Few things are as boring as watching a 20 000 job
Oracle Application Database patch roll over the screen.
Anyone out there who have tried putting a patch onto Oracle
Applications should now what I am talking about.

Anyway had some fun yesterday with creating an original
news story for Gnotices about the anti-aliasing patch for
GNOME and Mozilla created by Jacob
Berkman and vladimir. The story got
linked to from Slashdot, lwn, linuxtoday, Mozillazine,
LinuxOrbit and probably more. And Gnotices went down hard.
We really need to try to update Gnotices to a newer version
of Squishdot. I probably end up voluntering to do it
myself, yet it means needing to spend a some time getting
familiar
with how Squishdot/Zope actually work. And like everybody
else who could do the job I am having trouble finding
enough time :).

My interview with Ettore of Ximian turned into an interview
with Miguel de Icaza instead, as soon as this high-priority
job (getting an Oracle Application 11.5.3 system up and
running for Price Waterhouse Coopers) is finished and my
workdays return to normal I will
edit it, and mail Miguel a couple of follow ups before it
is ready to be published on Linuxpower.

Other interviews are also brewing, but they are progressing
slowly since I am very busy at the moment. But topics
include Linux Mandrake & GNOME, Eazel & GNOME, Berlin
Project and Gstreamer

My Interview with David Mason of Red Hat got onto Slashdot, which lead me to two conclusions. a) Slashdot is
still
the number 1 in terms of webpage hits it can produce. b) with around 70% of the comments being 0 or lower I
guess sums up the level of the discussion.

fejj get over it, strangely enough it seems a large percentage of the KDE userbase
actually believes that
GNOME hackers sit around plotting the downfall of KDE. Guess they would be even sadder if they realised that
most GNOME developers don’t even find it interesting to talk about KDE.

The interview with John Heard of Sun is up for everyones reading pleasure. I also finished my editing
of the interview with David Mason of Red Hat. So after
Crudman or katzj have
taken a look, I will send it back to David for final
approval before publishing it. Like the Sun interview I
think this one is really nice.
I have also uploaded my new GNOME Office pages into GNOME
CVS, all I need to do know is figure out how to get the
pages onto the website itself :)
On the personal front the following question has arisen: Is
there anything in this world creating more frustration in
men than women?

These are productive days. My interview with John Heard of Sun is going up on Linuxpower any day now, and the interview with David Mason of Red Hat
should go up sometime next week. The next interview will be with Ettore of Ximian, after that I need to make
further arrangements.

My new GNOME Office pages are getting very nice (IMHO) and Martin Baulig fixed my GNOME CVS account
yesterday so I am all set to upload everything on Saturday. The main problem with these pages are the
everincreasing applist. Decided to stick with the current list and get the pages out there. Some other applications
like Mr. Project by the cool Codefactory guys will just have to wait
for
my next update.

I have even managed to do some good work for my employeer, incredible :)

Energy. Been looking into getting new job, and doing that has given me a lot of extra energy. I guess I am one of
those people who thrive on change and wither when things get stagnate. Anyways, I have put all that energy into
good use getting a lot of paperwork, house cleaning task and Linux writing stuff done.
I got the interview reponse from Sun’s John Heard, which will be the next installment in my GNOME Foundation
interviews. The first one was IBM which I mentioned in my previous diary entry. John is one cool dude, and I think
this interview will be a great success. I think that the main difference between a bad interview and a good one is
the
quality of the answers, the questions are actually not so important.
Doing such an interview I also used the opportunity to bring some spotlight on a fellow Advogato member, so
gman don’t be suprised to find your name mentioned in the interview :)

On the other stuff front; I have taken it upon myself to get the GNOME office pages on www.gnome.org
updated. For those interested the construction site can be found here. Even though I still have a lot of unimplemented plans
and there is some VERY unfinished pages, feedback is welcome.

Just posted and interview I made with IBM about their
involvement with GNOME. The plan is to make it the first in
a series, so I have already made agreements with both Sun
and RedHat. Hopefully people will find them interesting.
Anyway the interview is found
here at Linuxpower.

Back from Montpellier,France. Very cool city, never thought
a city so integrated in color, material and style existed.
Impressed the hell out of me.

For the upcomming Abiword 0.7.12 relase I
have made a set of RPMS for RedHat 6.2. Both the plain Gtk
one and the more full-features GNOME version is available.
samth, msevior, Dom and
the other Abiword hackers are doing a great job and making
good progress. My RPMS are available from my website.

My first article for some time will go up on Linuxpower as
soon as katzj finish editing it. I also
have some cool interviews in the works, especially the
Berlin-project one I think will be great.

It seems that the fun and cool hack factor is once again
resurfacing in the Linux community, after a long period now
where such stuff has been put aside in favour of corporate
or ‘pragmatic’ agendas. While I think the coporate support
is great and important to bring Linux to the masses, I think
that the cool hacks like the recent ‘ORBit to kernel’
or ‘GNOME to Windows’ ports is what makes it fun to be part
of the
linux community, ‘the expect the unexpected’ feeling is I
think in some ways fundamental in building an online
community like the Linux community.

Also cool to see that ErikLevy has started
to work for a Norwegian company, strange how small a world
this is.

Having read the recent evolution vs. creationism debate I
just had to post the universe flicker hypothesis I have been
mulling over. Not directly related to the ongoing discussion
though,since that it is not a debate I can even relate to
since I have yet to meet a person here in Norway who
seriously would try to deny the corectness of Evolution
having taken place.

So over to my flicker idea, it might be that it is something
I have unknowingly stolen, many ‘original’ ideas probably are.

My idea is that the Univere ‘flickers’ in and out of
existence sort of like the light in a neon sign about to
break. The reason this happens is due to two opposing
impossibilities, the impossibility of existence and the
impossibility of non-existence. So what I think happens is
that for some time nothing exists until the impossibility of
that situation culminates in a great explosion where things
come into existence. This explains ‘the big bang’. This
situation then continues for a while until the imposibility
of something existing negates everything. And
so the cycle continues into eternity.

To make it clear, the rate of the ‘flickering’ is in
human measurement extremly long periods of time, but for the
universe itself human time is inconseqential and therefore I
think the ‘flickering’ visualisation is good.

I have been loosely following the GNOME print project for
some time now and have as part of that been getting more
and more suprised at the multitude of solutions for
printing under Linux/Unix that are developed in
competition/ignorance of eachother.

The only consolidation that I have seen currently seem to be
on the idea or talk stage. Most noteably there has been
talk during the last 3-4 months about integrating Gimp-
print, the IBM drivers project, Ghostscript and VA printing
development with GNOME Print. The level of integration
between these modules are yet to be determined and it seems
politics as much as technical issues will determine the
final outcome.

Another printing project with which integration as been
discussed is CUPS, but it seem like many people dislike the
business model behind CUPS, combined with low printing
quality.(Never tested personally so I have no knowledge of
correctnes of printing quality claims.)

Another printing project is called Xprint, which SUN is
backing. Don’t know much about it though, but it seems
pretty basic (aka Postscript output only) to me.

In addition to these projects there are a host of
others, personally I hope most of these projects will merge
into
one hell of a great system over time instead of resulting
in a multitude of low quality/low amount of drivers
solutions.

Disclaimer: I use the work integration is a very
loose sense here :), including just adding support for
library this or that.