Been getting more and more involved with the political side of software recently. Getting market acceptance is hard work and there are many ‘games’ which have to be played in order to get to the goal. There are of course some standarisation stuff happening in the free software world, through things like Linux Standard Base and freedesktop.org. But we are still babe’s in the woods compared to the wider world. But who know’s, maybe we can have GNOME declared an ISO standard at some point :)
Hectic week
Was a hectic last week with a visit to Helsinki from Wednesday to Friday. It was Wim and I who traveled from Barcelona up north and it turned out we where not the only ones there. Mikael Hallendal, Richard Hult and Tim Jannick from Imendio had by coincidence also some meetings with Nokia. Since Nokia is gearing up to start selling the 770 soon we discussed areas of cooperation for future software and hardware upgrades. Can’t of course blog about the details, but the meetings where positive and I think some exciting things will come out of it for everyone involved, including the community of course.
Also meet Zeeshan for the first time outside IRC. He seemed to have managed to adjust to life in Finland quite fine and seems happy with his job at Movial. Introduced him to the magic of Guinness beer, which I think he still needs a couple of more months to fully appreciate. It was fun meeting him, and hopefully Wim and I didn’t come of as too boring :)
Talking about boring, the Imendio guys are growing old and tired I think. The first night we didn’t get them to come out at all, and the second night they ran back to their hotel right after dinner. Could of course be my deoderant being bad or Mikael getting nervous after our discussion about the uses of baby oil, but I think its mostly that its natural for Swedes to grow old and frail quickly. In fact I think I noticed Mikael having grey hair above his ears now. I think for GUADEC here in Barcelona next year I will buy both him and Richard a walking chair each, so they can manage to get around and see a little of town.
It seems Michael Meeks will be in town tomorrow. Hopefully Novell Brainshare will not slurp away all his time so we can meet up for some good tapas and catching up. I don’t know about brainshare, but I guess it might be unrelated to Gandhi saying ‘Better with braindrain than brain in the drain’.
Anyone seen the Amulet of Yendor?
Would be interesting to do a poll over how many GNOME hackers have actually managed to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor in netHack. I am not one of them, but I am sure there are some out there :)
Rhythmbox magic
Charles Schmidt checked his DAAP work into Rhythmbox CVS today. This means that if you update to it you should be able to share music between Rhythmbox and iTunes clients on your LAN. Sweet stuff :)
I do have it running now, but since I am the only one in my LAN with it there was a limited amount of sharing. I did however succesfully have my user run RB pick up the sharing of my root run RB :). screenshot provided as proof
Movies
So being sick at the end of last week and not fully recovered during the weekend I used the opportunity to watch most of the movies in Jan’s DVD collection which I hadn’t seen before. And for the most part I realized there was a good reason for me not having seen them before.
The best of the pack was probably Legally blonde. While being based on rather well used elements at least it contained a shred of a message and the main character did actually have some development through the movie. And some of the gags where not so overdone they stopped being funny.
On the other hand the sequal was just pure crap. Like it was cute and funny when she had an iBook in the first movie where the rest of the class was using uniform looking black laptops, but the pink colored beast in the followup just went overboard and became stupid instead of silly. And every ‘joke’ in the movie was like that, they took something from the first movie and made it even more of a extreme.
Another movie I had the ‘pleasure’ of seeing was
Two weeks notice with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. A typical weakly scripted romantical comedy, but the main problem here is that it felt like both Hugh and Sandra where both getting rather tired of staring in these kind of movies so both of them where radiating a heavy dose of ‘lack of energy’ and ‘are we done we this scene yet’.
Also got to see 13 Going on 30 starring Jennifer Garner. Seemed to want to be the girlie version of Big, but no matter what angle you play it the movie stunk. The main character was very unconvincing, depicting a level of innocense in relation to sex for instance that only a 13 year old living in an amish boot camp can be believed to possess. Her reactions and those of her surroundings felt so fake that it came across quite clear that they had a plot, but forgot to write a real script to implement it.
Also had a dose of Kevin Smith movies. Saw both Clerks and Mallrats in addition to having seen Chasing Amy earlier in the week with the rest of the guys. Where not to impressed by either Clerks or Mallrats. Both being very similar, with two very unlikeable main characters and frequent appearances by Jay and Silent Bob. At the end of Mallrats I was actually hoping that the father would manage to send his daughter of with someone else and that the second guy would lose his girlfriend to Ben Afflecks character, so worthless was the main characters. I still think that Chasing Amy is a really great movie, but neither Clerks or Mallrats are even in the same ballpark.
Also saw Stepford wives. Not all bad I guess, but the whole storyline felt like it came out 30 years to late.
An example for GNOME theming?
Seems Citroën agrees with me that Giger style theming is a necesity.
Crazy frog downloads.
I put up two versions of the crazy frog image for download here one 1280×1024 for desktop background use. And a bigger 640×480 version of the one I posted in my previous blog.
GNOME 2.12 logo contest winner
This logo made by me could have won the GNOME 2.12 splash screen contest, at least it got the full endorsement of Luis. Unfortunatly due to a technical glitch another image will end up in the actual release, due to some silly rule about actually winning the contest.
New man at the Xiph RTP helm
I announced today that Luca Barbato would take over as project lead in charge of sherpherding the Theora and Vorbis RTP specifications to completion. Due to various reasons this work got stalled, but hopefully with fresh blood at the helm we can move things to conclusion. A lot of people are expression interest in ‘Ogg’ RTP and it would be nice to have something ready for them to start implementing and adding to their programs. With Thomas and Wim having worked much lately on RTP streaming support in GStreamer and Flumotion it would also be nice to be able to have it ready so we could start implementing support for it in the GPL version of Flumotion.
New librsvg release
Helped send out the release announcement today of
librsvg 2.11.0. It will probably be our last libart only release as most work goes towards CVS head where the Cairo support is added.
Desktop Glitz
Seems quite a few people agreed with my previous blog about eyecandy. Been thinking about how we could proceed with the issue. One thing which could be interesting to do was to host a call on for instance art.gnome.org where we ask artists to come up with mockups for what kind of themes or effects they would like to have available. Then we review those mockups and proposals and try to come up with a todo list for the various projects like GTK+, gnome-panel and Metacity for what they need to add in order to enable such things. Like if we want animated or shaped borders in metacity what would need to happen and how should it happen. If we want to have the gnome-panel look like a Giger like cloud of swarming larvas to go with our Giger inspired desktop, what would need to happen. The goal would be that GNOME continues to look like today out of the box, but people can grab themes and extension packs that can give them very dazzling looks to the desktop.
The age of litigation
Seems copyright infringement lawsuits are popping up like mushrooms these days. A couple of weeks ago I saw the movie the Island getting sued for beeing similar to an old movie called the Clonus Horrors. This week its the makers of the television series Lost who gets sued by a writer called Anthony Spinner who says he wrote something similar back in the 70’ties. And I have earlier blogged about the lawsuit against The DaVinci code book by Dan Brown. I have for a while held the belief that copyright was a good IP tool as it was weak enough to allow co-existence of a lot of similar works, which I think would be essential to avoid litigation hell in a world where huge amounts of books, songs and movies are made every year. Well hopefully the courts will prove me right and these lawsuits will fail, but if they don’t then I guess my beliefs about copyright are wrong.
Jonathan Schwartz’s thinking good thoughts
I think the Kodak Java lawsuit started a internal process at Sun where they are slowly re-evaluating their stances on a lot of issues
related to IP. Jonathan Schwartz for instance have been writting more and more blogs where he shows some good thinking, this last one showing the double standard of the content industries for instance. Good going Jonathan! Maybe its time to buy some of those Sun/AMD boxes :)
Pure pwnage
So I discovered the internet craze that is Pure Pwnage. Especially episode two is simply hillarious. I can even relate to Jeremy in the clips as I do tend to 0wn at Quake3 here at the office, of course it isn’t hard as everyone else here is a n00b. They also have a good Wikipedia entry.
GStreamer 0.9
We got two important pieces for GStreamer 0.10 in GNOME 2.14 in place yesterday. Wingo finished porting over the mixer interface which is used in things such as the panel volume applet and Ronald ported the FLAC plugin over getting us full coverage of the free codecs. To see if more people was interested to get involved I sent out a mail with a list of plugins that needed porting. Anyone out there who wants to get involved in GStreamer hacking, this is the time and place. Pick something on that list and start porting (or be 0wned)
SVG
Cleaned up my SVG test page yesterday. It now have four different versions and both rendering backend of librsvg on display. Rock on me!
Testing SVG renderes
After SVG Open got a lot of attention I got motivated to do something with SVG this weekend. So I created a bunch of scripts to generate png files from various svg rendering systems and a webpage displaying these png files side by side.
The results can be seen here on my SVG test page. As you can see librsvg is compares pretty well to the competition, although it seems our recent changes to add Cairo support have lead to quite a few regressions as librsvg was almost perfect earler for the non-text tests on that page.
ARGH!!
So am using Epiphany currently, the GNOME intergrated browser. So I decided to try drag&dropping an image from the browser into the Gimp.
Well it works as Gimp accepts the drop, but it turns out that since the Gimp in their brilliance don’t use gnome-vfs they didn’t have anything able to retrieve the image..great… So I decided to try EOG and gThumb instead, well it turns out these use gnome-vfs, at least EOG does, but they don’t accept the drop…..AAARGH, sometimes I want to scream!