So we got Slashdotted in the end for the Ogg Theora port to Java. Seems we peaked at 2500 people watching the stream. We had hoped for over 4000 people connecting as that would have given us a number of connected users which we haven´t yet had in other tests. Which means 3060 is still the maximum number of real world users we have had connected to a stream. Well even if Slashdot is not able to provide us with enough stress testing we will make Fluendo world leader in streaming media anyway :)

Was planning on going to Ikea today, but it turns out Barcelona is celebrating Catalunya idenpence day today which means almost everything is closed. Well guess Ikea on monday then.

One of the cool things of yesterday is that we had left the volume at zero before leaving the office. But Thomas was able to fix it from home using the prototype administration GUI :)

Yesterday evening we also did a company dinner to welcome Ronald and celebrate the start of the company. Very happy to have Ronald on board, he will make sure things start working really well in the playback department. While Ronald will be working on a lot of embeded-related tasks the pre-req for doing this is getting playback rocking in the general case. His personal goal is to make sure Totem + GStreamer kicks serious ass :) Which isn’t a bad goal :)

Next step I guess is to talk Scott into coming to work for us so we can get KDE multimedia rocking too :)

Long day at the office reading through CSS licensing terms, streaming server documentation. Julien´s interview with osnews is now online talking about our plans for Fluendo. It also includes a link to our office Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis stream which is decoded by a Java applet. Yes, that is correct we have ported Ogg Theora to Java. Or rather Wim Taymans our turbo powered hacker did it :).

Skipped my Spanish class today to participate in a small meeting we had discussing development plans going forward. My main motivation for going to Spanish class has also been skipping classes lateley, hopefully both I and her will be back on Monday :)

We are having our first company party tommorow, or at least the first since my arrival. Ronald is flying in and it will be nice to see him again.

Guess I try dragging poor Wim to Ikea on Saturday :)

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 :)