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.

Finally got fed up with a certain commenter to Lessig’s blog so I started replying. Lets see how grows tired first :)

I also bought Linux User & Developer Magazine today as they featured a livecd with the Java Desktop from Sun. Wanted to take a closer look at what Glynn & Co. had cooked up. Some of their changes are quite nice and I do wished the opensourced their theme. Need to find some time to dig a little deeper to see all there is to see in the Java Desktop.

Anyway off to see a movie at the cinema :)

Spent the morning working on the GStreamer RPM packaging and testing stuff. I was able to play the Shrek Quicktime trailer in Gst-player today, which was the first time I got that format working in the player :)

While having a boring time at work yesterday I started clicking through my friends friends lists on Orkut and their homepages; I discovered Ylith posing in Ximian and Gnomemeeting t-shirts. Think we need to send her some Fluendo and GStreamer t-shirts ;)

My youngest sister is in town this weekend to celebrate her birthday. Going down there later with the L’or de Torrente I bought her. No idea how it smells, but it is what she wanted :)

On monday I plan on seeing Jeux d’enfants, which our french movie comentator hadess has not mentioned yet in his blogg for some strange reason. But many of the other french gnomies I know strongly recommend it.

Also talked with my boss yesterday about my future plans. She is simply wonderful and said that I should just simply send in a request for a sabatical when I know the details. I would then be able to return to my job here during the next 3-4 years if I so should wish. Getting a sabatical also makes me much more flexible as it doesn’t have the 3 month notice period that quiting has.

Seems Sun came through and managed to work out a deal with ds. They will give David a Sparc box in return for the creation of a Solaris Audio plugin for GStreamer and some GStreamer and Java Media Framework integration work. Cool stuff.

Iain just reported that he watched a full movie with perfect playback in gst-player, which means we are getting somewhere on the stabilization front. Also cool stuff :)

Started to think about how to manage my finances in the year ahead. Theoretically so would I wish to move a lot of money out of Norway and the US and into the EU. But as you all know the exchange rates for moving money that way atm is very bad. So I probably move the money into the stock market instead, although I feel a bit jittery about moving all my life savings there. Then again, if I do move them into stock funds it should be relativly safe, especially since I could take a long term view on the placements.

Also need to talk to my boss tomorrow about my future. I am determined that this is my last year in Norway; with a migration South almost guaranteed. With Spain on the top of the list and Australia as the fallback solution :)

Back from Barcelona. My appartment feels very big for some reason :)

The program in Barcelona was non-stop and I don’t think I went to bed before 0200 – 0300 any of the nights I was there (which is very late when you reach my age :)

Lot of really cool Fluendo stuff happening, with Johan having gotten rid of his Joey Tempest haircut being the only thing I will mention publicaly atm :)

Also met with Evangelina again. That was really great and I enjoyed talking with her just as much as I did at GUADEC. I hope to keep in touch with her. One of the days there we went to a Jazz club in Barcelona which turned out to have a really sweet Fusion band playing thanks to Evangelina. Think it might become one of my favourite hangouts when I move down there.

Also feeling good about knowing that Thomas and Kristien have a good game and movie collection for me to enjoy next time I come to visit :)

Some days I feel like work is intending to kill me. You people have no idea how tired I am of dba’s and unix admins who don’t know anything. I am so tired to having to explain to people how their own network functions, how their backup systems work, how to add something to the Unix path, how search for something on the web, how the browser proxy settings work and so on. I don’t mind explaning such stuff to an end user once in a while, but it frustrates me beyond belief when I have to explain such incredibly basic things to people who are supposed to be system administrators.

Today I had to deal with just to many of these people. One even had the nerve to phone my project manager complaining that I where not available to help him with his job. Who the hell do he think he is? I am part of a project team working on a fixed price project which is supposed to be deliverd on record time. Yet this guy has the nerve to complain when I don’t have the time to help him with a task not related to the project we where hired in to do and which has nothing to do with what I am supposed to know and everything about what he is supposed to know.

Or this other guy calling me around 10 this evening because he can’t find ‘unzip’ on his UNIX box!! What friggin kind of Unix sysadmin is unable to download and install unzip on his own friggin server. And when he fails he has the nerve to call me at home in the evening asking about it. Have people no shame anymore?

Or this idiotic support person who had the nerve to suggest that I reboot the machine to ‘activate’ the new lines I added to the host file. Even when I told her I was able to ping the entries added to the host file did she insist I reboot the machine. Even when I explained exactly what the problem was she continued to insist I rebooted.

aaaah, this a just a small sample of the lovely people I had to deal with TODAY.

Biting my teeth together and refusing to join Orkut. Some times strenght of character is shown when refusing to follow the herd :)

Stressfull days at work with added pressure since I am going away in the middle of a intensive project and are also overbooked. Didn’t help that my ‘1 day a week’ project had a major breakdown which meant I had to go there instead of staying at my ‘4 days a week’ project, which in turn has turned up the pressure in regards to that for tommorow.

I am so happy I am getting away from it on Friday, but I have a feeling it will be a rough re-entry into hell on Wednesday.

Cool to see how company has brought forth his code scimitar and slashing of memleaks in GStreamer left and right, maybe 0.8 will keep its memory use in check even :)

So it seems Steve Lhomme is making good progress on porting GStreamer to Windows with it compiling today, curious to see what will be the effect of that port in terms of developer interest and similar.

Meanwhile there has been a great deal of general bugfixing done today in preparation of a new GStreamer release. Seems a lot of stuff is really starting to come online now, so while 0.7.4 will not have every format working there will be enough for us to feel confident that the basics work.

I also managed to get my system upgraded to latest Fedore Development tree. Lots of nice improvements in GNOME 2.5, I am especially impressed by the speedups in yelp.

Spatial Nautilus is going to take some time getting used to. The lack of the sidebar doesn’t really bother me since I never used it anyway, but the removal of the navigation buttons will take some getting used to. It was very fast though so I guess I will get to like it after a while.

And of course seeing the SVG’ified games made my heart sing with joy :)

And not to be forgotten I am happy to see Planet XFCE online. Some people see XFCE as a GNOME competitor, but personally I see them as an asset to GNOME. They use GTK+ too and they offer a good alternative to GNOME for people who want a lighter alternative or who just like the way XFCE works. Alternatives that help promote and develop the platform is only a good thing. Keep on blogging guys!

So I spent much of the day at my mothers place trying to get her wireless network up and running. The SMC Barricade Wireless router worked as a charm and so did the CNET PCI card. The hard piece of the puzzle was the standalone SMC Wireless Print Server. Having experience with the Barricade I figured it would be a piece of cake to configure using the webinterface, but no. The print server is definetly not the big volume products that the barricade is for SMC and the interface showed it. It took me quite a long time to actually get the wireless part of the print server to work to begin with. Part of that was both the obscureness of configuring it and the fact that it seems you need to cycle the power of the print server frequently as part of configuring it.

Having gotten that working evertually I was on to the job of getting the printing to work. My mother uses WinXP on her machine, and the SMB based printing I got working after 30 minutes of fiddling, seemed to freeze the computer while the printing was going on. The docs suggested I use LPR based IP printing, but the tools included did not really work at all.
One more hour+ of fiddling and suddenly it started working. Sad part is that I am still not sure what I did in the end that made it work, but now it prints fine without freezing the windooze gui so hopefully everything will be fine from here. Not sure I am ready to recommend the print server to anyone. I mean it definetly works now and hopefully will keep working, but it was a pain to get there. Both the web gui and the included windows GUI tools seemed half developed and many of them simply did not work. I think that if SMC want to start shipping those things in numbers the price need to fall with at least two thirds and make the setup smoother.

The next step in the masterplan is to get the linux based laptop at her place working within the wireless network. Then she we hopefully use that to get aquinted with Linux and GNOME and I will also have a solution where I can get sure that moving her to Linux will not give me an increased support burden.

My GStreamer article put me back in a writing mood and I have some more stuff on my table I want to do now. Including some interviews and a couple of feature articles. Hope to get started/done with at least some of it during this upcoming week and also mail thomasvs to arrange stuff for leaving the crap web hosting service I use today.

Had a discussion with cinamod and donscarletti over my previous blog entry on SVG and how to handle it. My solution of not implementing something which when used reduced speed was not so popular :). Instead we agreed to try and write some documentation for artists as stuff got implemented with suggestions and advice about the cost usage of certain things. So when an artist want to make a icon theme he/she can check out this doc and get some ideas about what to do/not to do to keep GNOME humming along at top speed when people use their theme. Writting this docs will also hopefully push me into writing some more full docs on icon themeing in general. But for now I am waiting on GTK 2.4 as stock icon themeing will change there. So I want to see how that works out before making the docs.

Now on to apt-getting myself latest Fedora development packages :) Thanks hadess!