We are planning a little GNOME Multimedia gathering. It will be here in Norway in a cabin in the forest outside Oslo. The planned time is now the second week of march.

I was out looking at the cabin we can rent today and it was wonderful. There where a full 30 beds in the cabin and the living room was huge so even 40 people would be possible I think. Electricty seemed goods for the laptops and the kitchen
had lots of big pans and things like that.

Everything was well kept in the cabin and things looked clean.
I think this gathering gonna be a lot of fun. Only thing I am curious about is getting everone to the cabin as it is approx a 2 kilometer walk from the nearest road through deep snow and rough terrain, and hackers aren’t exactly known for their sportive habbits :) Hopefully I be able to get snow shoes for everyone

Getting the keys to the cabin was fun. The cabin is owned by an association who works to promote outdoor activities like forest walks and forest skiiing. They do this by marking trails, prepping skitracks and renting out cabins like this.

Anyway to get the key I walked into their office down in Oslo center and said that I would like to borrow the key to take a look. The lady I talked to said, ok, that is a 40 Euro deposit for the key. I paid and got the key. No asking of name, no signing anything. I guess they figure a thief wouldn’t bother trying to get the key anyway :)

Working from home these days is rather pleasant, longer days it tend to foster, but a lot less stressfull.

On the GStreamer front it seems we might be making some progress on the threading issues as Wim threw himself into the battle, they fixed some issues yesterday and hopefully more today. Between him, David Schleef, David I. Lehn and thomasvs
I think they should be able to clear the issues. If I understand it they are currently looking into glib as it might be that our bug is in there.

bg commented on trommey question about relative success of gcj and mono. I doubt it
is the policies of Sun that has hampered gcj, as Microsoft has
much less of a standing in the community.

Personally I believe it has to do with who and how the projects are run. Mono has been running with a high profile, with a very energetic leader (miguel) who is very good at getting other people involved and motivated. Mono has also furthered itself by its association with GNOME and Ximian.

gcj on the other hand has been developed with a much lower profile (do it even have a website/webpage of its own?
It has not assosiated itself to a high mindshare project (yes, I know gcc is what everyone uses, but the number of people checking up on GNOME news on a daily basis is a ‘gazillion’ times higher than those who go looking for gcc news on a daily basis. I have no idea of the style of maintainership on gcj, but I would guess that the maintainer (trommey is it you) do not have that flare of miguel that tend to get people motivated and interested.

I think with the pletora of free software projects struggling for attention these days, then good code is only half the story behind free software success story.

That said I have not written gcj off as a dead project, in my opinion it is more probable to be a sleeping giant.

Starting to get really tired. Work is really eating up my hours these days, I was even working all through the weekend including the full night between Sunday and Monday. Seems to calm down a bit for the rest of this week, but I will be working this weekend too. Urk.

Feel I have done little else than work and sleep the last weeks. Everyone time a customer calls these days I have to fight down the urge to reply: ‘ask me if I care’.

I have three things on my free software agenda atm and that is getting a fresh cvs of GStreamer and see if I can close some bugs, finally get to test the bluetooth stuff from edd and get a new GNOME Summary out. Hope I manage to do at least some of these tings the next few days.

Spent the day upgrading customer system combined with getting some stuff for the sailboat, boring stuff really. Of course wasting the weekend on work is making me a bit annoyed and tired. So with that backdrop I got truly annoyed reading the PortableNet discussion
on Slashdot. Why so many people seem to think it is their job to spread misinformation is beyond me, their posts are cluefull enough to make me belive they know that what they are saying is at best half truths. On days like this I feel the community is being overrun by people whose main interest is spreading disinformation, complaining and maybe everyone else feel as miserable as they themselves are.

Tons of work and staying at my mothers place in order to take care of the cat while my mother is on vacation has left me a little out of the free software loop for the past few weeks.

When I work much as I do now I usually tend to start pondering my career choices. While I believe that I can always change the direction of my career if I so desire I also recognise that for each year I continue at my current job the road to doing something very different gets longer. Which means that if I really want to do something else the sooner the better. Question of course is if I really want to do something else, I mean in general I am happy about my work situation, and I can’t help wondering if my longing for something else is just the classic ‘grass is greener on the other side of the fence’ trap that we all tend to fall into from time to time.

Another part of the equation is that each time I do these ponderings I realize that while I do want something else I don’t really have a clear idea what it is. Only thing I really do want to do is write fiction, but I guess my current job should be as good as any to combine with that since chances of me making a living of writing isn’t that high, especially not short term.

GNOME

The work/living situation combined with a some social obligations has resultet in almost no GNOME effort from me for the last 10 days or so. Did manage to integrate some patches into GStreamer over a week ago which I am happy about. I feel there is no greater disservice an ambitious free software project can to itself than not review/commit submitted patches. Project leaders/maintainers/core devs who doesn’t do this sends out a clear message saying ‘this is a one man show and plans on staying that way’ IMHO.

Been building up a nice list of stories for a new summary so hopefully I be able to actually get it done this weekend.

Australia

I haven’t said much about my effort to get a work permit in Australia for some time as there hasn’t been much to report.
But I did check last weekend and found that 12 weeks had passed since I sent my initial application for certification to ACS. Considering that they promised a reply in 10 weeks I felt I had reason enough to try contacting them even if their homepage threatens to delay the application further if you inquire about status. Learned two things, the first being that the rules for qualification had changed in October which means that in the middle of reviewing my (and other applications) the rules had changed. Haven’t read through the new rules yet, but worst case scenario is me not qualifying anymore. Secondly it could be that this change has lead to delays in the process since many applications might had to be re-evaluated. ACS has not sent me any info on this so I don’t really know. Secondly I got an autoreply on my inquiry, telling me the person who does the certifications was on vacation and would be back the 19th November.

Could of course be that this is the reason I have no response yet, simply because he left for vacation just before replying to my application which has caused an extra 2-4 weeks delay depending on the lenght of the vacation.

Of course I now need to send another mail if I want ot get some feedback since the autoroply stated that all mails recieved during vacation period would be deleted.

So when I finally get my hopefully positive reponse from ACS I should be ready to move on to sending my appliclation to the Australian Authorities proper. So my current estimate for having the work permit in hand is somewhere around march-april next year.

Stress at work, might even have to work through next weekend, not thrilled about that (even if my boss sent out a mail saying we would get paid for the extra workhours)

Started preparing to test edd‘s Bluetooth for GNOME stuff today. Lots of deps I need to package before I get there, but I will :)

Also got a fresh checkout of GStreamer CVS today so I can start merging the patches from bugzilla in. Hope I will not be to tired when I get back from work the next few days.

Nautilus views are the latest big thing it seems. Todays addition a xterminal view :)

Been a little inactive with GNOME and GStreamer the last few days due to a friend lending me his Black Adder DVD collection. I just love it, long time since a saw something that not only made me smile or grin, but actually made me really laugh over and over. Never liked mr. Bean, but Black Adder is a masterpiece.

Will try to kick myself into action today and get a new GNOME Summary out, lots of good news to convey including the big Nautilus bugzilla cleanup that was done this weekend.

But first get a days honest work at work completed…

Nymia, I am not the person to get the nitty gritty details on rsvg from. If I where you I would contact cinamod who you can get hold of in the #abiword channel on irc.gimp.net using the nick ‘dom’, he is current maintainer.

Since you have seen the code you probably now the basics, that is made using ANSI C and that it only dependency is afaik libart. If you have GNOME stuff installed it will create a SVG pixbuf loader and a gtk theme engine for you also. After Dom’s latest updates it is getting rather full featured and it will mean that GNOME 2.2 can use SVG graphics pretty much anywhere in the GUI. The code was originally created by raph as part of some contract work for Eazel.

How news are made. Working on my spare time at making the GNOME Summaries I often think that what I do is simplistic compared to ‘real’ journalism. Today I got a reminder that a lot of professional journalism work
on the same simple level I do. By reading mail logs, blogs and so on. Sadly enough professional journalists often works on a even simpler and very low quality way also.

I saw a article in Norways largest paper about Ian McKellen being interested in doing the hobbit. The story in the norwegian paper gave credit to Ananova(.com) for the story.
Going to Ananova I saw they refered to Ian McKellens own homepage as their source. Going to his website and looking around I found that the statements he was quoted on was not an ‘official statement’ as such it was just a reponse he posted to a fanmail. Of course Ananova had rewritten his statements to make them seem like they where made to them or made to the public as an announcement. And of course the meanings had been slightly altered compared to the original message in the posted mail. And of course the norwegian paper reporting on Anananova’s story had slightly altered the story compared to Ananova again. So what the Norwegian papers claim of what he did say wasn’t really accurate anymore as theirs was a rewrite of a rewrite.

So that is how ‘real’ journalism work :)

Often wonder about the dynamics of free software. Sometimes it is clear what
is the direct cause of something other times it is not so clear. For instance we had for some time now had a rather stable core of 7-8 contributors to GStreamer, but the last week we suddenly got an influx of new people sending in patches and new plugins. It could of course be just random chance that brings these people decide to get active at this point in time, but I wonder. Only major thing that has happened lately is an increased interest from the KDE camp for GStreamer (thanks to Tim Janssen), but afaik none of these new developers come from a ‘KDE background’. Could of course be that the recent interest from KDE combined with our established relationship with GNOME has helped legitimize GStreamer to a wider developer audience or something.

Will also be interesting to see how November goes development wise. Judging but the Sourceforge statistics November has traditonally been the month of year with the lowest activity followed by December and January with the highest. Of course I can’t be certain of the truth of this as the sourceforge statistics system seems rather fickle and I am not sure if some of the seasonal changes in the sourceforge statistics are caused by blackouts from the statistics engine instead of real seasonal changes.

Have also become a fan of the advogato rating system, let myself get drag into an argument with a certain someone last week, but due to his trolling his score must have fallen bellow 3 so for me he doesn’t exist anymore. Of course I still get to read others replies to later entries, but guess you can’t win em all :)

Also looking forward to putting out a new GNOME summary tommorow, this has been a week full of cool patches and addtions so
there is lots to report :)