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.

Was very cool to see that Intel where demoing GStreamer at the CELinux Forum. World domination next step :)

Also noticed a Football manager game for GNOME on gnomefiles today. I guess Bastien will be very happy now that he can stop buying those expensive football manager games from Electronic Arts :)

Testing out wine again after a long time away. Project has come a long way since I last had encounters with it. Current setup was getting a RPM from the winehq homepage then downloading a winetool which did all the needed wine setup for me.

Tried installing some random pieces of software. Winzip and Opera installed like a charm. Winamp installed with some stuff disabled, but Wine seems having problem handling its GUI, but it basically works. Curently I am downloading the World of Warcraft demo using the Blizzard installer. Which works suprisingly well too. Still there where other pieces of software I tried, like the print server admin tool I need which did not install at all. Maybe 2005 will be the year of wine. Will be interesting to see if World of Warcraft runes under Wine, if it does it do not bode well for Transgaming and Cedega, as I would then donate some cash to Codeweavers instead of buying Cedega.

On the topic of non-free stuff, got a story submission to gnomedesktop about a UML tool for GNOME. Well it turned out to be a proprietary Java tool with Eclipse integration. screenshots here. The shots are of GNOME and Red Hat running the tool, but they are not using the GTK+ look and feel support in Java for instance. Anyway it started me wondering what a Java application would have to do before I would consider it a ‘GNOME’ application. Using java-gnome would be one answer, but even a Swing based application using the GTK+ look and feel could be considered a real GNOME application I guess if they have done some groundwork on getting it nicely integrated. Anyway I did not approve the post, left it for stro to probably delete.

Got a lot of requests for the background image used in the 3ddesktop shot in my last blog entry, to those who mailed me, I will send the image to you on Monday as I don’t have access to the SMTP server from home. (at least not without a lot of hassle).

So I installed 3ddesktop after seeing it in James Cape’s blog entry. Very cool and it was just installing 2 rpms and it was working. Almost something I would consider suggesting be used as our default way of doing it if I felt sure the hardware out there could handle it. The obligatory screenshot.

Tried MacOSX yesterday for a little while. Loved it how you got a little screenshot of your window in the mac bar when you minimized them, even a nifty animation following it. Guess the lesson is that high usability doesn’t have to be about being boring.

Also ran through the GStreamer testsuite today. We are making progress there as even the hard cases are now starting to play. Of course fixing some types of bugs help reveal other bugs, so I guess I opened quite a lot of bugs today, with issues such as audio and video sync for certain formats. Scaling when playing fli animations with repeat mode in Totem and so on. But almost all files now basically plays.

I also made some RPMS of Wim’s threadsafety patch to glib. Mattias is testing it for us now to see if it solves a Flumotion crasher bug we had. I guess if we discover no problems today or over the weekend the patch will get submitted upstream next week, than the flamewar can proceed, or hopefully not :)

ABI stability is both a blessing and a curse. When you are blocked from fixing something it feels like a curse. When you are on the receiving end of a supposedly stable ABI being blatantly broken you feel that ABI stability should be considered a blessing. The library frustrating me this time is libflac. The FLAC codec decoding library. And sadly enough this is not the first time they break their API in what is supposed to be bugfix releases. So current GStreamer CVS now demands FLAC 1.1.1 as our current test is broken with 1.1.0 (which is the one shipping with Fedora). Sucks Sucks Sucks.

On to something more postive. Wim tried out Meld today and loved it. Maintainers of out there who still hasn’t tried this wonderfull patch merging tool should get their acts together ASAP and do so.

After a lot of strugling I finally got mono working on my machine. A bit frustrating that none of the package repositories for Fedora have up-to-date Mono packages. So I had to make them all myself. But now I have and Muine is humming along on my machine. Muine surely is different, I am gonna use it for a while and see how it works out, but I think the GUI approach actually might have a lot going for it. Good work Jorn and the Muine crew!

Wim is hacking away today fixing glib, or rather making its refcounting threadsafe. Which is complicated by needing to keep ABI stabilitity. Patch is almost ready and hopefully it will get accepted upstream, at least after some more testing. Currently have atomic1.patch on my machine, waiting for what I guess will be called atomic2.patch :)

Signed a contract today which means my soul is now in foreign custody until 2012. But someone had to do it, and since I am our sales and marketing department I don’t really have a soul anyway.

Also wrote an NDA today, kinda nice to write a NDA for someone else to sign instead of always having to sign other people’s NDA’s. Guess it means we have arrived :)

Had a goodbye party for Lotte yesterday organized by Kristien. Most scary part was seeing how much high alcoholic beer Wingo drank, I would never even consider drinking that much. And I ever would drink so much I would at least keep much more steady and balanced.

Thanks to Hugh Skottowe I was able to resolve my OpenOffice document pain in a acceptable manner. Seems there a OpenOffice release note page describing how to manually migrate your docs from the old format to the new one. Have to say that the latest snapshots of OpenOffice looks much nicer than they used to, although I think the new OpenOffice stock icons are less nice than the one’s Tigert and Jimmac made. But I guess they want icons that fits better in on Windows in additon to GNU/Linux systems.

Only thing I really miss in these new OpenOffice versions is SVG import support. As a stopgap solution I guess they even make a import filter on top of librsvg, although the result would of course be a pixmap in OO, but still better than nothing.

Got the Robin Hood game recently so I played it a bit. It is a graphically nice game although there are a few ugly things popping up. One purely visual item is that the site names in the minimap is in Chinese. The second item is that I am suddenly getting segfaults while playing one of the modules. Not sure if it is something in that module causing it, or if something changed on my distro underneath it to break something. The segfault message is not very usefull, just saying something about SDL parachute being activated. Mailed Epic-Interactive today and got a quick response that a bugfix was coming this week. Nice :)

Wingo found himself a place yesterday so he will be moving out on Saturday, while its fun to have Wingo around, I guess the freed up bed space will be sorely needed soon anyway for the GStreamer summit. On the topic of Wingo, he is now hacking on a Jack plugin allowing you to use Jack as a drop in replacement for esound or artsd etc. While doing this is a bit of crack, it seems some people really want it, and it is according to Wingo a really simple plugin to make…and we are all about pleasing our users in the GStreamer community.

Bluetooth mousing. Got my bluetooth mouse working smoothly thanks to an online howto, some input from Edd Dumbill and finally with a little Red Hat help through their bugzilla. Still not sure why the mouse locks up with the –search parameter turned on for hidd though.

In regards to Fluendo I had a productive day today, sending of two initial proposals. Thomas pretends not to like it when I ask for help writing sales propositions, but I know that deep down he wants to gets transfered to Fluendo’s sales department.

One thing everyone knows is that you should never use development versions of software for production use. I know that and so does everyone else. But like everyone else I find it hard not to sin against it. So I have been using the development snapshots of openoffice for quite some while now but had a annoying bug with putting images inside a page header. So upgraded my snapshot and removed the old snapshot. Bad bad mistake. Now I am unable to open the docs I have been working on a lot during last week and have to extract the text from the xml files and redo the layout once again. What sucks the most is that I can’t really blame anyone but myself. I should have known that openoffice could be changing their file format or something during the development of the unstable format.