Managed to do a GStreamer 0.7.2 release yesterday. Well kinda, got the files out on GNOME ftp, but there is still tasks to do to get the files everywhere they should be, make proper release notes, update freshmeat and icewalkers and so on. Doing release management for a big project like GStreamer is actually quite a lot of work.

I am quite happy about the release cause it contains lots of very visible changes. It adds full support for wma and aac. And it adds some support for wmv and quicktime. The release also includes a Real demuxer, but that needs to be hooked up to a real decoder to do something usefull.
Hopefully by the next release the issues hindering wmv and quicktime to work reliably will be solved and we manage to hook up a Real decoder, either using ffmpeg or by a wrapper for the Helix binaries.

Wheels is also hard at work porting Kabodle to GStreamer which I think will be a major step forward for the use of GStreamer in KDE.

Combined with dolphy and thomasvs working to get the new GStreamer company Fluendo going so am I very positive about the future.

That said so is there major still some major obstacles on the road ahead. For instance so are there still some major bugs both in the current autoplugger and in the current scheduler. But that said the list of tasks needing doing seems much more manageable than it ever did before. I mean there will always be a long todo list, the important thing is how urgent the items on that list is. As long as we are at a stage where it isn’t a crisis if a certain change will not hit CVS before 4-5 months then we are to be considered 100% production ready IMHO.

Think I am over the worst at work for a while. Found I had some energy for free software stuff again this weekend. Did a lot of little things like keeping atop the Sodipodi flag collection, updating gnome-themes-extras, writing lots of mail and trying to get Gstreamer CVS head to build. Some irritating bug in Fedora Core 1 that makes our docs build spew crap atm.
Also managed to do the promised librsvg bugzilla work I promised Dom.

I am really positive about the week ahead, thinking that I will feel that I accomplished at lot in it :) Time will tell.

Lots of good hacking in both Sodipodi and Inkscape going on. Think the fork actually was a good thing as disagreements where really hurting development motivation for the people involved.

Really glad to see IBM starting to get behind GNOME. Think it makes my little business plan even more viable :)

Managed to get out the first release of the SVG flags package today. Around 215 different flags which I think is rather impressive :)

Reading the excerpt of an interview with Steve Balmer I realized that there is a real sign that Microsoft is in big trouble. In almost every interview they are giving these days they are forced to answer questions about Linux. This is just what happened to all their competitors who they crushed, the competitors ended up having to talk almost more about Microsoft than about their own product, and from there you can only go down.

The sad news of Chema’s passing struck me hard today. As others has said he was a wonderful person. He was one of the few people who was good about regularly sending me news stories while I was doing the GNOME Summaries and he was always forthcoming with information and help when I mailed or chatted with him. I had the pleasure of meeting Chema in Barcelona in September when he, Nat and Miguel was there for the Novell conference.
There is this one episode I remember especially about Chema from meeting him in Barcelona; we had all gone to a bar and after being there for a while I stepped outside for a few minutes to grab some fresh air;I hadn’t been talking to Chema for a little while then, but he saw me walking out and came out after me to check if I where ok or leaving. I really appreciated that gesture and I think it shows what kind of person Chema was. You will be dearly missed Chema.

Life consists of two main components; what you plan on doing and what you actually end up doing. Personally I make lot of plans and few of them actually ends up happening, personally I don’t see that as me failing, just that while working towards my goals other opportunities arise which I decide is just as good options as my original plans. That doesn’t make plans irrelevant however, in fact they are highly important as working towards them is what tends to give me these other opportunities.

Anyway, frustrated with how slowly my plans on emigrating from Norway is moving I have decided to move on some local opportunities that has arisen instead. I decided that my strategy, of not doing anything to improve my current life, because I plan on doing something else in the semi-near future, doesn’t really work out.

So now tommorow I am going out for a beer with some guys who hinted about increasing my salary 25% percent of I come working for them. I am also going to go on a date with a beautiful girl next week that my sister introduced me too. While I claim to have international dreams I have to admit being a sucker for crystal blue eyes and plantinum blond hair, especially when it is real :)

But today I am just stuck in what could turn out to be Norways next Olympic city. Not to bad, except I do feel somewhat guilty about not being able to update the Sodipodi flag database with latest additions, so that we can announce over 200 flags.

Bryce and co. announced Inkscape the other day. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, I have to admit being rather frustrated with the low level of GNOME integration in Sodipodi, so this fork might be a good thing.

Also realized I am really not keeping up with stuff in GNOME as well as I used to; since I was taken by suprise by the Novel Suse buyout. Guess not knowing kept me from doing some insider stock trading, which I guess is somewhat of a good thing :)

Update: Ok, so I decided to go with the flow. I sold my last lot of Sun shares and bought Novell shares instead. Don’t let me down.

One thing about having a boring dayjob is that it tend to give you a lot of time to think about the state of the world. As most of you probably now the Israeli government is building a great wall and in the process of that doing a major landgrab into the Westbank. So I was thinking that we needed a name for those areas that the Israeli government here is taking. Since I am a firm believer in learning form history I thought ok, what examples do we have in history of a country stealing someone else’s land under the pretext of protecting the population. And there it was, the perfect name for the parts of the Westbank that the Israli government is stealing in this way would be: Sudetenbank

All we need know is for George Bush to say; ‘Peace in our time’ and things have come full circle.

Seth: So you are looking for more religion in GNOME. Well I think part of the trouble to the degree that there is a real problem (not sure there is) is that people who come up with really new ideas has a tendency to not stick around to complete them, or actually they tend to stick around, but they move their attention to their next grand vision before completing the first. Examples of such in my mind are medusa, dashboard and GPF (gpf in gnome cvs).

Even in the cases where the originator sticks around or a strong enough development team evolves to keep the project going so do innovation also tend to demand a lot of trial and error which has a tendency to demotivate people. I am probably biased, but I think that GStreamer deserves the label innovative. That said it has taken an enourmous effort with each subcomponent being rewritten numerous times, some still need an iteration or two before getting there. Keeping developers happy during these phases have not been easy, which is why we have had some people abandoning ship by implementing alternative backends to their applications etc.

As for grand visions, well I think the HIG do qualify as a grand vision altough maybe not innovative in the sense that HIG’s is an old Apple concept.

I also think Havoc makes a good point in regards to the kernel. There needs to be something to build upon before grand vision stage is plausible. An example would be that for someone to pursue a dream of building an multimedia centric network media system where every machine on the network shares things like music playlists, you exchange files and collaborate using video confercing with built in whiteboards etc., and on and on. Well that vision gets a bit overboard to get anyone else involved in if the system doesn’t even have a basic music playback system.

The flag creation effort we are doing at Sodipodi.sf.net is continuing at a brisk pace. Seeing the overwhelmingly positive response it has gotten and the large number of contributors has been an eye-opening experience. Given the opportunity there are a lot of people out there who wants to contribute.

This has started me thinking about the never ending problem that major projects face in recruiting new contributors, and how some projects seem to have a much easier time than others in getting new contributors.

One successfactor of the flag project in my mind is probably that fact that helping with it is open to people with a lot of different skill levels when it comes to vector drawing. If you are relativly new you could make flags like the French, Japense or German. For the people with a little experience there are flags such as the US, Chinese or Indian. And for the higly experienced we had flags like the East German or Croatian flags. Each flag is also a standalone entity so people can work on it without thinking to much about people working on other flags.

Another successfactor was that the target is clearly and easily defined. People could easily identify a flag that needed doing that was within their skill level and they had a good resource like flagspot to get information on apsect ratio’s and colors.

Based on this I started to think about the projects that I am familiar with. Mono seems to be an example of a project that has had relative ease at attracting new developers. While a part of this of course is attributed to the energetic style of Miguel, which clearly helps to both bring in new people and motivate excisting ones, so do Mono share many traits with my flag project. You have a clearly defined list of classes that needs implementing with some classes perfect for someone new and some classes a good challenge for someone experienced. Each class is to some extenxt also a standalone entity which you can work on as a separate project.

For GNOME there are a lot of people doing stuff around it, but inflow of new developers to work on the core is relativly slow. But then again GNOME is very much the opposite of the Flag project or Mono. First of all it doesn’t have something predefined to implement, which means there are no good list of tasks needing doing. Secondly as things gets more and more integrated many of the tasks have ramifications for other parts of the project, which means doing something tends to mean you might need to relate to a lot of different stakeholders which can be both frustrating and hard, especially for someone new to the project.

If you go into #gnome on IRC and say ‘hi, I want to help with GNOME’ the standard reply is often something along the lines of ‘cool, go look in bugzilla and find a bug you can work on, that is a good way to get started’. This is really a sucky and stupid reply I realized today. The problem is that while bugzilla theoretically could be the GNOME version of the list world flags or the C# ECMA specification, it is next to useless for that task today.
For instance if I wanted to help out with Nautilus and was sent into bugzilla looking for a task I would a) have quite the job of actually finding a bug with a clear enough scope to work on. ‘Started Nautilus and it crashed’ is not a good work description for a hacking newbie. b) If I did found a bug I could work on I would have no idea if that fix is still wanted. Could be that since that bug was filed the design goals of Nautilus has changed to make it obsolete. c) bugzilla does not tell me anything of how to implement it, so even if I did manage to make a patch it could be refused due to not implementing the solution in an acceptable manner.

So my conclusion to todays ‘thinking in public session’ is that if we really want to be able to say ‘go look in bugzilla for a task’ then we need to make sure no module has more open bugs than the maintainer(s) are able to handle/keep control over. For some modules that would mean getting though on some bugs that are not really bugs but design discussions, loose plans for the future, trivial behaviour changes etc. It would also mean that when a new bug arrives the maintainers should probably add a comment on how/where to fix it. That way if they don’t get to it and this new developer comes along he/she can actually be productive.

That said, GNOME is a much more complex project than the flag project, so no matter how much we alter structures and systems to make things easier it will always have to pay some efficency price for being a large and compex project.

Ok, so we are doing a SVG flag creation drive, to create a large database of public domain flags in SVG format.
Read the article and start drawing :)

Me, Ronald Bultje and Ted Gould has conspired to bring
the new gst-mixer into gnome-media. I spent the evening working on the migration so Ronald and Ted can focus on the hacking that needs doing. Felt kinda like a hacker myself as I strugled with auto*. Still some love needed from me, but it is ready to be commited I think.