyright case filed against Dan Brown from a disgruntled author who felt Dan Brown had taken many plot ideas from him and used them in the DaVinci code.
This author even have a blog set up to cover the case. The judge recently came out with a clear non-infringement verdict in the case and it is an interesting read for those of us following the SCO case as it gives one example on how todays judges view copyright (and sorry SCO, general ideas are still not copyrightable).

Even though most book authors seems to think of themselves as the embodiment of creativity and new ideas, the reality is that everything they do someone else have written before them. Sucessful writing is not really about unique plot elements, its about craftmanship, the skill of enganging the reader in whatever story you are telling. A great and relativly fresh plot can not cover over bad writing, but good writing have a good chance of covering over a weak plot. (Although some unappy readers like myself, with the DaVinci code, feel a bit cheated when we get treated to a weak and illogical plot).

I guess next on Perdue’s lawsuit list would be Jacqueline Carey as her Kushiel triology also touch the topic of a feminine divinity and is loosely based on religious history with some added spice.

SMIL the next chapter

So after a lot of work Ambulant
worked on my machine. Sent Jack and co. my configure and Makefile fixes so hopefully they will merge them.

Next step is to have Tim investigate utilizing libambulant in GStreamer/Totem. Luckily Jack from the Ambulant team seems very interested in this too, so hopefully by working together we will be able to get somewhere.

As Dom mentioned in his blog, Cairo support in librsvg is starting to take shape now with Carl Worth hacking on it like crazy. Will also see if I can get the Ambulant guys interested in using librsvg to try get SVG support into Ambulant. Dom fears I will create a lot of work for him and Caled doing that, while I always say that there is nothing to fear except fear itself.

Food on sticks

So with Tim and Ronald here we went out to eat at a Basque tapas place last night. They have a fun setup where you go around taking and eating the tapas you want. In each tapas there is a toothpick and in the end you pay based on how many toothpicks you have collected. A highly trust based
concept, but it seems to work.

Stop energy

Been a lot of blogging back and forth about dconf over the last few days. Can’t help but feel its an example of stop energy in action. I wish we could be better at not using words like ‘crack’,’stupid’,’bloated’,’overdesigned’ and so on when commenting on what other people do and instead try to give constructive feedback or give constructive feedback under less insulting headers. Could be that dconf is a bad idea that we will never end up using in GNOME, but publicly lynch mobbing the project and its developers isn’t a good example of the type of developer outreach we claim to want to do.

Open source browser for Maemo

Philippe De Swert just announced yesterday night that he have ported the gtk-webcore based browser from GPE to Maemo/Nokia 770. Take a look at the nice screenshot
of the little baby in action. Wonder how long before a minimo based browser pops up :)

Also there is a Nokia 770 blog for you to read.

More important court case for open source than the SCO/IBM case?

While many of us follow the SCO case through sites such as Groklaw I wonder if it should take precendence in importance to another important case underway to the free software community. By now the SCO case is shown to be so weak and unfounded that Darl probably spends his evenings praying that he will not end in purgatory for it.

Anyway I think people should instead start taking greater interest in the class action lawsuite lead by Handal & Associates against the DVD patent holders. This case claim that the DVD patent pools basically constitutes price fixing and a conspiracy to monopolize and demand that all the patents involved gets found invalid. If they succeed it will have a profound effect on free software as things like mpeg2 becomes royalty free. Secondly it will probably be the death stroke for royalty bearing patents pools, which most likely will lead to more royalty free standards.