Ok, so after a lot of tweaking today I finally managed to get the DellA920 printer running with CUPS on our server and share the queues. Learned that there is still a lot that needs to be made better in the printing area. What made my job even harder is that we needed a special printer driver provided by Lexmark for the printer. For some reason so doesn´t the RedHat print config tool handle having new drivers added so I needed to use the Web Interface of cups to add the printer as that let me choose my new installed driver. The problem with the web interface however is that it doesn´t let you configure stuff like wether to allow browsing and from whom. I tried using the Red Hat tool for that, but the tool then just undid the setting I made in the web config which killed its usefullness.
After pulling my hair for a while I did some Googling and I found this rant by Eric Raymond. Seems he had much of the same issues I had with getting the thing running. The rant is actually a good read and points out the horror that is the current print setup utilities and docs. Anyway in his rant he did provide me with enough info to manually fix the cups file and voila the print queue popped up on my laptop too. Only downside being that it doesn´t pop up on some of the other computers without anyone understanding why.

Ok, so I tried sleeping in my appartment this weekend. A somewhat mixed experience. My main issue at this point is the lack of a good bed. The one I am sleeping on now is way to short for me which made it quite uncomfy for me to lie in it. Planning in fixing that soonish, in fact I am selling my Oracle shares now to have money to buy some really nice stuff for the appartment. Was planning on using the sailboat money for this, but I have a feeling that selling the sailboat will take some time.

The second issue is that my electrical power is kinda weak. Having a 10 amp fuse for the whole appartment is rather poor, proven by the power going everytime I try to wash my clothes (and have the fridge running at the same time). My landlord promised to fix this, hopefully he is able to do so without turning my appartment into a deathtrap.

Think I also have found a solution for getting my stuff down to Bcn from Oslo. I will buy an old truck in Oslo, drive it down and sell it. As long as the truck doesn´t shut down somewhere in the middle of europe that should be the cheapest solution.

Seems like I am also the main attraction for our demo stream currently. Hope that changes before the stream becomes public :)

Ok, so today I got myself an appartment in Bcn. It took a bit longer than I anticipated, but it worked out well in the end I think. I wanted an appartment walking distance to work and this apartment is in the house closest to the WTC which has appartments so I think I did well. Will take me 5 minutes to get to work in morning :) A tad better than the 1 hour thing I had in Norway.

Did some meetings today, one of phone and one in person. Thomas did a small presentation on the server which was great. Got a lot of good ammo when presenting the server to people, think we have a product that will seriously rock.

More work on the website. When I said yesterday it was done I meant that the first phase was done. Now the others have seen it and I have to fix a lot of stuff :) Gimp is giving me a hard time with fonts for some reason, but I think I managed to find a way to work around it.

Lots of stuff happening at work and I feel a bit thorn that I have not been able to do everything I wanted to do. For instance we have a new employee Alexia which it is partly my responsibility to help get started and I have really not been able to dedicate the time to her that I feel I should. On the other hand I feel that the other tasks I have been working on are time critical too….

Ok, so the website is finally done. Or actually it still needs me to read it over once again as it turned out to contain many weird sentences and bad spelling once fresh eyes took a look at it. Hopefully we manage to iron out the last nicks in that department tommorow so the website can go live. You tend to go blind when having looked and worked as much on the website as I have now. Saddest part is that I guess I spent almost as much time just fixing/creating graphics as actually writing content, but that is another story.

Thomas is currently pouring over the pages to clean up the code; guess ugly code doesn`t sit to well with him even for HTML :)

Also started my spanish lessons yesterday, although a bit embarassaing as I arrived late and left early. Probably didn`t impress anyone with a dedicated student image for that.

Also think I found myself an appartment finally today. Only negative thing is that I really hate some furniture there, but hopefully the owner is willing to remove it or at least let me throw it away. To make sure however I will be visiting another appartment tommorow, but I have a feeling I take the one I saw today. Hope it doesn` get rented by someone else in the meantime.

Things are still continuing at an ardent phase, thing it will be a few weeks at least before I feel fully housewarm in my new job, but I am definetly getting there.

Fluendo is getting a daughter company now which is rather cool and its first employee might be starting as soon as next week it seems.

Been working on the website for the most part of the day. I have other things on my todo list also, but I feel that getting a presentable website up is a very important first step for most of the other steps. Someone recieving a mail from me and wanting to learn more about Fluendo will not be very impressed by the site that is currently there :)

Due to the procedures of one of our partnering companies I have also had to learn how to use GPG over the last few days, although thomasvs still refuse to acknowledge me as a GPG master.

Almost tempted to look him out of the rafting trip we are planning for this weekend for not acknowledging me as a potential OpenBSD user.

Btw, if anyone out there, as I have now, had problems with some XKB error message popping up everytime you log in (yet everything seems to work ok) please tell me how to get rid of it.

I got my laptop today, so no more working on the server for me :) Getting Fedora 2 to run on the laptop did remind me thought why Linux isn’t truly there for moms computer yet. It took me a lot of trial and error using various hints from the internet to get X to utilize the widescreen correctly. Thanks to thomasvs RPM repository I was able to get hold of a RPM which partially added support for my Intel wireless chipset, from another site thomas pointed me to I got hold of an RPM with the actual firmware for that wirelss chipset. My laptop basically works now, but it took some hours of work and would have taken longer hadn’t thomas gone through a similar setup and made the RPM.

We also got a Dell printer in the office. We managed to get the printer working pretty quick with the server, but getting a client to print through CUPS has been hell so far. Not sure what the problem is anymore at this point, but CUPS network permissions seems to be at least part of the story.

I also got the Fluendo website sent over. Been working todaya on adding content to it. Plan to have it up this week.

Seems Julian and Pascal isn’t sleeping either, they came up with a new contract for Fluendo today which we have to sort out how to handle without delaying the Streaming media servers release.

The Barcelona appartment hunt continues. Almost rented a place today by the lady of luck decided that I was inflicting a wrong upon myself and intervened to make sure I didn’t get the appartment. The hunt continues. This evening we are all going to a big nightclub with 5 different floors/rooms with different music in each. Will be cool.

Another day goes by in Sunny Barcelona. Last evening as I and Wim where walking back to the appartment we came across a street fair just one block from his appartment. The whole street where closed of to make room for a stage where they where doing what I would describe as a Moulin Rouge style show . It was definetly enjoyable to watch and it struck me that I really had moved to a new place, since for instance a public striptease in Norway is only performed by drunk students :)

Got my social security number also today which means I can actually get some salary, which never hurts :). Still more paperwork to get sorted out and I am still not having a appartment. Very optimistic about the two flats I am about to see tommorow though.

I really hope my laptop arrives soon, using the server is not bad, but I feel kinda naked without my own little machine :)

So I am back after spending three days in Stuttgart attending the aKademy KDE conference. It was really great to meet Scott and Mark in real life and I kinda got to meet Rob Buis of KSVG fame (for 3 minutes at least :). It was of course also great to see and talk to Evangelia again, seems she will be visiting us here in Barcelona early next year. Scott made similar threats about visiting so it will be lots of guests I guess :)

The talk Scott and I did went pretty well the only thing I was a bit sorry about was not doing some fancy smancy demoes; their always popular and we did get a bit upstaged by the NMM guys :). On the other hand while cool demoes are fun; hackers do see through them so it wasn’t like it was a crisis that we didn’t have some. I am feeling very optimistic about the chances of KDE adopting GStreamer after this weekend, but of course the final decision lies in the hand of the KDE hackers.
At least I think being their and being able to talk to a lot of people did help clear up some misconceptions about GStreamer and of course people where very happy about Fluendo streaming the conference. We have gotten some requests from other conferences now about doing streaming so we have to see how to solve that, because as big supporters of free software we do want to help out whereever we can, but on the other side it takes a lot of time and resources for us.

Tommorow Julien told us we meet a new employee, seems we are growing steadily. By next year I guess we will be ready to make the Google IPO seem it was about playmoney :)

The Ferrari I got is still not big enough to sit in though, but I did supplement it with a Ferrari shirt and a Ferarri t-shirt while in was at the Milano airport. And they do said the clothes makes the man, so I guess the true size car will follow soon.

Went looking at two appartments today with Noelle. The first was ok, but rather far from the office. The second one was very cool, but a bit pricey. It had a huge terrace, 3 bedrooms, a big living room, a nice bathroom and a nice kitchen. It was also fully furnitured with some baroq style furniture. While I guess I can afford 900 euro’s a month it do eat up more of my salary than I would like. I mean one of the points of living in a place like Barcelona is..well living…and as we all know most things in life isn’t free. I don’t want to end up being one of those who always say no when something is suggested cause I can’t afford it. Stupid Spanish renting laws also make it hard taking the appartment and then terminating the contract if I decide that the appartment is making me too poor.

Well tommorow it is time for more appartments probably and also getting my social security number. Until I get that Fluendo can’t sign my contract and until they do that I am unpaid labour, which doesn’t work out to well when you are tempted to go for pricey appartments :)

Seems I am still not 100% attuned to Barcelona, after 3 trips I have still not done a really correct walk from work to Wim’s place yet :)

Sitting at the office currently and polishing my GStreamer slides in preparation for doing my talk at the KDE conference Akademy in Stuttgart on Sunday (leaving for Stuttgart this evening :).

Looking forward to being able to spend some time in real life with Wheels and Markey. Hopefully Wheels will not be to busy with being part of the organizing commitee to at least grab some beer in the evenings :)

My todo-list for next week is already starting to grow, but you can’t help having a good feeling for how things are going when your boss tells you to not make to many new initiatives for the next month as we need to focus on the engagements we already taken upon ourselves :). Hopefully we be able to get the real Fluendo website running next week and I can start adding content to it.

The job will take some mental adjustments for me I as the level of autonomy is wastly greater here than it was at Oracle.

Yesterday Noelle helped me getting started on finding an appartment. We ended up using a local agency to help us and hopefully they actually will help in the end (especially considering that their services was not cheap). Noelle explained in spanish multiple times to them that we where looking for something in walking distance from the World Trade Center and even showed them on the map the areas we felt where of interest. Yet the one appartment they offered me to look at yesterday turned out to be far far away from WTC. When Noelle called and asked why they had given us this appartment to look at when we asked for WTC walking distance and also clearly stated the name of the city areas we felt where within walking distance they answered that it was close to the subway….