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 :)

So I went on a skiing trip with Thomas, Kristien and a very beautiful girl named Laura this weekend (who is a friend of Thomas and Kristien). First time I visited that tiny spot on the map called Andorra, felt almost like traveling in western Norway with its tall mountains and winding roads.

The first day started out with sun from a blue sky and nice slopes. Clouded over in the evening though, but it was still a great day of skiiing. Took me a little time to get into skiing again as it had been some time, but I avoided causing any accidents at least :)

Second day had even more Sun, but the air was much colder, which made the slopes very hard and icy. Not to much of a problem for me as I at this point felt more comfortable with the skiiing again, but it did lessen the degree of leisureness somewhat.

Continued my dutch learning throughout the trip, although it made me somewhat socially out-of-the-loop as the conversation had usually moved on before I was done computing a setence :)

Today my body just hurt all over the place. Either my physical condition is not as good as it should be or I got beaten up by someone during the weekend :)

Noticed today that Muine changed to GStreamer as its default backend. Big thanks to Jorn!

I know have Eina, Muine, AmaroK, Player and Rhythmbox installed on my machine. I must really like listening to Music.

Also made a new release of GNOME Themes Extras today. Mostly to have a release out there not conflicting with the gtk-engines package. Need to make a final decision on what to do with the package going forward.

Very happy to see the Inkscape team making waves. The fact that most icon artists today use Illustrator is a big problem. First of all it forces our artists to use other platforms parttime and it also creates problems with getting the icons in the free open SVG format. The biggest example of this is the horribly misnamed Crystal SVG theme which in the end couldn’t even be exported to SVG at all due to Everaldo having used some Illustrator extensions. Having similar issues with getting the SVG icons for Nuvola as it takes extra work for David to export them to SVG format and make sure they look ok after being exported. If we can reach a point when our artists can use Inkscape, which use SVG natively, then we will take a big step forward. Jimmac is already trying to work with Inkscape community to make Inkscape work for him as a tool, and David said he try it out again to see how it works for him now. But I do urge the artist community in general to test out Inkscape and try to give the developers feedback on what you might be needing before you are ready to take the leap from Illustrator.

So Ronald went balistic on GStreamer bugzilla again, and we are now out of the GNOME Hall of Shame list. VTE makes an entrance instead. Who will be the next to leave the list? gnome-vfs, epiphany or maybe the control-center? I mean who want their module to be known as a big pile of bugs?

Got permission from all Totem copyright holders today so we now have an exception added to Totem CVS license for using non-gpl GStreamer plugins. Together with the LGPL relicense of Gst-editor and the GNOME Sound recorder we are making some progress on the licensing after I got the advisory ready and onto the GStreamer webpage.

Anyway a big thanks to Ronald for his relentless attacks on GStreamer bugs.

Had a dream last night about NetworkManager. It had gotten a cool graphical tool letting you use it as a homing device for your wireless router. So I had this image on screen showing me me immediate sorroundings and then a pulsating laser (kinda like the lasers in the ghostbusters movies) going from my laptop out into whatever place the wireless router was. I remember running around trying to find the wireless router, but I was running to fast so I often missed turns and would have to backtrack. Don’t think I ever found the wireless router before waking up.

Thomas said I needed to get out more when I told him about the dream. Then he goes on to tell Bastien about a dream he had about Bastien having made a record and then blogging about the distributor not getting it out to all stores, and thomas then discovering the record in a local store. And he thinks I need to get out more?

Ellijah and the Metacity team are kicking arse, having put Metacity down to 121 open non-enhancement bugs atm. GStreamer on the other hand is sorta stuck around 140 bugs atm (which is a nice step down from the around 300 we started at, but above the stated goal of reaching 100). Luckily we are at least kicking epiphany’s ass as they are stuck way up on 159 bugs.

The Nautilus team seem to want to get into the game as they have been taking Nautilus down to 799 bugs, which is the lowest in been in years (I noticed I said they where around 1000 when I uttered my first challenge to Metacity and Epiphany) . Still some way to go, but only 40 more bugs and they can call gtk+ a big pile of bugs at least :)

Anyway I still would like to send out a general call for people to get their modules out of the hall of shame. Lets continue towards making GNOME 2.10 the least buggy release of desktop software ever :)

So it seems that its official that Convergence is bankrupt. How they managed to do so it a bit of a mystery, but severe mismanagement seems to be the common theory. For a company that seemed to have the right people and the right technology at the right time, it is kinda tragic that it ended like this.

Opens some new opportunities for Fluendo though, not that we really need them as we seem to have more options available than we have resources to pursue.

Spent quite some time this weekend working on the SVG flag collection. While we have more flags than those on the sodipodi website it has taken time to get everything up on openclipart due to opencliparts use/demand of inline metadata. Having this metadata is a good thing, but it is quite a lot of work to add it to every flag. With my work today I hope than openclipart 0.11 will contain all flags assembled with good high quality metadata fields. Discovered some bugs in inkscape and SVG_Metadata perl scripts though. And Caleb is also fixing one bug found in librsvg. I strongly encourage others who have SVG files which misrenders in either inkscape or librsvg to file bugs as such bugs will be fixed as both teams have the manpower and determination to have first class handling. If SVG is to overtake proprietary formats we need to ensure that all our tools handle it alike and close to perfect. If all SVG renderes and editors developed do things a little differently it is enough to render the standard worthless.

David Neary is working hard on getting a plan for GNOME merchandising in place. This is important as it can give GNOME another financial leg to stand on in bringing in money to help make events such as GUADEC and the GNOME summits even better and help sponsor more developers to attend. Seem to be diverse interests on the board this year which is could cause it means multiple things will be approached and worked on.

Built a new GStreamer based music player called ‘Player‘ today. Its quite nice, especially doing the visualisation inside the header is quite nifty. Ended up working on cleaning up buildfiles and cvs also :) It will be released today or at least very soon.

Also learned that the new vmware uses SVG graphics due to librsvg, neat stuff!

Wim’s patch(es) for fixing threading and glib is now in bugzilla. No instant smackety smackdown from Owen and Matthias which I guess is a good sign :)

Wim did a presentation today of his cvs branch of gstreamer since we have David Gerber here now who is going do some contract work for us on GStreamer.

Btw, I forgot to mention it in last nights blog, but Owen Taylor got elected Chairman (Chairperson to be PC) of the GNOME Foundation board yesterday, so he is now the offical head of GNOME for the year to come. Guess its proof that the possibilty of American leaders who are liked on both sides of the pond is still there :)

Since I now have the licensing advisories as part of our documentation in GStreamer, I felt it was time to get ‘our own’ software licensed correctly. Gst-editor and friends where a natural choice. Luckily it turned out to be only one .c file that was GPL, the rest was LGPL already. So gst-editor is now all LGPL in CVS. Next step is gnome-media. Neither the mixer, the cd player or the gstreamer-properties capplet needs relicensing as they are not using now or likely to ever use any non-free plugins. Which basically leaves the sound recorder, which I guess could use an mp3 encoder plugin at some point. Once Sound Recorder is done I guess I need to hassle Rhythmbox, Totem, Sound Juicer, Goobox and so on. Muine, Buzztard and Pitivi have already done or started a process for either relicensing or adding an exception clause.

Also had a good GNOME board meeting today. Seems I will be part of the working group who is supposed to get the trademarking policy etc. of GNOME in place. So I guess if it doesn’t get sorted out people have a good argument not to vote on me again next year (if I run). The board also set ourselves a strict limit on coming up with some concrete measurable goals for this year. My own two main causes will be some concrete measures to try and invigorate the process towards GNOME3 (not as much since I think a GNOME3 is needed soon, but because I think a clearer goal can help sort of lots of things for how to proceed with GNOME 2.x releases) and a much better process for handling our interaction with commerical companies surrounding GNOME.

Seems to be a good bunch of people on the board and I think that we should be able to pull of something this year that can allow us to approach the Foundation membership next election and point to some concrete achievements. Still think the board is to big though, todays meeting had for various reaons quite a number of people missing which made it much nicer. Not because of the specific people missing, but since the fewer number attending let people get their say without it becominging tiresome.