Germany sucks

Ok, so Andy, Wim, Thomas and myself pooled our resources to pay for Zeeshan flying in from Pakistan so he could attend GUADEC in Stuttgart. Zeeshan have never been outside Pakistan so we thought it would be a cool experience for him and a thank you from us for his contributions to GStreamer over the last few years. So far so good. So I ask him to check locally if there will be no visa problems, which he do and report back that he checked locally and it should be no problem. So we buy an airplane ticket for him and send a letter saying we will take care of his expenses while at GUADEC. Tim Ney sends a letter on behalf of GNOME Foundation saying he is asked to come on special invitation of GNOME. The local Stuttgart government which is co-hosting GUADEC also sends a letter stating that he is an invited guest to GUADEC.

Then the run-around treatment starts. As Zeeshan lives in Karachi he is in touch with the German consulate in Karachi.
After calling them and being told he can come in to file his application he arrives there only to be told that he have to come back some other time as you only get in if you come early in the morning and get a ticket for the day in question.

So he comes back a few days later early in the morning and is let in. Then they tell him that they can’t accept his papers as they need to have those letters faxed to them directly. It turns out their fax machine doesn’t work most of the time, so in the end I fedex the letter to them. The Stuttgart representive have more luck than me and faxes it down, and also calls them on the phone.

After this he once again goes to the consulate, this time he is told that they can’t accept his application as he is not a native of Karachi, so he have to go to the embassy in Islambad instead to file his application.

Going to Islambad costs Zeeshan quite some money considering his local salary, but he takes a day of work and goes there on a Sunday so he can go to the embassy when it opens on Monday. Everyone involved also re-fax our letters to the German embassy for this. So on Monday after having called ahead and booked a timeslot he goes to the embassy. There they tell him that he can’t apply for the visitors visa, instead he needs to register for a business visa. The documentation needs for that is different from the visitors visa so his current documentation doesn’t allow him to apply.

So now he is back in Karachi, with limited resources in terms of being able to travel back to Islamabad again. Due to limit time they didn’t have time to explain what he needed, only to give an URL to a website with information.
This website turns out to be inaccessibile from outside Pakistan.

All hope is not out, but now we need to figure out how to sort out the new needed paperwork, how I can transfer him some money to help with a new trip to Islambad and hopefully manage to get that all done before GUADEC happens at the end of the month.

Considering we started on this process in March I am quite frustrated atm. Feels like we are chasing moving target with the consulate and now embassy coming up with new demands for every step of the way.

Just for the Fun of it

As far as being fun I think GNOME have managed to keep things fun better than most. If you look at the list of people involved in GNOME that have been here since the early days I see few other projects who can compare.

Things change however and from being part of an marginal effort set up to take on the establishment we are becoming
a central piece of the establishment. We have today a large host of companies and private persons depending on GNOME to make a living and get their job done. This do have some cultural implications on how development is done. New ‘cool’ stuff tends to not get top priority in competition with polish.

I guess GNOME in the 0.x and 1.x days where a lot more fun for me than GNOME is today. On the other side GNOME 2.x is a much better work tool than GNOME 1.x ever was. Every new release add’s more consistency, better speed and new essential functionality to core applications. GNOME is not a toy anymore, which of course makes it less fun, but much more useful.

For example I had a lot of fun with Sawfish themes that could make my window borders look like a cow or have one theme per window. Metacity is much more boring, but it gets the job done in a more stable and effective way. A dialog to kill your application when the close button doesn’t work is a much better approach than a ‘kill’ choice in the menu IMHO.

Have fun in the where fun can be had

That said I still enjoy GNOME. My suggestion to people feeling a little worn out is that maybe you shouldn’t be hacking on ‘the core’. People writing music players with GStreamer have fun, the Inkscape people have fun, the Abiword and Gnumeric developers are enjoying themselves.
Maybe taking a step back and getting involved with one of the many sub/side projects is the way to bring the fun back.
Working in a smaller target project lets you cut away a lot of the politics and considerations that working at the heart of the system brings. I mean if you are hacking on Inkscape you don’t have to worry about if your change is ABI stable with what was done 5 years ago or wether change xy makes the GNOME panel crash for people running GNOME on their Irix systems.

What to do going forward

That said I can understand that the Java vs Mono debate which ebbed out into nothing have made many developers feel that the future is a bit foggy atm. The problem is that the debate set up the idea that we had to adopt something in order to go forward, while it provided no final decree on what that something is supposed to be. So we know have a situation where ‘everyone’ feels that we have to do something, while no-one knows how the decision to do ‘something’ should happen.

I think it is somewhat of a false premise. No matter what decision eventually might be made for most situations it will matter little. The choice of Java vs Mono will have no or little implication for the development of GStreamer, GTK+, glib, ATK, libxml, gnome-panel, HAL and many of the other core parts of GNOME. Its not like Daniel will one morning wake up and think ‘well since GNOME have now decided on going with Mono I will have to rewrite libxml in C#’

So while the decision is not as important or critical as
one would think, I still think it needs to made in some fashion. Or rather I think its being made for us, lets not fool ourselves into thinking we have full control on whats happening. People are working on applications in Mono, Java, Python, Ruby and more and through that making the decision for us. There are currently really nice tools being developed with both Java and C# for instance and I think that when it comes down to it they will both be allowed into the desktop. And as soon as applications which are official part of the desktop are using a certain technology, then I think new library developers etc., will follow.

I think Beagle for instance will end up opening the door for Mono and C# in GNOME and I think Red Hat’s Java based admin tool will open the door for Java as two examples.

If people don’t think that is enough I will not oppose a GNOME board vote to resolve it. I think however that it is more in the tradition of free software that the community makes it choices based on their efforts than for it to be chosen by an entity like the board. For everyone hour you put into working on a GNOME application in Mono, Python, C++, C, Ruby, Java and so on you are making the decision.

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).