There is an article on news.com talking about objections from Hewlett Packard to the patent provisions of the GPL3. First of all I hope Hewlett Packard don’t get to much traction on their change suggestion, as their change suggestion looks to me like they make the patent protection provisions of the GPL3 even weaker than those of the GPL2. I think that the GPL is powerful enough at this point to be used as a way to weaken the software patent regime. Bad bad HP.

Dell
On the topic of PC makers, my laptop harddisk broke down yesterday. Luckily we have a on-site support contract with Dell so a technician will be here tomorrow morning to fix it. A bit frustrated that they couldn’t come today, but I guess we are not paying the kind of money to have that kind of availability. By the luck of the gods
I did do a full home area backup Tuesday. So today I am using our spare laptop running from a ubuntu live CD. I will miss my data though, but I guess I can manage until tomorrow.

So I am back after spending the weekend in England attending LugRadio live. Had a great time there, Jono and Stuart for insance are two likeable young lads, but it is a good thing they have older more experienced people like Ade and Matthew to help them.

The conference was a blast, with beer and interesting talks both flowing freely from the early hours of the day.

From a GStreamer perspective it was a great conference with talks on GStreamer projects such as
GStreamer itself,
Pitivi,
Diva,
Lowfat and
Farsight.

Michael Meeks also talked a little about GStreamer in his OpenOffice talk and explained that they are now working on adding GStreamer support to OpenOffice in order to do embedding of audio and video in OpenOffice documents etc., very cool stuff.

The generic GStreamer talk was my own and went ok apart from my demo section getting butchered by power supply issues. For some reason I had trouble getting reliable power out of the UK socket I was using (with my European power plug) so my power went away halfway into demo’ing Elisa. My screen setup was a bit stupid as I had to look at the projected bigs creen myself to see my slides which hampered the ‘look at the audience’ part of doing a talk.

Got to talk to a lot of interesting people, like the internets
Ted Haeger the host of Novell Open Audio who came away from the conference a beard richer.

Also got to discuss a little with Paul Cooper about next years GUADEC which will be in Birmingham. I have some ideas on an addition to draw in a wider audience and grow the community which we will look into the plausability of pulling off.

Due to EasyJet having cancelled our Sunday night flight, me and Edward stayed on until Monday. Luckily Matthew Allum and a very pregnant Sid was kind enough to let me stay at their place for the night. Their two dogs aka the Pugs where a little freaky looking in my view, but they more than made up for it by being very friendly and fun.

Slept very well on their sofa after two days in Wolverhampton sleeping in a sauna-like hotelroom while fighting a constant battle for space. Spent a easygoing Monday with Matthew, following up on some work items and discussing the state of the world with Matthew. Also we did a very nice lunch in the nearby township. Always enjoy talking with Matthew a lot, I think we are on the same page on most issues.

In the afternoon I went off to the airport to hook up with Edward again who had stayed the night at his brothers place. Think we where both rather tired after a great weekend, but we managed to get ourselves onto our airplane for the return to the city by the sea.
A big thanks to Ade, Jono, Matthew and Stuart and the LRL volunteers for organizing a great LugRadio live. Sure to be back next year! P.S. Make sure the Guinness is colder next year :)

The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone, Henrik Ibsen

It seems leaving Norway is one of the hardest things one could do. The Norwegian government have basically decided that Norway isn’t just a country, its a concentration camp. So even after living for almost two full years in Barcelona the Norwegian government refuse to accept that I have moved and demand that I tax to Norway for instance. Will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Norwegian government comes to accept that I actually have moved.

So having a cold I spent most of the weekend watching movies. Most of the movies I seen before, but I keep reseeing them again and again in order to try to learn Castilliano (using spanish dubbing and subtitles). Anyway one movie I ended up seeing which I hadn’t seen before was Ninette. It a spanish movie I picked up at the FNAC some time ago figuring that I should get some spanish movies too for my learning and it was cheap.
Anyway, what an incomprehensible movie. The storyline seems patched together and the characters are completely unaccessible. When the movie was over I was wondering what the goal of the movie was, was it an attempt to restore self-confidence in the middle-aged Spanish man?
Or was the reason I didn’t get it that I am not intimate with the Spanish historical ideas about France and the french? Anyway the only thing I liked about the movie was Elsa Pataky, the lead accress, she was as hot as they come.

Tonight is X-Men 3 time :)

Roozbeh, while I can understand your frustration I don’t think its fair to pin this one on Google. I am sure Google’s lawyers are quite good and if they feel that allowing Iranian citizens into the Google SoC program is running afoul with US law then they probably think so with good reason. For Chris DiBona to be able to go to the Google laywers with an opposing view he would need much stronger ammunition than iranian foreign exchange students being unhappy about it and non-laywer reading of the documents in question.

Also in the current US political climate I am not sure Google want to have to fight a potential PR war about wether they are trying to subvert US export regulations or not.

On a related note, was I frustrated when Google didn’t make GStreamer a Summer of Code project? Sure I was. But at the same time I realized of course that its Google’s money and they have the right to spend it exactly how they see fit and give it to whoever they want. Including not giving them to citizens on the US export ban list countries.

In the end Roozbeh you have to face that the US and Iran is not on very good terms. That is neither your or Chris DiBona’s fault, but you both have to deal with it. That might not be ‘fair’, but it is how the world works. Citizens get ‘punished’ and ‘rewarded’ based on the actual or percieved actions of their nation no matter if the citizen in question has any kind of responsibility or influence on the situation or act. Sanctions probably has to work that way or they will be very ineffective.

So while I sympatize with your plight, and I am sure Chris DiBona does too, these blog entries about how evil Google is feels misplaced to me.

So as anyone who don’t live under a rock is aware of by now, there is a live-action Warcraft movie planned based on the gaming world created in the Warcraft series and now giving millions of people an unhealthy addiction through World of Warcraft. As a former partially recovered World of Warcraft junkie I can’t help but to be curios to see what they come up with. Fantasy movies have tended to be of low quality and movies based on computer games hasn’t been known for their quality either. The Lord of the Rings movies have proven however that technology has reached a level know where making visually believeable fantasy movies are possible at this point. Hopefully they will be able to put together a budget and team to make this movie fun to see.

Was an article in a Norwegian newspaper today about what I believe is the last Norwegian king to attempt a foreign invasion, namely the invasion of Harald Hardrada of England in 1066. (Hardrada means ‘hard ruler’) as his rule was supposed to have been very harsh.

The story of Haralad Hardrada has always facinated my as he played a part on my important events in Norwegian history, like participating in the battle of Stiklestad in 1030. This battle is famous in Norwegian history as it was the battle which basically turned Norway into a Christian country, even though the army fighting to keep the faith in the Norse gods won the battle and managed to kill the king later known as Olav the Holy.

In 1034 Harald Hardrada had travelled to Constantinopel and took service for the Byzantin emperor, which was where he gained his battle experience and wealth. In 1045 he returned to Norway and became co-ruler for a year, before gaining sole kingship. Harald Hardrade is also known as the founder of Oslo, which is today the capital of Norway, which is why a
statue of him decorate the city hall.

Anyway the story in today’s paper was about the Battle of Fulford which I had to admit I didn’t know about. The battle of Fulford preceded the more famous (and for Harald Hardrade final battle of Stamford bridge. The battle of Stamford bridge preceding of course the even more famous battle at Hastings in which Harald Godwinson (the then king of England) was beaten by William the Conqueror.

It seems the battleside of the battle of Fulford is actually preserved today in a condition almost identical to the one of 1066, with an english society working to have it preserved as there is a recent effort to build a road and housing over the site.

So if you are in that area lend your support to the Battle of Fullford group :)

Decided recently that I need to be more active during my weekends as I was feeling that I was letting them slip away to easily. So I set myself a goal of at least doing two things every day of the weekend. Started doing this weekend by goin to Montserrat which is a old church/convent in the mountains north of Barcelona. It was a very nice area and I walked around in the mountains for many hours enjoying the feeling of being outdoors and the beautiful scenery. Definetly going to go back there to explore further. In the evening I went to a stand up-comedy show in Gracia. They had pulled in some stand-up comedians from London and it great fun. Mike joined me there and I learned that Mike has an uncanny likeness to David Hasselhoff from our friends on the stage.

Sunday I went to see V for Vendetta at the local cinema. Loved the movie and combined with my recent viewing of Closer it increased my appreciation of Natalie Portman as an actress a lot. In the evening I went over to Matthieu’s place where he hosted a barbeque on his roof terrasse as a delayed house warming party. Mattheiu’s appartment is pretty nice even being very rustic. Nice view of the town from the terrace and short walk to the beach.

Elisa update

So Phillipe and Loic are working hard on getting a first version of Elisa ready to be announced/presented at GUADEC. One of the things they are currently working on is making sure it integrates with ViiV systems. Managed to take this screenshot today showing Elisa browsing the directories of the ViiV server. Lots of polish needed though :). Lionel has already made an agreement with David Vignoni for doing graphics for Elisa (the current temporary graphics used are taken from various existing icon sets, mostly Crystal afaik). David has done work for us before, doing a set of icons for Flumotion (which we haven’t fully included yet due to letting it block on a more generic ‘cleaning up the Flumotion GUI’ task’)

Been dealing a little lately with the issue of standards. On one hand I recognize some standards as important and their existence has problably been a critical success factor for free and open source software. POSIX, PNG, Window Manager specification, UTF8, SVG, XML and various hardware standards come to mind as some examples.

The problem with standards is that the standarisation process often brings with it stagnation or that the standard advocates horrible solutions (the horrible solution was the compromise between two good solutions for instance). I think Solaris is an example of how letting yourself get locked down into a gigantic pile of standards and ABI promises in the end becomes more of a problem than a help. Sure if you ask people if ABI stability is important to them they will say yes, but in the end developers tend to value feature additions and improvements in the library they are depending on even more than ABI stability. And the same is true for standards, while everyone would say that being standards compliant is good, they would still choose to use something else if it provides a better experience.

Of course the worst kind of standards is when you create technical workarounds for the lack of standards and then ask people to standarize on those. Been a couple of examples of such I seen recently.

I don’t know how to do good and needed standards while not creating a standards bog, all I know is that I think standards isn’t the solution to all of the worlds problems.

Was sad to read today that Robert Jordan the author of the popular fantasy saga Wheel of Time have been diagnosed with a disease called amyloidosis, which according to Jordan has a median of 1 year until fatality from diagnosis if untreated. If treated the median jumped to 4 years which isn’t that much more. It made me think about my uncle who died two years ago after having been diagnosed with cancer about one year before that again, which again made me realize I tend to accept the occurence death quite quickly. I guess it comes as a byproduct of having a lot of doctors, nurses, vetrinerians and biologists in the family, all who comes in close contact with the cycle of life through their jobs almost on a daily basis, which in turn I guess have made them very ‘comfortable’ with such events, something which has rubbed of on me I guess. Combined with a complete lack of religiosity in the familty which has removed words such as ‘unfair or unjust’ in relation to death and instead quiet acceptance that death is direct result of being alive. So while there are of course the sadness and sorrow which comes when someone close dies, no energy or anger is spent looking to the heavens asking ‘why’.