Energy. Been looking into getting new job, and doing that has given me a lot of extra energy. I guess I am one of
those people who thrive on change and wither when things get stagnate. Anyways, I have put all that energy into
good use getting a lot of paperwork, house cleaning task and Linux writing stuff done.
I got the interview reponse from Sun’s John Heard, which will be the next installment in my GNOME Foundation
interviews. The first one was IBM which I mentioned in my previous diary entry. John is one cool dude, and I think
this interview will be a great success. I think that the main difference between a bad interview and a good one is
the
quality of the answers, the questions are actually not so important.
Doing such an interview I also used the opportunity to bring some spotlight on a fellow Advogato member, so
gman don’t be suprised to find your name mentioned in the interview :)

On the other stuff front; I have taken it upon myself to get the GNOME office pages on www.gnome.org
updated. For those interested the construction site can be found here. Even though I still have a lot of unimplemented plans
and there is some VERY unfinished pages, feedback is welcome.

Just posted and interview I made with IBM about their
involvement with GNOME. The plan is to make it the first in
a series, so I have already made agreements with both Sun
and RedHat. Hopefully people will find them interesting.
Anyway the interview is found
here at Linuxpower.

Back from Montpellier,France. Very cool city, never thought
a city so integrated in color, material and style existed.
Impressed the hell out of me.

For the upcomming Abiword 0.7.12 relase I
have made a set of RPMS for RedHat 6.2. Both the plain Gtk
one and the more full-features GNOME version is available.
samth, msevior, Dom and
the other Abiword hackers are doing a great job and making
good progress. My RPMS are available from my website.

My first article for some time will go up on Linuxpower as
soon as katzj finish editing it. I also
have some cool interviews in the works, especially the
Berlin-project one I think will be great.

It seems that the fun and cool hack factor is once again
resurfacing in the Linux community, after a long period now
where such stuff has been put aside in favour of corporate
or ‘pragmatic’ agendas. While I think the coporate support
is great and important to bring Linux to the masses, I think
that the cool hacks like the recent ‘ORBit to kernel’
or ‘GNOME to Windows’ ports is what makes it fun to be part
of the
linux community, ‘the expect the unexpected’ feeling is I
think in some ways fundamental in building an online
community like the Linux community.

Also cool to see that ErikLevy has started
to work for a Norwegian company, strange how small a world
this is.

Having read the recent evolution vs. creationism debate I
just had to post the universe flicker hypothesis I have been
mulling over. Not directly related to the ongoing discussion
though,since that it is not a debate I can even relate to
since I have yet to meet a person here in Norway who
seriously would try to deny the corectness of Evolution
having taken place.

So over to my flicker idea, it might be that it is something
I have unknowingly stolen, many ‘original’ ideas probably are.

My idea is that the Univere ‘flickers’ in and out of
existence sort of like the light in a neon sign about to
break. The reason this happens is due to two opposing
impossibilities, the impossibility of existence and the
impossibility of non-existence. So what I think happens is
that for some time nothing exists until the impossibility of
that situation culminates in a great explosion where things
come into existence. This explains ‘the big bang’. This
situation then continues for a while until the imposibility
of something existing negates everything. And
so the cycle continues into eternity.

To make it clear, the rate of the ‘flickering’ is in
human measurement extremly long periods of time, but for the
universe itself human time is inconseqential and therefore I
think the ‘flickering’ visualisation is good.

I have been loosely following the GNOME print project for
some time now and have as part of that been getting more
and more suprised at the multitude of solutions for
printing under Linux/Unix that are developed in
competition/ignorance of eachother.

The only consolidation that I have seen currently seem to be
on the idea or talk stage. Most noteably there has been
talk during the last 3-4 months about integrating Gimp-
print, the IBM drivers project, Ghostscript and VA printing
development with GNOME Print. The level of integration
between these modules are yet to be determined and it seems
politics as much as technical issues will determine the
final outcome.

Another printing project with which integration as been
discussed is CUPS, but it seem like many people dislike the
business model behind CUPS, combined with low printing
quality.(Never tested personally so I have no knowledge of
correctnes of printing quality claims.)

Another printing project is called Xprint, which SUN is
backing. Don’t know much about it though, but it seems
pretty basic (aka Postscript output only) to me.

In addition to these projects there are a host of
others, personally I hope most of these projects will merge
into
one hell of a great system over time instead of resulting
in a multitude of low quality/low amount of drivers
solutions.

Disclaimer: I use the work integration is a very
loose sense here :), including just adding support for
library this or that.

Waldo I had similar troubles and it seemed
that having a dos extended partition was causing therouble.
In order to make this to work smoothly try installing
Windows first, in a primary partition. Then RH7 next in
another primary partition. RH should then automatically add
you windows partition to lilo and everything should run
just fine.

Just heard that a friend of mine was commited to the
hospital due to a drug overdose. [Update: he died this
evening]
Not that he was a very close friend, but he has sort of hung
out with the same crowd of people
that I have for the last 10 years.This is the second person
that I knew well enough to call a friend to have fallen
victim to drug abuse, the first one dying due to it a couple
of years ago.

Looking at them now I can sort of see many similarities
between the two; low income, failed at school and
meeting a lot of dead ends with their careers. Wether the
drugs or problems came first for my two friends, I don’t
know, but I guess they lead into a evil circle where the
drug problems feed the social problems and vica versa.

Guess it doesn’t make me a very good person, but my
dominant feeling when thinking about my two friends is
not compassion for their problems, but more a relief that I
have myself escaped such problems and hardships in
my own life.

There is an fun discussion between RMS and the leader of the
Crystal Space project to be found here.
What makes it sort of funny is two things, the fact that the
CS guy simply doesn’t understand what RMS means by free
software at all in the beginning and not understanding why
RMS
don’t want to discuss OpenSource software and RMS on the
other hand is so completly ignorant of stuff like what a PS2
and DirectX is that that also causes some confusions.

As always RMS gets a lot of criticism on ‘popular’
discussions
sites for not being willing to compromise. Personally I have
big trouble by seeing why people hold up compromise as some
sort of higher ideal. Sometimes holding to a firm belief is
more appropriate,
unless you want to be a complete idiot who stands waving a
worthless compromise agreement while uttering words like
‘Peace in our time’

mathieu just put up a list of people he
would like to see elected to the GNOME Foundation board and
I think it is a good list. My first thought was to put up my
own list of candidates too, but starting with Matheiu list I
had a hard time deciding who to delete, I guess I have some
hard decisions to make before casting my vote :)

So I will instead just make some extra recomandations:

• First of all I suggest altering the list so
  that Martin Baulig and Miguel de Icaza both
  gets on the board.

• I also suggest adding Michael Meeks to the
  list.
  Michael has been one of the core Gnumeric hackers and is
  currently doing some great work on Bonobo. Michael is
  working for HelixCode and is located in England.

• The third candidate I would like to see is Bertrand
  Guiheneuf a long time GNOME contributor (ObjC bindings
  and early incarnations of Evolution.) and founder of
  Henzai, a company which
  is making GNOME run on handhelds etc.

As mentioned I haven’t really decided who I am going to
remove from Matheiu original list to make room for these
candidates, but
I want to say that since all these alternative candiates are
coders, if you decide to add them your own ballot list, you
probably should replace some of the other coders. Currently
there are only two people on the list who aren’t primarly
coders and I think decreasing that percentage even more
would be a bad thing.