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 :)

Hula & OpenGroupware.org

So it seems Novell is doing a mail and calender server called Hula. Originally I wondered why they did it instead of just contributing to OpenGroupWare. Still don’t understand their initial motivation, but after reading JWZ’s blog about it I at least think they have a valid reason for doing it now, thanks to JWZ. Making something much more narrow and focused (and hopefully something easier to install, as I gave up installing OpenGroupWare and have been waiting for an opportunity to get help from Thomas in getting it running). What we need to decide on at Fluendo is wether to go for OpenGroupWare as an end to end solution for our mail,calendaring and CRM needs or go for Hula combined with something else like the web based CRM tools I have been blogging about earlier. Guess one decision factor would be to see how Noodle progress and if this development will affect Noodle in any way. Noodle doesn’t exactly seem like a buzzing project so I do worry that waiting on it is like waiting for the return of Christ, an excercise in misplaced patience. On the other side the Hula page doesn’t seem to mention syncing with handhelds in any way at all which is part of Noodle’s goals. Which means waiting for Hula to sync with cellphone calendar might be just as big an excercise in misplaced patience. Wish the multisync project was a bit more active….

librsvg & Cairo

Caleb Moore has as good as finished his rework of librsvg to enable multiple backends. This means a Cairo backend is now feasible. Hopefully Carl Worth will reply positivly to my mail suggesting the xsvg for has outplayed its role and he join Caleb and Dom instead on making librsvg rock with Cairo.

GStreamer & the future

The GStreamer summit is really close now with Benjamin having arrived here in Barcelona already. Ronald and David is also on the way.

Flumotion continues rocking

We made the 0.1.6 release of everyones favourite streaming server today. It is a really nice release with a lot of GUI work by Wingo making it even easier to use and lots of work by Thomas making the backend more robust to network outage and similar problems.

Thomas and Wingo have been working hard on preparing a new release of Flumotion. A lot of polish and improvements have gone into this one. I took the time today to update the manual with some nice new screenshots of Flumotion in action as seen here: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9).

Of course when we get around to integrating the beautiful artwork David Vignoni made for us things will start looking even more beautiful.

The Annodex people got a nice mention on Slashdot today. Hopefully we will get the financing in place so that that Conrad can come to GUADEC and talk about Annodex this year.

Listened to the LUG Radio interview with Miguel yesterday. Quite enjoyable shows so far and much better done than TheLinuxShow was ever done. Maybe we can convince them to stream the show at some point using Flumotion.

Things will start gearing up towards the GStreamer Summit here tommorow with the first batch of people arriving. Will be a hectic week with lots of discussions and demo’s. After that World domination should be a slam dunk afair :)