Once again Christmas is upon us. Personally I be spending it with my family so I probably be offline until 3rd day of Christmas. So I want to wish everyone, who celebrates it in one form or the other, a very happy Christmas!

Finally got my new
digital camera just the other day. Very happy with it so far, worked like a charm under Gtkam, just plug it into the USB port and chose the model, now I only need to get Gnocam to work. Put it to good use yesterday to take photos of the cabin I have rented for the GNOME Multimedia Summit in Oslo, March.

The summit is looking good, we have just started to get participants to sign up, but I think we will easily reach the 20 needed and probably hit close to the 30 we have room for. Going to send out a formal invitation tommorow to the gnome-multimedia mailing list and select other addresses.

Personally I think there is way to few events like this happening in the wider linux community. We often talk about being a community, but I feel that to often the definition of that community is ‘cvs commit’, something which falls way short of a real community in my mind.

Also decided to strenghten my more job related knowledge this week so I bought the O’Reilly book ‘Oracle XML Applications’, so far I like it very much. My boss also told me it would be ok for me to ask for a refund from work for the price of the book, which was nice as I had bought the book on my own initiative.

A bit frustration the last few days. First of all so did a workproject I planned on being done with on Sunday not end for me due to bugs, so now I am still strugling with it.

Secondly I tried mailing ACS once again to see what was happening with my immigration assessment. To my suprise I got a reply almost immediatly. It stated that my request was received and forwarded to the consultant that handled my case, even got the email address of that consultant. After not hearing anything for 5 more days I mailed her directly. Got a autoresponse that she was away and would not return before the 12th and that all mails recieved while away would be deleted, aaargh. 8 to 10 weeks their homepage says, I am getting close to 20 now.

Thirdly I ordered a digital camera last week, to be delivered to my door my a messenger company. Still no camera seen.

On the postive side we managed to get a new GStreamer release out with a big thanks to thomasvs,
secondly I think I have enough material to do a nice summary this weekend.

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…