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 :)

It is distressing to see how bad the situation is on some
customer systems. Sometimes I wonder how they actually
manage to get their databases for instance into such states
of disarray. Sometimes I wonder if there are people working
on these systems that are activly sabotaging them, but I
can’t really believe that people have so little pride in
what they do that they allow themselves to do such things at
work.

Other time I wonder if people try and cover their own lack
of skills by attempting to cover up doing some really ugly
‘fixes’, but once again I have hard time seeing how people
can have so little pride in what they do and the fall height
if exposed should be to high.

Got a mail reply today to my application for a internal
transfer to China. The mail basically states that I am not
of a high enough level in the hiarchy compared to what they
where looking for, but that my application will be looked at
anyway.
This of course means that it is quite unlikely that I
actually will get the a transfer. While getting a no is
always a disapointed I have no problem accepting it as long
as the reply, like in this case, was friendly and
professional. What I hate most is potentional employeers who
don’t even bother telling you that you didn’t get the job
etc., that marks a company to me as a place I probably
wouldn’t have wanted to work anyway. Hmm, so I guess it is
onward and forward with my other little ‘new job’ projects
instead then, and these all will take me to a place with a
better climate than Bejing could offer :)

Started working on making a Nautilus theme yesterday. My
plan is to write/gather tutorials so that in the end I will
have a full set of tutorials taking you all the way to
making a GNOME Metatheme.

Have started working on getting the GStreamer RPMS up to
date and complete. Currently some build issues with the RTP
plugin that I hope we can resolve quickly.

Started working on cleaning the gtop bugs in GNOME bugzilla.
I am moving the bugs that are related to libgtop over to
that module, and for the rest I am refering them to procman
and gperfmeter. Seems Ximian had made a couple of patches
for adding HP-UX support to libgtop which is cool, sent the
patches onward to Kevin.

GStreamer development is continuing briskly forward with new
applications developers using GStreamer showing up and even
more people helping out with plugins etc. Wim Taymans also
added a much improved registry system which finally gives us
support for creating a plugin registry even without root
access. The core is definetly getting there and Benjamin Otte
have an improved event mechanism almost ready, which I think
will finally give us great seeking. Thomas is working hard
on giving us a way to create more full proof binary packages
for when we are ready to make the Red Carpet GStreamer
channel public. Another great development is by Andy Wingo who
is getting our graphical editor working again under GNOME
2.0, this time better than before.

For my own part I have come to the conclusion that I need to
re-engange the project somehow. For some reason I feel that
I have gotten myself derailled and it not really
contributing anything meaningfull at the moment. Will try
with going over the SPEC files this weekend and see what
needs updating in them after the latest changes.

Have been feeling a little low on energy for some months
now, think it is a sign that I need to have a change in my
life again, work has gotten to be really boring. Think I am
one of the people who tend to get
bored with things after some of years and then need a
radical change to get things moving again. I have started
some efforts to make this happen and hopefully one of the
seeds I am planting will yield a harvest.

My second and last day of the work assignment I should never
have volunteered for. Not sure how things are going since I
am waiting for the system to regenerate before being able to
do some tests. The leasson learned here is: Read through the
job description twice before volunteering; if you do not you
end up being the foreign expert supposed to know something
you actually don’t (and that sucks).