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…

Nymia, I am not the person to get the nitty gritty details on rsvg from. If I where you I would contact cinamod who you can get hold of in the #abiword channel on irc.gimp.net using the nick ‘dom’, he is current maintainer.

Since you have seen the code you probably now the basics, that is made using ANSI C and that it only dependency is afaik libart. If you have GNOME stuff installed it will create a SVG pixbuf loader and a gtk theme engine for you also. After Dom’s latest updates it is getting rather full featured and it will mean that GNOME 2.2 can use SVG graphics pretty much anywhere in the GUI. The code was originally created by raph as part of some contract work for Eazel.

How news are made. Working on my spare time at making the GNOME Summaries I often think that what I do is simplistic compared to ‘real’ journalism. Today I got a reminder that a lot of professional journalism work
on the same simple level I do. By reading mail logs, blogs and so on. Sadly enough professional journalists often works on a even simpler and very low quality way also.

I saw a article in Norways largest paper about Ian McKellen being interested in doing the hobbit. The story in the norwegian paper gave credit to Ananova(.com) for the story.
Going to Ananova I saw they refered to Ian McKellens own homepage as their source. Going to his website and looking around I found that the statements he was quoted on was not an ‘official statement’ as such it was just a reponse he posted to a fanmail. Of course Ananova had rewritten his statements to make them seem like they where made to them or made to the public as an announcement. And of course the meanings had been slightly altered compared to the original message in the posted mail. And of course the norwegian paper reporting on Anananova’s story had slightly altered the story compared to Ananova again. So what the Norwegian papers claim of what he did say wasn’t really accurate anymore as theirs was a rewrite of a rewrite.

So that is how ‘real’ journalism work :)

Often wonder about the dynamics of free software. Sometimes it is clear what
is the direct cause of something other times it is not so clear. For instance we had for some time now had a rather stable core of 7-8 contributors to GStreamer, but the last week we suddenly got an influx of new people sending in patches and new plugins. It could of course be just random chance that brings these people decide to get active at this point in time, but I wonder. Only major thing that has happened lately is an increased interest from the KDE camp for GStreamer (thanks to Tim Janssen), but afaik none of these new developers come from a ‘KDE background’. Could of course be that the recent interest from KDE combined with our established relationship with GNOME has helped legitimize GStreamer to a wider developer audience or something.

Will also be interesting to see how November goes development wise. Judging but the Sourceforge statistics November has traditonally been the month of year with the lowest activity followed by December and January with the highest. Of course I can’t be certain of the truth of this as the sourceforge statistics system seems rather fickle and I am not sure if some of the seasonal changes in the sourceforge statistics are caused by blackouts from the statistics engine instead of real seasonal changes.

Have also become a fan of the advogato rating system, let myself get drag into an argument with a certain someone last week, but due to his trolling his score must have fallen bellow 3 so for me he doesn’t exist anymore. Of course I still get to read others replies to later entries, but guess you can’t win em all :)

Also looking forward to putting out a new GNOME summary tommorow, this has been a week full of cool patches and addtions so
there is lots to report :)

pfremy I think your reading of my interview is heavily coloured by your premade opinion. While there are issues in Nautilus as my interview did illustrate your are blowing these issues out of proportion.

First of all the mime support in Nautilus is and as far as I know has always been tied in with the rest of GNOME, but Nautilus as the filemanager is the most major user of the mime-system, which was why it was covered as a ‘Nautilus’ issue.

As for the file access we have something called gnome-vfs in GNOME that does the same thing as kioslaves in KDE.

Nautilus don’t have a file dialog, and I can’t even see why you would want one in a filemanager.

The separate theme handling was a mistake, but has now been 99% fixed, the two minor details left will be taken care of before GNOME 2.2 as the interview clearly states.

As for its own icon management I am not sure what exactly you refer to, but I don’t think there was ever a duplication,
if anything you could argue that the functionality was misplaced inside Nautilus or eel instead of being placed in a more core GNOME library. On the other hand this is how we develop new stuff in GNOME. We include them it outer libs or applications and as they mature and prove usefull we migrate them further down in the toolchain.

As for full of bugs. Well a vast majority of the bugs in Nautilus bugzilla are leftovers from the Eazel days. They used bugzilla as their primary work tool which means there are tons of bugs in bugzilla with things like ‘maybe we should do this instead of this’, ‘wouldn’t removing one pixel
from x make it fit better than y’. Such type of bugzilla usage is not how volunteer based free software projects do it, thus the number of bugs is significantly smaller.

As for slow, well yes it is slower than windows explorer, but it is faster than Konqueror…..

As for most of the future features are things that KDE already have. Yes, some of these features you already have, yet some like the video preview stuff is ugly hacks. And there are other things in Nautilus and GNOME where you implemented them after us, SVG support comes to mind as an example.

As for the money use of Eazel, it is wrong to claim that all of it went into Nautilus development. A large part of it went to developing the services part of Eazel and their marketing deparments. I am not saying that money use at Eazel where perfect, but claiming that all their money went into Nautilus development is rather blatant desinformation.

As for lacking a ‘large shared vision’, I think you are mistaken. But truly we have had more discussions about these issues in GNOME than you have had in KDE, but I think this is mostly because KDE have almost no power over these issues, you have put yourself in a position where most important design decisions are handed down to you by TrollTech.
In GNOME we do discuss more such issues because we, unlike you, are masters of our own destiny.

Putting finishing touches on a new interview I just done, think it will be rather popular when John puts it up on linuxorbit next week.

I made myself a bit usefull today and made a website for Gnonlin today.
Gnolin is our library for nonlinear video editors and it is starting to be usefull so I felt a webpage was in order :).

Some people have asked me what is happening with my .au workpermit application. Well ACS said I would get a reply in about 10 weeks, 8 weeks have now past. So hopefully I can move onto the next stage within the next 3 weeks.

nymia if you want to work on SVG rendering I suggest you look at the rsvg library in GNOME cvs. It was originally made to render SVG icons in Nautilus but has lately been updated to render SVG for lots of stuff and its rendering speed and capabilites has also been improved. It only depends on libart so it is also very versatile and portable.

Started looking today for some linux software that will help
me convert EPS files to SVG. Haven’t found any yet, anyone have any suggestions?

Got Red Hat 8.0 installed on my machine last night at it is very sweet! I needed to use both the networking and X windows config tool last night and they booth looked great and worked well.

Only thing I missed was the GNOME2 menu editing stuff, which was not included, but I guess it came into GNOME CVS at to late a date to include it.

On the GStreamer front things are progressing well. Wim is working on a new scheduler which hopefully will let us leave scheduling issues behind for a good while. Ronald is busy on getting gst-record ready for a release. He is also debugging the asf video demuxer that Owen wrote. Thomas is hacking on Dave/Dina at the moment and also has some work work he needs to catch up to, yet he seems to be able to sneak in doing cleanups and fixes to GStreamer somewhere in between it all ;). David Lehn is has been working on the debian packages and python bindings lately and David Schleef seems to have more little coding projects going on that I thought humanly possible. Steve seems to be a little busy getting settled back in New Zealand, but hopefully he will be back soon as we need to get libgstplay useable for the mozilla plugin that David Schleef is doing.
Christian Meyer is still hard at work on the C++ bindings, while lot of code has been commited they are still designing and re-designing stuff to make sure the bindings are easy to use and also integrates well with the rest of the gtkmm stuff. Haven’t seen Zeshan in a while online, hope he has gotten into trouble for his political articles back home. And last but not least (of the most active contributors) we have Andy who has just released the first and latest gst-editor before packing his rucksack to go to Africa for two years, and who will be missed while he is away. Hopefully he remember to send us his contact info so it is possible to go and visit him while there.

On my own front I need to give myself a kick in the ass and learn how to use thomas bitches system so I can be of more assistance in the release process again, especially important since I want to help bring about a much higher release frequency on GStreamer.