Wim is hacking away today fixing glib, or rather making its refcounting threadsafe. Which is complicated by needing to keep ABI stabilitity. Patch is almost ready and hopefully it will get accepted upstream, at least after some more testing. Currently have atomic1.patch on my machine, waiting for what I guess will be called atomic2.patch :)

Signed a contract today which means my soul is now in foreign custody until 2012. But someone had to do it, and since I am our sales and marketing department I don’t really have a soul anyway.

Also wrote an NDA today, kinda nice to write a NDA for someone else to sign instead of always having to sign other people’s NDA’s. Guess it means we have arrived :)

Had a goodbye party for Lotte yesterday organized by Kristien. Most scary part was seeing how much high alcoholic beer Wingo drank, I would never even consider drinking that much. And I ever would drink so much I would at least keep much more steady and balanced.

Thanks to Hugh Skottowe I was able to resolve my OpenOffice document pain in a acceptable manner. Seems there a OpenOffice release note page describing how to manually migrate your docs from the old format to the new one. Have to say that the latest snapshots of OpenOffice looks much nicer than they used to, although I think the new OpenOffice stock icons are less nice than the one’s Tigert and Jimmac made. But I guess they want icons that fits better in on Windows in additon to GNU/Linux systems.

Only thing I really miss in these new OpenOffice versions is SVG import support. As a stopgap solution I guess they even make a import filter on top of librsvg, although the result would of course be a pixmap in OO, but still better than nothing.

Got the Robin Hood game recently so I played it a bit. It is a graphically nice game although there are a few ugly things popping up. One purely visual item is that the site names in the minimap is in Chinese. The second item is that I am suddenly getting segfaults while playing one of the modules. Not sure if it is something in that module causing it, or if something changed on my distro underneath it to break something. The segfault message is not very usefull, just saying something about SDL parachute being activated. Mailed Epic-Interactive today and got a quick response that a bugfix was coming this week. Nice :)

Wingo found himself a place yesterday so he will be moving out on Saturday, while its fun to have Wingo around, I guess the freed up bed space will be sorely needed soon anyway for the GStreamer summit. On the topic of Wingo, he is now hacking on a Jack plugin allowing you to use Jack as a drop in replacement for esound or artsd etc. While doing this is a bit of crack, it seems some people really want it, and it is according to Wingo a really simple plugin to make…and we are all about pleasing our users in the GStreamer community.

Bluetooth mousing. Got my bluetooth mouse working smoothly thanks to an online howto, some input from Edd Dumbill and finally with a little Red Hat help through their bugzilla. Still not sure why the mouse locks up with the –search parameter turned on for hidd though.

In regards to Fluendo I had a productive day today, sending of two initial proposals. Thomas pretends not to like it when I ask for help writing sales propositions, but I know that deep down he wants to gets transfered to Fluendo’s sales department.

One thing everyone knows is that you should never use development versions of software for production use. I know that and so does everyone else. But like everyone else I find it hard not to sin against it. So I have been using the development snapshots of openoffice for quite some while now but had a annoying bug with putting images inside a page header. So upgraded my snapshot and removed the old snapshot. Bad bad mistake. Now I am unable to open the docs I have been working on a lot during last week and have to extract the text from the xml files and redo the layout once again. What sucks the most is that I can’t really blame anyone but myself. I should have known that openoffice could be changing their file format or something during the development of the unstable format.

Ok, so we have a deinterlacer plugin for GStreamer, which is a good thing. Problem is that the code is taken from tvtime. Billy Biggs when making tvtime took a lot of code from a lot of different places, mostly GPL sources, but also some LGPL ones, and merged them into his deinterlace support under the GPL. Now this is an example of the strenght and power of free software, that you can legally take all this code from a lot of different sources and reuse it. The problematic part is now that we want to relicense that code to LGPL for GStreamer it is quite a job to trace all authors and ask their permission and then rewrite those parts where the author says no or author is unreachable. Luckily all asked have so far said yes, but it will probably be still some time before this plugin can be declared LGPL clean and merged.

Similar problem with our DVB plugin which is also blocking on a relicensing problem. Luckily Mitch, known for his work at Convergence and now Imendio is helping me with getting those small pieces of code relicensed.

I also put the licensing advisory online on the GStreamer webpage. Hopefully all this licensing work will pay of in the end in the sense that they will spur GStreamer onwards towards even greater acceptance and use.

So I joined the masses who own an iAudio M3 portable music player. Like other people have comented on before it is a nice piece of hardware. One thing I had hoped for when buying it though was that since so many people in the community had bought it someone would hack on some nice integration tools and fix the last small issues (like the non-critical Do not disconnect message not disapearing when you unmount the device. I guess it works well enough with HAL already for people to not bother or something :) But some nice automated syncing of songs and playlists with Muine, AmaroK and Rhythmbox would be nice.

Also went with Kristien to Ikea yesterday to purchase some new furniture and utilities for my appartment. Very happy with how the living room table ended up as it really completes the room. Had a small ‘dinner party’ with Wingo and Wim, eating a self composed dish and drinking one bottle of relativly expensive red wine and one both of extremely cheap red wine. The expensive one did taste much better in this case.

Hopefully I manage to put together the rest of the furniture today.

Doing some testing on Flumotion today in prepartion for a new release. The error handling works well now with dialogs telling me if my device permissions are wrong or telling me I am missing a needed GStreamer plugin. Thomas has done some outstanding work on it.

So I decided to take the plunge and try Seth’s legendary GNOME blog tool. Earlier attempts failed horribly due to missing dependencies etc., but now I was able to apt-get what I needed. Had to rebuild the SRPM instead of using Seth’s, but after that the thing worked sweetly.

Was shown a very nice example of someone doing Cortado streaming. They use our applet to play a video on the net and it works very well. The cool thing is that this is free Creative commons content combined with our free GPL java applet player, using the free Ogg formats hosted on the free GNU/Linux platform :)

There was a nice interview on Gizmodo with Bill Gates where he was asked to clarify his ‘communist’ statements to CNET. What was nice about the interview was that the interviewer didn’t let Bill of to easy with just fluffy feelgood questions.

I still think Bill do not see the basic issue though. He still defends IP like it is a black and white issue. For me IP issues are like taxes. I think everyone agree that taxes are a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that having everyone paying 100% tax would be the best thing. People from different sides of the political spectrum have different ideas on what the sweet spot for taxes are, but the number who go for 0% or 100% is marginal. Bill’s argument seems to be that since 20% tax is working out so well we should jump much closer to 100% as that naturally would work out 5 times better.

So to keep with the analogy, I think most in our camp, the IP sceptics, think that we have slided towards 50% in regards to IP, especially due to rampant software patenting, and need to get back to 20% for society to work as well as possible, while Bill and his buddies wants to go to 80% or higher.

Another important item is that all things are not the same. I know how patents work out in the software world, and see that they are currently causing more harm than good. That doesn’t mean the patent system is broken for the medical research sector for instance, could very well be that it is, but I don’t know the sector well enough to say. IP maximalists tend to try to mush everything together in order to be able to say that since patents work well for ‘this’ it of course works equally well for ‘that’.

GNOME: Glad to see the GNOME Bonsai interface back, never knew how much I missed being able to view a summary of recent commits.

GStreamer/Totem: In regards to continued Totem bugfixing it was really nice to get Ronald a laptop identical to mine as he now have available a range of new reproducible issues to fix, like seeking/sync issues. He already solved the problem of the screen being black on second iteration when playing a quicktime. Also started talking with the annodex guys about getting annodex support into Flumotion, Ozone seems keen on working on the code to do so. We probably also look at getting such support into Totem.

We basically decided to pull the plug on gst-player at a meeting yesterday. So unless someone reads this blog and steps up to maintain it we will pull it from bugzilla and any mention on the GStreamer homepage. Julien has theoretically been its maintainer recently, but he hasn’t worked on it for quite some time as first he, then Ronald has instead been focusing on helping out with Totem.
Of course this being free software it might get restartet at some point, but for now its dead.

CRM: Still trying to get somewhere with the CRM system. Basically I am now looking at a vTiger which is supposed to be a better SugarCRM than SugarCRM. Secondly I am trying to get OpenGroupware.org going as the web interface to that might contain enough functionality for us to solve our still relativly limited needs while providing other types of nice functionality. Unfortunatly I am having some problems getting postgres set up correctly. I guess only having been exposed to Oracle RDBMS before makes me somewhat unable to grasp a system working a little differently :) One thing we did at Oracle though which was a nice idea IMHO was provide a pre-loaded database with our system. It simplified the install a lot.

Fluendo: A big welcome to the newest memember of the Fluendo team, Jan ‘thaytan’ Schmidt! In addition to being the CEO of our Australian office he will be tackling various issues in regards to DVD support and various customer contracts. Jan will not remain our newest employee for long however as Andy Wingo will arrive on Saturday :)

Today I really need to get my appartment cleaned up as I got a rather tight visitation schedule coming up with Ronald, Andy, my mother and sister in the next couple of weeks. Things will not let up either with various events planned after that.

Happy to see Imendio hire Mitch. Congrats to both parties involved. I guess I feel a certain kindred spirits thing with Imendio, OpenendHand and ourselves, being all started around the same time with people coming from the same circles of the community. Hopefully we do better in working together than say Ximian and Eazel where able to get along :)

The GStreamer licensing advisory is getting rather nice now with its latest revisions. Ended up removing the interpretation statement suggestion after RMS almost ate his beard over it. While legally sound I guess it profilerating would have led to undermining the official intepretation of the FSF. Guess the time of putting the document onto the GStreamer homepage is growing closer.

Only problem still is that everyone developing GPL licensed software considers themselves a better interpretors of the GPL than the laywers at FSF. Which makes relicensing discussions rather outdrawn. Still Buzztard and Muine have already said they relicense or add a clause so I guess the effort is slowly moving forward. I will start on getting gst-editor etc. relicensed this week and when we clean up gst-player to use playbin we can ditch the playlist and we then suddenly have a LGPL movie playing application.

Bastien said he do some rounds with the Red Hat lawyers internally also on the question, so hopefully Totem will get sorted out soon. Personally I stopped caring what lawyer/person XY thinks about the subject, the fact that there are lawyers out there who think it is a problem is enough for me to want to resolve it in a final way. Uncertainty is a killer in these litigation heavy times.

cbj: A couple of notes on GNOME Volume Control. First of all Ronald who maintains it has requested feedback on it during its design multiple times in his blog here on advogato, so as an advogato blogger you had the chance to give input. Secondly I don’t know what version of gnome volume control you are using but the latest one being developed for GNOME 2.10 have tried to limit the number of controls. Thirdly the issue of alsa muting itself is not GVC fault and needs to be solved by the distribution maker/alsa developers. Since GVM isn’t a daemon it can’t check your ALSA setting on boot and reset them to thhe setting of your previous session.

GStreamer: Have to agree with Ronald that some of the responses on gnomedesktop are rather disapointing. Yes, it is fair to ask when we get support for xy, but when people start claiming bugs are getting ignored I feel myself getting rather annoyed. Anyone who have actually looked at the last 5-6 releases of the various components we have done see that they contain a huge list of bugfixes.
Anyone following the bug statistics of Bugzilla know we have lowered the bug count significantly over the last months.

In regards to our ongoing bugcount war with metacity and ephiphany they have taken a lead we are having some problems with closing. Not because the pace of bug closing have gone down, but because the pace of bug opening have increased. Luckily a lot of these new reports are patches for new plugins and new functionality so hopefully we will be able to overcome them and continue lowering our bug count.

GStreamer licensing advisory: Got a reply from Stallman on the licensing advisory for GStreamer. He had many objections to certain wordings and statements, but all in all I think I will be able to accomodate him on most of his objections in my next revision. I guess the biggest issue is the licensing interpretation statement, which Stallman certainly did not like and said he would oppose loudly. While I understand that having a large group of apps include a statement of interpretation which runs opposite of the interpretation the FSF supports could undermine the effort of the FSF (which I do not want) I have to balance that against the fact that some application developers have seemed much more open to using such a statement with the license than adding a clause or relicensing.

GNOME: While not strictly GNOME I noticed the new beta of Adobe Acrobat 7 is using GTK+. Being a long time GNOME participant it is nice to see major companies like Adobe use our toolkit for one of their flagship products. I am still looking forward to seeing Evince though, and that will be my primary PDF viewer when its out in a stable release. But as long as free pdf viewers sometimes fail it is good to know that even the proprietary fallback solution will integrate nicely.

Barcelona: Went to the Port Aventura ammusement park yesterday with zaheer and his wife Alia. We had a great time, and I think the roller coaster there was the biggest one I ever taken. Saw a lot of fun shows too. Did learn that Alia should not be trusted when it comes to train timetables though.

Really looking forward to Wingo coming on the 15th, he is sorely needed after Johan’s departure at work and he is a really cool guy to hang out with too :) I hope he is making sure to hassle Leif about MIDI support in GStreamer while staying with him.