Some days it feels like the world conspires against you. I have been spending the last 3 looong days on a task I had set aside half a day to complete. First I had some database consistency troubles. When I managed to fix that I realized I needed to reformat the USB disk to use ext2 to be sure that it would preserve case sensitivy properly. Or actually I thought about making a tarball, but fat32 has a 4GB file size limit.
Anyway it seems linux is unable to handle formating a usbdisk without crawling to halt for some reason. Then when I finally got the disk formatet I started the file copying and went home. Arriving this morning I discovered that the server must have rebooted/crashed while copying files to the usbdisk, that it only had copied maybe 10% of the files before crashing, that I needed to reformat the disk again since there seemed to be some hard file system corruption on it now.

So if my frustration over this wasn’t enough I got a reply from the Australian migration authorities regarding an email I sent them. It turns out that since I lodged my application they changed their list of high priority professions which means I my work permit will probably take 1 year to process instead of 4-6 months…aaargh!!! But maybe even more frustrating was that I got a relatively standardized reply which means I don’t really know, I can just assume. And it didn’t even answer the most important question I asked, namely if they now had all the papers they need from me.

Got latest epiphany and galeon installed on my laptop yesterday and used them both. To be honest I think the difference between the two is rather marginal. The most major difference is in the preference menu, but even there I can’t help feel that the difference is more look than actual functionality.

Been some discussion of what browser to go with as the default GNOME webbrowser, personally I feel the issue is rather marginal usability and integration wise, and instead we should look at which has the least amount of bugs / most maintenance when the time comes for actually including a browser in the core package.

Which brings me around to related issue, the issue of applications truly conforming to the HIG, being integrated with GNOME etc. Mostly the change of focus has been good as it has brought the debate away from being about pure technical issues to be about usability and integration. It has not however solved the basic problem that you have in any organisation where decisions are made, where people tend to make the arguments to fit the choice instead of making the choice based on the arguments. Of course I am not claiming to be innocent of this myself, it is a very human thing to do.

When skimming through Jeffs cool planetgnome
website today it occured to me that it is the closing of a circle. It started by Advogato being set up as a blogging tool and people found it interesting to read since it contained news tidbits from many different developers. Then many of these developers wanted to host their blogs on their own site with their other stuff. Problem with this was that of course very few people actually read their blogs cause who bother going to 50 websites to read something which just as often is personal ramblings as it is cool news. So Jeff sets up planetgnome which I guess could be seen as a way to re-advogatize these blogs in the context of gathering them all into one central location :)

My tan is darkening after another blue sky/hot sun weekend sailing in Oslo. This is how life was meant to be :) Ok, so I spent most of Saturday at work, but still.

Didn’t get much productive work done this weekend, but I do plan on getting a new GNOME Summary out either today or tommorow.

Got some criticism for approving a story about the new GNOME website look onto gnomedesktop.org, but I can’t help but feel I did nothing wrong. When you change the frontpage of the gnome website, the change is official by nature. It was not like I announced www.s3cr3tb3tagnomesite.org.

While working on the GNOME themes lately I have started to ponder the mechanism for theming application icons. The problem with the current filename based approach is that it seems people tend to use both different icons for the same applications or at least give the icons different names. There is also the issue distributions in the name of userfriendlyness assigning generic icons to different applications. My current solution to at least some of the issues involved is having my metatheme package create lot of symlinks, but it doesn’t really solve everything.

The only alternative method I know is the one currently applied by GTK+ in regards to its stock icon themes (a method to be replaced by the filename method in the next release of GTK+). The GTK+ method lets you assign icons with any filename to a programatically defined name. Problem with this method is that it puts more effort onto the programmer and is according to the Sodipodi developers quite hard to implement for custom widgets (which sodipodi use a lot of). I am also not sure if this method truly solves the problem.

I guess the fix here will be to help clean up the icons and the icons names used by application. Martin gave me permission to update the gpdf package to use a custom icon for gpdf which will take care of one package, but many others probably also need some love. Oh well, it took me some time, but I think that we have nailed all important issues with using SVG graphics in GNOME now so I guess I need a new pet metaproject anyway :)

Depressing day, discovered I didn’t get a bonus this year. I had a utilization grade of 75% compared to the target, and the minimum requirement for getting a bonus is 80%. So while I survive getting the 1300 Euro after taxes less this month it is still a frustrating loss. argh.

We had a tropical night in Oslo last night, the weather is just smashing these days. Days as these I do enjoy owning a sailboat :)

Fun stuff happening on the GStreamer front.
Ronald Bultje has just commited a Matroska demuxer and is currently working hard on libcolorspace. A Matroska muxer is also on his agenda. Most of this work his is allowed to do as part of his current job which is cool.

There is also a major software company considering to use GStreamer in the flagship product. They have currently mainly done windows software altough clones of their products exist on both Mac and Linux/Unix so their first action would be to port GStreamer to Windows, which would be a nice contribution. But I think the major advantage of them using GStreamer would be the huge increase in mindshare the project would get, in fact I think being able to announce it would firmly cement GStreamer as the de-facto multimedia layer on Unix.

Anyway they are still exploring their options, but I feel optimistic about the whole deal.

Personally I am currently working on creating a standalone package with the monkeys audio plugin and library. We decided to pull it out of the main package due licensing concerns, but since the plugin is done and ready including a full port of the library from windows and a contributed PPC port I feel it would a shame to just let it rott away in the CVS attic.
Making it a standalone package will let people who want it get it, yet at the same time keep software with a stupid license out of our core modules. In fact we have with the help of Brian Cameron been continuing the license cleanup of GStreamer core modules with the goal of making sure that all code in there is LGPL. All non-LGPL code including GPL code we want to push into either separate libraries or at least put in a special directory. This way people who want to make plugins can feel sure that no matter which plugin they use as their template/starting point for their own plugin it has a LGPL license.

Another great piece of news is that someone might
be paid for working part-time on GStreamer soon. dolphy wants to use GStreamer as the framework for the software his company provides as part of their service.

On the SVG front I have slowly started to experiment with cascading stylesheets now. Anyone who have look at Metacity know that it has a SVG like XML language it uses for configuration. It allows for different codes like gtk:[SELECTED] used for color codes. Our plan is to support those kinda color codes in the CSS stylesheets too, through adding support for them in our CSS library libcroco my by dodji. That way the SVG’s are still just using valid XML yet they can be made to color intergrate with the GTK+ theme used. In the same way non-pixmap Metacity themes does. Anyway that is the second step and probably a couple of months away. First step is actually getting the CSS stylesheets with standard color codes working, which they in theory does, but since nobody has actually tested it before it probably has some smaller issues that needs solving.

Managed to do a new release of gnome-themes-extras
the package of SVG based metathemes for GNOME I maintain. The themes took a major leap forward in intregration quality lately with panel icon themeing starting to work with gnome-panel 2.2.2.2. Currently only the Nuvola and Wasp themes take advantage of this to advanced degree, but I hope that Gorilla and Lush will follow.

I am also working on adding 2-3 themes to the package, with 2 of them already being partially in CVS, but they need some more love before I feel they are ready for primetime.

cinamod is doing a new librsvg today which is good as it contains a few little rendering fixes. librsvg mostly renders thing ok now, as the screenshots for g-t-e shows, but there are a few glitches which I hope we get to over time. Dom seems a little overextended atm however so I am hopeing for someone new to come to the rescue and help us take librsvg that last mile to perfection. If anyone is reading this and wants to help out me and Dom can be found in #librsvg on irc.gimp.net.

Built myself an RPM from gnome-panel CVS 2.2 branch yesterday and finally SVG icons work in the panel menu. kmaraas is doing a new GNOME 2.2 panel release which is great as it will enable people to instantly upgrade to a working version of the panel to try out the menu icons provided in gnome-themes-extras. Now all that remains is updating the themes to really theme as much as possible.

Got two new SVG based themes on the way to gnome-themes-extras, the first is new to GNOME and the second is new to everyone :)

I also managed to clean up the SPEC file for CVS of GStreamer plugins the other day. It now has a structure that makes it a much better solution for upgrading the default RH packages.
For some strange reason ffmpeg doesn’t build when packaged now, but hopefully I will be able to dig out why over the next few days.

Also been thinking about doing some new GNOME interviews. This time focusing on people doing some really innovative stuff out there. Think it would show the reality of how free software developers innovate, while large companies who demand the freedom to innovate in their antritrust defence never truly does.

Interesting weekend filled with me attempting to be a hobbyinst plumber in my kitchen. Finally managed to unclog the kitchen sink, unfortunatly the water flows a little to well now so I need to buy some silicon tommorow to seal up a few spots again :)

I also got Never Winter Nights running under Linux. The Bioware guys had been cool and put up a complete tarball of the whole game, so no fidgeting with the windows CD and merging patches with Wine. Just download the whole thing and enter inn the cd-rom key. Unfortunatly it seems they Linux version still suffers from some stability issues. I am running it with a NVIDIA card using the official NVIDIA drivers which I guess must be a rather mainstream setup, but it still crash for me with a frequency of once every 1-2 hours. To bad, cause the game works like a charm under Linux apart from that.

Also started working on redoing the GStreamer SPEC file. We are moving to make our core plugins package include everything the gst-plugins shipped with redhat includes which will make things more intuitive for users who upgrade from those.

It also seems we might have found someone interested with helping us doing Midi in GStreamer. He is working on a really cool app called amsynth that uses GTKMM already. I hope it works out cause it would close one of the few remaining holes in our featureset.

Just back from Stockholm where I attended my uncle’s wedding, but also got hang out with alex and hallski afterwards. Had a great time and I have to say I really like Stockholm, it is a bit to long a drive however for it to be a place I go often. They had this really neat store downtown called Nordiska Kompaniet which had managed to gather a lot of the major brands under one roof, bought myself some Ted Baker jeans among other things there.

Stayed the last night at Mikael’s place, he downloaded Dashboard and it looks quite cool, looking forward to see it evolve as more people get involved.

I also got my act together and got my machine updated to GStreamer 0.6.2 and got CVS gst-player. All I can say is wow, this thing is really looking good now. The gang has done a tremendous job in cleaing up GStreamer over the last couple of releases. I think when we do 0.6.3 soon with Quicktime and Asf support then nobody will miss Xine or MPlayer anymore :)

I also started with the big relicensing project. Started by fixing up CVS gst-player so it is now fully LGPL. Also mailed Eben asking for some advice on how to formulate the exceptions for the libraries and apps that we don’t relicense.

Also tried building Totem and Sound-Juicer from CVS. Totem failed due to needing Xr (a bit premature in my opinion) and Sound-Juicer failed due to some po weirdness.

On the theme front I haven’t worked so much on the themes since GUADEC, but I have been mailing a little around in that regard to get bugfixes backported etc.

Sort of a big little day today as I managed to mail the last three papers the Australia government need in order to process my application. Which in theory should mean the only thing left of the whole process is actually getting the work permit, wonder how many months it will be.

Legal stuff is a bees nest in free software, and I am guessing part of the endless discussions is because so few actually truly understand the issues at hand and even if they do they probably just fully understand them in the context of their native legal system. Anyway we are trying to relicense the GStreamer based applications to the LGPL in order to try and partially solve the issue of patents and GPL licensing. The second part of the fix is probably adding some exceptions to the license of the GPL and LGPL libs we link to.
Urk, I wish whoever made the up the term intelectual property got a two tonn boulder dropped on him or her.