e8johan: The answer to your question is both yes and no. Yes, sure it is a plus, but on the other hand there have been and is lot of other options for easier OO in GNOME using C++, Python and Java for instance. So concluding that Mono developments main attractiveness is due to easier OO is probably much to simplistic. I think it is more that people feel that with Mono the platform is actually taking a big step forward; ie providing more than just some extra programming language gloss. That Miguel is a good advocate probably doesn’t hurt Mono either :)

That said I think the position of Python as a programming language in the GNOME community is understimated. Considering that Red Hat seems to use it for most of their stuff, Ubuntu is using it for their stuff, my own company Fluendo is using it for our stuff, and of course a lot of independent developers are using it, I think that Python is probably the most widely deployed development language for GNOME apart from C.

Pointing back to the mono discussion I guess Miguel would be fast to point out that you can easily tie inn Python stuff to Mono using Iron Python. Although afaik no of the main commerical or independent users of python are doing so yet :)

Just read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry defending the settlement of the Kodad lawsuit. It was sad reading. I guess it would be impossible for him to say that the settlement was the stupidest thing Sun have ever done, McNeally would probably have fired his ass for it. But no matter what angle Jonathan tries to put on it Sun showed less backbone and insight in this case than Microsoft has done with Eolas or IBM have with SCO. And if he thinks people in Java community will praise him for giving in to Kodak I think he is wrong. What Jonathan fails to see is that giving in to Kodak (or anyone else) is wrong cause it leads to the same problems as giving in to terrorists and blackmailers; it will spur more such actions. Maybe Sun have got Kodak of the back of Java developers for the time being (of course if I where Kodak I would really start looking around for other patents to bring up knowing that Sun is ready to cough up huge amounts of money no matter what), but they have also made sure that thousands of other people with dubious patents have seen and learned that taking Sun to court over them will get Sun to hand over huge amounts of money even if they, as Schwartz himself admit, think the claims and patents are bogus. And the natural extension of that is of course that if a deep pocketed giant to Sun are prepared to pay great amounts of money to settle groundless claims then surely smaller players (like the companies and people in the Java development community) would be even easier pray wouldn ‘t they?

So Jonathan you haven’t saved anyone, you just brought hell one step closer to our door. Thanks…..

Spent the weekend back in Oslo. It is incredible how much more you enjoy the Oslo fall when you know that you will only be exposed to it for a short while; that you have a warm refuge further south to retreat too again.

Managed to get some stuff I wanted like a fan for the bedroom ceiling. There is a little funny that I was easily able to find that home in Norway, yet have been unable to find it in Barcelona as the need for such a thing is ‘a tad’ bigger in Barcelona.

While I was resting on my laurels home in Norway the rest of the team where hard at work preparing for a release of our streaming server in Barcelona. Things are starting to look pretty nice and I was even able to make a few screenshots 1,2,3,4,5
of the wizards and a test videoscreen running :)

The plan is to make a release this evening so that people interested can start playing with it. We probably keep this first release relativly lowkey since it is surely to contain some bad bugs. Then we do a new release in a week or two which we announce more loudly.

Discovered a new GStreamer application today called Buzztard. It is a application like FastTracker or SoundTracker for those of you in the know about these kind of applications. One interesting comment that is both a bit tragic and rather amusing at the same time is the comment about the application which they are trying to duplicate the functionality of, a windows app called Buzz. It turns out this application Buzz is not being developed anymore since the developer making it lost his source code…..kinda says it all why open source is the way to go for small garage software projects.

Another day of reading through contracts, updating myself on the technology issues involved and more. Discovered Bastien felt I overstated his intentions in my latest gnomedesktop.org posting :). Sorry Bastien.

Anyway Wim and Ronald is continuing their crusade to fix playback issues. An issue where people using newer version of gnome-vfs didn’t manage to view the Fluendo stream using Totem turned out to be a server bug. Since we haven’t seen the bug with any other software I am guessing the issue is so common that most applications have a workaround for it. Which of cause makes the issue harder to spot for server developers and thus many pieces of server software have the bug, which in turn pressures applications developers to add a workaround for it. And you have an evil circle going. Anyway the server is now fixed and the stream streams beautifully even with gnome-vfs 2.8 (with no work-around :).

Planing on reading the RTP book we have at the office. While will not be doing any of the implemenation work myself I felt I needed to know more as RTP and RTSP of course are very important protocols in our business. So Colin Perking, I don’t know who you are, but I do hope your technical writing is understandable also for mere mortals :)

We also got a book at the office called ‘Streaming Media Bible’ not long ago. I had hoped it would be a good book to learn some basics of streaming for the less technically inclined at the office. The book has some usefull parts, and I guess it will be a better book for Alexia than me, but I have to said I was disapointed on the book. One thing I was hoping to find for instance was some in-depth discussion on the various streaming protocls and their pro and cons. Think I found one small paragraph making some broad statements so far.

Started reading Harry Potter at home before going to sleep. Did half of book 3 last evening and I guess I finish it today or tommorow.

Also returning to Oslo on Friday for a short weekend visit. Will try and arrange for some more of my stuff to be transported down to Barcelona. Will also be nice to get away from appartment fixing, work, and spanish for a few days :)

It is incredible how much small issues can cause big pain. I have NVIDIA card on my machine and have been trying for some time to get a program that uses some NVIDIA specific OpenGL stuff and the Cg tools. Problem is that this program needs the NVidia version of glext.h to compile. This have given me a series of headaches. First of all it turns out this header are not installed by the NVidia installer script unless you run it with –opengl-header as a command line option. Secondly since I was using the installer this header file kept being overwritten when I got security updates etc. of Mesa.

Ok so tired of playing that game I installed the nvidia rpms today form Livna.org. Turns out they are built without the –opengl-headers option so the files are missing in there too :) Filed a bugzilla report to livna.org so hopefully there will be a new package soon with the needed header files.

sometimes it is a bit painfull living on the edge :)

Pushed new releases of GStreamer, GStreamer Plugins and Totem today. Hopefully good enough for Fedora 3 already :)

Read The DaVinci Code yesterday. On many levels I find it to be as good as the reviews leads you to belive. For instance he has clearly researched the background for his topic very well and weave his story very well together with the real world. In regards to raising important spritual questions I think his book is a a masterpiece. The problem in my point is that he seems to have skimped somewhat on the character development and motivations in the book. For instance I am still not sure why a woman who loves his grandfather very much, who has been raised by him and due to that probably share his rather liberal values should be so morally shocked when learning that her grandfather participates in sexual rites that she refuse to speak to him for ten years. The reaction seem to extreme and her anger to longlasting considering who she is and the nature of the ‘transgression’.

The trigging event of the book also seems a bit weird considering the conclusion of the book. Considering that fear of loss of knowledge is the starting point then a conclusion which basically says there was no real risk of knowledge being lost is kinda weird, especially when the person at the begining should have known this.

Also having the crock behave crocked at a point in time when behaving non-crocked would rather obviously give him increased chance of success towards his goal is also a bit weird, although the author do try (unconvincingly) to justify his behaviour somewhat.

Another point never explained is that if your family is in continues mortal danger until the secret you guard becomes publicly known then you have a rather strong motivation to reveal it. The rather cavalier attitude of ‘grandma’ in regards to the urgency of publicising it seems a bit out of place due to this.

First of all a public announcement: If you have some media files that are giving you playback issues with GStreamer, please please submit a bug report to bugzilla. Ronald is fixing issues left and right and need more testcases. So if you have any kind of mediafile you want supported in Rhythmbox, Totem, Muine, Amarok or whatever please bugzilla them. bugzilla.gnome.org -> product GStreamer.

On to Fluendo stuff. I been working on product descriptions and pricing models for the last few days (in addition to having a fever and a bad cold). When you are a small company entering a market where some big players involved you need to feel confident you will be able to handle some hardball tactics. Partly wondering how the free software communtiy actually is able to compete with Microsoft considering their enourmous resources I started thinking of the community as a ´ ‘whack a mole’ game and microsoft as someone doing the whacking. This version of the game however has the special feature that it is gradually growing as the game progress with more and more mole holes popping up. So while Microsoft are easily able to do some serious whacking on the mole holes of their choice they are forced by sheer number of mole holes and the speed at which moles pop up from said holes to leave more and more mole holes alone at any given time. And as their attention shifts between different areas of holes the moles pop back up in the mole holes they turns their attention away from. So by this analogy the way to win the game, being one of the moles, is having enough resources to survive hiding out down in the hole for those periods of time when the giant is able to focus on whacking on you, knowing that the increasing number of moles popping up elsewhere will force the giant to shift his attention soon away from your area of the board. And of course eventually even the big powerfull giant will collapse of exhaustion :) You can only whack moles for so long.

Guess we be going to the Creative Commons launch in Spain on Friday (sorry Julien it is around 10 in the morning). Part of my want to go to the Italian one in December too, as Lessig himself is supposed to be there.

Since we are using so much Python code in our software I suggested we make Fluendo boxer shorts with the text ‘Want to see my python’ written on them. Nobody else seems to like the idea.

It turns out that Johan Dahlin has seen to many of those movies about white men discovering a remote tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and then being choosen as king to be catered for in all respects by the young women of said tribe. Luckily Andy Wingo on the other side has discovered that similar movies made in an Africa setting are not rooted in reality. So things work themselves out somehow :)

So there is a
blog based debate between a Solaris kernel developer and a Linux kernel developer. The fun part of it is that it seems most people missed that the Sun guy basically changed debate in his rebutal. The Sun guy started out by saying that due to this and that cultural issue we can’t implement the features we want in Linux, instead we have to do it in Solaris. In his rebutal to the rebutal however he switched it to be a argument over wether a specific set of features in Solaris where more polished than in their Linux counterparts and also examplifying that since they have a known target in terms of hardware it is easier for them to do certain stuff (yet that would be true also for Linux on Sparc if Sun where to go that way in terms of OS).

I think the problem that Sun refuse to acknowledge is that if you cost ten times the competition then you can’t justify that price by features needed by 1% of your potential customers. The remaining 99% of custmers will just look at those features and think ‘yeah, could be useful if my company was a gigant like Coca-Cola, but for my small company the solutions that cost so basically do what we need.’

The claim that a 110% stable ABI for hardware drivers in the operating system is essential to be viable for people being able to support it is kinda funny considering how many 3rd part drivers are written for Solaris compared to how many are written for Linux :)

A good anecdote in the solaris hardware support department was that at my previous job we ended up buying a Token Ring/ Ethernet router just to connect a Solaris box to the network using its built in ethernet card since the only supported token ring card was Sun’s own and it cost 6 times the price of the router (and ten times the cost of Madge and IBM cards for Intel server).

Ok, so we have a public holiday in Spain and the whole team is gathered at the office working on trying to perfect GStreamer playback. The goal is to make sure Totem can go into Fedora 3 with a GStreamer backend which works very well for it. Kinda nerdy way to spend a holiday, but that is the sorta people we are :)

Had a cool time in Firenze at the free streaming media conference. Talked a lot with Michael Sparks from BBC about Dirac and future developments around that and about the upcoming Fluendo streaming server. Cool to see how aligned we where on a lot of ideas and issues. One thing we discussed was the need for a new open and free protocol for streaming video. RTP is ok in many cases, but as Michael’s talk showed it has some severe issues for large scale streaming. When I meet Michael again at the airport this morning I suggested that maybe the free streaming group could try to get EU funding for development of such a new protocol, so today I mailed that suggestion of to the freestreaming mailing list.

Also talked briefly with Manuel Lora from Xiph.org after his talk. It was a very nice talk from a Fluendo standpoint as it contained a lot of positive talk about Fluendo’s efforts and our sponsorship of Xiph.org.

I also completed readig Lawrence Lessig book Free culture while in Italia. It is easy to despair a bit when reading his book, but I think there are some light in the tunnel. Basically while I am begining to wonder if democracy is sustainable, or if it like all other forms of government before it will end up eating itself, I am not prepared to give up on it just yet. I think Lawrence and others are actually making relativly good progress in building understanding and mindshare for their ideas, so maybe both EU and US politicians will come around eventually. First step I guess is stopping the EU patent directive, but even if it does go through maybe through the continued effort of public education will we be able to turn the tide.