I am so tired!!! I am in the middle of an upgrade of an Oracle Applications production system and am soon finished
with 12 hours on the graveyard shift. But of course this evening it is back for another 12 hours. Only bright side is
that I do get some extra cash for this, which I definetly need in order to pay the bills from my trip to LWE in San
Jose last august.

In case someone wondered; No it isn’t cheap attending US tradeshows when you live in Norway. (Not that I regret
it though, had a lot of fun, even if Julian was cruel and refused to fix Norwegian character
support in Gabber :)

Spent the last two days bughunting an installation of Oracle iMarketing, spending a lot of hours looking
through tables in a database hoping to find the misconfiguration that causes some damn ‘charsett is null’ error.
Due
to having to move on to another assignment I was left leaving it to Oracle support to do the last part of the bug
hunt. I have to admit, and I know this is sad and a sign of a empty life, that I am a bit curious to find out what was
causing it. :)

Seems like the Gtk-only vs. GNOME debate(flamewar) has died down, to be replaced by a ‘what
responsibility
do we have for the poor and homeless’ debate. My personal feelings on the subject is somewhat in a flux, ranging
from; everybody should be supplied with the basic things they need to survive, to a more pragmatic; there’s too
many humans anyway, lets spend the money on wildlife conservation instead.

Aaronl, I just saw your post to the Abisource developers
list regarding the two bugs that had resurfaced. It really suprises me a bit when someone who himself codes for
free software sends messages like that. Abiword is still pre-1.0 and making releases is the only sensible way for
a free software project do QA during development, and through the use of these releases get feedback
from people like yourself on what is broken so it can be fixed before the 1.0 release. If you feel that the current
Abiword maintainers don’t manage to keep the bug count low enough or make sure that your patches still does
what their are supposed to after the latests rewrites, then you should yourself help out to make sure things works
well. Personally IMHO that would be much better way to spend you time than your current Gtk-only crusade. Or
to
put in another way; the number of people who would be happy if feature X got added to Abiword is probably a LOT
larger than the number who will bother getting a Gtk-only Gnapster.

Wow, just watched Kids on
television. that was one disturbing movie. The cynic
attitude that the movie portrayed in those kids actually
scared me. Seeing movies like that makes me wonder if we
are
replaying history and our current times is a rerun of the
decay of the Roman empire.

Over to something completly different. My Mozilla
article
seemed to be a success which is nice. Motivates
me somewhat into getting another article ready this weekend.

Why is nothing ever easy? Having meet the girl of my dreams
I am having big trouble getting her to become a real part of
my life and not just a passing ship in the night.
Maybe that is why she is the girl of my dreams, since like
with all dreams they disappear when you try to hold on, only
to leave you realizing the dream was never anything but an
illussion to begin with.

Life is always a series of ups and downs, yet this time I
feel the choice is between my greatest up or my most
sorrowfull down. Yet the problem with this struggle is that
I can’t really fight it myself, I am left drifting on the
seas of destiny wondering if the enchanting siren will swim
out to joyfully meet me or lure me to my doom.

Okay time for a new episode up in my series of sarcastic
diary entries.

Ralsina
wrote: I still feel Debian has, in general, acted wrong
in the past, but I will apologize and forgive.

Did you hear that Debian developers? What is it people do
when someone forgive them, ah yes now I remember, I think
this calls for a press release posted on Slashdot called:
Debian to Ralsina: That is absurd.

Next item:
b) Nautilus (and other GNOME programs) are GPL and link
(optionally) to mozilla. Mozilla is still not compatible
with the GPL. Shouldn’t those programs be declared “not
properly licensed” by Debian, too?

hmm, how could one possibly respond to such great
logic…..
wait what is this!!! in the Galon license there is this
little notice:
The present copyright holders of this file have given
permission,
as a special exception, to link this file with the Mozilla
rendering component and distribute linked executables, as
long as you follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in regard
to all of the
software in the executable aside from that component.

Shit, the Galeon developers have actually added the clause
that Debian requested KDE to add, but why have they done
that when according to Ralsina only KDE would not be allowed
to get away with faulty licensing. It sure is a strange
world we live in.

It just occured to me what being a KDE developer is all about; it is living in constant denial.

I mean take the licensing issue, before the QPL there wasn’t a problem.
Then the QPL came and fixed the problem that never was.
Then the GPL’ing of Qt came and fixed a problem that never existed.

Or on the technical level:
Mico was fast enough and GNOME’rs claiming otherwise was spreading FUD.
Then TinyMico comes along to solve a problem that never existed.
Miguel was acussed spreading FUD when he said the KOM/OpenParts wasn’t good enough
Then DCOP comes as a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

On the distribution level:
Corel and Caldera bundle only KDE, which is a good thing since it proves that KDE is the standard.
Sun, IBM and HP decides to support GNOME, which is a bad thing since it removes user choice.

Wov, I don’t envy those guys, it must be a hard life to live, everything you do and say creating a contradiction.

Guess I should have learned my lesson of not writing an
editorial as
a response to reading stuff that has provoced/angered me.
The result is usually just non-productive flamebait :)

Back from the LWE even if I managed to miss my airplane. The nice people at United gave me a new ticket for the
next day without extra cost though. Got to stay one more day in San Francisco, great city.

Loved the Gnome Foundation stuff that happened during the expo, getting all these highly experienced engineers
from Sun, HP, IBM etc. working on GNOME will be a great boon to the project in my opinion. Not that the current
crew doesn’t do a splendid job, but more people means that more of the most ambitious plans can be realized
faster.

Some of the comments to the GNOME Foundation announcement from despairing KDE fans and developers are
just to silly to believe. I think the most absurd claim is that of GNOME being a corporate sellout, which coming
from the loyal servants of Troll Tech seems a tad hairy. Unfair to compete through marketing is another favourite,
yes; sending out press releases telling the world that these companies will dedicate engineering resources to
GNOME and start to use it as their GUI is reeeaally evil. KDE ‘never’ announce it when somebody gives them
some sort of support.

Anyways, back to the LWE, has anyone else also noticed that swag has a tendency to turn into dirty laundry?

Finally things are slowing down at work at I can focus some
more on Linux stuff again, got an article/tutorial on the
GNOME panel which I got started on yesterday for starters.

The what should be in gtk instead of gnome-libs debate seems
to refuse to die down on gnome-list. Wonder if these people
asking for all these different things moved from gnome-libs
to gtk since they only need ‘that’ one feature, realize that
if the GNOME authors caved in and moved all that stuff, then
all that stuff they claimed they didn’t need and therefore
didn’t want to link to GNOME libs due too, would instead be
in Gtk………