Managed to do something usefull this weekend. My main bedroom is now painted in a light light blue tone. Next step is actually buying a new bed for it and other basic furniture.

Also spent a lot of time on Saturday and Sunday just walking around Barcelona trying to learn more about the city. Managed to get lost on Saturday so it took me 3 more hours to get home compared to what I planed.

Things are going relativly smoothly at work and I am looking forward to the actuall release of the free server. As it will mean we will lock a lot more things in regards to the commercial version too.

Ok, so I finally got myself a spanish mobile phone number. So everyone reading this who have me in their phonelist can update my number to be: +34 678093464 :)

Starting to feel more on top of my tasklist. Not that is has grown much shorter, but at least I feel more confident that I will be able to deliver whats needed for when its needed.

Starting thinking again on gnome-themes-extras and what to do with it. The problem is that most of the themes are mostly unmaintained in the sense that no-one is making new icons for them. David is still working on Nuvola and has promised me a host of new icons closer to Christmas. Jimmac is theoretically still working on Gorilla. But for Amaranth, Lush and Wasp there will be no icons and I do not really get much contributions for icons. I am considering putting a request for new artist/maintainers for the unmaintained themes in the next release announcement and then remove those of the themes I don’t get new maintainers for. I would then do a new release of those unmaintaned themes standalone for people who want to continue using them even without new icons getting added. I expect that g-t-e will only contain Gorilla and Nuvolla after that, but such is life. Maybe there will be other themes which I can feel confident about being maintained that can go in.

Thomas is gone for Boston for a few days which is problematic in regards to booking the rafting. If we go the weekend of 25/26 will he be able to come, will Kristien be able to come. Do Lotte want to come? Should we ask Ishmael? Lots of questions, but no-one to answer them :)

Yesterday evening I returned from work and decided to sit outside on my balcony enjoying the evening and looking out towards the sea, contemplating life in general. Well it worked out well enough, but when I changed position in the chair as a preparation to get up the chair literally fell apart. It was one of these all white plastic chairs and obviously the plastic had become old and fragile. So instead of getting up I found myself hitting the tile floor of my balcony and getting jabbed by several sharp pieces of white plastic. Spent the next 5 minutes crawling into the living room and au oh ah au oh on the sofa. Think my landlord should be very happy he didn’t show up at that time to pick up the furniture he has promised to take away (now including the remaining white plastic chair) or he might have found himself being the target of me stress testing the other chair by hitting him with it. Today my tailbone is tender, but I think it will be ok.

Today I also went to Vodafone again to try to get a local phone subscription for my cell phone. Well when she told me she needed my account number the last time that wasn’t enough, she today told me she needed my actual reciept from the bank. I managed to keep smilling and went back to my appartment and got that. I also got my appartment renting contract and my passport (I had already given them a photocopy) to be sure I wouldn’t be sent away again.
Then I arrive at Vodafone again and suddenly they tell me that since Norway isn’t a member of the European Union vodafone will probably turn me down. What I would need is the NIE number/card in order to be approved. They would try, but still I shouldn’t expect to be approved. Aaaargh!!!

Ok, so I tried going to the police station to see if my NIE card was ready (I applied for it on 26th of August). At the police I was told I was back way to soon. 1st of October was when she thought it might be ready…

I love BCN and Spain, but sometimes this place makes me consider agressive behaviour.

Me and Thomas is going to see Miguel’s talk today, wonder how it will work out with the spanish :)

Life continues in Barcelona. Had a great evening yesterday. The Fluendo team met at thomasvs place to go through Wim´s plan for fixing the remaining issues in GStreamer, or rather hear what Wim had so far and provide feedback. If we are to convice the community to go with this the plan needs to be rock solid. The fun thing with Wim of course is that whenever someone had a question or worry he could show that it was already covered somewhere further down in the document :). Wim is incredible. Later in the evening we barbequed and Miguel came over. He had some problems finding the doorbell so he called someone in the US to go onto IRC and find us and tell us he was outside :). Some people would call that a geeky solution to the problem :)

He had seen Wim’s applet while browsing in the airport in Paris and was quite impressed with it. I hope he and the rest of the world will also be impressed when Fluendo release our streaming server next month. We think it is pretty impressive for a first release, but it is hard to guess what others will think.

We are planning on going to the Mono talk on thuesday, but I wonder how interesting it will be for me since it will be in Spanish. Then again considering the english skills of a lot of people here I wonder how interesting it would be for the rest of the audience if he held it in english :). Guess I need to keep going to spanish classes. And I am getting rather determined to prove my co-workers wrong on their evalution of my chances with the israeli model girl from my spanish class :) When they even bring in Miguel in on teasing me about it I take is as a declaration of war :)

Monday will be spent going through and answering all the mails the slashdotting generated and polishing up the roadmap for our products.

So we got Slashdotted in the end for the Ogg Theora port to Java. Seems we peaked at 2500 people watching the stream. We had hoped for over 4000 people connecting as that would have given us a number of connected users which we haven´t yet had in other tests. Which means 3060 is still the maximum number of real world users we have had connected to a stream. Well even if Slashdot is not able to provide us with enough stress testing we will make Fluendo world leader in streaming media anyway :)

Was planning on going to Ikea today, but it turns out Barcelona is celebrating Catalunya idenpence day today which means almost everything is closed. Well guess Ikea on monday then.

One of the cool things of yesterday is that we had left the volume at zero before leaving the office. But Thomas was able to fix it from home using the prototype administration GUI :)

Yesterday evening we also did a company dinner to welcome Ronald and celebrate the start of the company. Very happy to have Ronald on board, he will make sure things start working really well in the playback department. While Ronald will be working on a lot of embeded-related tasks the pre-req for doing this is getting playback rocking in the general case. His personal goal is to make sure Totem + GStreamer kicks serious ass :) Which isn’t a bad goal :)

Next step I guess is to talk Scott into coming to work for us so we can get KDE multimedia rocking too :)

Long day at the office reading through CSS licensing terms, streaming server documentation. Julien´s interview with osnews is now online talking about our plans for Fluendo. It also includes a link to our office Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis stream which is decoded by a Java applet. Yes, that is correct we have ported Ogg Theora to Java. Or rather Wim Taymans our turbo powered hacker did it :).

Skipped my Spanish class today to participate in a small meeting we had discussing development plans going forward. My main motivation for going to Spanish class has also been skipping classes lateley, hopefully both I and her will be back on Monday :)

We are having our first company party tommorow, or at least the first since my arrival. Ronald is flying in and it will be nice to see him again.

Guess I try dragging poor Wim to Ikea on Saturday :)

Ok, so after a lot of tweaking today I finally managed to get the DellA920 printer running with CUPS on our server and share the queues. Learned that there is still a lot that needs to be made better in the printing area. What made my job even harder is that we needed a special printer driver provided by Lexmark for the printer. For some reason so doesn´t the RedHat print config tool handle having new drivers added so I needed to use the Web Interface of cups to add the printer as that let me choose my new installed driver. The problem with the web interface however is that it doesn´t let you configure stuff like wether to allow browsing and from whom. I tried using the Red Hat tool for that, but the tool then just undid the setting I made in the web config which killed its usefullness.
After pulling my hair for a while I did some Googling and I found this rant by Eric Raymond. Seems he had much of the same issues I had with getting the thing running. The rant is actually a good read and points out the horror that is the current print setup utilities and docs. Anyway in his rant he did provide me with enough info to manually fix the cups file and voila the print queue popped up on my laptop too. Only downside being that it doesn´t pop up on some of the other computers without anyone understanding why.

Ok, so I tried sleeping in my appartment this weekend. A somewhat mixed experience. My main issue at this point is the lack of a good bed. The one I am sleeping on now is way to short for me which made it quite uncomfy for me to lie in it. Planning in fixing that soonish, in fact I am selling my Oracle shares now to have money to buy some really nice stuff for the appartment. Was planning on using the sailboat money for this, but I have a feeling that selling the sailboat will take some time.

The second issue is that my electrical power is kinda weak. Having a 10 amp fuse for the whole appartment is rather poor, proven by the power going everytime I try to wash my clothes (and have the fridge running at the same time). My landlord promised to fix this, hopefully he is able to do so without turning my appartment into a deathtrap.

Think I also have found a solution for getting my stuff down to Bcn from Oslo. I will buy an old truck in Oslo, drive it down and sell it. As long as the truck doesn´t shut down somewhere in the middle of europe that should be the cheapest solution.

Seems like I am also the main attraction for our demo stream currently. Hope that changes before the stream becomes public :)

Ok, so today I got myself an appartment in Bcn. It took a bit longer than I anticipated, but it worked out well in the end I think. I wanted an appartment walking distance to work and this apartment is in the house closest to the WTC which has appartments so I think I did well. Will take me 5 minutes to get to work in morning :) A tad better than the 1 hour thing I had in Norway.

Did some meetings today, one of phone and one in person. Thomas did a small presentation on the server which was great. Got a lot of good ammo when presenting the server to people, think we have a product that will seriously rock.

More work on the website. When I said yesterday it was done I meant that the first phase was done. Now the others have seen it and I have to fix a lot of stuff :) Gimp is giving me a hard time with fonts for some reason, but I think I managed to find a way to work around it.

Lots of stuff happening at work and I feel a bit thorn that I have not been able to do everything I wanted to do. For instance we have a new employee Alexia which it is partly my responsibility to help get started and I have really not been able to dedicate the time to her that I feel I should. On the other hand I feel that the other tasks I have been working on are time critical too….