Managed to get GStreamer CVS head packaged yesterday and same with Gst-plugins. Now I just need to get the ffmpeg plugin building using David Schleefs automake patch and I think we are ready to release 0.7.0. The last fixes to make everything parallel installable is in and working well which makes it possible for us to do frequent dev series releases without hurting the stable install people have.

After that we have releasing a new 0.6.x on the schedule, I have come to the conclussion that we should do a 0.8.x series for GNOME 2.6 as maintaining the old stable branch has become a pain as it has moved ended up rather different from CVS head as time has gone by. Hopefully for GNOME 2.8 we are ready to do a GStreamer 1.x stable series. It has taken us a long time to get here/there, but I think that getting the design and core technology right has been an important enough goal make it worth the extra time. If we want to compete with Windows and MacOS we need well designed solutions not a collection of hacks enabling video playback.

Ok, its friday 15th of August and I have my 30th birthday, scary…

Argh, so now it seems we need to write a new playlist widget for gst-player. Not sure how we missed it however, I was sure we had gone through everything and arranged for a relicense, but I guess there had to be one item forgotten. Well such is life :)

Spent time last night working on g-t-e, a release is now imminent, maybe even today unless I need to stay late at work.

Fun stuff, it has been so warm here in Oslo that my home computer has stopped working properly :) Or actually it is the IBM disk I have which also earlier has shown overheating issues, but which has behaved well ever since I moved it much lower in the box, but with the high temperatures over the last few days it seems the issue is back. Well good excuse for me then to do something else, like how I cleaned my entire appartment this weekend.

Was shown that gDesklets
made a release this weekend. Can’t help, but feel I should take some credit/blame for it as I always suggested gDeskcal as a starting point when people wanted something like Arlo’s Konfabulator or KDE’s Karamba for GNOME.

Would be a bit funny if they where able to integrate Javascript support into the framework and enable it to run Konfabulator apps.

Also wondering a bit about the GNOME related announcements from Suse over the last few months. Considering their partnerships with both Ximian and now Sun one could it could seem like they are preparing to get serious about GNOME.

thomasvs: I digg the sound profiles stuff :)

So a boring few days has gone by with tons of work related tasks, what is even sader is that my fantastic build system for Oracle Applications and Linux seems lost, which means I need to spend my own time on redoing it from scratch.

Been wondering if I should comment on the Novell buying Ximian thing, but the fact is that I don’t really know what to think. I mean having Novell on the GNOME team is a sure plus and if this move do give Ximian deeper pockets and more business credibility then that is great. Having worked in two large companies myself and seen a lot of such aquisitions from the outside I do worry that a lot of the things that made Ximian cool and fastmoving will get strangled inside the huge established organisation that is Novell. Seeing the statements from Novell CEO etc., over the last few days has given me the impression that they are going into this with the right attitude and a will to make it something really positive. On the other hand there is a looong way between the decissions being made and the people doing the work in such a big company. I fear that the Ximian people might feel like they are wading in syrup when they need to do something different from this day on.

MichaelCrawford: Being rated a master or not on Advogato has nothing do to with the amount of time you spend working on free software. People’s rating is about how well they know you and how good they think you are, you can also only become Master afaik if someone who is already a master themselves certifies you as such.

Anyway I spent some time yesterday evening hacking on the gnome-themes-extras-package again. Integrated the new very cool Amaranth GTK+ theme from Andrew and did many other additions and fixes to the themes.
I also moved the Smooth theme engine into its own directory structure which sent me on a long row of cvs add’s and remove’s before I figured out what I was doing wrong. It seems I hadn’t removed the CVS dirctory in a subdirecty moving it over so that whenever I did cvs add and cvs commit the code got added to the old placement in CVS. When updated CVS afterwards it placed the files back in the old dir, which made me remove them which removed them from the new dir when I updated again, which as you might figure made me scratch my head in confusion a couple of times, especially as the cause-effect connection wasn’t always that clear due to timing.

That said with the latest addtions from David Vignoni and Michael Doches the themes in the package are looking really nice. Not 100% complete, but the incompleteness is moving from critical components to less critical components.
The new Metanetics theme is also looking quite good, but we still lack a Metacity theme for it and there is also a lot of work left on the icon theme. I still hope to be able to do a new release this week, but maybe without Metanetics if we can get the Amaranth Metacity theme ready.

A true weekend weekend for me, Saturday I visited a friend and we played Socom online on his playstation 2 well past midnight. Sunday where spent at the beach just enjoying the sun and the scenery.

Did get a new batch of icons from David Vignoni for Lush and Nuvola making them both more complete for some of the core stock icons. Did also manage to put in some good work on the new Metanetics theme I am doing with star and ajgenius.

Haven’t done much GStreamer stuff in a while now, partly cause I am waiting for some help with getting the ffmpeg plugin building with the rpms again.

Also got reminded of the danger of delaying the ordering of airplane tickets today. Last week I found tickets on the days I wanted at lowest fair, today only the return ticket was available. Managed to find a good solution anyway by going to a different airport on the way down, but for a moment I saw the price of the trip increase drastically. So anyone reading this; book those tickets!

I preordered Savage and was able to join their beta due to it. The game is actually rather fun and even at that early beta stage the game has top notch linux support. I am happy to finally see a commercial game development company actually supporting linux properly.
Even if the game is still beta is it running extremly stable for me under Linux, haven’t had a crash yet. Experienced one bad bug yesterday, but I discovered that it is shared between Win and Lin versions of the game and is something the developers are working on.

One thing that made a really good impression on me was the fact that they had a great patch system also on the linux version. When I start the binary it checks if a new patch is out and if it is then it downloads and installs it. No manuall intervention needed.

The combination of real-time strategy and first-person-shooter is also very interesting. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first, but I think it works out very well. I don’t know how fun it is to play in commander or real-time strategy mode yet, considering that your subjects are rather autonomous (other players) and I got the feeling that it wasn’t perfectly balanced out yet in terms of how to play, but I think the remaining beta testing and even post release patches will probably iron this out.

Been discussing a lot with my friends here in Norway the importance of games for the adoption of Linux as a desktop solution and the impact of things like Transgaming. Personally I don’t see Transgaming as such a problem as some people do, I mean yes of course I prefer ‘native’ versions if nothing else to help promote the development of gaming related functionality and libs under GNU/Linux. But as long as transgaming can become good enough to support 95% of new games out of the box then I think they will be a force for good. Some people also bring up OS/2 and its windows compatability as an example of how these things can go bad, but I think the problem with OS/2 wasn’t its windows compatability, but ineptitude of IBM of getting it distributed and gaining mindshare. When you don’t even bundle it with your own computers and also through promotion make create an image that the best quality of the system is its ability to emulate windows then you can’t do anything but lose.

The lastest delay in my Australian migration plan is eating at me. Before I got the latest mail I was literally bustling with energy, but after this last mail I am having trouble finding motivation again. The basic problem is that I in many ways have my life on pause waiting for the migration to happen. Since it is so near I feel it meaningless to plan or do anything with a more long term perspective, but living a year in a sort of limbo state is not that fun really. The fact that I can not get a clear answer to wether it will really take one year or if I am in the 4-6 months que doesn’t really make it any easier as it just ties me closer to the limbo state as it keeps the option that I could be preparing for my move already in 2-4 months time open.

Anyway I did manage to merge the updated Smooth engine into GNOME themes extras yesterday and also move Galaxy and BlueSphere out of gnome-themes-extras. There is some of Galaxy left as its Metacity theme lives on in a modified version as part of the Lush theme, while Bluesphere will be resurrected as a standalone package.

The plan for g-t-e now is to get the Amaranth theme to a usefull level and also import the new theme that Star managed to dig up. That theme looks really sweet altough it is a pixmap theme not a SVG theme, so it does undermine the pure SVG’ness of g-t-e, but who sticks to the book when Nirvana appears…;)

Non productive weekend free-softwarewise for me. Today I woke up and chatted a bit online before going out to buy some tools etc. After that I ended up looking at a movie my sister lent me, Nothing Hill. Some good jokes etc. in it, but I guess it definetly goes in the ‘girl film’ category :)

Then I went over a to a friends place who is betatesting the Playstation 2 network support, played a FPS shooter game called Seals on the net.

Also talked to my mother today and was ‘drafted’ to go help cheer on my cousins son tommorow when he plays fotball during Norway Cup, seems I was also drafted to keep the kid entertained tommorow afternoon as he is staying at my mothers place until Monday morning.

I don’t really mind, I love children, but I think I am getting to a point where I rather have my own than babysit someone elses, of course the is currently a small practical issue that needs to be adressed for that equation to work out :)

Been downloading the Oracle Collaboration Suite over the last two days. Want to get the GNOME tools working flawlessly with it in order to get people at work to start using Linux and GNOME on their desktops.