jdub, svu: I am not sure I fully buy the ‘proof’ here. The issue is much more complex than one person quiting Debian being the ultimate proof. First of all I need to say that as a singular example the flags are probably without ‘value/meaning’, but as one component in a bigger picture and trend it might be of importance.

What is boils down to is what a free software community is about and what drives its members into action, ties them together and brings in new people. In that context being as edible as possible might not actually be ‘the right solution’.

To explain my thinking I like to use the recent process of choosing the Democratic candidate for their upcoming US Presidental election as an example. To simplify it, you had Howard Dean, the candidate who (dared) speak boldly and hold some relativly controversial standpoints on one side and you had the ‘edible by all’ candidate John Kerry with the typical politician fuzzyness/political correctness on the other side.

The initial reaction would be to say ‘hey, Kerry won so being very round in the edges was once again proven to be the best strategy’. Well I beg to differ, our short term needs is not having as many people as possible like us, but have as many people as possible being enganged enough in what we do to actually help out. And from this point of view Howard Dean ‘won’ over Kerry. He had a order of magnitude more people activly invovled in his campaign.
Or in other words; if you are building a house it is much nicer to have 10 people willing to help out than having a 1000 people giving you applause for taking on such a big task alone.

So back to the flag issue. Yes doing things that might be controversial might turn some people away, like jdub’s URL was an example of, but as my example above was meant to hightlight so taking away all controversy might eventually be more damaging; as some small controvesy is a smaller risk for us than stagnancy caused by lack of engagement from developers would be. So my worry here is not the flags, I was done with them after the last round, but that it will be the first step among many towards diluting the underlaying values that makes contributing to projects for volunteers (like myself) interesting. Free Software is not just about producing a product, if it where then we are nothing more than stupid people working for free, it is as much about promoting some clear values associated with it; like freedom of information, equal access to the basic infrastructure of our society and help bridging the digital divide. These values are much more important for my motivation for working on free software than being able to write my email in a program I can download without paying.

Me and a friend tried playing TripleA yesterday, a clone of the old Axis and Allies boardgame. The graphics and gameplay worked nicely enough, but the network code seemed a bit flakey, after the 7th lost connection during play we decided to wait until the next version before trying again :)

Ok, so there is this book thing people are doing now:
The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

She moaned in exstacy as Georgio pushed into her hungry and insatiable love nest.

Saw 50 first dates at the cinema yesterday. Not nearly as funny as I thought the Wedding Singer was when it was released. What suprised me the most however was seeing that the US censors had rated it at ‘R’ originally (set down to PG-13 after a complaint). Tells me that US cinema censors need their head examined, sometimes I am wondering if the US is trying to immitate Iranian standards for censorship; here in Norway it was rated ok for 7 years old.

A nice calm Saturday with no special plans. Been going through my mailbox trying to reply to some of the mails and deleting old stuff. Updated my copy of GStreamer and was happy to see that a lot of work has been going on with getting GStreamer working under windows with the Microsoft compiler. Going through my mail I happily noticed that Ronald Bultje has been going over almost all the playback bugs I filed and fixed them. Guess I need to see if I can find any more troublesome files :)

Most things are now up and running only bad item being running my mail, xchat etc. through VNC since I don’t have a keyboard and mouse connected to my old computer anymore and my laptop doesn’t have Linux installed atm due to a harddisk crash.

Now I need to start looking into stuff for GUADEC, like accomodation and the planned rafting trip.

Finally 100% done with the appartment!..the bliss. No more packing and moving stuff, no more trips to the garbage dump with old furniture, no more cleaning, no more companies to contact to fix electrictity, internet etc., it is all done :) I handed over the keys to the appartment to the new owner this morning. Now I am ready to focus on my future instead of my past :)

Need to get a new gnome-themes-extras relase out. Got lots of bug reports on the current one. Also need to get back on track with GStreamer, actually need to get back on track with being online at all :)

This has been a really bad week. Caught in the crossfire between tasks at Oracle, tasks in regards to moving, tasks in regards to Fluendo, tasks in regards to GNOME and tasks in regards to friends and family. So now at the end of the week end I have a bad conscience towards all mentioned tasks who are either not done yet or only partially done. I hope to get done of some of the tasks today and tommorow, but since I have to go away for 3 days starting on Sunday for Oracle, so I am worried there is still some time before I feel I have done all I should.

Been packing and transporting my stuff like crazy for the last few days. Rediscovered that moving is actually a lot of work. Glad to see my hours at the gym has paid of somewhat since I was able to do lots of heavy carrying without getting badly exhausted.

So from today I have actually moved out of my appartment and moved into my mothers house. While I do have the appartment until the end of the month I figured I had already moved so much stuff out that it was getting a bit to spartan to keep living in the appartment. Not living there will also enable me to cancel electricity etc. right away and save a little more money. Money saved is money earned some wise people have said.

Think that the move will be completed next weekend, including cleaning the appartment to make it ready to be taken over.

David Vignoni has added a lot of new icons to the Nuvola theme in CVS. I really really need to get a gnome-themes-extras release out now. Especially since the last official release fail to compile with GTK+ 2.4.

I also ordered the new offical GNOME 2 programmers book. Looking forward to reading it and a big thanks to everyone involved for making it happen.

Things are moving ahead rapidly. Signed the sales contract for my appartment yesterday, will probably turn over the appartment a few days before the first of May, which doesn’t really give me much time to move out. Drove a huge pile of old furniture to the garbage dump yesterday evening and will be going through more stuff today in order to get the move underway. It will be really strange living under my mothers roof again after all these years, but since it is only for a few months I guess I survive :)

All this stuff is really detracting from the time I am spending online doing GNOME and GStreamer related stuff, which I feel a bit bad about, but I guess it is just the way things have to be. I am guessing that as soon as I have actually moved out of my appartment I will get lots of time for GNOME and GStreamer as my job at Oracle will wind down due to both summer and my leaving.

Lots of feelings are rushing through my head these days due to the dawning realization of the realities of all of this. I have sold my home, I am leaving my work in just two months, I have booked a 2 month trip around the world and I don’t formally have a new job yet :) I think a person more prone to worrying would panick at this point, personally I am just feeling very alive :)

Ok, so I just had easter vacation. The thing is that vacations tend to come with a lot of work, and this was no different. Spent most of my days washing, painting, polishing the sailboat. The rest I spent taking my appartment apart and packing stuff in preparation for moving out. I also spent some time getting my scooter running after a long winter in the cellar. So while there has been little ‘work’ work, there has been a lot of work.

Spent a lot of time today going over my mail and cleaning out the spam and replying to the important ones. Also once again learned the hard lesson on the importance of adding a filter for any recently joined mailing lists to avoid my inbox getting drowned.

thomasvs pinged me on the planned Rafting trip around GUADEC today. I still plan on trying to arrange something. Problem is that the rafting place I know is good is 610 kilometers from the place GUADEC is hosted (for those who wonder, yes we are a small country, but that is in regards to population; we are actually around the same size as Great Brittain in square kilometers). There is a rafting place close to GUADEC, but I never heard of it and is rather sceptical about the quality of the river. So I will go myself on a rafting trip there very soon to try it out. If it is good, then great, if it stinks then I wonder if this rafting trip will be feasible to pull of, except maybe for a few though nails who are willing to driver for 7-8 hours to get there and 5-6 hours to get back to Oslo/the main Oslo airport)

A small bump in the road in regards to my long world trip. I need to get an ISIC card before July. The university will not give me a student card until the end of July. Gives me a tad of a logistical problem, which I am trying to figure out how to work around. Already found one option, but it is relativly expensive. Anyone reading this have any suggestions for how I could qualify for a ISIC card without paying a fortune in tuition fees please let me know :)

Been dealing with some interesting groups over the last few days, strange how sometimes the expected bad guys are the most accomodating ones, and the expected good guys are like talking to the wall. Conversations like
Me: hi, we see you advertise ‘a’, but we want to do ‘b’, is this possible?

Reply: Have you looked into doing ‘a’.
Me: Yes, but ‘a’ is not possible for us we want to do ‘b’
Reply: We really hope you want to do ‘a’

At this point I am starting to wonder if I my question is understood, and I am getting the salesman version of ‘no’ or if he doesn’t understand my question.