Had some nice days in Sydney starting with Jan and Jamie talking me to Jeff and Pia’s place for a barbeque. Even got to try some barbequed kangaroo. I am really curious to see what Jeff and co. will cook up to revolutionize the Linux world, could be really interesting.

Jan and Jamie took me the next day to see some wildlife at the Australian Reptile park. Although the name says reptile they do also have a collection of Australian non reptiles so I got to see and touch both live kangaroos and koalas in addition to seeing a nice sample of the Australian reptile population. In the evening we went to Jan’s parents for a nice dinner.

Although I had a good time the first few days my stomach problems from Borneo had not really gone away and it was really draining me of energy. So the third day I just took it easy at Jan and Jamie’s place trying to just drink Gatorade as an apotechary had suggested to me. Didn’t really help much so yesterday I visited a doctor. Got some antibiotica and about one hour after popping the first pills I was feeling much much better, my appetite returned, my nausea gone and my spirit much lifted.Also met up with Caleb and we toured the city together so I got to see the harbour bridge and the Sidney Opera. We also went to see Spider-Man 2 which was ok, although a bit to sappy at times. Ended the evening with some games of pool.

Today I will get introduced to the Sidney debian community as I will be joining Jan and Jeff at a local debian users meeting. Supposed to be a talk comparing Debian to Gentoo which will be interesting to hear, although I am a habitual Red Hat/Fedora Core user myself and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Only bad thing is that due to the antibiotica I will not be able to partake in the heavy drinking which seems to coincide with these debian gatherings, luckily I was able to leech some beers of Jeff the first night so I have sampled the local brews. Guess I find out today if it is true as some religious people say; that you can have just as much fun without alchohol. Have a feeling I conclude what I usually conclude; that religious people should be refered to as religious nuts :)

For those interested I have also gotten my photos online now. Although in a simple fashion. When I get back from Africa I hope to get them onto my new apestaart area which Thomas is setting up for me, with a proper photo gallery.

After my last entry we went to an island resort run as part of a giant sea turtle conservation effort. They had a large sea turtle hatchery on the site and in the night we could see the huge turtles come in to lay their eggs (under ranger supervision of course). I think I managed to get a sun stroke cause I got quite sick in the evening and the days after. Luckily the rest of the trip we just flew back to Kota Kinabalu and rejuvated at a nice holiday resort kinda hotel. Had big problems eating anything, but even my stomach seemed to make a comback the last day so I had a plesant flight (as pleasant as they can get flying economy class) to Sydney today. With a little effort and some help from Chantal (one of the girls who had been on the trip with me) I managed to get hold of Jan (thaytan) and he came and picked me up at the airport which was very kind of him. The little I have seen of Sydney so far looks nice, but it is friggin cold here :)

My adventures on Borneo continues. After leaving the hot springs of Porig we travelled on to stay a night out in the jungle. They had built a small wodden platou where we slept under a mosquito net. Was quietly lulled to sleep by the sounds of the jungle around me. The jungle was nice, but due to a forest fire some 60 years ago it was relativly young. Jungle cats came into our camp in the evening just before we fell asleep which was very cool. The night after we spent living together with the villagers in their houses. We where splitt into groups of two people and placed at various families. It was an interesting experience as you got very close on the daily life of the people of Borneo. The shower beeing a bucket of water and a smaller bucket to use for pouring the water onto yourself is quite a bit removed from the life I am accustomed to, but definetly an interesting experience.

Travelled onwards to the Sepilok Orangutang sanctuary. It was fun seeing all the young Orangutang’s come running in for the scheduled feeding. There was even a young mother with a child. No large males though as the older Orangutangs tend to stop comming to the sanctuary’s feeding sessions. On the afternoon feeding there was also a large host of smaller monkeys swarming around trying to steal bananas from the Orangutangs. I hope some of my photos turned out well.

Today we travelled to Sedakan, with a short detour to a Probiscius Monkey sanctuary. These monkeys only exist on Borneo and the mature males have a very distinctive look; a huge nose. They where definetly worth the watch, and it was kinda ecouraging to see that the sanctuary had been started by a palm oil plantation owner who after seeing the plight of the monkeys had decided to not turn the jungle into a palm oil plantation after all. (The vast majority of the tropical jungle in Sabbah has been cut down and replaced by palm oil plantations in just the last 10 years).

So know I am sitting at an internet cafe in Sadakan where we stay until tommorow when we take a boat to an island just outside here where sea turtles come in to lay eggs at night.

My next post will probably be from Australia and hopefully I be able to post my pictures online then too :)

Glad to see advogato is back up and running. I am currently sitting at an internet cafre in a small town in the middle of Sabah, Borneo. Had a great start of my vacation. I am on a trip done by a company called Intrepid, which specialize in adventure travel. The first night we spent sleeping in a small village being the guests of the Dusun people which is one of the local people of Borneo. They where really friendly to us and shared willingly (maybe a bit to willingly :) of their homemade ricewine. We had a great time talking, singing and drinking. The next day we had a small guided tour around their village before heading of to Mount Kinabalu which is the highets in South East Asia (4095 meters). It took two days of hard walking to reach the summit (staying the night at a lodge in the mountain) and getting up at 0200 in the morning to reach the summit at sunrise. Incredible to see the local people carrying stuff up the mountain as the lodge was supplied by foot so they had to carry everything up on their backs.

Going down really got to one of my knees, but luckily we are taking in easy at a hot springs resort today. Only thing on my schedule is going to see if some Orangutangs come to the an organized feeding session they do here.

Tommorow we are traveling on to visit the organgutang orphanage and to stay one night in a small village populated with bumiputras, which is the malaysian muslim people.

Traveling with a fun and interesting group of people; some very cute and single girls among them. Our tour leader Nathan Cox is a great guy and really pushes himself to make us have a good time.

Next update the next time I am near civilization :)

Things are going very smooth on the GStreamer front atm. in regards to cross-plattform support. Zaheer made a OSX audio sink, David Schleef has commited his Sun Audio sink, and the MSVS port is being polished, only need plugins for Windows audio and video and we should be set. A OSX native video sink would of course also be nice.

It is also nice to note that it seems that fewer and fewer people seem to have problems with the basics, like actually just getting Rhythmbox to play music on their system, which means we are starting to reach a good level of robustness IMHO.

Also upgraded to Fedora 2 last thursday. It was a pleasant use experience, but I am frustrated by the fact that the Wireless driver I need is still not ported to the 2.6 kernel. More troublesome is the fact that it is next to impossible to find a supported wireless cards in shops these days. Wonder how long it will be untill someone has managed to reverse engineer the drivers for the new hi-speed wireless cards so we can actually start using those with Linux. Lack of such drivers (among a lot of other small stuff) is why I basically agree that the Linux desktop is not ready for the consumer market yet. You can tell people that card XY is not (yet) supported, but you can’t tell them that NO card is supported.

Been thinking more about the Mono stuff and I think that my post yesterday probably didn’t really hit the nail on the head in the sense that it didn’t really address the issue that needed addressing.

The basic issue is that we simply shouldn’t be having this argument today. Most of the senior members of the GNOME community has known each other and had a good relationship/been friends for many years know. Based on that there should be a level of trust present that I currently feel is being ignored. But let say there is such a basic trust present behind all the arguments being thrown around, then why are we currently enganging in what can only be described as fence building activities.

If we try looking honestly at the situation I think we can all agree that the community has never been in a better position to actually take these issues of the table. Today we have resourceful companies behind us which allows us to actually sort of such legal issues in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago. Starting with Mono, Miguel and Nat has repeatedly stated that they are working on doing a patent review, that they have a letter promising RAND+Royalty free and that they will publish this letter and the results of their review when its done. I am also sure they will aim at clearing away any uncertainty about any GPL imcompatible clauses in the RAND agreement. We should remember that it is not only Microsoft who has a hand on the steering wheel here, Intel and HP, two companies which has a clear interest in our success also have a say, which might make it harder to M$ to create a saboting RAND agreement even if they want to. So I think the sane thing to do is simply trust that Migueal and Nat who we have known for a long time and such trust the motivations of to; have Novell work getting us clear answers to the legal uncertainties. Until that happens we try to keep the ‘dark cloud of doom’ editorials to a minimum.

On the Java side I think Red Hat should engange in a dialog to get Sun to write a binding document promising terms on their Java related patents etc., which would protect us from any change of heart on Sun’s side. While I currently don’t think Sun would consider going after us I think we want guarantees that we are legally safe even if Sun gets huge financial problems in the future, and starts looking for new sources of income. It is clear to me that until Sun makes such a document or relicense/dual-license the official implementation under the LGPL there is also a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Java, albeit smaller than the cloud hanging over Mono.

In the meantime I guess we should continue focusing on the stuff we feel confident about, like improving the things we have already and working on partnerships like the one we started exploring with the Mozilla team. GNOME hackers at companies with big wallets should probably also encourage said companies to donate money to efforts like Public Patent Foundation and Public knowledge, because the success of these efforts is the long term fix for these issues.

The Mono/Java patent debate is back it seems. Personally I think I agree with Miguel and Nat. If we let the fear of patents paralyze us we might as well give up right away. Havoc’s argument about Novell trying to force everyone to take a risk doesn’t really hold water. It is the same kind of argument SCO makes about using Red Hat at all, which I assume Havoc thinks we should ignore.

GNOME is a free software project and as such the people involved with active contributions decide where we go next. This meant a lot of changes have been made in GNOME between 1.x and 2.x and it has meant changing the default behaviour of Nautilus simply because the people doing the actual work thought it was the right thing to do. And this is the way it has to be; while I personally is rather lukewarm about spatial Nautilus I also accept that unless I personally is ready to maintain a version of Nautilus functionaling differently my vote on how Nautilus is supposed to work will be abysmally smaller than the votes of Dave and Alexander. The only veto power any developer(s) or companies hold is confined to what they themselves are planing on doing or not doing.

So if developers in general embrace Mono and use it for their development that is their choice and at some point the amount of stuff being done using Mono might get large enough for GNOME to officially start including Mono based technologies. Wether Red Hat or Sun will do so in their versions of GNOME is their choice, but I think the story of open source software is that it is such a strong force that no company can stand against it.

The good thing I think the SCO case has shown us is that when someone tries to strongarm us the open source collaborative model can also work in a legal fight. Groklaw is an open source project, with a maintainer in the form of PJ, which has helped dig up a lot of information truly usefull in the fight against SCO. If the day come where Microsoft or Sun or anyone else tries to go after companies/people for using Mono or Java I think the community will respond by digging up all the prior art we need to bury the case and the company for good.

As a sidenote: If anyone out there has managed to get a atmel based wireless card working with the Fedora 2 2.6 kernel please let me know how :)

So I visited Barcelona this weekend spending some time with my friends Wim, Thomas and Julien (and a tiny amount of time with Johan :). I even got to witness the arrival of the Fluendo office water cooler; which is final proof we are a real company :)

Spent friday with Thomas trying to go over the GPL to figure our what exactly it says and formulating questions on issues we need clarified. Our goal is to have a lawyer approved FAQ for these things to post on the GStreamer webpage and put into the GStreamer Application Writers Guide. This is likely to be some issues in regards to the current batch of GPL licensed applications, but hopefully we can have a good exception text for people to add to their license which makes shipping plugins for patented formats toghether with these applications possible.

On Saturday we had a company meeting to discuss our short and medium terms plans. One of the major things to come out of that for my own part was that I will be starting working for Fluendo sooner than originally planned. Which meant I had to shave of 3 weeks from my planned vacation. Australia and Africa both took some heavy cuts which mean for instance that I know only we stay for one week in Sydney and only for a weekend in Perth.

Anyway spending this week in Barcelona really gave me a boost in regards to Fluendo. For instance working with Thomas on going through the GPL really opened my eyes to how much more fun and interesting it will be to work with really smart people who are at the top of their field. Unlike my current situation where so many of those I meet makes me want to give up any notion that there is something glorius to be found in mankind (sorry for the lack for faith Ayn :)

Speaking of patents. Was sad to see that the European Union took a big step closer to US style software patents. While there is still some hope that the European Parliament can turn it around again, things are looking bad. And while I can envision certain scenarios where Fluendo might profit from such patents I think the long term effect could easily be that the only ones earning any money on software is lawyers, and the only type of small ‘software’ companies viable in the end being the Eolas type.

Tobias sent me a nice SVG version of the Firefox logo, which I think will be a perfect fit for Nuvolla. Think I mail it to David to see what he thinks. I also got a SVG Gtk+ theme last night which I hope to take a closer look at tomorrow. Maybe it is what is needed to make artists aware of what is possible with Dom’s new engine.
Anyway tommorow is set aside to do a lot of GNOME, SVG and Fluendo related tasks so I know more after that. Today I am going to see my local fotball team play against the team who has won the norwegian series for the last 12 years :)

We had a batchelor party yesterday for a friend of mine. Started with some Go-Cart driving, followed by paintball; then to an appartment for a vorspiel including having a nice looking stripper stop by; and then ending the evening out on the town. A fun day, and I am definetly going to try paintball again.

Plan for today is just taking it easy while trying to figure out why no GStreamer applications that use the gstinterface stuff will not link for me (but it seems noone else has this problem) and do some gnome-theme-extras bugfixin.

Ok, so I get a fixed amount at work each year to buy clothes etc., since I am leaving I need to use this money as I will not get it in cash no matter what. So I took along my sister yesterday and went shopping for clothes. When spending a relativly big amount of money quickly is the goal you can easily end up like I have today wearing jeans purchased for 275 Euro, which is definetly the most expensive jeans I have ever bought.

Happy to see so much good work on GStreamer these days. Owen Frasier-Green is back and has been updating the Mono bindings. Our Matroska friends are still hard at work porting GStreamer to Windows, with most of the basics done and Windows specific plugins next on the tasklist. Wim Taymans seems already in full action at Fluendo commiting a Theora encoder just yesterday. Ronald, Benjamin and David is also steadily fixing bugs moving the obscurity level of our bugs upwards. Hopefully we soon have a Ogg muxer ready and the autoplugger code needed to allow Colin to activate tag editing in Rhythmbox before GUADEC along with a GStreamer based Totem working like a charm :)

On Java: I read James Gosling weblog where he says that it would be problematic to put Java under something like the LGPL (putting it under the GPL makes it next to useless IMHO) due to wanting to protect developers from having to worry about the plattform ‘forking’. This is bogus. The Java plattform is already ‘forked’ in the way he describes; mostly due to Sun being slow and incorporating fixes into Java proper. For instance my current employer, Oracle, has been forced to ship its own JRE and browser plugin for the last 4 years since the one available from Sun has had bugs and issues. Only know have the official Sun jdk/plugin incorporated enough of Oracle’s fixes for Oracle to have started looking into certifying our ERP applications with it. And not only have Oracle felt the need to maintain our own ‘branched’ Java for all these years, but as anyone using our software knows we do not support the use of new versions of our own plugin/jre until we certified them for use with the Oracle 11i ERP package. So already today what Goslings ‘fear’ will happen if they make the JVM free software is happening. So basically nothing will change if Sun makes Java free software in regards to API predictability. Small developers will just continue supporting the version released as the official one from Sun as that is all they have resources to do.