Back from vacation in the sunny hills of France. Nice to get away from the stress of daily life for a while. We had great weather all week and apart from the skiing I really enjoyed just sitting in the Sun relaxing and reading.

Was driving the car home from France part of the way. Came to the conclusion that driving at about 100 km/h when the fog is so thick that you just see 2-3 meters in front of the car is rather exhausting.

Now I need to get ajour again with getting stuff ready for the multimedia track at GUADEC, getting Nuvola updated with all the icons David sent me.

Ralph Giles put up his design ideas for embeding MNG images in Ogg files. Hopefully we will get this working before GUADEC. Our goal is to be able to overlay the camera capture of the speaker onto a PNG image embeded in the video stream taken directly from the desktop or office application. This should give you readable slides when watching the stream online instead of seeing the speaker and a blurry and unreadable projected slide on the wall behind him.

Some Brazilien developers are looking into RTP support in GStreamer and Flumotion. They are looking at using a library called ccRTP for this which is licensed under a GPL & exception license. The exception is basically making the GPL into the LGPL, or at least what we all believe about the LGPL. The reason fro this setup is explained in this information from GNU, it seems that LGPL C++ libraries could be interpreted to have demands on them similar to what you would expect from a GPL licensed library. I have no idea wether this interpretation is valid, but it strikes of one more example of how easy it is for us common people to assume stuff about how licensing works, then have the rug pulled out from under us when the lawyers get involved.

Hopefully we be able to sort Zeenix’s visa troubles out the coming week. Since we already bought the ticket it would be a shame to see that money just go down the drain.

So my money trouble are over for this time. Like all high-flyers I restructured my debt to sort things out. Also known as getting money from mom. Not very prestigious, but it works.

Also sorted out my flight tickets today, by rebooking my ticket back from London on Sunday to instead fly me to Grenoble, and bus from there to met up with the rest of the Fluendo crew for some skiing and snowboarding action.

Upgraded Cedega yesterday evening to try World of Warcraft in OpenGL mode. It made quite a difference with my fps increasing by about 20 on average.

Also thought about the Transgaming business model lately. Think the basic idea is sound, but it must be quite a pain to handle sometime. I mean having your customers pay to be able to vote on items they want fixed/changed is probably a quite hard balancing act between keeping customers happy, impossible vote winners/proposals and moving targets. To bad they didn’t manage to make it work within the context of the wine project.

Think I have been living a bit over my means the last few months (surround sound system probably biggest sin). Discovered today that I was 80 Euro in the red. Which isn’t big amount, but considering that its 7 days after salary day and I have some big expenses coming up it do feel a bit worrisome. Think I need to be a fiscally conservative for the next few months so that I have money again for summer. Or maybe my friends in Norway will manage to get the sailboat sold so I get some extra pocket change.

Going to London this weekend. Lots of nice stuff lined up both workwise and socially. (of course they also all mean more cash expenditure ;)

Thomas mailed me today telling me the sysadmin running the server where we both hosts our sites said that my sites where already above the expected traffic for hosted sites. Checked the stats and noticed I had 50 000 hits on linuxrising.org last month. Can’t understand why as there is nothing happening there, even my blog is just syndicated from other pages. Only guess I have is that maybe my pictures from Borneo, Australia and Africa are being linked to from some popular travel information site or something. Or maybe more people like looking at the GNOME screenshots I post from time to time than I thought. Or maybe my mom is getting psycho about me not living in Norway anymore :)

On the GStreamer side I am very happy to see the iTunes integration work being done. Noticed Ronald didn’t mention the name of the person who is doing it, so I guess that person don’t want to be named just yet, so I am not saying who it is either :) Thanks I guess is all I can say at this point.

JeffTV is quite cool, its very nice when you see other people take something you have been closely involved in the making of and doing fun stuff with it. Maybe Jeff will get a sponsorship for a show and can start going around to people with old computers, take them away, mod them, then return them to the original owners with a rad new look. Kinda like that car show on MTV :)

Have my youngest sister visiting this week, as she is taking a short break from student life in Rome. She will have to tend for herself the last two days however as I will be flying to Hamburg in the weekend to attend my stepgrandmothers 80th birthday.

So some of us are pitching in to pay for Zeeshan coming to GUADEC this year, which has its own little series of confusing bits to sort of. Called Turkish airlines today to order his ticket. Since my spanish is still at infant stages I called the London office of Turkish airlines. Don’t think they have many cases of a person in Barclona (a Norwegian even) calling the London office to order a flight for a person from Karachi to Stuttgart. The number of times she asked me to wait a bit (think she was running around the office asking for advice) was rather high. So in the end I think they figured out the steps needed for someone in Barcelona to pay the London office so that the Karachi office can hand out a ticket to another person. :)

GStreamer:

Weird bugs. So we have a weird bug currently. I have been using the UK Virgin Radio Ogg streams as testbeds for Totem supporting chained oggs properly. Well currently I have the strange problem that if I click on the links they work, but if I drag and drop the URL onto Totem it doesn’t work. Ronald is unable to reproduce, on his system the streams play when drag and dropped. So anyone reading this I would be happy if you could try drag and dropping one of these URLS onto totem and see if it plays, then report your success or failure to this bugzilla entry.

FOSDEM:

We went to FOSDEM and both Wim and Thomas did talks. The talks went well, but the conference was a bit wasted on me. Being rather sick the whole time I had little energy for anything above moving myself from one place to another. Felt a bit better on Sunday afternoon and Julien, Wingo and myself first took some beers with Alex and Pippin, with also Charles partaking in this first part, then went on for a nice meal and some good beer at a resturant Julian knew.

Fluendo:

With only me and Wingo in the office today we have finally been able to work uninterupted. On that note Wingo is really starting to kick ass and taking names in his Akido classes. Last week he beat up a nine year old girl at the akido club. He know feels ready to move on to beating up little boys.

Jeff put up a stream today using Flumotion. I viewed with David Schleefs Mozilla plugin in progress. Took first this screenshot, but Jeff thought it looked to stern so I also took this shot of a more jovial Jeff. See and enjoy, especially his cool overlay image :)

So I have continued playing World of Warcraft under Linux. Mostly happy about it as it seems most of my performance issues are on the Blizzard side ie. server overload or bandwith saturation on their side. Also noticed that the Wine guys have World of Warcraft going in OpenGL mode now, which is very cool. Cedega, which I now use, is only able to get it working with the essential minimap in DX9 mode, which is supposed to be slower. Big thumbs up to the wine developers. As soon as a release with the needed fixes are out I will try switching over. Considering that World of Warcraft is still the game getting most votes I hope that Transgaming continue improving their support though. One thing I am curios about wether I will be able to get working is the surround sound.

I am now a level 16 Gnome warrior (what else :) and are thinking of trying to set up a guild for Linux using players. Any other european players out there interested in joining let me know, I am on the Agamaggan realm, currently exploring the area around Darkshore.

Jimmac mailed the librsvg mailing list recently and Dom replied to him explained some of the work that Caleb and he is doing. The ongoing work have some really cool possibilities (apart from Cairo support) like the possibility for much improved SVG support in Gimp which was what Jimmac was wondering about. Dom did send out a request for assistance from someone with some gimp-fu knowledge, so if you are that person know your visitation hour.

The GStreamer Summit has winded down, but the whole Fluendo team will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels this coming weekend. Thomas and Wim will both to talks in the GNOME hackers room about Flumotion and GStreamer, so anyone is welcome (especially since neither topic is especially GNOME specific).

So the GStreamer Summit is over, but some of the participants still linger. The summit went very well with thomas posting a nice summary to the gstreamer list. Hopefully these plans will let us move fast forward toward GStreamer 1.0 and world domination :)

We had a discussion today with David Schleef about liboil and how to make it widely used. Liboil is a library containing optimized asm routines for a variety of platforms for common functions, like memcopy/setcopy for instance. Currently we have a situation where most projects add their own asm optimizations for common routines, which has the sideeffect that most things are only optimized with mmx and maybe altivec, but little else. By centralizing this into liboil we hope to get implementations for more obscure platforms and through that helping people not using i386 or PowerPPC to also get optimizations and make such optimizations more common also for apps on the two major platforms. David have already added SPARC optimizations to liboil for instance.

So what we need now is for a lot of central pieces to start using liboil, and the way to accomplish that was what we discussed. Currently GStreamer and swfdec uses among popular products. We want and are trying to get projects such as libtheora, cairo, gdkpixbuf and others to also start using to get critical mass. Hopefully we suceed and you will get a much faster system in the future, no matter what CPU architecture you use :)

Been playing World of Warcraft a bit during the last few days. Its a really addictive game and it works very nicely under Cedega. Mike Hearn pointed my to a long WoW thread on the Wine mailing list today which gives me hope that also standard wine will support it soon, maybe even using the OpenGL option.

I ended up buying a license to Cedega to play WoW. I am ok with having done that as it have enabled me to play the game. Question now of course is wether to keep subscribing to Transgaming. Their voting system is ok, but the system is a bit confusing for a newbie and there is no clear way for me to make it clear I bought Cedega to WoW and without further WoW related fixes being worked on there is little motivation for me to keep subscribing when this initial period ends. While fixes for updated distros for instance is nice it is also clear that before the current Cedega stops working I will probably be over my urge to play WoW and have no need of Cedega anymore anyway.

On the topic of gaming, Epic-Megagames have still not released the patch to Robin Hood they promised which sucks. On the other side the game has worn out its interest for me anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much. I grow tired of a game usually after 3-4 days and since there are relatively few games coming out for Linux it means I don’t play games that much :)

The GStreamer summit underway

Check Fluendo office stream to see and hear the summit as it happens :)