The question of sound servers seems to be a neverending
problem. Today I started that maybe the solution was to give
up or rather to lower the ambitions. I mean we probably will
never find a sound server that satifies both video people,
audio people, the desktop people, game people and that runs
well on all the important flavours of Unix and Linux.

As a person coming from the desktop world my initial
interest was finding a good solution in the desktop context.
Currently we use Esound in GNOME and they use artsd in KDE.
Both sound servers are not exactly something you want to
give a round of applauds, but of the two artsd is
the better one. We have discussed using artds in GNOME, but
the enthusiasm for switching to a sound server that sucks
less, but still sucks has not been overwhelming. So we are
desperatly looking for a solution that we can actually feel
is a good one.

One project I held high hopes for was MAS which
is being developed by Shiman Associates Inc., under the X11
umbrella. Lately I have started being more doubtfull of this
solution as a) they seem intent on bloating it and b) I am
not sure they will finish it unless someone starts sending
them some money. This need not be a problem, the source is
there so anyone could start working on it if it truly is the
solution we have been looking for…..

Another solution that many of the audio developers like
is Jack. There
are two things that makes me a little wary of Jack, one is
that it is closely tied to/dependent on ALSA which makes me
unsure about how well it would work on Solaris or HP-UX.
The design is supposed to be able to use other backends, but
since ALSA is the only backend with the advanced
functionality Jack has been designed for it is a question
how good a solution you get with other low end backends.
Also it has been designed very much with high end audio
applications in mind so there is also a question on how well
it fits the bill for other user and developer groups.

In addition to these there are other projects which I am
not sure is even alive and even if so definetly not ready
for prime time anytime soon, like ASD for instance.

As many of you probably know I am helping out on the GStreamer project, and
your response will probably be that why worry about sound
server when GStreamer based apps can output to all of
them.
Well the reason is simply that when we ship GNOME
2.2 using GStreamer as the backend for our multimedia stuff
it feels deeply disatisfying to tell distros and OS makers
to use whatever sound server/system they can manage to dig
up. Because when we do that we at the same time give up on
making sure that people have a solution that works
consistently well. We risk that on some platforms people
will choose a soundserver which easily creates lagging in
the sound, one that is a resource hog or the most critical
problem atm, the lack of good audio/video sync.

Yet, as I started this longish diary entry with, maybe the
solution is to give up and instead accept that things are
not perfect and there are difference in quality provided
between the platforms, but maybe after all it might be
better than trying to cram a one-size-fits-all solution onto
the world. Especially since the current sizes fit so few :)

neil: Get yourself a brain before speaking
up next time, or if you by some chance actually have one maybe
try using it before screaming murder the next time. If you
are to boycot anyone it should be some of the other distro’s
who keep their stuff proprietary like Suse or Caldera.

My interview with Murray Cumming about C++ programing in GNOME
went up on
Linux Orbit yesterday. Think it has been rather well
recieved. Seems I got some renewed writing energy as I have
started and mostly writen an article about GNOME2 also which
I plan on completing this week.

In the offline world it is Friday night and I am at work, ugh,
worst thing is that I will need to go to work all through
the weekend. Only good thing about it is that I earn some
extra cash which is needed to pay for the new boatengine.
I really really hope this will be a sunny summer to I can
actually get to enjoy that bloody sailboat instead of just
sinking my hard earned cash into it.

Learned yesterday that we are pulling the plug on
Linuxpower.org. Even if I have seen it coming for a while, and
even considered taking the initiative myself to close it
down, I still feel a bit nostalgic about it. When I joined
linuxpower as a writer around 4 years ago (eek) it was in
many ways my first venture into activly participating in
the wider Linux community..errr….GNU/Linux community.

Looking back it was an interesting period in time as using
Linux had not really caught on yet. It was in many ways a
more idealistic and friendly community at that time. I have
when thinking back sometimes wondered if the license
conflict that arose between KDE and GNOME at that time and
which colored a lot of the debates in the whole community,
was to blame for the decline in civility in the community
the years afterwards. Yet I guess that decline was something
that had to come as the community grew away from being
heavily dominated by academia to also include other less
educated groups.

Anyway back to Linuxpower, as I mentioned the site will be
going down, the direct reason being that
Chad(icemonk) who has been
hosting the site on his machine all these years is moving to
Hawaii(lucky bastard). The indirect reason being that we,
the four core
memebers of the team, have all gotten involved with other
things which left the site on a backburner.

So having a site for when I got the writing fever once every
second month was not really worth keeping the site alive
for. Luckily I talked with John Gowin of Linux Orbit (.com)
and he was willing to publish my articles from here on, so
when I do get to urge to do something I will have somewhere
to publish it.

So to my fellow Linuxpowerians
katzj,ErikLevy and
crudman thanks for the fun of the previous
years and I am really looking forward to the day the four of
us get togheter again, be it work, leisure or free software.

Not overly productive the last few days, but I guess I have
managed to do something usefull. For instance I sent my
latest interview of for publication yesterday, I re-openend
all the Nautilus search bugs I closed and I did the long
overdue dishes at home :)

Wim told me last night that he expect to be able to commit the
implemented event stuff for GStreamer in one week, two at
most. This is great news as this is the piece which we are
missing to be able to supply applications with the needed
functionality for seeking and EOF. Hopefully we can do a
0.4.0 release at that time and at the same time be able to
push that
release out through Red Carpet.

My plan for today is getting a new GNOME Summary out.
Actually have more then enough news already, just need to do
the markup and polish.

The GNOME2 snapshots that Jacob distributes through Red
Carpet works like a charm for me, nice to see bugs getting
fixed even if some of the fixes are of the ‘disable’
category. While there will be some feature regressions in
GNOME2 compared to GNOME1.4 I think most people will be more
happy with it due to the new features of the plattform and
the much improved quality of this release.

Argh, those bloody swiz are arguing the bill for my
assignment there. True enough the problem wasn’t solved
while I was there, and still isn’t, but when you request
someone for a 2 day assignment and it turns out to be a
problem they have been strugling with for 6 months then
acting suprised when I am not able to solve it in 2 days is
a little over the hill in my view…

Managed to compile Mozilla with GTK+ 2.0 support last night
thanks to Marco’s patch and SPEC file. Now I only need to
get Galeon for GNOME 2 compiled. Not long after that I think
I am ready to launch the Svirfneblin Desktop Environment
upon the world (evil grin)

Spent a lot of time talking with Star yesterday about the
feature regressions in GNOME 2.0 compared to GNOME 1.4. What
I told him is what I have told anyone else missing their
favourite feature; file a bug. If regression bugs are not
filed then it is perfectly natural for developers to assume
that the feature that has been removed is not missed. Also
many features are not really gone, they have just been moved
to another place.

I also sent my new interview back for final approval last
night, expect it to go online early next week.

I also managed to get some more work on the Nautilus theme,
think I need to do some fixes on my tutorial.

Morning, the clock is 07.50. Been at work all night. Seems
the job will be over in about an hour so I can go home and
sleep. My fever has gone, so now only my cold is left. What
a wonderfull world :)

Noticing that gman is giving everyone but
me some credit for the good work that are getting done on
GNOME2…..hmmm :)

thomasvs got his patch for the tasklist
included just in time for the ui freeze, which was cool :)

Its Sunday, I have a cold and a slight fever, I am at work,
life sucks today.

The amount of patches coming in for various GNOME modules
these days is very encouraging. Seems that the impending
GNOME 2 release in combination with things like our new
Human Interface Guidelines, the accessibility stuff, and the
feeling among many including myself that GNOME 2 is becoming
our most stable and coherent release ever, despite the huge
amount of changes that had to be done to port to the new
plattform, is getting a of people interest in helping out.

The other thing is that I am starting to be just as exited
about GNOME 2.0.1 as I am about 2.0.0. Due to the strict
demands on what kind of things are allowed into the 2.0.0
tree at this moment in prepartion for the release, at lot of
cool stuff is being commited to placeholder modules in CVS
or left in bugzilla. As soon as 2.0.0 is out all this cool
stuff will
get commited to the core modules and I think 2.0.1 will see
the light of day just 1 or 2 months after 2.0.0.

Lots of cool stuff happening on GStreamer too.
thomasvs has made some shared GConf schemas
we will distribute. Hopefully we will get all GNOME apps
based on GStreamer to use this and people will have one stop
shopping for configuring their multimedia output. Also with
Trommey having joined the team I guess all our automake
challenges are a thing of the past :).

Jeremy Simon also
commited his snapshot plugin last week. Hopefully we will be
able to use that to give the mediaplayer both a pause image
that don’t go away when people move other windows over the
video image and also we can start getting screenshots taken
of our apps playing video.

In the other news deparment: I have a new interview on
the way. Got some great
answers back yesterday so now I only need to edit it up and
maybe make a few follow-up questions. Think this one will be
interesting.

Took my IELTS exam today. Think the listen test, the reading
test and the writing test went rather well. More unsure
about my speaking test, was more nervous than I would have
expected which did hamper me a bit.

I also managed to get a small Nautilus
website
up and today. Not that much there yet, but it is a start :)

I even put up my Nautilus themeing tutorial there :)