I was trying to figure out how to get the Xerox Docucenter printer at work going under Linux when I discovered that Xerox
ships a tool called xpadmin for Linux and Unix. With this tool I got a easy to use GUI that took care of creating printer queues very easily for me. Although the apps was not open source, but a precompiled Motif binary I had no problems of getting it going on my machine running Phoebe-3.

Having such a positive experience I tried getting Hewlett Packard webjetdirect for Linux to see if it would be as easily runable. Unfortunatly this tool was done using C++ which of course meant that it is unusable on any system other than the one it is compiled on. I think that making closed source software for Linux using C++ is as stupid as it can get considering that C++ binaries break compatibility for each new compiler/compiler version released, it is like planning for your application to be unusable for most of your users.

Been hopeing that we would be able to make a new GStreamer release this week, making such a release without thomasvs would be rather hard at this point. Unfortunatly he has been a little unavailable lately, which I think is related to getting a new girlfriend not long ago. New girlfriends truly are the bane of free software ;)

Been feel energetic and tired at the same time this week, not sure how that is possible. Guess it is a combination of a long todo list, feeling caught between what I want to do and what I actually can do and keeping a good balance between the different components that make up my life.

Anyway, on to free software, I managed to put togheter a first draft of a new GNOME Summary today so hopefully I be able to put it out tommorow. I also worked a bit on the spheres-and-crystals theme and got some nice little fixes in.
Also working slowly on two other theme sets.

Helped Leif out by doing a gst-editor testbuild which should enable us to do a new release now. Also did more testing on the Monkeys Audio support which is now doing very well.

So on my todo list for this week is tons of work tasks, some .au work permit tasks (and expenses) and a host of other little fixlets in the GNOME world.

Been a bit caught up the last week between a busy workschedule after returning from vacation and trying to catch up on sleep lost during the Oslo summit. Especially jorn ‘Casanova’ Baayen had a tendency to need transport at ungodly hours ;)

Talked loosly to cinamod the other day about what I should do next with the Spheres and Crystals SVG theme. Dom is contemplating moving librsvg to use libcroco for CSS2 parsing if possible. Anyway the CSS2 support in librsvg should already be good enough for a simple stylesheet to allow for changing the colour of the theme, so I will try this out next. Latest gedit and nautilus releases also fix the biggest themeing bug in GNOME 2 which makes my theme look so much smoother.

I also hope that we can get moving on doing a GStreamer 0.6.1 release this weekend. There are tons of nice fixes that it would be nice to have out in the stable series. Jeremy Apoc also commited his Monkey’s Audio decoder and encoder plugins to GStreamer head the other day. They are still a little raw, but hopefully the buglets gets cleaned out soon.

Been scanning the archives of the
KDE-multimedia list on and off a little for the last few days. Been lots of discussion there lately about choice of multimedia system for future KDE releases. Personally I hope they go for GStreamer of course, but judging from the discussion the issue is far from decided yet.

From my point of view I would think that the only real alternative they have to GStreamer is the NMM framework. I guess it will be tempting for the KDE developers to go for a C++ based framework, but on the other hand with Tim’s Qt-style bindings for GStreamer I would think GStreamer offers just as much of a KDE-style API as anything they can put onto NMM.

Personally the issue for me has always been the advantage of the two projects sharing big and important piece of infrastructure to reduce duplication of effort, but for the time being the jury is still out on if this will happen or not. I have considered joining the kde-multimedia debate, but I have a feeling that a ‘GNOME person’ ‘medling’ in their internal debate might do more damange than good.

Have been feeling energic the last few days. Managed to update the online GStreamer docs, put out a Gst-player release, merge lots of patches in bugzilla and continue following up on some bugzilla entries I have going. Extending my plans by trying to help dsandras get GNOME Meeting better integrated with rest of GNOME, get Lauris to improve GNOME integration in Sodipodi and of course just talking to walters and cinamod to get their library efforts merged.

snorp has also been very helpfull with trying to sort out the bonoboui problem that makes my Spheres and Crystal theme look suboptimal in Nautilus, Gedit and Galeon. Hopefully he will manage to get it fixed in the not to distant future.

ajgenius from #gnome-art has also been a great help in helping me figure out how to solve various problems I experienced with the theme.

Tried Linux Mandrakes new Galaxy theme for GNOME yesterday. It is actually quite nice. Made Red Hat packages last night that I will upload to my server for kanikus tonight, guess I am his personal RPM pimp ;)

Also went out yesterday with some friends to watch the latest James Bond movie. Entertaining enough even if the scene where he paraglides through the icebergs looks extremly CG like.

Plan for today is getting out a long overdue new GNOME Summary.

Been a bit tired after returning from Belgium. I guess the combination of ten days in a row with late nights, lots of food and drink etc., does that that to you :)

Anyway think my energy is returning as I managed to put out a new release of my Spheres and Crystals SVG metatheme for GNOME 2.2 yesterday, and today I got a mail telling me that the theme has been packaged for Debian now, which is cool.

Going to get the GStreamer documentation on the website updated today and hopefully make a gst-player release. I was testing it last night and with the Julien’s latest fixes it is getting really sweet.

Back from my 10 day trip to Belgium. I have an absolutly wonderful time visiting thomasvs, my cousin and Wim and Michelle. It is incredible how much you feel you have done during a vacation when traveling so much around being with different people.

FOSDEM was fun too, not really because of the talks (even if some of them was very interesting), but mainly due to being able to hang out with so many fun people in the GNOME community. I never liked going to LUG meetings and similar due to them tending to be way to nerdy in my opinion, but GNOME gatherings on the other hand tend to be attended by very outgoing and entertaining people. The fact that people are able to bring their non-techie girlfriends/wives and they actually enjoying hanging out with the GNOME crowd in the evenings is a testament to this. Not to say that there are no GNOME people out there lacking people skills, there are, but they do in no way dominate the field when Gnomes gather.

Anyway back in Norway now with a lots of things on my agenda, like making some gstreamer related releases, writing some business proposals, work related tasks, making a new GNOME summary, preparations for the Oslo Summit, try to get themeing more clean in GNOME2 and so on.

Also got to see a lot of Belgium during my stay, at least the Flemish part. Spent time in Gent, Brussel, Antwerpen and Leuven. I liked them all even if the weather was colder/wetter than what I had hoped for. While writing this I started pondering on how quickly I have come to consider the people I stayed with there my friends, then realized it hadn’t really been quick at all, considering all the time I spent chatting with them. Yet I think that having seen and talked to these people in real life from time to time over the last few years is what have made them true friends in my view as opposed to people I just have a friendly relationship with over IRC. IRC is a great way to get to know and keep in touch with people, but I feel that the medium do not allow for the forging of true friendships, you need to meet up face to face somewhere for that to happen.

Hectic last few days. First out was the release of GStreamer 0.6.0 which contained a lot of bugfixes compared to 0.5.2. Seemed I had some regressions with NTPL, but we where not able to find out why. Luckily both omega and Wim are installing the RH beta to debug for themselves.

Also spent a lot of time over the last few days helping cinamod with debugging librsvg and creating a proper webpage for it. librsvg is now really good and renders all the SVG icons we could lay our hands on. It has come a long way since its humble beginings under the stewardship of raph. I also created a SVG metatheme using available SVG graphics. Sodipodi was really great for adjusting the icons out there, but we came across some SVG bugs in Sodipodi when it created the SVG from scratch. Lauris was helpfull however and fixed the biggest issue right away.

This week will also be interesting with two projects at work competing for my 4 day workweek. I am leaving for Belgium on thursday to visit thomasvs, FOSDEM and dsandras, my cousin in Antwerpen and ending the week visiting Wim and Michelle in Leuven. A bit overwhelming indeed.

Before I leave I also need to send out a reminder email about the GNOME multimedia Summit in Oslo. Looks like we be fever people than expected, but that is actually good since it cut costs hugely and easen the logistic burden.

Since we support SVG all over the place I thought it be fun to create a 100% SVG metatheme, using SVG to do icons, stock icons, widgets and even the background image. Still some work todo including learning to use Sodipodi and how to make gtk2.2 themes. Been using the Vadim’s SVG icons as a starting point. cinamod has been very helpfull fixing bugs in rsvg as I have trotted along. Still a lot to do, but have gotten of to a good start as can be seen.

Yet another dull Saturday at work. If only the firewall here would allow for IRC then waiting for file copying etc. wouldn’t be so tiresome.

Got Rhythmbox running again last night. jorn has put back the GStreamer backend and everything works like a charm for me on new Phoebe.

MAS was released a couple of days ago and we have already had a long debate on the gnome-multimedia mailing-list about MAS that is really not about MAS :).

The question debated is wether GNOME 2.4 should ship with a default sound server or not or if the abstraction GStreamer provides makes it something we should leave to the distros and users to decide. Personally I do not use a sound server, but I guess I do see the point of having a default sound backend that behaves the same way X does in regards to remote terminals etc.