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.

Found out you can’t use the edit function to fix typos in
your diary entries. Then you end up with the date being
moved forward.
So I am now making a new entry to replace an old one :)

Seems like Helix Code employs a new person each day, those
guys are really aiming at getting somewhere fast. Only part
that worries me a bit as that the focus of these developers
will be moved to align with the Helix business plan which
might leave other important part of GNOME without enough
developers. Then again I think the added value that Helix
brings GNOME will probably bring in a lot more new
developers as GNOME gets better at a lightning pace. People
have a tendency to be drawn towards succesful projects I
think.

Did get involved in the cschtml/gtkhtml discussion on the
gnome-list, from reading the posts here on Advogato it seems
like this has been discussed elsewhere too. Noticed btw.
that the gconf dependency of gtkhtml was removed in CVS
today.

This Debian /KDE debate is really getting me irritated.
Stupid illiterates attacking the GPL, why the heck are these
newbie dorks using Linux? If the license is such a pain for
them use another OS and shut up.

Well, I probably should try to keep to my stay-out program
and focus on doing positive things for free software instead
of letting Troll Tech and their dupes irritate me.

The Sam Lantiga interview is ready and commited, also
commited my long in the making CSC Mail review. Also Rob
Warren have written a really good article for us on OpenLaw
which went up today on Linuxpower, to bad Slashdot haven’t
linked to it, think it would have sparked a healthy
discussion.

I have also written an editorial called: The Linux desktop
Wars: Chapter Two.
None of the people I have gotten to test read it agree with
me, but I haven’t gotten any feedback that has made me want
to change it
significantly.
I let it rest a day or two, look at at it, and if I still
think it’s arguments hold water I submit it.