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).

I personally closed 120 bugs in GNOME bugzilla last night.
Ok, maybe not that impressive as I only closed all GMC bugs
as wontfix with a short message that they should use
Nautilus or if they wanted a GMC like filemanager they could
try GNOME Commander. But those 120 GMC bugs showing up in
the GNOME Summary bug status each week had been anoying the
hell out of me. Guess it is an example of a itch getting
scratched.

Was back from GUADEC on monday. GUADEC was as always great fun and my renting a couple of apartments
worked out really well for the most part I think. As for the partying some bars in Seville will never be the same
again
I think :). Another conclusion is that the GNOME community seems to have managed to change the way we work
to be more scaleable now. The entry of first Sun and now Wipro into the community has lead to the GNOME
community slowly changing our style of working and finally Bugzilla for instance is really serving its purpose as a
central part of the development infrastructure. It has seemed to me that even if the number of developers in the
GNOME community has been continually growing over the last three years we have not really scaled the amount
of
work getting done. Sometimes it seemed that our 100 developers of 3 years ago managed to get as much done
as
300 does today. But I feel that with the structural and attitude changes now working their way through the
GNOME
community we are finally getting to a point where it is easy to join and do real development. Of course only time
will tell if its really is our organisation that is working better or just a normal ‘new major release’ type energy boost
taking place.

Me and kmaraas stayed longer than the main crowd and spent 4 days traveling around in
Andalucia. A lot of fun even if we missed Hale Berry by just a day in Caduz.

Got back on monday and spent that day and yesterday getting my day to day life back in working order.
Suprisingly no big crises waited for me back at work and I think I will be able to get back on track with writing the
GNOME Summaries and helping out with GStreamer now.

Also applied for a internal transfer to Oracle China today, guess I have decided that it is my destiny to live in China
for some years :)

I think today is my musings day.
I sometimes wonder if Linux and free software projects
becoming business is a good thing. I mean on the positive
side it does mean people can get to work fulltime on Linux,
GNOME, Apache etc., but on the other hand the reason many
of us enjoyed working on these projects to begin with was
the stressles, only work at what you find fun, situation
that comes with a truly volunteer system like the free
software community mostly was uptil 2-3 years ago.

When I started out I used to read Freshmeat everyday to see
if there was something ‘new and cool’ out, and if there was
I would eagerly compile the 0.0.1 release to test it out.

Today things have moved to a different level and instead of
being excited about the existence of a project to do xyz,
we now have apps that can do xyz in most common cases and
the focus have moved to issues like portability,
accessibilty, usability, release schedules etc. I don’t
really find that as exciting for some reason. So today I
can use Linux and GNOME as a tool to do my job, but I do
sometimes miss the good ‘ol time when it was just a fun
toy.

This being said I don’t really want to go back to
the good old days either. Having fifthy 0.0.1 apps that
could almost do something was fun at the time, but today I
am older and less full of energy and would probably find
those 50 ‘almost’ apps mostly frustrating. I guess it would
be like seeing one of those movies from your youth that you
remember as extremely funny, but seeing in again you just
find it rather stupid and plain.

In case you wonder what made me think about these
issues, well it is not software related at all actually.
What started my thinking about the good ‘old’ days was
meeting again the most beautiful girl of my college years
early last week first the first time since graduation day
10 years ago. She had in my mind since that time always
stood out as the dream girl I wished I could meet again.
Well actually meeting her again was a big wake-up call, not
only had she gotten really old during those 10 years not
even being close to the beauty I remembered, but meeting
her again and talking to her made me also remember the
reason why I didn’t really pursue a relationship with her
back then, she was now as then rather dumb and shallow.
Having gotten my illusion broken I started feeling rather
old myself and that started me thinking about how much
better things where before. Which I rationally know is not
true, things where not better before it is just that you
always forget the trouble and remember the only the good
times. I am sure that in 10 years time I will one day sitt
back and think ‘darn how much better things was 10 years
ago’, no children to feed and take care of, no wife to keep
happy and no giant house loan to strugle with, just me and
all the opportunities the world had to offer <g>

Made the switch to GNOME 2 today for the first time fully. YAY!

It is still a little rough in the edges this beta, but now
it is at least useable. Filed a bunch of bug reports on
different little things. Think I try and join up for the
next bugday to see if I can lend a hand.

I am really exited about the upcoming GStreamer release. Seems
Rhythmbox is quickly getting into a condition where it can
have its first release and same goes for the media player.

Got a hybrid GNOME 1.4 & GNOME 2.0 system running now. Have
yet to make the full switch as I am having some problems
with the GNOME 2 panel that makes it a little trouble some
to use
for me.
Think I will make the full switch at the next beta.

We posted two articles today on Linuxpower.org
on the topic of Unix and Multimedia. The first is done by me,
the second by Chris Pirazzi. Please head over and read them,
think if you are interested in video playback under Unix you
will find them very interesting.

Got two articles that was supposed to be published today, but due to the linuxpower.org server changing
ip-adress
we decided to hold them until next week so dns servers would manage to get updated.

Seems a lot of people are upset at Blizzard for stupidly shutting down a battle.net clone, well hopefully Blizzard’s
stupidity will cure some people of the habbit of doing some even more stupid namely play computer games.