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 :)

So the loooooong wait is over. I finally got my Australian Visa approval and now have the right to resettle in Australia. What a splending two year process it has been :)

Only snag is that I am planning to resettle to Barcelona atm, but it feels good to have a fallback plan :). Only thing is that I need to go and visit Australia before August the 30th or my visa will become invalid. So I guess my vacation plans are set. Maybe I hook up with one or more of our Australian GNOME hackers for their trip back from GUADEC this year.

up2date in fedora sucks incredibly much. downloading anything through it is so slow that I sometimes wonders how it is possible. Unfortunatly it seems up2date is a bit faster at getting new package into Feodora test than apt, but then again it seems that I would have to wait anyway since apt2get spends an hour just to grab a few small packages. I think someone said that Fedora up2date uses yum, if that is the case them yum is not very yummy.

Also seems there is a Sodipodi/Inkscape shotout in progress although atm the shoots are coming mostly from Sodipodi towards inkscape. All I can say is that I think lauris needs some new glasses cause his view of the situation is rather far removed from reality IMHO. I can sympatise with the fact that being on the ‘recieving’ end of a fork isn’t fun, but he is as much if not more to blame for the fork himself, than the ‘forkers’ are.

So after a little searching I found a place just an hour from Kristiansand which offers rafting and riverboarding; problem is that I have never heard about it so I am a bit sceptical. My current plan is that try and go down there myself when the open for the season and try it out before inviting a bunch of GNOMErs to come rafting before/after GUADEC. On their homepage they have a video which makes the river seem reasonably nice, but it could be misleading and the river be much tamer than it seems in the video. At the end of the video there is some girls climbing in bikinis and watching it I was struck by the fact the gman never features such stuff in the climbing pictures he put up :)

Been thinking a bit about the US Presidential election and the issue of wether Nader should run or not. In the begining I agreed with Lawrence Lessig’s reasoning in that Nader shouldn’t have run against Gore and for the same reasons should not run now in order to get Bush out the White House.

As much as anyone I would really like to see Bush trown out of the white house, but I think it is no excuse for Nader not to run, in fact I think its the opposite. As jamesh pointed out the system should probably be mended using Instant runoff voting.

But if Nader or anyone else never runs based on the idea that it might hurt the candidacy of the Democrats then I don’t see why the democrats should even consider supporting changing the system, I mean why support changing the system if the current system ‘forces’ independent candidates to not run?

Instead he should run (and so should Pat Buchanan) and their main goal should be to ‘cost’ the major party, their policies are closest to, to lose the election. I promise you that if the Democrats lose a couple of more presidencies due to Nader running they will quickly start to consider supporting something like Instant runoff voting.

I don’t believe aiming for the short term wins should be done at the cost of your (more important) long term goals.

Spent the weekend offline cleaning the house and doing a fresh install of Fedora 2. I was not able to get any of the Fedora 2.6 kernel rpms to work with my upgraded system so I thought a freshinstall would solve the problem. Turned out the problem was more sinister than that. Turns out that the 2.6 kernel is not able to mount any of the partitions on my old disk (standard ext3) instead I needed to switch to using my new disk. With the new disk everything works like a charm, but if I try to mount one of the partitions from the old disk I get a message saying that they are not valid blockdevices. Tried booting with my Java Desktop Live CD and it turns out that this is able to mount the partitions just as fine as Fedora 1 could. So there is definetly something strange with the 2.6 kernel in this regard.

With this upgrade I am also using ALSA now, which was part of the reason I did it, so I could help debug the ALSA mixing issue people report. Of course for me it seems ALSA mixing works perfectly….

Visited a friend of mine last night. We ended up talking a little bit about the upcoming GNOME 2.6 release and especially Nautilus new spatial mode. I ended up trying to defend it even though I too are mildly sceptical of wether it actually is an improvement compared to the old way. What struck me is that I have no idea what the rationale is for switching to spatial mode for the default. I think what needs to be done here is that someone takes the time to write a small spatial advocacy article to post on gnomedesktop.org or similar. If the proponents of spatial mode wants it to be positivly recieved I think they need to start spreading the message quickly or it might end up replacing the file selector as biggest nag issue :)

Also got of to a good start yesterday with some writings of my own. I have come to the conclusion that the hardest part of writing an article is actually writing the first draft. Once that first draft is finished it seems articles tend to just come together, even if I end up totally rewriting the article while polishing it. I think having the first version of the article done much makes it so much easier to continue because it gives me something concrete to relate to, so I can easier see what is missing and what is redundant, what is interesting and what is just blahblah. That said I am really curious to see how this article will be recieved as it is quite a departure in form from my earlier articles. Personally I think it will be an interesting article, but other might just see it as some form of ego gratification or something.

Got a rude reminder last night about how important it is to go to a movie with the right expectations. Saw Jex d’enfants expecting something rather cheerful and lively and instead got a depressing tale of emotionally damaged kids ending with a suicide pact. In that context the movie did not really hit home.

On a positive note I got kind of an epiphany this morning about what to do in the upcoming months. Think I will follow in thomasvs footsteps and take some months break between jobs. So that I probably leave my current job in early July and go traveling for a couple of months. To make it affordable that means I either will travel in the countries that where part of the old Soviet Union or in China, not sure which yet as the plan is still in a rather fluid state.

But first I need to get through this rather stressfull day at work. Two fullday projects doing a tug of war on me combined with two other projects demanding phone support. Nice.