Ok, so to complete my recount of my Namibian adventures.

The second day in Opuwo we traveled north towards the Angolan border river. As I mentioned there is a mobile school system for the Himba’s which is funded partially by a Norwegian NGO. We had three of the teachers coming with us in the car and we stopped and various schools on the way to deliver exam papers and similar. We where a bit unfortunate about the timing as the where few students attending at the time we where at the schools, but it felt good helping them out. When we reached the river we stopped for lunch and it happened that there was a Himba village just next to the river so we managed to get a few pictures taken while there. The border river was quite fierce and there was a small waterfall where we stopped so we managed to get some nice scenery shots too. At the very end of the drive we stopped at a local center where I managed to bumble right into the middle of a poolio vacination project. Unfortunatly the presence of my white self caused quite a stir and all atention shifted from the poor guy trying to explain to the local why they should let their children to be vacinated to the strange white guy walking around.

On the way back our teacher friends tried taking us by a Himba village for some more photos, but most of the villagers where out moving their cattle when we came in so there was just 4 people to be taken picture toghether with.
So when we finally came back in the evening I went out together with Stephanie to take some pictures of Himbas living closer to Opuwo. With Stephanie as translator things went easier, although it still felt kinda weird going over to people and asking permission to take pictures of them (for which they charged us though :) Had another great evening at Ingrid and Stephanies place in Opuwo; although I guess our joke ‘themes’ wouldn’t have lasted that many more days without getting replaced so maybe it was good that we left the morning after before a lack of creativity would make our jokes very stale :) On the other side it is incredible how the presence of beautful women tend to increase my creativity tenfold.

Next morning we headed south towards Zwyfelfountain which was a site with 2000 to 6000 year old stone carvings. It was a long drive and we didn’t reach the area before late in the evening. We ended up staging at a game lodge not to far from the site. At arrival they told us all their cabins where rented out, but that they had a tent we could rent. Well…. the word tent didn’t do it justice. When you have something that has its own garage, a concrete floor, real beds and its own garden then calling it a tent is almost funny even if the walls are made of fabric :)

Zwyfelfountain was nice and it was really interesting to see these ancient drawings where obviously where used by the old hunters to teach their children about different animals, their movement and how their footprints look. The carvings depicted for instance elephants and next to the elephant there was carvings of elephant tracks.

Leaving Zwyfelfountain we went towards the coast, also known as the skeleton coast due to all the ships that have stranded there. A beautiful desert landscape, but the constant wind contained a lot of sand, which ended up costing us a heavy 1000 namibian dollars extra due to the sandblasting damage incurred on the car.

Out of the desert (with an almost stop due to lack of gasoline) we reached Swakopmund, a little german city. Felt strange walking the streets at night seeings german style buildings, mostly white people on the streets, german names and words and yet being in Africa :) Have to admit though that if I where to move to Namibia (not very likely) I think Swakopmund would be the place I go simply due to it being a modern city by western standards.

From Swakopmund we traveled towards a place called Susevlai which is located in a majestic red sanded dune desert. As the story goes we never actually reached the place due to being a bit cocky and getting our car stuck in the sand. After digging it out by hand and getting some poor italian tourists to push us out there wasn’t enough hours left in the day for us to reach the actual site. We did climb one of the giant dunes though and got some nice pictures of the place.

Final day in Windhoek we stayed once again at the hostel called the Cardboard box. Ended up talking at lot to the girl in the bar, Rejoice, who turned out to be a computer science student at the local university. Very cute girl and she seemed to have her priorities straight too.
It also turned out that she had also been working as an intern at Schoolnet which is a namibian NGO which tries to provide internet and computing services to the local schools. Wingo has been working with them since he is the sysadmin for his local school so Wingo and me also went out later in the evening for some beer and dinner with Uwe Thiem who works at Schoolnet and has also been a long time KDE contributor.

Ok, the concludes my long recount of my vacation trip. wingo already has some of his pictures from the trip up on his website (bottom). He got some better Thimba pictures than me it seems, but hopefully Thomas will help me getting ym personal site running when he returns from his music festical in Belgium next week. :)

So I am now sitting in Barcelona on my desk at Fluendo. Feels strange, but I am very excited as we have some really cools deals in the pipeline which will change the multimedia landscape :)

Warning this will be a long entry as I try to summarize the last 16 days of my vacation; this entry covering almost all of my African stay.

Ok, what a fantastic last 3 weeks of my vacation! While I loved Borneo too, South Africa and Namibia where the absolutly best part of my vacation. The Kruger park safari in South Africa was wonderfull and I got to see vast variety of local wildlife up close. We even ended up being chased away by a huge angry old male who didn’t like have his little romantic encounter with a female elephant in heat interupted.

Did a small 24 hour buss trip from Johannesburg to Windhoek (capital of Namibia). Was about as boring as I feared it would be, although the first half of it was interesting enough as I ended sitting next to a nice South African girl called Anrja. We had an interesting time discussing many issues like teen pregnancies, HIV/Aids, local politics, religion and that she had broken up with her previous boyfriend since her parents couldn’t deal with her being together with a white person; wasn’t sure if I thought that had some irony to it or not :)

Arrived in Windhoek early early in the morning. No Wingo there. There was a really pushy taxi guy however, which I almost had to run away from. After a while I ended up going to a hotel nearby thinking I should get a room and get some sleep and try calling Wingo on the phone (it needed a recharge). After hearing their price I decided to go back to the buss stop in case Wingo was just late. Turns out he was there now and the pushy guy was actually a driver he had sent for me (who had gone back and gotten Wingo while I was in the hotel).

We drove back to a nice hostel called the ‘Cardboard box’ in Windhoek where we spent the first day before going to get the car we where to rent. During the day we went off to buy a digital camera for Wingo and in the evening we met up with two friends of Wingo’s; Jeff and Gillian. Jeff also working in the peace corps and Gillian being his visiting girlfriend. We ended the day eating at a nice Cameronian resturant in Windhoek.

The next day was car rental day and we got a cheap transport there sharing a car with a nice scottish girl who was down in Namibia to get some practical work experience as a vetrenarian as part of vetrenarian degree. I had her pegged as Irish at first due to her natural red hair, but I guess there might be a relativly higher concentration of that rare trait also in Scottland. Arriving at Avis it seemed there was some confusion about when we had booked the car from. The lady first claimed we had rented it from the day before, but after a short discussion with Wingo she relented. We where quite lucky as it turned out they where now out of 2-wheel drives so we ended up getting a 4-wheel drive for the same price.
We took our leave of Avis and headed off to pick up Jeff and Gillian who where joining us for the first part of the trip. Our first stop was the Etosha national park in the north of the country. It was similar to Kruger, although since where quite a bit further north the landscape was drier and browner. We got some really nice pictures there however; and our self composed dinner of Boerwors, vegetables and canned sauerkraut turned out to be one of the definitive gastronomical highlights of the trip.

The next day we drove more around the park. One of the camps we stayed at used to be an old german fortress back in the collony days, which had been beautifully restored and today was a lodging place for tourists.

We ended up driving up to the village where Jeff stayed and lived as a teacher. Like most Namibian peace corps volunteers he had lodging living at the homestay of a local family. This place was the home of a local headman whose house where out in nowhere. No real road or anything going there. At the house I guess I got my first real taste of the local AIDS issue. The local way of doing things it seems means that the local headman takes any AIDS orphans into his own household. Which meant the headman had a lot of kids staying at his place; with only a minority being his own.
Jeff part of the homestay was primitive by our standards, but not bad compared to what most local had. His had his own little house as part of the homestay made of bricks and cement. And while he had no electricity or running water he did have a gas fueled oven and fridge. Only thing that could have gotten a bit embarrasing was that when I needed to take a leak in the evening misunderstood the directions I got, so instead of pissing through the fence out of the homestay I pissed through a fence into the chickenhouse :)

Next morning Andy and me took our leave of Jeff and Gillian and travelled onwards to stay one night at Wingo’s house. He was also staying at the homestay of a local headman; although being a little closer to a city they had running water and electricity. Lots of children at this headmans place to, but consider he had 60 kids of his own that wasn’t all to be blamed on AIDS :) (For those who wonder he had only one wife, most of the kids was from various ‘accidents’ with other local women ;)

From there we travelled towards the coast to a city called Opuwo in order to see the Himba people. The Himbas is a local tribe which still leaves a traditional life as nomadic herders. The women especially has a very distinct look as they cover their bodies in a mix of ocer and animal fats making their skin look very red. They also style their hair using a mix of clay and animal fat with different hairstyles depending on age and martial status. Since my own pictures aren’t online yet I guess pointing people to this nice article by National Geographic is the best way to let you see some of what I mean.

We stayed with two girls named Stephanie and Ingrid, who where working in Opuwo with the Peace corps. They where really fun to hang out with and was very gracious about our stay expanding from one night to three :). It also turned out that the mobile schools operated for the nomadic Himbas was funded from Norway and had a norwegian project lead. We went over to talk to them and arranged to come with them for our second day in Opuwo to drive around to the schools with the exams papers.

The first day was spent helping Ingrid and Stephanie with various computers around the towns and at the schools. Also had a nice walk around the town and the surroundings.

Hmm, this is taking longer than expected. Guess I do a second entry tommorow with the rest of the trip :)

Ok, so I have now arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Drifters Inn is pretty nice and the two australian guys I share a room with doesn’t snore to badly. For the first time in my life I am having some language problems talking to australians, the two guys are from a small mining town around a 1000 km north of Brisbane and talk english like crocodille dundee multiplied by ten :) The local sheilas do seem to find it charming though :)

Me and my newfound friends thought we should rent a car and drive around the city to look around, but after talking to one of the guys at the hotel who tended to say ‘no, you don’t want to take the chance of going there by yourself’ we decided that caution should take precedence. Instead I went for a 25 minute walk to a local shopping mall as recommended. The guys warning about not going most places on our own struck me as being in accord with local customs as I noticed on my way to the mall that every house had a high wall with either iron spikes or an electric fence on top of it and signs from local security companies promising an armed response if anyone should trepass.

The Safari trip starts tommorow which look forward to, should also try giving Wingo a call so we can work out some more details for meeting up in Namibia.

Had some nice days in Sydney starting with Jan and Jamie talking me to Jeff and Pia’s place for a barbeque. Even got to try some barbequed kangaroo. I am really curious to see what Jeff and co. will cook up to revolutionize the Linux world, could be really interesting.

Jan and Jamie took me the next day to see some wildlife at the Australian Reptile park. Although the name says reptile they do also have a collection of Australian non reptiles so I got to see and touch both live kangaroos and koalas in addition to seeing a nice sample of the Australian reptile population. In the evening we went to Jan’s parents for a nice dinner.

Although I had a good time the first few days my stomach problems from Borneo had not really gone away and it was really draining me of energy. So the third day I just took it easy at Jan and Jamie’s place trying to just drink Gatorade as an apotechary had suggested to me. Didn’t really help much so yesterday I visited a doctor. Got some antibiotica and about one hour after popping the first pills I was feeling much much better, my appetite returned, my nausea gone and my spirit much lifted.Also met up with Caleb and we toured the city together so I got to see the harbour bridge and the Sidney Opera. We also went to see Spider-Man 2 which was ok, although a bit to sappy at times. Ended the evening with some games of pool.

Today I will get introduced to the Sidney debian community as I will be joining Jan and Jeff at a local debian users meeting. Supposed to be a talk comparing Debian to Gentoo which will be interesting to hear, although I am a habitual Red Hat/Fedora Core user myself and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Only bad thing is that due to the antibiotica I will not be able to partake in the heavy drinking which seems to coincide with these debian gatherings, luckily I was able to leech some beers of Jeff the first night so I have sampled the local brews. Guess I find out today if it is true as some religious people say; that you can have just as much fun without alchohol. Have a feeling I conclude what I usually conclude; that religious people should be refered to as religious nuts :)

For those interested I have also gotten my photos online now. Although in a simple fashion. When I get back from Africa I hope to get them onto my new apestaart area which Thomas is setting up for me, with a proper photo gallery.

After my last entry we went to an island resort run as part of a giant sea turtle conservation effort. They had a large sea turtle hatchery on the site and in the night we could see the huge turtles come in to lay their eggs (under ranger supervision of course). I think I managed to get a sun stroke cause I got quite sick in the evening and the days after. Luckily the rest of the trip we just flew back to Kota Kinabalu and rejuvated at a nice holiday resort kinda hotel. Had big problems eating anything, but even my stomach seemed to make a comback the last day so I had a plesant flight (as pleasant as they can get flying economy class) to Sydney today. With a little effort and some help from Chantal (one of the girls who had been on the trip with me) I managed to get hold of Jan (thaytan) and he came and picked me up at the airport which was very kind of him. The little I have seen of Sydney so far looks nice, but it is friggin cold here :)

My adventures on Borneo continues. After leaving the hot springs of Porig we travelled on to stay a night out in the jungle. They had built a small wodden platou where we slept under a mosquito net. Was quietly lulled to sleep by the sounds of the jungle around me. The jungle was nice, but due to a forest fire some 60 years ago it was relativly young. Jungle cats came into our camp in the evening just before we fell asleep which was very cool. The night after we spent living together with the villagers in their houses. We where splitt into groups of two people and placed at various families. It was an interesting experience as you got very close on the daily life of the people of Borneo. The shower beeing a bucket of water and a smaller bucket to use for pouring the water onto yourself is quite a bit removed from the life I am accustomed to, but definetly an interesting experience.

Travelled onwards to the Sepilok Orangutang sanctuary. It was fun seeing all the young Orangutang’s come running in for the scheduled feeding. There was even a young mother with a child. No large males though as the older Orangutangs tend to stop comming to the sanctuary’s feeding sessions. On the afternoon feeding there was also a large host of smaller monkeys swarming around trying to steal bananas from the Orangutangs. I hope some of my photos turned out well.

Today we travelled to Sedakan, with a short detour to a Probiscius Monkey sanctuary. These monkeys only exist on Borneo and the mature males have a very distinctive look; a huge nose. They where definetly worth the watch, and it was kinda ecouraging to see that the sanctuary had been started by a palm oil plantation owner who after seeing the plight of the monkeys had decided to not turn the jungle into a palm oil plantation after all. (The vast majority of the tropical jungle in Sabbah has been cut down and replaced by palm oil plantations in just the last 10 years).

So know I am sitting at an internet cafe in Sadakan where we stay until tommorow when we take a boat to an island just outside here where sea turtles come in to lay eggs at night.

My next post will probably be from Australia and hopefully I be able to post my pictures online then too :)

Glad to see advogato is back up and running. I am currently sitting at an internet cafre in a small town in the middle of Sabah, Borneo. Had a great start of my vacation. I am on a trip done by a company called Intrepid, which specialize in adventure travel. The first night we spent sleeping in a small village being the guests of the Dusun people which is one of the local people of Borneo. They where really friendly to us and shared willingly (maybe a bit to willingly :) of their homemade ricewine. We had a great time talking, singing and drinking. The next day we had a small guided tour around their village before heading of to Mount Kinabalu which is the highets in South East Asia (4095 meters). It took two days of hard walking to reach the summit (staying the night at a lodge in the mountain) and getting up at 0200 in the morning to reach the summit at sunrise. Incredible to see the local people carrying stuff up the mountain as the lodge was supplied by foot so they had to carry everything up on their backs.

Going down really got to one of my knees, but luckily we are taking in easy at a hot springs resort today. Only thing on my schedule is going to see if some Orangutangs come to the an organized feeding session they do here.

Tommorow we are traveling on to visit the organgutang orphanage and to stay one night in a small village populated with bumiputras, which is the malaysian muslim people.

Traveling with a fun and interesting group of people; some very cute and single girls among them. Our tour leader Nathan Cox is a great guy and really pushes himself to make us have a good time.

Next update the next time I am near civilization :)

Things are going very smooth on the GStreamer front atm. in regards to cross-plattform support. Zaheer made a OSX audio sink, David Schleef has commited his Sun Audio sink, and the MSVS port is being polished, only need plugins for Windows audio and video and we should be set. A OSX native video sink would of course also be nice.

It is also nice to note that it seems that fewer and fewer people seem to have problems with the basics, like actually just getting Rhythmbox to play music on their system, which means we are starting to reach a good level of robustness IMHO.

Also upgraded to Fedora 2 last thursday. It was a pleasant use experience, but I am frustrated by the fact that the Wireless driver I need is still not ported to the 2.6 kernel. More troublesome is the fact that it is next to impossible to find a supported wireless cards in shops these days. Wonder how long it will be untill someone has managed to reverse engineer the drivers for the new hi-speed wireless cards so we can actually start using those with Linux. Lack of such drivers (among a lot of other small stuff) is why I basically agree that the Linux desktop is not ready for the consumer market yet. You can tell people that card XY is not (yet) supported, but you can’t tell them that NO card is supported.

Been thinking more about the Mono stuff and I think that my post yesterday probably didn’t really hit the nail on the head in the sense that it didn’t really address the issue that needed addressing.

The basic issue is that we simply shouldn’t be having this argument today. Most of the senior members of the GNOME community has known each other and had a good relationship/been friends for many years know. Based on that there should be a level of trust present that I currently feel is being ignored. But let say there is such a basic trust present behind all the arguments being thrown around, then why are we currently enganging in what can only be described as fence building activities.

If we try looking honestly at the situation I think we can all agree that the community has never been in a better position to actually take these issues of the table. Today we have resourceful companies behind us which allows us to actually sort of such legal issues in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago. Starting with Mono, Miguel and Nat has repeatedly stated that they are working on doing a patent review, that they have a letter promising RAND+Royalty free and that they will publish this letter and the results of their review when its done. I am also sure they will aim at clearing away any uncertainty about any GPL imcompatible clauses in the RAND agreement. We should remember that it is not only Microsoft who has a hand on the steering wheel here, Intel and HP, two companies which has a clear interest in our success also have a say, which might make it harder to M$ to create a saboting RAND agreement even if they want to. So I think the sane thing to do is simply trust that Migueal and Nat who we have known for a long time and such trust the motivations of to; have Novell work getting us clear answers to the legal uncertainties. Until that happens we try to keep the ‘dark cloud of doom’ editorials to a minimum.

On the Java side I think Red Hat should engange in a dialog to get Sun to write a binding document promising terms on their Java related patents etc., which would protect us from any change of heart on Sun’s side. While I currently don’t think Sun would consider going after us I think we want guarantees that we are legally safe even if Sun gets huge financial problems in the future, and starts looking for new sources of income. It is clear to me that until Sun makes such a document or relicense/dual-license the official implementation under the LGPL there is also a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Java, albeit smaller than the cloud hanging over Mono.

In the meantime I guess we should continue focusing on the stuff we feel confident about, like improving the things we have already and working on partnerships like the one we started exploring with the Mozilla team. GNOME hackers at companies with big wallets should probably also encourage said companies to donate money to efforts like Public Patent Foundation and Public knowledge, because the success of these efforts is the long term fix for these issues.

The Mono/Java patent debate is back it seems. Personally I think I agree with Miguel and Nat. If we let the fear of patents paralyze us we might as well give up right away. Havoc’s argument about Novell trying to force everyone to take a risk doesn’t really hold water. It is the same kind of argument SCO makes about using Red Hat at all, which I assume Havoc thinks we should ignore.

GNOME is a free software project and as such the people involved with active contributions decide where we go next. This meant a lot of changes have been made in GNOME between 1.x and 2.x and it has meant changing the default behaviour of Nautilus simply because the people doing the actual work thought it was the right thing to do. And this is the way it has to be; while I personally is rather lukewarm about spatial Nautilus I also accept that unless I personally is ready to maintain a version of Nautilus functionaling differently my vote on how Nautilus is supposed to work will be abysmally smaller than the votes of Dave and Alexander. The only veto power any developer(s) or companies hold is confined to what they themselves are planing on doing or not doing.

So if developers in general embrace Mono and use it for their development that is their choice and at some point the amount of stuff being done using Mono might get large enough for GNOME to officially start including Mono based technologies. Wether Red Hat or Sun will do so in their versions of GNOME is their choice, but I think the story of open source software is that it is such a strong force that no company can stand against it.

The good thing I think the SCO case has shown us is that when someone tries to strongarm us the open source collaborative model can also work in a legal fight. Groklaw is an open source project, with a maintainer in the form of PJ, which has helped dig up a lot of information truly usefull in the fight against SCO. If the day come where Microsoft or Sun or anyone else tries to go after companies/people for using Mono or Java I think the community will respond by digging up all the prior art we need to bury the case and the company for good.

As a sidenote: If anyone out there has managed to get a atmel based wireless card working with the Fedora 2 2.6 kernel please let me know how :)