Ok, so I had a few files I needed to get burned onto a cdrom. And I thought, ok lets give that cdburner thing in nautilus a try. So I put in a blank cdrom in my cdburner and nautilus pops up with a ‘burn:’ view. I drag&drop my files over, press burn, and a dialog asking some basic questions appear, like burn speed etc. I press continue, my cdrom gets made and I am happy.

I guess ‘just works’ is possible with free software too :)

Thanks to everyone involved!

We had a small discussion about Sun at work today. Seems people at work are convinced that Sun is going down. The argument is that Sun has locked itself in a proprietary corner and is unable to see that the market is heading the opposite direction.

Personally I am not so sure, but I do agree that Sun needs to do something to get back on track, and that none of the options they have available can be considered easy.

I mean Sun has lots of good things going for them, question is if they can convert it into something they can earn money on.

For instance Sun do have a strong stack on the desktop with their Java desktop, SunRay technology and StarOffice they could become a big player in the Linux desktop space. Question however is if that market will come quick enough and if the competitive situation will let a big company like Sun earn enough per unit. If they provided SunRay for Linux servers I think it could be a winner thinclient product, but I do think they will let themselves be locked into some sort of Solaris & Sparc loyalty program to let that happen.

On the CPU side, well they do have a ton of good CPU engineers, but the question is if they are able to get something usefull out of it. Having SPARC keep up with Intel
CPU’s isn’t enough. If SPARC is to have a future then SPARC needs to outperform Intel CPU’s with a great margin, yet the price needs to be cheaper, meaning I could buy a SPARC with double the performance of an Intel CPU for the same ammount of money. Not sure Sun will be able to do that. An alternative would be for Sun to buy/merge with AMD and use their SPARC technologies to make a killer IA64 CPU with AMD. But I am not sure how technologically feasible this is.

When it comes to server sales in general I am not sure what to say. For instance their latest effort to evangelize Solaris on Intel is doomed to fail. When a market behemot like Microsoft is unable to keep linux at bay, then no way a niche player (like Sun is on Intel) will be able to.

One more weekend spent at work, this one semi-voluntary also known as trying to avoid greater pains later on. Of course doing upgrades of Oracle systems tend to give me time for other pursuits while the system does its thing. This time I found a really interesting article in the Economist (I am really starting to love that magazine) about a research project which has managed to get monkeys to manipulate a robotic arm with their thoughts. While the target of the research was to help disabled people, I personally started thinking that it might be a great step towards truly immersive gaming experience and in the next instance even be the first step towards immortality through digitalization.
Anyway the research papers are available from Public Library of Science, a website that aims to make scientific papers freely available. I guess open source’s idea of freely exchanging ideas is making the idea make a comeback in other scientific circles as well.

Did some testbuilds of GStreamer CVS head last few days. GStreamer builds well know, but my main test app Rhythmbox have had some build issues in its CVS version, luckily waters is on the ball fixing stuff as I report them.
Hopefully we can get GStreamer 0.7.1 released tommorow or early next week.

Boring weekend at work, much waiting for sql jobs to complete.
Luckily the firewall at the customers place don’t block IRC. Talked a long while with sdodji last night and I think we made a good roadmap for world domination for
mlview+, details to be revealed later.

Also tested latest RPMS of Red Hat Eclipse, which is compiled with gcj. It is really quite fast and I can absolutly see that it might become a major IDE tool for GTK+, GNOME and Unix/Linux hacking in general.

Me and some friends walked into the forest yesterday to find my Uncle’s cabin. He has offered me to buy it from him,
since his daughter don’t really want it and he wants to keep it in the family. So we walked in to take a look at the place since it has been quite some years since I last was there.

The idea of buying the cabin awakes conflicting emotions in me. Part of me wants to buy it since it was built by my great grandfather and there is actually a large area of forest and part of lake that belongs to it, including some nice hunting rights. Basically the idea of owning a large piece of forest appeals to me, partly I guess since it is a resource that is in steady decline globally, and owning a piece of it would enable me in a small way to contribute to the preservation of this beautiful resource, and it would be something lasting to pass on to my own offspring.

On the other side so is investing a large sum of money in Norway now not really a good mix with any of my other plans, expecially those related to moving abroad. For instance if I move to Australia so would having a cabin in Oslo be rather silly. The buy would also increase the amount of money I would need to set aside each month to pay for my loans, at a time when I have been looking hard at reducing the amount of money I owe the bank.

Hmm, think I need a girlfriend with a steady income. That would solve all my financials worries :)

thomasvs have been merging patches and fixing bugs in the stable branch of GStreamer. A new release is imminent, and even more pressure from me on me to get moving on the development branch release :)

The level of lameness of people posting on Slashdot never stop amazing me. Looking at the comments to the story about Seth’s initscript, it is clear that many of the posters didn’t even read/understand the small Slashdot intro before posting their comment. Maybe the laws regulating free speech should have a ‘if you are going to say something about a topic you have NOT studied before, read at least 1 article on the topic (the header is not enough), or at least stop and think about if for 5 minutes before you start blabbing’ clause added.

Managed to get a release of gnome-themes-extras out yesterday. Not sure how I feel about it, I mean it is definetly an improvement over the last release in regards to the theme engine and distribution icon name coverage, but the fact that only the Amaranth theme contains a significant amount of new icons is kinda sad.

Hopefully the artists find more time to make new icons as we get closer to Christmas.

Anyway with this out of the way I feel freer to once again focus on pushing a development release of GStreamer again. Since Rhythmbox now works well with CVS head I think it is a good opportunity to get the release out. Of course getting Ronalds new typefind commited might be a good idea for the release as it could improve the usability of rb and friends a lot.

Ok, back from Bergen…and it turns out that I am wanted for an assignment in northern Norway this weekend…ugh. But the money is good so I guess I go.

Been doing little usefull since I got back from Spain except some minor versioning fixes for some GStreamer stuff. Wonder if I am able to do some usefull stuff the next two days before leaving Oslo again.

I did send a email of to someone at Oracle Spain on sunday in the hope that it would enable me to get a job in Barcelona. No reply yet, unless I managed to delete it by mistake earlier today. Problem is that I get tons of email each day to my work account, but we have tiny storage space on the mail server which had forced me to adopt a rather agressive deletion strategy in regards to email.

So came back from the GStreamer summit having David Schleef stay for a day in Oslo before starting his journey home to the US. The week in Barcelona was great and it is though getting back to the bleary dullness of everyday life. Not sure it made things better that I am getting shipped around the first days back home. Was in Lillehammer the last two days and are going to Bergen next, probably as early as saturday.
Anyway David is a fun guy to hang out with and I think he managed to see a lot of Oslo during his short stay.

I really loved Barcelona and is considering different options for moving there. I realized my earlier misgivings about moving to a non-english country where probably misplaced, yet the concept of moving there to stay is not as easy on me as the concept of moving to Australia to stay. But I guess by moving there to live for a year or two would be a good experience even if I decide to move on to Australia later.

Learned something about myself as part of these considerations also and that is that I have gotten rather attached to rather padded lifestyle. Which means I am not prepared to move without getting a salary I feel will enable me to maintain my current way of life. It is not that I am rich, like people getting bought out by Novell and simmilar, yet I definetly have a financial sitation that gives me a fairly decent elbow space. The last year I have started to wonder if my involvement in free software was a sign of an altruistic me coming out, but I guess my latest revelation debunked any such notions.

Yet I am hopefull that I will manage to find a way to move there without losing to much of my current income. Would be to sad if I let greed be the factor that hindered me in doing something new and exciting with my life. I think living there in a city that is new and fresh to me, yet with people I already know like Thomas, Kristien, Julien and Noele; all who I already like very much, seems like a great bargain to me.

Having a great time at the GStreamer summit. We are actually being really productive at this one. I managed with the help of thomasvs to finally nail the ffmpeg related build issues in GStreamer. David Schleef is working on designing the interactivity support for DVD and flash and Ronald Bultje has implemented mixer support using the new interfaces stuff we agreed upon. The plan is to replace the mixer in gnome 2 with this one, which would mean that instead of the gnome mixer being a big beast it would be 160 lines of code :)

We also decided to at a 0.7.1 release while here and declare that the first development release towards a new stable 0.8.x series for GNOME 2.6.

Also bought myself a new wireless card today which actually seems to work perfectly with the atmel driver.

Also learned that Sven of Gimp fame has been fixing some bugs in librsvg, sweet :)