Finally got my act togheter and put out a new GNOME Summary yesterday. Needed something to kickstart me and David Schleef having made a new library for rendering flash animations and a flash plugin for gstreamer based on it was just the news I needed to get into summary mode. Lots of little things going in for GNOME 2.2 which makes me really excited.

Wim Taymans of GStreamer fame and his very nice girlfriend Michele have been staying at my place for a few days as part
of their vacation on Scandinavia. I have taken them for a long forest walk and out sailing in the Oslofjord while here. Yesterday they traveled onwards to visit Stockholm, but they will be returning to Norway next weekend to join me on a rafting trip. They will also go glacier walking the day after.

My little programming project (my secret GNOME2 porting attempt) has sort of been on hold while they where here, but I plan on getting back into the hacking mode tommorow. I hope I manage to understand enough to actually get it to compile :)

Interesting week full of little tidbits. The week started with a email from ACS telling my they where reviewing case. This is the first step in getting my .au work permit so I hope it turns out ok.

Secondly I tried out the new OEOne Homebase desktop. It is an interesting concept and with just a little more polish I think it could be a good sell to people who are not very affinite with computers yet. Currently however I got hit by some rather nasty bugs. Another sad point is that they have replaced their
GStreamer based mediaplayer with something else. Not sure what exactly that something is, but it didn’t work very well. I mean I can understand a systems integrator or developer choosing something more mature than GStreamer (say xine-libs) or something to have something stable and full featured faster (while I do understand, I still think their efforts would be better spent at porting things like asf and wmf support to GStreamer instead), but replacing GStreamer with something that don’t work is just weird.

Have trying to do a small license audit on GStreamer and have due to that tried mailing around asking people if they would be willing to relicense under the LGPL for us (instead of using the GPL.) The effectv people where very kind and not only let us relicense their code, but also got the permision to do so for some code they had gotten from someone else. Thanks a lot!
More problems with the rest of the permission or rather problems reaching the authors. I also doubt we be able to relicense some of these projects even if it is ok for current maintainers as they have been around for a long time and due to that have code from to many people inside, people who are next to impossible to get hold of. The Mozilla people are a good example of how hard it is to relicense a big project that has been around for a while.

And last but not least, I turned 29 yesterday :)

Started my Nth teach-myself to code project this week. The project is taking a ‘simple’ GTK 1.x application and trying to port it to GTK 2.x. Gotten further than my previous attempts already, but I have to admitt I have spent more time getting the build system cleaned up than I have looking at the actual code.

So even if also this attempt at learning to code fails at least I have learned much about the GNU build scripts. I have to admit that before this attempt the autogen.sh, Makefile.am, Makefile.in, Makefile, Configure.in, configure and their relationship with eachother was somewhat voodoo to me. Can’t call myself a buildsystem master like thomasvs yet, but at least I have some understanding on how they all relate now. Havoc’s book on GTK+ and GNOME developer featured a nice chapter on it which got me started and if there are others out there wanting a quick intro on the GNU buildscripts I suggest checking out that book (it is available for free in html format from developer.gnome.org).

Anyway having spent some time now fixing the buildtree and buildsystem I have now gotten to a point where the application is actually trying (and somewhat succeding to build against gtk+ 2.0). Hopefully I manage to get it to compile fully by the end of the week and through that process have gotten a little more understanding of how GTK+ coding is supposed to be done.

Went out to town only to remember why I hate going out on a saturday night. Keywords: Overcrowded, cramped, to loud and to many lowbrows around.

Much prefer a going out to a pub or similar on a normal weekday with smaller crowds and music at a level where conversation is not defined by screaming your lungs out into someones ears.

Hmm, back from vacation. 16 days of no work, no computers and no stress. Feel more energized than I have for a long time.

Managed to send the letter to ASC to get the process of me getting a Australian work permit started. Hopefully it will give me a work permit and a job within the next 6 months.

Even though I am back I think my GNOME and GStreamer contributions will continue to suffer for a few weeks as my schedule is pretty booked up also privatly with family get-togheters and baby sitting being among the components.

I do hope I will be able to at least get a new GNOME summary out next monday as it has been to long since the last time.
Think I will also make mini-summaries containing the statistics for the weeks gone by without a proper summary.

8 more days and I am 29, scary. I mean just one year left of being a young person in my twenties before becoming a old man above 30 ;)

Going on a 14 day sailing trip tommorow. 14 days with no computers or mobile phones. (Actually not 100% correct as we will be bringing a laptop with navigation software and a cable
connecting it to our GPS unit.).
Still it will be some time without any of the factors that usually make up such a large part of my life and I am really looking forward to it. Need some time doing something completely different in order to get my internal batteries up to max again.

Also got my papers in order for my .au work permit application. Will get it sent of as soon as I return from my vacation.

Was also happy to learn that thomasvs is doing very well at the GNOME summit in Boston doing two GStreamer talks.

Bothersome weather in Oslo today, warm hot air coupled with clouds and lots of humidity. Walk like 5 minutes outside and you feel like you have been working out for an hour. Clothes cling to your body and your skin feels like it is getting clogged up and can’t breathe.

On the free software side we did a successfull release of GStreamer 0.4.0. Think the new rpm apt repository and Red Carpet channel will make things much easier for people. Next step is to get a release of the player out. It still has some annoying bugs, but it is definetly useable as a test application. Bother that jorn as away on vacation for the next 14 days as a Rhythmbox release would also be nice. Of course delaying the release 14 days do give them time to get seeking working.

Not done much this week of substance either at work or else. Closest thing this week was getting the new summary out on monday, but that I had mostly done on saturday. I think hot and humid is not the kind of weather that energises me. More of a dry and hot kind of guy :)

Question of the day? Is using threads the way to kill portability? We have been strugling with differences in threads between i386 and i686 on Linux, but it seems that there are thread problems on FreeBSD also. Can’t help but wonder what suprises are in store for use on Solaris and HP-UX *Grumble*

I see lot of people commenting on Tromey‘s
question about amount of ‘it sucks’ mail. Unfortunatly it is not a uncommon thing. In all the projects I have been involved
in I have experienced it and also seen the energy wasted reacting to it. The bad thing is that it seems like the tendency for these kind of mails are increasing as the popularity of free software systems increases as we get more and more users and unfortunatly also developers who are more acustomed to complaining and critizing than appreciating the effort being done volunterialy by others.

Like everyone else I have pieces of software I think stinks, but there a large step from that to mailing the author telling him/her that is sucks and that they should get a clue. Unless you have the energy to send in a constructive mail and/or good bug reports you are doing everyone a favour by not giving feedback about things you are unhappy about.

On a related note I noticed that John ‘Maddog’ Hall was quoted on LWN today I think about a talk he did about the importance of saying ‘thank you’ in free software. He did a similar talk at GUADEC and after that I have tried to be more aware and send authors of applications I like a little mail sayings thanks for the nice/cool application/library they are making. Also a mail with some praise of the application/library and a bugfix/feature request has a 110% higher chance of actually getting you that bugfix/feature than a flame telling the author what a buggy piece of shit he/she is making.

Somehow we must make people aware that in the free software world they are not customers, at least not of the developer.

Been doing lots of little non-linux/non-gnome related stuff the last few days. Discovered that I have a scheduled talk with my boss in a month where we are to discuss my progress the last year. So I am now started reading up to at least get one or two Oracle RDBMS certifications exams before the talk since that was what we put on my schedule for this last year which was my personal responsibilty to do. Urk, that stuff is boring.

My sailboat is still not close to getting on the water and it seems it will be a couple of more weeks before it is. The guy who is supposed to install the engine is having some trouble finding someone to get us the correct coneing of the propel shaft. Argh, now half the summer is already gone. Bet it will start raining the last half. God how I curse that day I bought that boat.

Bought myself Never Winter Nights the other day, first game I bought in a year at least. Nice enough, but I am waiting for the the Linux binaries before really starting to play and even then I guess it will not be long before I decide to let it rest as I am not really into playing games anymore.

Seems many of the small anoyances of GNOME2 is being sorted out now for 2.0.1; menu editing and window manager chooser capplet for instance.

Many little fixes going into the GStreamer tree the last few days as we prepare for 0.4.0. Can’t help but feeling a little anoyed about the known scheduler bugs we will be shipping with. Stupidest thing is that I have really no reason to be annoyed, bugs that I have not even managed to trigger myself is not really something I should let bother me, still the knowledge that they are there gnaws on my soul. Guess part of my irritation is that I feel the hard work thomasvs and wingo have put into the two schedulers over the last 2-3 weeks, not to mention the work wingo spent on writing the new scheduler, should be rewarded higher by the powers that be.

Well hopefully we will be able to nail the bugs sometime after the 0.4.0 release so that we can concentrate on more polish level fixes in prepartion for GStreamer 0.5.0 and its inclusion in GNOME 2.2