Why is nothing ever easy? Having meet the girl of my dreams
I am having big trouble getting her to become a real part of
my life and not just a passing ship in the night.
Maybe that is why she is the girl of my dreams, since like
with all dreams they disappear when you try to hold on, only
to leave you realizing the dream was never anything but an
illussion to begin with.

Life is always a series of ups and downs, yet this time I
feel the choice is between my greatest up or my most
sorrowfull down. Yet the problem with this struggle is that
I can’t really fight it myself, I am left drifting on the
seas of destiny wondering if the enchanting siren will swim
out to joyfully meet me or lure me to my doom.

Okay time for a new episode up in my series of sarcastic
diary entries.

Ralsina
wrote: I still feel Debian has, in general, acted wrong
in the past, but I will apologize and forgive.

Did you hear that Debian developers? What is it people do
when someone forgive them, ah yes now I remember, I think
this calls for a press release posted on Slashdot called:
Debian to Ralsina: That is absurd.

Next item:
b) Nautilus (and other GNOME programs) are GPL and link
(optionally) to mozilla. Mozilla is still not compatible
with the GPL. Shouldn’t those programs be declared “not
properly licensed” by Debian, too?

hmm, how could one possibly respond to such great
logic…..
wait what is this!!! in the Galon license there is this
little notice:
The present copyright holders of this file have given
permission,
as a special exception, to link this file with the Mozilla
rendering component and distribute linked executables, as
long as you follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in regard
to all of the
software in the executable aside from that component.

Shit, the Galeon developers have actually added the clause
that Debian requested KDE to add, but why have they done
that when according to Ralsina only KDE would not be allowed
to get away with faulty licensing. It sure is a strange
world we live in.

It just occured to me what being a KDE developer is all about; it is living in constant denial.

I mean take the licensing issue, before the QPL there wasn’t a problem.
Then the QPL came and fixed the problem that never was.
Then the GPL’ing of Qt came and fixed a problem that never existed.

Or on the technical level:
Mico was fast enough and GNOME’rs claiming otherwise was spreading FUD.
Then TinyMico comes along to solve a problem that never existed.
Miguel was acussed spreading FUD when he said the KOM/OpenParts wasn’t good enough
Then DCOP comes as a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

On the distribution level:
Corel and Caldera bundle only KDE, which is a good thing since it proves that KDE is the standard.
Sun, IBM and HP decides to support GNOME, which is a bad thing since it removes user choice.

Wov, I don’t envy those guys, it must be a hard life to live, everything you do and say creating a contradiction.

Guess I should have learned my lesson of not writing an
editorial as
a response to reading stuff that has provoced/angered me.
The result is usually just non-productive flamebait :)

Back from the LWE even if I managed to miss my airplane. The nice people at United gave me a new ticket for the
next day without extra cost though. Got to stay one more day in San Francisco, great city.

Loved the Gnome Foundation stuff that happened during the expo, getting all these highly experienced engineers
from Sun, HP, IBM etc. working on GNOME will be a great boon to the project in my opinion. Not that the current
crew doesn’t do a splendid job, but more people means that more of the most ambitious plans can be realized
faster.

Some of the comments to the GNOME Foundation announcement from despairing KDE fans and developers are
just to silly to believe. I think the most absurd claim is that of GNOME being a corporate sellout, which coming
from the loyal servants of Troll Tech seems a tad hairy. Unfair to compete through marketing is another favourite,
yes; sending out press releases telling the world that these companies will dedicate engineering resources to
GNOME and start to use it as their GUI is reeeaally evil. KDE ‘never’ announce it when somebody gives them
some sort of support.

Anyways, back to the LWE, has anyone else also noticed that swag has a tendency to turn into dirty laundry?

Finally things are slowing down at work at I can focus some
more on Linux stuff again, got an article/tutorial on the
GNOME panel which I got started on yesterday for starters.

The what should be in gtk instead of gnome-libs debate seems
to refuse to die down on gnome-list. Wonder if these people
asking for all these different things moved from gnome-libs
to gtk since they only need ‘that’ one feature, realize that
if the GNOME authors caved in and moved all that stuff, then
all that stuff they claimed they didn’t need and therefore
didn’t want to link to GNOME libs due too, would instead be
in Gtk………

Working on a Saturday sucks, especially when I could have been out sailing in the sun instead.

Otherwise a fun week, the StarOffice announcement took me by suprise, especially since StarOffice has limited
KDE support at the moment and no GNOME support. Well, nice to see them wise up.
Since Caldera owns Openoffice.org and their relationship with Sun I wonder if this also means a new direction
from
them, yet another convert to the free software camp would be nice.

My Linux work has really suffered the last couple of weeks, no articles written for Linuxpower and no work on
getting my GNOME-python skills moving. Have found myself an even easier learning project than the icewm
gnome-capplet thingie though. A wrapper script for gtkyahoo which lets you configure username and password
through a Gtk\GNOME gui. Simpler than that I think would be difficult to find :)

Seems like my first USA trip is coming up. I am going to
San Jose/San Francisco to join Jeremy
Katz in staffing the Linuxpower booth at LWE. Hopefully
I will get to see some of San Francisco too when I am there,
and even find some fun way to celebrate my birthday on the
15th of August.

Noticed that Trebinor
has pretty much decided to take my suggestion of looking at
Xtraceroute. Just shows how much can be accomplished when
hanging out at #linuxpower.

Hasn’t had the time to work much more on learning to program
with Gnome-python, but expect to get some time to spare
during next week. If anyone has some nice example
gnome-python code for making a control-center applet, please
send it to me.

My editorial
on the Linux desktop future was well recieved, I almost
didn’t even get flamed at all, hmm. Hope that doesn’t mean
that I have become to edgeless in my editorials. Some people
was unhappy with my use of the word war etc., but I think
that if you are to keep an editorial interesting and
eyecatching you need to wrap it in words and sentences that
gives some feeling of action and urgency.

I started looking into programming with the GNOME python
bindings today. I actually think I finally will learn to do
some
productive coding using these. My first project is creating
a GNOME
control center applet for configuring IceWM. Just wish that
there was some easy way to make the control center only show
the configuraton entries for the windowmanager currently
used.

I also use CodeCommander as my IDE, this is another great
app.

Cleaned my appartment today in a big way, funny how nice it
is
to be in an appartment that is clean and tidy, to bad it
will
not stay this way for long :)

I also got an Enlightenment article
edited and sent of
today, will probably go up on Linuxpower
monday.

Techrepublic did a review of the Helix GNOME install. I
always thought that
GNOME would dominate the Linux desktop
as a result of being
technically superior, but after seeing
the response to the Helix
installer I have come to the
conclusion that the ease of use and
install that Helix
provides will probably be a bigger success
factor for GNOME
that the technical qualities.

Of course ease of install isn’t
worth much if what you
install is crap so the qualities of GNOME is
not
unimportant, but I am quite sure that the mass adoption and
migration to GNOME
we see these days, wouldn’t have come
about without the Helix
installer.

Speaking of success, I think the recent annoucement by Troll
Tech to alter their
QPL license, is a direct response to the
tremendous response of
GNOME 1.2, just like the QPL was a
direct response to the
threat posed by Harmony.
This time it will get them nowhere however,
actually wonder
how long it will take before Troll Tech gets desperate
enough
to LGPL Qt, or maybe they decide that the desktop war
is a lost
cause and that they will never own the Linux
desktop anyway.