We released the new 0.4.1 version of GStreamer last evening.
Getting more and more proud of this release as I see that the bug reports that has come in afterwards are relativly obscure. Not that we shouldn’t fix obscure bugs, but I take it as a sign that we are starting to iron out the most important issues. Think it was also telling that the two people we needed to help build GStreamer on IRC last night was using MacOS X and Gentoo (not to say anything bad about Gentoo, but I do feel it says something that 9 out of 10 people which has problems building GStreamer on Linux seems to be using it, considering the relative market share of Gentoo I think that hints at something.)

That Jacob was able to build and use GStreamer of MacOSX last night with only minor tweaks makes me very happy cause it is something of a proof of concept that we have managed to keep things portable.

I added icons, desktop files and code to add appicons to most of the in-house GStreamer applications yesterday. Since I don’t know shit about about coding (I have a degree in Marketing and Finance) it took me some time and help, but I did it. Anyway I think such smalls things adds a lot of polish and makes thing look a lot more mature.

Had to log of early last night and go to my mothers place to feed both myself and the cat. I am house and cat sitting this week :).
Anyway this led to me watching a television documentary on the Norwegian emigration to Netherland during the late 1700 and early 1800. Rather interesting, especially the part about what things those who returned brought back in terms of cultural impulses and linguistics. For instanse there is a saying in Norway that goes like ‘Jeg skjoenner ikke et doeyt’, which means ‘I don’t undersand a bit (of what your saying)’. That last part of that saying, ‘doeyt’, is a word that has had no special meaning to me, but it turns out that it is the name of a dutch coin that is worth next to nothing. Another expression is ‘hulter til bulter’ which is a term used when something is a mess, seems this is also a term from that term and is actually a dutch term. There where other terms mentioned to, mostly nautical expressions.
(Over half the people who emigrated did so to become sailors in the Dutch fleet.)

Anther important thing the documentary reminded me of is how
important part of Norwegian history emigration is. Being a land of extreme weather and relativly little farmable lands has through our history lead to a lot of people emmigrating from time to time. This goes as far back as the settling of Iceland, Greenland, Shetland Islands and attempted settling of North America by the vikings. To the emigration to Netherlands this program described and most recently with half the population moving to North America during the colonial era (with a large percentage ending up in Minesota).

Raph actually Abiword isn’t just using libart for their SVG support, their using your rsvg library. Cinamod is even activly hacking and improving rsvg atm.

On the GStreamer front I commited a patch that adds license information to each plugin. I did this after we/I had some mail discussions with RMS about avoiding potentional GPL infringements. By looking at the license field people can now easily determine if the plugin they are trying to access is under the GPL. We have some loose plans to extend this so that applications have to activly tell GStreamer that they are GPL compatible in order for the autopluggers to give you access to
the functionality of GPL plugins.

I have to admit that my first reaction was that this was a bit zealotly, but then I came to the realisation that many of the authors who have licensed their code under the GPL did this with a clear intent, and for us not to make sure that their wishes are respected would be disrespectful and morally wrong.

Judging by the ammount of traffic the GNOME Multimedia mailing list is a success. There is some disagreements on the nature of the simple utility library we plan to offer, but hopefully we be able to sort that out in a way that leaves everyone at least content.

Have also been looking into the issue of out of box support for multimedia keyboards, like the logitech itouch.
hadess have this neat little application which is called Acme which runs as a deamon and catch the calls of these special keys. I mailed my proposal to Bastien
last night for how I thought it should evolve, and Bastien being the great person he is responded, not by telling my how stupid my solution was (even if it was), but instead by explaining how he thought it could be solved easier and cleaner. He was even courteous enough to ask if I thought his alternative proposal was a good idea at the end of the mail. Think I owe Bastien some free beer at the next GUADEC. (hmm, my list of people I owe beer is starting to grow very long :)

We where planing on making a new test tarball today of GStreamer, but it was decided that we wait a few more days since there a many issues we want to resolve before making this release. Everyone seems to be in a good hacking mode however so I think we will get these issues resolved pretty fast. The good thing about the delay is that it will increase the chance of the flash and asf plugin getting included.

Also decided to move my personal life forward by changing some rules. My life philosophy is that you never get a bad hand of cards, you are just playing by the wrong (usually self imposed) rules. More on that later :)

Been sick since friday which sucks. Good part is that I spent the time I have been feeling well enough, doing small GStreamer related tasks. We are preparing for a 0.4.1 release sometime during next weekend with a first pre-release on thursday. Lots of fun things happening with Owen Frasier-Green
having started on ASF support for us and DS continuing his work on flash support and browser embeding.

But the new release will mostly be about bug-fixes and polish which maybe is a little less glorious than adding features, but which probably is twice as important as adding features. We are already starting to have a lot of people trying to build apps with GStreamer and us responding quickly to fixing the issues they encounter is a extremly important task in my opinion for some who develops a library like we do.

thomasvs is continuing to put love and care into our buildsystem. I think we are at a point where most people should be able to build GStreamer easily or at least get a understandable error when it fails to build.

Also learned today that Sun has dedicated 3 engineers to work on printing solutions. Hopefully they will get involved and help Chema with gnome-print soon.

Argh, grumble. Got something I interpret as getting turned down asking this girl out. If she only knew the mental pains I went through getting myself to call in the first place.

I will actually give her one more chance, but I am not to optimistic about it.

Well good thing is that at least I never have to wonder now about wether I should have asked her out.

Question I need to ask is: is it time for me to get myself a mail-order bride? <g>

Writing this with a bit of a hangover. We had a 10-year aniversary party for my high-school class yesterday. It was great fun and I got to meet a lot of people again that I haven’t seen since we graduatet 10-years ago. Many strange suprises, like the girl I considered a bimbo back then who now had just completed here education as a doctor.

Also meet again a girl I had regrettet that I didn’t ask out back then and she still looked stunning. Even better she was single atm, so I am not making the same mistake twice :). Got her email address and have just mailed for her phone number (I think asking someone out over mail is a bit to lame, so I need the phone number.)

Ok, going out with the GNOME.no guys sailing today so I have to run.

Had a effective day yesterday where I managed to both add
nautilus mime-type support to Gst-Player and also fix many buglets in the GStreamer RPM SPEC files. I also wrote a new GNOME summary which I need to proof-read today and send out.

Still feeling a bit stressfull as my schedule for the next days are a tad full and the planned items don’t mix to well.

Could also get stuch in Tromsø on a work assignment for a couple of weeks which is definetly not a good fit with my other plans, but in these times and days I guess I should just be happy to have a job.

Learning the downside of a networked world at work currently. All our fileservers and businness process systems are moved to US HQ. Unfortunatly our ISP went bankrupt and we (500 employees) share one ISDN line now, until the new ISP setup is ready next month. It means that due to network latency a 5 minute job can take up to 2 hours.

Today I finally discovered how to remove the bug tracker from the GStreamer sourceforge site. Since GStreamer now use GNOME bugzilla this was just annoying having active. Not sure how to access the few bug reports there now that where still unresolved, but I know it is possible.

My little secret programming effort has not moved forward much during the recent days, I do however start to feel that my understanding is increasing somewhat. If I do end up being sent to Tromsø I guess I will have some spare time in the evening that can be well used to work on my secret project.

Ok, going Rafting later this evening and will be gone all weekend. Just hope I manage to get my small additions for gst-player commited to CVS first. Ripped them out of hadess Totem player which amuses me quite a bit :).

Finally got my act togheter and put out a new GNOME Summary yesterday. Needed something to kickstart me and David Schleef having made a new library for rendering flash animations and a flash plugin for gstreamer based on it was just the news I needed to get into summary mode. Lots of little things going in for GNOME 2.2 which makes me really excited.

Wim Taymans of GStreamer fame and his very nice girlfriend Michele have been staying at my place for a few days as part
of their vacation on Scandinavia. I have taken them for a long forest walk and out sailing in the Oslofjord while here. Yesterday they traveled onwards to visit Stockholm, but they will be returning to Norway next weekend to join me on a rafting trip. They will also go glacier walking the day after.

My little programming project (my secret GNOME2 porting attempt) has sort of been on hold while they where here, but I plan on getting back into the hacking mode tommorow. I hope I manage to understand enough to actually get it to compile :)

Interesting week full of little tidbits. The week started with a email from ACS telling my they where reviewing case. This is the first step in getting my .au work permit so I hope it turns out ok.

Secondly I tried out the new OEOne Homebase desktop. It is an interesting concept and with just a little more polish I think it could be a good sell to people who are not very affinite with computers yet. Currently however I got hit by some rather nasty bugs. Another sad point is that they have replaced their
GStreamer based mediaplayer with something else. Not sure what exactly that something is, but it didn’t work very well. I mean I can understand a systems integrator or developer choosing something more mature than GStreamer (say xine-libs) or something to have something stable and full featured faster (while I do understand, I still think their efforts would be better spent at porting things like asf and wmf support to GStreamer instead), but replacing GStreamer with something that don’t work is just weird.

Have trying to do a small license audit on GStreamer and have due to that tried mailing around asking people if they would be willing to relicense under the LGPL for us (instead of using the GPL.) The effectv people where very kind and not only let us relicense their code, but also got the permision to do so for some code they had gotten from someone else. Thanks a lot!
More problems with the rest of the permission or rather problems reaching the authors. I also doubt we be able to relicense some of these projects even if it is ok for current maintainers as they have been around for a long time and due to that have code from to many people inside, people who are next to impossible to get hold of. The Mozilla people are a good example of how hard it is to relicense a big project that has been around for a while.

And last but not least, I turned 29 yesterday :)