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

Was working today on getting the last papers I need from current and former employers in regard to being able to send of the first set of papers to .au for approval. Starting to regret that I didn’t get a good reference letter from my former employer when I left 3 years ago. Seems all the people I knew, or who knew me has left of other pastures too. What I have done now is write the reference myself, so I will send it of to them hopeing a kind soul bothers to print it on company paper and sign it.

thomasvs has been working hard to fix our (GStreamer)scheduler the last few days. Luckily the bug isn’t a showstopper for a 0.4.0 release (hey, still a long way to 1.0.0 :). Rhythmbox our primary sample application only gets problems with the current bug if you start it and let it play over 500 songs without stop.

Good day yesterday with GNOME2 out. YAY!! Now all I need to do is make sure all the patches that I want see go in, that has piled up during the freeze for 2.0, go in now :)

On the GStreamer front thomasvs also managed to fix one of our two schedulers to make it work for ‘everyone’. This means we are now ready I think to do GStreamer 0.4.0.

Been using Rhythmbox extensivly for the last few days and it is definetly stable enough as a demo app, even if functionality is still not where it was before the latest GUI rewrite. Cool thing is that steveb have fixed the gstvideowidget used by gst-player so implementing Vizualisation plugins in Rhythmbox should now be easy.

People are reporting that gst-player works well, but it has some issues with its disting and me having taken a solemn oath to only use rpms with GStreamer (in order to catch a lot of build issues as they occur :) have not been able to get it working. Hope to get it packaged soon, and I am wondering if we should release it under the name ‘GNOME Media Player’ instead of gst-player. In the GNOME2 menu it is just called Media Player so I think this is fitting.

wingo has been working hard on the gst-editor, our GUI pipeline editor. He has been making some nifty screenshots and claim stuff is working, but I just get tons of warnings :), hopefully I will discover what the issue is there and get it fixed.

Another cool development I learned of yesterday is Wim Taymans who is making a video-wall plugin (enabling stuff like those big screens at shopping-malls where there are big screens consisting of many smaller screens.)

As you have seen from the other GStreamer dudes here on
Advogato we are working through some hard technical issues
atm. Well ‘we’ are maybe taking it far as it is wingo and wtay
who is having the pleasure. My contribution has been giving
wingo ssh access to my machine. Got some complaints from
wingo that the password and security system I used was overly
though, but that is the way the world works :)

I like reading books, problem is I am a fast reader which
means that I go through a book in a matter of days, which
means that they are shortlived entertainment. Anyhow
Saturday I bought Terry Goodkind’s The Pillars of Creation.
It is the latest installement of a series called The Sword
of Truth. Actually I don’t think they are very good books,
the author spends 90% of the book on trivialities when the
books are supposed to be about ‘the survival of the world’.
And when he then spends a lot of time trying to build up to
something great like someone being appointed to a great
destiny, that destiny turns out to be a paragarph stating
that ‘here, you are the mailman take this south’. Also when
the great battle between good and evil finally arrive at the
end of the book it is also like a paragraph and done. There
are a lot of other things I don’t like about his books too.

So why are I reading them then? Well when you have read
close to what I now estimate to be like 1500 books you are
starting to get short on good books to read at least since I
usually limit myself to the fantasy genre. So why am I
writing this? Well I just needed to rant about how unahppy I
was with the latest book I read :)

For some good reading I suggest Robert Jordans Wheel of Time.

Loong week with tons of work. Did manage to send of some
snail mails on thursday however in order to get hold of the
needed papers for my Australian work permit.

Been building and testing X number of GStreamer builds this
week in preparation for our 0.4.0 release. I feel we are
getting closer and closer, but my vision of the QA phases
getting shorter as we moved forward is not turning out to be
correct. Guess that will not happen until we enter 1.x land.

My best guess now is that we might be able to get it out
sometime next week. Of course my contributions to the
process are rather minor, the real heroes of the QA process
are people Wim, Steveb,wingo and especially
thomasvs. I am just pointing out the build
errors etc., they are the people doing the real work.

Well hopefully I will be able to move from the library
level to the apps level this weekend in my testing :)

Also upgraded to RH7.3 from RH7.2 today. Darn sexy upgrade
RH is providing. The Swap increase screen for instance was a
very nice and polished touch for instance. The thing was
however that this was the first time I didn’t upgrade at
once when a new release was out. There wasn’t really a neeed
to for me as 7.2 was working very well for me and I knew of
no new features in 7.3 I needed. The story was quite
different for my laptop where the updated XFree drivers with
support for Radeon Mobility was a critical factor :).
What got me moving on the upgrade in the end was that
thomasvs is making a gstreamer apt
repository and his 7.2 support was rather bare :)

Started going over the forms I need to fill out and the papers
I need to get hold of in order to get a work permit in
Australia. Quite a lot of work and it costs a great deal of
money too. But at this point I am determined to do it, and I
score very well on their point test so I think that as soon
as I get all the formalities in order I will get the
workpermit and can really start looking for jobs. I am
really looking forward to the day I can sit down in the
evening on the veranda of my Sydney appartment and enjoy the
warm weather. No more freezing my butt of here in Oslo.

chakie: Bashing, flaming? Just because people
have an opinion that differs from from yours doesn’t make it
a flame. A flame is when you arguments sink down to the ‘X
and Y is only for brain damaged retards’ level and stuff
like that.

Got my IELTS language test results today. Got a bit
depressed when I saw that I have somehow managed to get 6.5
in my Reading understanding test. Since I had gotten 7.5 in
my listening test and 8.0 in my writing and speaking tests
(9 is top score) I was really unhappy about the 6.5 since I
was sure the New Zealand and Australian governments had put
down a minimum 7 score in all categories to be eligble for
immigration. Turns out I remembered wrongly, their
demand was only 5 or higher so I passed. Now I only need to
formally apply for work permit and the job hunt down under
can proceed.

My mail hasn’t been working for almost a week now. I mailed
them yesterday using another account. They sent me another
password for the admin account then and I logged in to find
all mail accounts gone. The admin account did catch all mail
sent to the domain however so I downloaded it. Found that my
ISP had sent me a mail with telling me their mailsystem had
broken down and didn’t work. While I
understand they probably didn’t have many other options for
trying to get in touch with their customers it does feel kinda
like Dilbert sending out a mail about all mail accounts not
working anymore :)