17th of May, it is Norway’s national day today yet I am at
work. One more case of having big trouble getting Oracle
Applications to play nice after an upgrade. I am starting
to come to the conclusion that is was a mistake of my to
start working in the technical field. I have a Masters
degree in Marketing and Economics yet is spending my days
in a telnet session pendling Unix commands and SQL scripts.
It is a saying which says you shouldn’t make your hobby you
work, and I am starting to think its true. Having my hobby
also being my work is taking the fun out of my
hobby.

My Uncle wants me to come and work with him at his company
doing Management Consulting, I might just do that.

Got the latest GNOME Weekly summary posted last night.
Got some criticism for metioning the probable imminent
Eazel shutdown, since there haven’t been any official Eazel
announcment yet. And I see the point that people might see
anything that is in the summaries as something official,
but on the other hand I didn’t want it to look like we
tried to cover it up or something by not mentioning it.

Didn’t get it up on Gnotices however since there was some
small startup problems with the new Gnotice setup. It is
fixed now, but I need to chat with Elliot to get my
administrator account for the new Gnotices activated.

Crudman thanks for the Nvidia patch,
doesn’t work yet for me, but I haven’t had that much time
to look at it yet either.

raph: I don’t agree with you on suggesting
that gregf posting belongs on Skolos. His
posting was not really about sex the way I saw it, it was a
opinion piece on western judgementalness and to some extent
racist opinions of a country and their culture. By asking
him to move I almost feelt like you placed yourself in the
same category as his australian ex-friend.

Being the founder of Advogato I guess you have the
inside track on what Advogato is supposed to be, but there
has been lots of political postings here before without you
stricking out at it.

Ok, over to something that is definetly Advogato related. I
tried out Galeon
today with Mozilla 0.9. (I compiled galeon using Mozilla 0.9
and the –enable-mozilla-cvs parameter). WOW! The rendering
speed is simply increadible, Galeon must now be the fastest
web browser available on Linux. I have tested most Linux
browsers, including other who claim to be fast like
Konqueror and Opera, but no browser has impressed me so much
speedwise as this latest Galeon+Moz release did. Thanks for
the incredible work.

Hate, a word I become quite familiar with last night.
The background is that last Friday I where to have my
sailboat set on water. But I after me and my friends
arrived at the harbour we where told that the crane cable
was begining to break so they couldn’t set out somethings
as heavy as a sailboat. Ok, a little irritated that they
didn’t call and tell us that our appointment was cancelled,
but we didn’t complain.

Ok yesterday second attempt. Arrives at the harbour and the
boat is lifted onto the river. It turns out the river is to
shallow and the sailboat stands on its keel on the bottom
of the river. The harbour master tells us just to wait a
couple of hours until the tide comes in and everything will
be fine. Ok, while we felt that he as a proffesional should
have a) checked how deep the river was and b) have maybe
waited until high-tide to set the boat on the water we
didn’t complain. Ok, tide comes in and boat doesn’t budge,
still to shallow. Harbour master suggests we wait till
morning since the tide might be higher then. Ok, we have no
choice but to accept that.

Arrive at harbour this morning
and boat is still stuck, the tide isn’t any higher (didn’t
really expect it to be.) Not only that, but that asshole
harbour master wasn’t there and doesn’t arrive before
midday, aargh. Hope that bloody ass has a plan for how to
get the boat onto the ocean, cause I getting tired of his
bloody amatourism and passive attitude toward our problem.
(Which will be his problem too since he can’t put any other
boats on the water until we are moved.)

Ok, a small, yet irritating, dark could is hanging over my
new SGI/Red Hat XFS system. The problem is with devfs,
which I think is a great thing technically, but current
practical limitations give me a headache. I even emailed
the devfs creator Richard Gooch who replied back to me the
same day. And even though I am gratefull for Richard taking
the time to answer a email from a end-user like myself, he
confirmed my theory that I need to make some sort of script
which recreates my /dev nodes for the drivers I need
which /devfs currently doesn’t support. This is mainly the
sounddriver and the commercial NVIDIA driver in my case.

So now I am pondering wether to: a) try to figure out
how to
make such a script or b) simply reinstall to basic RH7.1
again. Making such a script would probably be a good
learning experience and it would allow me to keep my cool
bleeding edge devfs/XFS system. The downside is that I
don’t really want to spend a couple of evenings researching
how to do it. I guess the compromise here is just to try to
find some examples scripts online or some sort of howto, if
I find that I go for the script making solution, if not I
go for the reinstall.

The GNOME.no team is meeting for a couple of beers in
Oslo today. We will join up at Cafe SjakkMatt at 1900, then
probably move on to somewhere which has outdoor serving
(with just 3 months of summer each year we have to use them
to the maximum :). We have a nice growth rate going from 3
persons the last time to 5 this time. Guess we
have to start make reservations soon for our gatherings :)

The meeting is mostly a social event, but we also have to
decide wether to register as a foundation or an volunteer-
organisation. While it would be nice to register as a
foundation like GNOME international is, it do put some
extra work on our hands which includes such stuff as
writing laws and sending in a yearly financial statement
even if we have no money transactions. If we just register
as a volunteer-organisation things are much less formal.
Could be that there are some good financial/practical
reasons for becoming a foundation in Norway, but I have
failed to discover what that is unless you plan on making
it a business-venture of some sort.

I have now succesfully migrated my computer setup from basic
RH7.1 to the SGI XFS version of RH7.1. Well, kinda
succesful. The SGI setup used devfs which if for no other
reason than my infamilarity and lack of support in the
Redhat configuration tools have been causing me some
problems. The main problem is that I am at the moment unable
to setup my soundcard and nvidia card properly since the
configuration setup seems to be nullified by devfs each time
I reboot. So I am using the bundled nv driver at the moment
are rerun the rh sound setup tool whenever I want sound.
Guess I have to read up on devfs and how to get things
working with it. XFS on the other hand, which was the reason
I did this, works perfectly so far.

Also got my GUADEC 2 summary ready and posted so those
interested can find it at Linuxpower

My first ever GNOME-summary is going up this evening, which
I hope will be well recieved. I also hope to get some other
writing tasks going, mainly cleaning up my GUADEC2 report
and finishing my Jim Getty’s interview.

As soon as that is done I guess I need to make arrangements
for more interviews :), problem is that summer is finally
arriving and I have to admit that I prefer spending my
summerdays and evenings doing other things than poke at my
keyboard.

Long time without a diary entry, but then again it has been
slow weeks for me at least Linux-wise. Haven’t done
anything really productive for 3 weeks now I think, just
working and hanging out with friends, preparing the
sailboat for summer etc.

I have started writing a the GNOME summaries with the first
one planned up on sunday/monday. Me and Steve George will
take turns doing it so hopefully between us we can manage
to keep a weekly schedule. Thanks to Havoc for asking me to
start doing them.

Women problems again. Don’t understand why really. It is
not that I have a problem meeting women, but for some
reason the women who are attracted to me I don’t find
attractive, and on the other side the women I do find
attractive are usually not attraced to me. Aargh its so
frustrating.

Strange how some things really gets to you, because when you
try to think about them objectivly you can’t see why the
events meant so much to you. Guess the small signs of
communication sometimes lead you to get more emotionally
involved in another person than what is objectivly warranted.

jaq wrote:

As for #gnome, it was middle of the night UK
time, so I’ll give you that. The thing that irked me was
that conversation occurred around my question, and yet
there was no ACK that people didn’t know the answer. Is
that a trait of the channel? Here in .au, people tend to
give a NAKs as often as ACKs. Maybe I’ll come and lurk for
a while.

Unfortunatly I have to say it seems to be a trait for
the channel, at least sometimes. I think part of the
problem is that #GNOME is to big so most people with the
know-how don’t really follow the discussion but only
responds when adressed directly.

There are some people responding though
Telsa being probably the best at it. And I
try to respond myself sometimes, but I too tend to focus on
other channels most of the time so when my name is not
being addresed I often miss questions being asked.

My suggestion is trying the smaller channels on GIMPNET
since there are a much better chance of getting a reponse
there. Another alternative is if you now the handle of the
maintainer of the module you wonder about so you can try to
address him/her directly.

Anyway if your questions don’t
get answered and I am in the channel, try typing in my
handle (Uraeus) and I will try to help. I seldom now the
answer, but I usually know who you should ask :)