Things are moving ahead rapidly. Signed the sales contract for my appartment yesterday, will probably turn over the appartment a few days before the first of May, which doesn’t really give me much time to move out. Drove a huge pile of old furniture to the garbage dump yesterday evening and will be going through more stuff today in order to get the move underway. It will be really strange living under my mothers roof again after all these years, but since it is only for a few months I guess I survive :)

All this stuff is really detracting from the time I am spending online doing GNOME and GStreamer related stuff, which I feel a bit bad about, but I guess it is just the way things have to be. I am guessing that as soon as I have actually moved out of my appartment I will get lots of time for GNOME and GStreamer as my job at Oracle will wind down due to both summer and my leaving.

Lots of feelings are rushing through my head these days due to the dawning realization of the realities of all of this. I have sold my home, I am leaving my work in just two months, I have booked a 2 month trip around the world and I don’t formally have a new job yet :) I think a person more prone to worrying would panick at this point, personally I am just feeling very alive :)

Ok, so I just had easter vacation. The thing is that vacations tend to come with a lot of work, and this was no different. Spent most of my days washing, painting, polishing the sailboat. The rest I spent taking my appartment apart and packing stuff in preparation for moving out. I also spent some time getting my scooter running after a long winter in the cellar. So while there has been little ‘work’ work, there has been a lot of work.

Spent a lot of time today going over my mail and cleaning out the spam and replying to the important ones. Also once again learned the hard lesson on the importance of adding a filter for any recently joined mailing lists to avoid my inbox getting drowned.

thomasvs pinged me on the planned Rafting trip around GUADEC today. I still plan on trying to arrange something. Problem is that the rafting place I know is good is 610 kilometers from the place GUADEC is hosted (for those who wonder, yes we are a small country, but that is in regards to population; we are actually around the same size as Great Brittain in square kilometers). There is a rafting place close to GUADEC, but I never heard of it and is rather sceptical about the quality of the river. So I will go myself on a rafting trip there very soon to try it out. If it is good, then great, if it stinks then I wonder if this rafting trip will be feasible to pull of, except maybe for a few though nails who are willing to driver for 7-8 hours to get there and 5-6 hours to get back to Oslo/the main Oslo airport)

A small bump in the road in regards to my long world trip. I need to get an ISIC card before July. The university will not give me a student card until the end of July. Gives me a tad of a logistical problem, which I am trying to figure out how to work around. Already found one option, but it is relativly expensive. Anyone reading this have any suggestions for how I could qualify for a ISIC card without paying a fortune in tuition fees please let me know :)

Been dealing with some interesting groups over the last few days, strange how sometimes the expected bad guys are the most accomodating ones, and the expected good guys are like talking to the wall. Conversations like
Me: hi, we see you advertise ‘a’, but we want to do ‘b’, is this possible?

Reply: Have you looked into doing ‘a’.
Me: Yes, but ‘a’ is not possible for us we want to do ‘b’
Reply: We really hope you want to do ‘a’

At this point I am starting to wonder if I my question is understood, and I am getting the salesman version of ‘no’ or if he doesn’t understand my question.

Went to the travel agent again today to adjust my travel plans. Since my cousin isn’t in Singapore I decided to instead go on a jungle trip in Borneo. So now I am signing up for a 13 day backpacking trip in the jungles in Bornea, with Orangutang sighting on the schedule :). My stay in Perth got a bit gutted form both sides by my changes, cutting the stay down from 10 to 5 days. Really starting to look forward to this trip :)

My appartment is sold now. I got 1 070 000 Norwegian kroners for it which is approximatly 133 000 Euros. A pretty good price consider I paid about half of that for it when I bought it.

Seeing the debates on osnews and Slashdot about wether Novell will be using Qt or not for their development is rather funny. Almost get the feeling its a life or death question for some of these people. Claims ranging from Red Hat having abandoned the desktop (guess all those people Havoc has been hiring for their desktop theme will have restfull days ahead then :). Sun switching to just using Java (with the side project of one person, Glow, being seen as the ultimate proof :) while the continued effort of the Sun desktop team, including they fantastic works of the documenters, and their search for a replacement for Mark (who was hired into the Red Hat desktop team) counts for no commitment of course. And although Nat did the Novell desktop talk at Brainshare his statements about Novell’s desktop plans are of course just figments of his imagination :)

Talking about desktop developments. There are some (still) behind the scenes development happening which has given me quite a bit of extra work trying to come up with a solution. It is a strange situation for me as I on one side feel that having the backing of a company allows us to actually offer a solution to the issue that at least is better than the alternative, yet on the other side the development flies in many ways in the face of what I ‘politically’ believe in. I feel like I am trying to make the loss smaller, yet I guess others can come to see my actions as selling out.

Hi, do you want a patent license to go with that? – Wonder how long it takes before I can say that with a sincere smile; Mom will be so proud of me.

Ok, my SVG on the Desktop article is finally online. It took a while to get it done, but it is now here :) Thanks to Eugenia for posting it.

Now you have the chance to buy my appartment :)

It is incredible how much a horrible day at work suck you dry of energy. Todays assignment was one long hate session being sent out alone on an assignment which I had no business on being on in the first place, the customer contact who was supposed to be there to help me solve the problem (and who could have saved me hours just figuring out basics) was away at the doctors. The guy my company told me to call for assistance spoke so bad norwegian I almost gave up communicating with him. Then india called saying that the database where not upgraded as they wanted it upgraded so we had to restore a backup so they could upgrade the database themselves. Turned out that it was two steps at the end they where ‘missing’. Two steps they where told had not been run and which they could have run before they started. Two steps which they could run now, instead of demanding a rollback. People who say that India are virtually full of highly competent IT professionals are probably not competent enough to make the judgement. Not to say there are not good IT people in India, but the majority are only qualified to follow a step by step list (sadly that reminds me a lot of Norway). I am still smiling to myself thinking of that indian support guy I talked to a year ago who told me I couldn’t have found a bug as the system had been through our QA procedures. Anyway I am just to tired to fight and argue and told the customer to rollback from the backup tapes. I am leaving in two months anyway, I don’t care anymore. Most of the afternoon has been spent sleeping/watching television.

Dom just made a new release of librsvg. Lots of nice fixes from him and Caleb and the mozilla-plugin is much much nicer than in the 2.7.0 version. The rsvg-viewer even got a small appicon now :) Thanks to Tobias Jakobs for making the SVG we use for that.

Turned of spatial nautilus in gconf today. It simply do not work for me. The spatial setup is nice in theory, but for all practical reasons it just ends up giving you tons of extra windows I need to close (yes I now about shift+mouse click). While I do tend to use multiple windows for my file copying/management so is the browser navigation buttons much much more convenient to use than the solutions offerd in spatial nautilus. Personally I think that browser Nautilus will make its comeback as the default in GNOME 2.8.

Sent of my SVG article for publication today. Thanks to the people who proofread it for me, especially cinamod who fixed a lot of bad sentences etc.

As for the (l)ongoing language debate I think we need to allow for people to both use Java and C# (or any other language) that has a big enough community around it to ensure that bindings are kept up to date and follows the development of the rest of the desktop. Any other choice will cost those friends Havoc is worried about losing. And I don’t think GNOME’s by doing any kind of choice will be able to get Sun away from developing applications using their own JDK, or people at Novell from using their Mono stack. This might cause some disturbance in the force if they try to propose something for inclusion which depend on something not acceptible, but personally I think everyone is wise enough to realize that something which depend on something which is not GPL compatible will not be accepted into GNOME and due to that will not propose it in the first place.

As for using XPCOM or UNO, probably a nice idea, but we need some code not good wishes :)

miguel: I think Bastien has your ‘play this song’ api in totem already for Xine and GStreamer. He probably would accept a patch for a Helix backend if you want that. Another alternative to having to download your ‘160M’ of GStreamer is to have Ximian package each GStreamer plugin in its own RPM, that way you can download your mean, small and lean media framework with only what you want.

The problem with your idea is that as soon as you want to go beyond ‘play this song’ your solution would just give us a new media framework with plugins for the others, kinda like GStreamer today.