Been trying to find a nice open source CRM system for Fluendo. Being a GNU/Linux company we want something that is fully open source. One of the first I looked at was Compiere as it seemed like a rather extensive solution which had other functionality as well so it would be easy to grow with. But it only supports running on Oracle databases, which sorta killed the open source aspect of it IMHO.

Currently installing and testing SugarCRM which I saw people recommend in various forums etc. My inital testing makes it look relativly nice, but I need to try and run a full virtual sales cycle in it to get more of a feel for it before I decide. If anyone reading this have any experience with open source CRM systems and has something to recommend feel free to mail me at uraeus at gnome dot org.

GStreamer:
Wim’s work on his branch for GStreamer 0.9 is progressing very well. He is currently demoing lighting fast seeking with on-the-fly previewing meaning it displays the keyframes as you drag the seekbar back and forth. Not everything is perfect yet of course, but it is looking very nice so far.

Zaheer is in Barcelona with his wife Alia, to celebrate her birthday. We are going out to eat with them today so hopefully we will be able to dig up a nice place that serves halal meat.

Wim, Thomas, Kristien, Zaheer, Alia and me all went to see Sky Captain yesterday. Managed to scare Zaheer and Alia with claims of it being dubbed in Spanish :) Anyway it turned out to be a rather entertaining movie. Not Oscar material I guess as the acting was maybe a bit wooden at times, but still a fun storyline and setting. I guess the Wizard of Oz clip in the beginging was rather fitting :)

Happy new year to everyone!

rbultje: I would agree with you if people where suggesting a legal ban on buying fireworks and mandatory use of the money saved to foreign aid. But if you are actually saying that sharing thoughts/discussing issues related to society and private values should never be done then I think you are not thinking of the consequences of such a ‘ban’. In fact it would go straight against your own recent blogs on the murder of Theo van Gogh.

I tried the demo for the recent Linux port of Robin Hood during Christmas week. The gameplay is very similar to the game Commandoes for those of you who have tried that. I enjoyed the game quite a lot and tried ordering the full version, but I am still not sure I was able to do so (some problems with the online ordering system screwing up my mastercard number).

Also noticed an interesting project on Freshmeat the other day. Metatheme seems to be an abstraction layer for theme engines that allows you to write theme engines that covers GTK+, Qt and Swing. I haven’t gotten around to testing it yet, but if it work the way I got the impression it works from the website I for one would push for it beeing adopted as a freedesktop shared system. Combined with the icon theming specification this could be a big step forward.

On the topic of themes, there is a new icon theme on art.gnome.org called ChaninDjoole really nice looking IMHO.

Tim commented briefly on the recent debacle caused by Jan Egeland of the UN saying that rich western nations where ‘stingy’ in regards to foreign aid. US officials got rather angry about it, and maybe rightfully so as the statistics for foreign aid that Egeland based his comments on do not include military aid for instance, an area where the US currently shoulders a bigger piece of the cost pie than other nations. Or that US citizens, due to the US culture of more things done in the private sector, might be making more private contributions than their European counterparts (no idea if this is true or not).

Sadly enough I found that
Nagsios who seems the be the head of US aid didn’t mention these items as the reasons for criticizing Egeland’s comments; instead he basically
says that the US is to rich and are growing even richer so fast that they can’t be expected to give as high a percentage as other wealthy countries (see two last parahraphs in linked article). In most circumstances great wealth is considered a reason to do more to help the less fortunate and not a reason to do less, but I guess my thinking is stuck in a pre-bush era or something.

Back in Barcelona after spending Christmas back in Norway. Had a great time both together with family and visiting friends in Norway. Managed to go back with trice the luggage I had when arriving, of course half of that was the ceiling fan I bought for the bedroom.

Also spent quite some time watching tv as the Asian tsunami news unfolded. Since many of the places hit badly in Thailand where very scandinavian centric the catastrophe got even closer as scandinavians where heavily represented in the foreigners dead or missing there. Got a bit annoyed with some of the Norwegians returning home, who complained loudly about the Norwegian government not doing enough for them quickly enough. While there probably where things which could have been done better I think in the context that there had been a natural disaster which completely broke down local infrastructure and killed maybe as many as 100 000 people a little more humbleness would be in order.
I have no problem understanding that the days for the survivors and hurt where long, but I am also sure that Norwegian embassy officials and others where not sitting around twinning their thumbs. They where probably working their ass off trying to help as many as they could as fast as they could, which probably was no easy task considering what had happened. Some where complaining that the Swedish government had done so much better and that the swedish officials had ended up helping norwegians too since there where no Norwegian officials there; well I am sure there are many cases where even Swedish officals where not there quick enough for Swedish citizens too. Instead of being angry at Norwegian officials for not managing to be everywhere for everyone I think they instead should be happy that we have such a close relationship in scandinavia that the Swedish officials could help them out instead.

Once more trying to fix this broken entry.

Elijah: Havoc wasn’t unemployed last time I checked :)

Ok, so due to the Ogg clips featured in Red Hat magazine being so horrible I did some quicktime to ogg transcoding testing with GStreamer today.
I took the World of Warcraft Quicktime trailer and converted it to Ogg using this little script(qt2oggt input.mov output.ogg). The end result came out very nice so I made a screenshot of the Dwarf and one with the Tauren. You can download the whole Ogg here to see for yourself. Only frustrating part being that I had to use mplayer for the shot as Totem/GStreamer (and Totem/Xine for that matter) was to CPU heavy in non-xv mode for me to be able to use it. Guess we need to put some optimizations of this onto Ronald’s todo list for next year.

Another nice thing I noticed is that the Ogg file is about 12 MB, while the Quicktime is 28MB (and image/sound quality about the same). Not a scientific test of course, but still a nice example showing that free formats do not have to be ashamed when being compared to proprietary ones.

Bug piles
Elijah’s futile attempt to unpile Metacity have now been severely punished. While he has taken Metacity from 175 bugs down to 164 it is not nearly enough. The Ephiphany developers are also showing their weakness by only lowering their bug count from 178 to 155 since I uttered my big pile of bugs challenge. According
to the Bug Summary GStreamer is now at 151 open bugs. Which means we can safely state that not only are Ephiphany and Metacity big piles of bugs, but also Gnumeric belongs in this category. If I where a developer on those projects I would be ashamed. They should look at GStreamer and learn from its developers how to make bugfree software :)

Had a hectic but fun weekend with Julia and Michael visting me . Was nice to see them again for the first time since we met on the trip in Borneo. Think we drank a little to much yesterday cause I was pretty worn out at work for the first half of the day. Think I definetly have to pop over to England for a visit in the new year.

Suddenly realized how few days I have left in Barcelona before going home for Christmas, think I need to do some present shopping tommorow if I am to be able to look my family in the eyes this Christmas.

Noticed Havoc pointing to the nice stuff in Red Hat Magazine today. To balance it out I guess I should point out that the Ogg Theora videos, like the ‘choice’ video and the Bob Young video about the Red Hat name are horribly broken in regards to audio/video sync. I guess they didn’t use GStreamer to transcode the videos :)

Ok, we are now safely below Metacity in number of open bugs, with only 173 open, so I can now safely safe that Metacity is one big heap of bugs. The Ephiphany team seems to be cheating currently as they have closed a lot of bugs to since my last blog so we are still not past them. But look out we are not so easily done in :)

The GStreamer bugsquashaton continues. We are now down to 288
bugs including NEEDINFO’s from well over 320 just last week. Using the statistics from the Weekly GNOME bug summary report we are down to 220 open bugs. Hopefully we manage to get the bug count low enough to fall out of that list. Currently Conglomerate is at the bottom of that shameful list (of top 15 GNOME bugzilla modules) so we need below 134 open bugs to get out. Next step is being less buggy than Ephiphany with 178 Open bugs and Metacity with 175 open bugs on that list. So watch out Ephiphany and Metacity developers, one or two more weeks and the GStreamer community can start refering to Ephiphany and Metacity as a big piles of bugs :)

Goetz Waschk the MandrakeLinux packager supreme mailed me today saying that Flumotion in Cooker now works like a charm for him. Which means we have our first report on Flumotion working with Python2.4 also. For me the flumotion-admin program segfaults on Mandrake for some reason to be investigated. Anyway I hope as many MandrakeLinux users out there try out the shiny sparkling Flumotion package. Thanks Goetz!

Still working on getting Flumotion integrated with Fedora. Mailed the fedora-devel list proposing Flumotions inclusion in FC4. Colin Walters seems to have some suggestions on how to do it nicely using ACL instead of groups. So hopefully the Red Hat bugreport will be reopened by Bill Nothingham now that Colin has a easier to implement proposal in it.

Ah, and my announced cool press release will be delayed till sometime durng Q1 of the new year, so I guess I have to figure out other ways to make some big splashes before then :)