Public warning: Anyone who should happen to encounter cinamod also known as Dom in the next weeks; do not ask him about browser plugins and background colours. If you do you might not survive the encounter as I have exhausted that subject with Dom for the foreseeable future :)

Ok, so there is a windows port of GStreamer now, done by some of the core Matroska hackers. Some issues on how to merge the changes upstream as the port is done towards MSV which doesn’t like GStreamer’s heavy use of VarArgs. So debate is about redoing port with mingw or find some way to merge the MSV patches. Well I leave it to the devs to decide.

The Matroska team is also trying to make a cross-plattform transcoder on top of GStreamer using wxWindows. Will be interesting to see what comes from that camp.

Also started some light mailing regarding my little world tour today, trying to fix the most time consuming items first. Discovered my cousin was in Norway just the week I am in Singapore, so I probably will go a jungle trek on Borneo that week instead. She sais I could borrow their house in the center of Singapore though. Well see.

Tested cinamod news librsvg Mozilla plugin. It worked very well. It let me view the SVG conformance test online and it seems we have a few bugs here and there. Filled some bug reports so hopefully Dom and Caleb will get around to it. Poor Caleb have to rewrite most of his masks implementation though :(

Just read Havoc’s article on Java, C# and where to go.
First of all I don’t really buy the ‘we gotta move on this now or M$ will forever hold the desktop attitude’. Could be that my work as an Oracle consultant gives me a to narrow worldview and that the customers I talk to don’t represent the ‘whole picture’, but I am not convinced Havoc’s position as a developer relativly far removed from buying customers give him an excelent view into the realities of the marketplace either.

Personally I question how many ports we ‘need’ and of those we could be said to need how many will be dependent on GNOME using C# or Java as our main development languages. The amount of software for the GNU/Linux/FreeBSD desktop is increasing every day both with and more and more commercial developers are making their applications available for us and the ever growing presence of high quality free software. The commercial developers are making their applications available for Linux desktops because they see an emerging market, which is why Oracle is currently certifying all our desktop products (like the ERP/CRM E-Business suite that I work with) for Linux desktops.
True enough in our case the fact that all our desktop applications are Java/Swing based made the ‘ports’ very easy, which is partly why the ports proably are seen as viable already. But I do question wether the lack of something like java-gnome and/or is centrality in regards to the GNOME plattform would be the deciding factor if ever Oracle decided to make a linux native client of their software.

Personally I think the real issue we need to decide on is how we will deal with people wanting to use other programming languages other than C in their contributions to GNOME. Will we allow applications or utilities or core additions written in C#, Java, Python or whatever to become part of the official core GNOME desktop or not? If yes is it a yes to all, or a yes to one or two specificed languages? That is the only real issue I see, and while it do have some implications for what kind of technologies we probably will utilize in the future development of the desktop, it is not the all or nothing decision I feel Havoc is portraying. People are using Mono to make GNOME applications today and I am sure they will continue doing so even if Java is chosen as the official second language of GNOME or something. And the same goes the other way around.

So yes we should discuss what to do in regards to Java and C# and GNOME, but not in the context of ‘we have to decide now or doom awaits’

Ok, so I booked my little world trip today. After GUADEC I will be going to London, Singapore, Sydney, Perth, Johanesburg and then Winhoek in Namibia before flying home. Just need to mail and call a lot of people over the next few days before I get the travel agent to lock the travel dates in stone :)

We are having a discussion on ABI stability on the GStreamer list promted by Wheeler’s suggestion that KDE would demand around 3 years cycles for ABI stability for the media framework they choose. Many of the GStreamer hackers don’t feel we are at a point in time where offering 3 year cycles without ABI breakage and I am not really in a position where I have any reason to think they are wrong. I mean yes of course we can offer X years of ABI stability on a certain release series, we do that today with the 0.6 branch and will do that with the 0.8 branch. But what is harder to promise is the level of development will happen in that branch eventually. On the other side one could question how much work would be needed in that branch eventually. If all it is meant to do is to provide well working media playback the 0.8 branch could probably do that easily for 3 years without needing much work except being keept up to date with the underlaying libraries.

In GNOME we have kinda worked around the issue up to now by only being in the desktop release instead of the ABI stable development plattform release. But also here I guess there would be a wish to move GStreamer into the plattform release as more and more parts of GNOME starts to depend on GStreamer. As a sidenote we have not been really good at following the GNOME release process (although we where much better this time around that the previous round:) and Jeff suggested in a mail that maybe GStreamer should be moved out of GNOME and instead be considered a underlaying library like X or libpng. Not sure if it will solve anything except releasing us from the GNOME release process. On the other side trying to follow the GNOME release cycle has helped us discipline ourselves in regards to stablizing things and provided us with a focus point for getting stuff done.

I guess things are never easy :) And just so it is said I don’t think any of our potential multimedia framework competitors are anywhere near a level where keeping 3 year ABI stability in their main development branch is viable. Unless they feel that sucking is a nice state to be in :)

Got invited to a tamil St.Pathricks day celebration, feels a bit absurd, but maybe it will be fun. Guineess combined with Sri Lankan food might be an interesting combination.

Saw The Sweetest thing on Friday. I thought it was hillarious although maybe a few scenes where over the top absurd :) I think people who liked Whipped will like this one and vica versa.

On saturday I continued work now getting the appartment ready for viewings, many little details that I have postponed fixing while I lived here but which now demands attention.
Also saw the message sent by the S2 guy who helped SCO with getting their financing. The newsforge published mail where pure bullshit, but I think his message that due to IP litigation (using the M$ and Eoalas case as an example) only companies that could afford to pay 500 million USD legal settlements could survive as an software supplier really showed what the problem with todays IP regime is(although this wasn’t the point he was trying to make :)

And today I spent time cleaning up my SVG article. Still stuff that needs love as Dom and Caleb are hacking away like madmen making my info old before the ink dries.

Ok, so been cleaning and trying to fix up the appartment like a madman today. Incredible how much stuff I need to clear away to make the appartment look ‘perfect’ for the pictures for the real estate agent. Tommorow my mother and oldest younger sister are actually coming to help me since the real estate agent and government price evaluator will be coming on thursday.

Also felt a bit crazy so I sent in a mail applying to participate in this years version of Norway’s Survivor reality tv-show. Very unikely I get picked I guess, but a voice in my head told me to do it.

Oracle is sending me to Bergen on thursday and friday which will be the start of a new project where I am to be the local project leader/coordinator on an upgrade project which will be executed by Oracle people in India. Will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Also John, the issue isnt’ that all your blog entries isn’t about GNOME, the problem is that planet GNOME gets flooded with 7 non-gnome blog entries from you each day :) Sometimes I think it should be renamed Planet Fleck :)

low tech: As part of preparing the appartment for sale I was to replace the lamp in the bathroom with a nicer looking one (first impressions are important to get those bids flowing :). Anyway after removing the old lamp it turned out I needed to drill new holes for the new lamp, which meant I had to delay it since I don’t have a drill. Later in the evening I go to brush my teeth before going to sleep and by habit flip the light switch on. zzzZZZappf and a bad short circuited system. Turns out the cables from the removed lamp where touching eachother. Not only that but I was unable to turn of the light switch again. Being the techie I am I started dismantling the light switch to figure out why. It turns out that the small metalic swiches had something which to me looked like tin on the tip to provide better contact or something. The shortcicuit has caused this tin to melt and graft the switch into ‘on’ position. I was able to break it apart manually, but getting the light switch back toghether turned out to be not so easy :)

travel: Sent my official letter to Oracle today about taking a couple of years off. Probably will never return, but it never hurts to keep my options open. My current plan is to do a small world trip in July and August. Currently planned stops include Berlin, Singapore, Sydney (and Melbourne?) and Namibia (visiting wingo). Got a bit worried about price during the weekend, but after discussing it with my family they basically said ‘go for it, who knows what will happen, maybe you will not have the opportunity later’. So know I need to put together a list of more concrete dates, mail people, contact a travel agent to see if they can help me with getting the trip a bit cheaper and call the Australian Embassy to see if we can either cut out the Berlin stop or at least make it a little shorter.

GNOME: Spent a lot of time this weekend building and testing stuff in GStreamer. A lot of bug fixing from a lot of people, but at some point mp3 and ogg playback stopped working for me. Hopefully that be resolved before 0.8 ;)

cinamod and donscarlettit is also doing a lot of librsvg hacking these days. We know have all filters implemented, a SVG backend for gnome-print, almost complete Mozilla plugin, much improved SVG gtk-engine and some other SVG spec implementation work. Cool stuff. Now I only need to get my act together and clean up my SVG article :). Chris Lahey is also working hard together with Dom to get the issue with using SVG images as desktop backgrounds working properly. I smell some big victories for the millitant SVG league in the weeks ahead.

Sometimes it seems fixes break more than they fix :)

Ok, since I need to take a trip to Berlin to get my passport updated with my Australian Visa information I did quick search on a online travel agent site. I got a long list of flights from different airlines with Lufthansa being the cheapest. Looking closer at that flight I noticed that it was actually a Scandinavian Airlines flight which was also sold a Lufthansa flight due to the Star Alliance cooperation. Ok, so I skimmed trough the list wondering why the flight wasn’t listed also for SAS. It turned out it was, it was listed further down on the list, but SAS wanted 500 kroners (60 Euro) more for the same flight. Which means I could order a airtrip with a SAS airplane cheaper from Lufthansa than I can from SAS itself… And they wonder why SAS is in such big trouble.

Looking forward to the official launch of Fluendo; think I even might have found it a customer yesterday here in Norway :)