Ok, back from Bergen…and it turns out that I am wanted for an assignment in northern Norway this weekend…ugh. But the money is good so I guess I go.

Been doing little usefull since I got back from Spain except some minor versioning fixes for some GStreamer stuff. Wonder if I am able to do some usefull stuff the next two days before leaving Oslo again.

I did send a email of to someone at Oracle Spain on sunday in the hope that it would enable me to get a job in Barcelona. No reply yet, unless I managed to delete it by mistake earlier today. Problem is that I get tons of email each day to my work account, but we have tiny storage space on the mail server which had forced me to adopt a rather agressive deletion strategy in regards to email.

So came back from the GStreamer summit having David Schleef stay for a day in Oslo before starting his journey home to the US. The week in Barcelona was great and it is though getting back to the bleary dullness of everyday life. Not sure it made things better that I am getting shipped around the first days back home. Was in Lillehammer the last two days and are going to Bergen next, probably as early as saturday.
Anyway David is a fun guy to hang out with and I think he managed to see a lot of Oslo during his short stay.

I really loved Barcelona and is considering different options for moving there. I realized my earlier misgivings about moving to a non-english country where probably misplaced, yet the concept of moving there to stay is not as easy on me as the concept of moving to Australia to stay. But I guess by moving there to live for a year or two would be a good experience even if I decide to move on to Australia later.

Learned something about myself as part of these considerations also and that is that I have gotten rather attached to rather padded lifestyle. Which means I am not prepared to move without getting a salary I feel will enable me to maintain my current way of life. It is not that I am rich, like people getting bought out by Novell and simmilar, yet I definetly have a financial sitation that gives me a fairly decent elbow space. The last year I have started to wonder if my involvement in free software was a sign of an altruistic me coming out, but I guess my latest revelation debunked any such notions.

Yet I am hopefull that I will manage to find a way to move there without losing to much of my current income. Would be to sad if I let greed be the factor that hindered me in doing something new and exciting with my life. I think living there in a city that is new and fresh to me, yet with people I already know like Thomas, Kristien, Julien and Noele; all who I already like very much, seems like a great bargain to me.

Having a great time at the GStreamer summit. We are actually being really productive at this one. I managed with the help of thomasvs to finally nail the ffmpeg related build issues in GStreamer. David Schleef is working on designing the interactivity support for DVD and flash and Ronald Bultje has implemented mixer support using the new interfaces stuff we agreed upon. The plan is to replace the mixer in gnome 2 with this one, which would mean that instead of the gnome mixer being a big beast it would be 160 lines of code :)

We also decided to at a 0.7.1 release while here and declare that the first development release towards a new stable 0.8.x series for GNOME 2.6.

Also bought myself a new wireless card today which actually seems to work perfectly with the atmel driver.

Also learned that Sven of Gimp fame has been fixing some bugs in librsvg, sweet :)

Ok, so after spending a few days in Mallorca, from here on known as German ompa music hell, I am now in Barcelona. Spending the first night in the appartment of matthias who is away in france with thomasvs and his girlfriend Kristien. Had a fun night out in town with Nat, Miguel, Chema and the spanish gang. Fun hearing about what is happening with them and Novell, the challenges of Nat and Miguel relating to homosexuality and so on :)

Got a lot of nice support for continuing with the gnome summaries, think I need to get started with em again. Maybe it is time to mail Larry asking to be allowed to work part time on GNOME ;)

670 emails in my mailbox, prolly not going to read em till tommorow. Wonder what the spam percentage is. I am sure that if my dick grew 1 millimiter per penis enlargement spam I got there wouldn’t be pants big enough for me by now

Sent Mikael of on the buss back to Stockholm yesterday. Think is was a fun weekend and hopefully he still has some confidence left in my sanity :)

Went sailing on friday til Sunday, fairly lucky with the weather altough wind was a bit weak all days. Today of course there was a clear blue sky and strong wind…

anyway back to work stress and nightmare managers for me…

I recently posted a poll about GTK+ theme engines on gnomedesktop.org, judgeing by the replies a lot/most people thought the poll was about themes, guess our userbase is so wide/big now that we can’t expect the average gnome user to know or care about the distinction between a theme engine and a them. A good thing basically, although it do make me a bit nostalgic for the old days :)

thomasvs got a new release of GStreamer stable out last night which I am very happy about. Hopefulle based on this release I should be able to figure out why stuff doesn’t build properly for me in CVS head and maybe I can do a release of that. Have a feeling I be running a fresh install of the latest RH beta before things resolved. Ronald said on IRC last night that he now has a working ASF muxer for GStreamer which is also very cool :)

Will probably be going to a footbal match this evening, looking forward to it as I haven’t been at a game in at least 2 years. Hopefully my team wins :)

Also seems I will be having a house guest in September after my vacation so I guess I need to do some more cleaning :) With Mikael coming to Oslo this weekend I guess I have a rather busy program the next weeks.

Been a weekend filled with some work, some movie watching, and some on general leisure like taking a forest walk. Almost none free software work. Been wondering a bit what to do, not really been in a summary mood in a while, I think I need to try and pass the torch onto someone else. Not been that much GStreamer work from me either lately, although I did do some cleanup of CVS head in regards to package building. Personally I think I am getting frustrated with our inability to make releases. CVS head is in my opinion unreleasable cause it doesn’t build the ffmpeg plugin which in turn provides most of our codecs. Stable I guess can be released, I think I probably do a release during next week with the fixes that are in there. Think we have reached a point where someone (me) just have to go ahead and make the releases or we will get stuck in CVS limbo for eternity. Currently I feel everyone is waiting on something undefined to happen.

Only thing that I have been progressing on is gnome-themes-extras which is moving along nicely. Think our next release will truly rock.

I think a major gift of the internet is access to people you would never have access to otherwise. This is basically the basis for free software, giving you access to the actuall developers of the software you use. But free software developers are not the only ones becoming accessible.
I tried posting to Lawrence Lessig’s blog asking his opinion on the SCO claim that the GPL is preempted by US copyright law, linking to Eben’s article on news.com. Although I didn’t get a in dept reply he did reply:


I’ve not read the claims, but anyone claiming the GPL is “illegal” because “preempted” by US copyright law is someone who knows nothing about preemption or US copyright law.

I think SCO botched its FUD campaign with the latest leak of proof from the SCO conference. With the people like Bruce and Linus being able to show the exact history of the code SCO’s credibility has been severely bruised. Of course once again I am disapointed with the level of quality of the reporting in maintstream media on the issue. Good thing is that a lot of the major trade press is writing about the proof of origin presented, the bad part is that the journalists tend to seem so utterly clueless. Some articles I have seen seem to think it matters which Unix source code the lines where actually copied from; like ‘yeah, these 10 lines might be in BSD licensed unices out there, but the 10 lines in Linux has been copied from AIX/SCO/Irix and due to this is a copyright infringement’…..

I hope the people who actually wrote the code that SCO now claims ownership of, who Bruce tracked down, will take SCO to court, maybe by getting the new Red Hat legal fun to pay for the legal costs.