Continued my build script work today. I wasn’t quite as finished as I thought yesterday. Today I needed to figure out stuff like how to rename files by adding a variable to the name and get Make to package that and how to add new options to configure to set those variables. Todays helpers where thomasvs and cinamod

My final bonus issue is running some apps as a specific user, not root. Luckily jrb is checking out that question for me.

Anyway when this is done I have a really nice rpm for our customers running Oracle Applications on Linux. This rpm integrates the stopping and starting of Oracle processes with the init.d stuff of Red Hat, meaning that you see stuff as ‘Starting Oracle Database OTEST’ [OK]. The package also adds all the Oracle Admin tools to your GNOME menu and installs a set of easy to use crontab scripts for making backups.

The by changing two parameters in the SPEC you can make parallel installable RPMS for each instance you are running. So if you have two Oracle Applications systems on one machine, then you can build and install both RPMS with no conflict.

Of course the job is not fully done yet, I mean I have the build system going now, which was the unchartered territory for me, but I still have quite a lot of simple labour to do making little scriplets to stop and start all the different processes that is part of Oracle Applications.

Spent quite some hours today working on the makefiles for a package I am making for work. Thanks to hadess I managed to solve my biggest hurdle
which was understanding how I defined my own global variables in configure.in, and thanks to Google I got past the second smaller hurdle which was caused by how Red Hat’s RPM macros worked. Turned out that since I needed to install files in non-standard locations (outside LFHS governed dirs), I couldn’t use the %makeinstall macro, but instead needed to use
make install DESTDIR=’my rpm tempdir’

Having worked with this automake setup and the ones for my GNOME metathemes I have gotten to understand quite a lot more about automake and how it works, but I still I have to say that much of the autogen.sh and configure.in files is still not part of my internal portfolio.

I also released a GNOME 2 metatheme based around Nuvola, I think David has a winner on his hands with the Nuvola iconset. I mean I have had three people contributing on their own initiative already, and the theme had just been existing inside gnome-themes-extras up to now. Anyway for those interested the theme can be downloaded from librsvg homepage

I went and picked up the letter I got from Australian government today, was wondering if a wonder had occured and they had already processed my application. But no such thing, in fact it was just a letter stating that my application was being reviewed and I should expect it to be complete in about 52 weeks….52 friggin weeks!! Considering I paid a rather hefty amount of money for them to review my application I do feel entitled to a ‘tad’ better service than that. I mean what do they do that takes 52 weeks? argh!!! The letter do mention a prioritized list of occupations that would cut the application time down to 4-6 months, but I have not yet found any info on this list, but hopefully my occupation is on it.

auspex I am having problems accessing a WebDAV server at work with Nautilus. If you are into fixing the problem I can probably set you up with access to a server.

Had some fun last night with my fellow GNOME hackers. Strangely enough it seems my mail where taken seriously by some, guess that is the problem with humour in such an international setting, to make sure everyone understand that you are making a joke you have to be extremely blatant about it.

Well I had fun at least <g>

I made a gst-player release today, 0.5.1, but it might be that we do not announce it waiting to we release GStreamer 0.6.2 in the near future. There are a couple of bad bugs in 0.6.1, one which crash the player from time to time ( the other baddie being a function only having its header included).

Been using net-rhythmbox continusly for the last few days, it works(tm).

Tried creating RH80 rpms for our apt repository using thomasvs ‘mach’ build system. Unfortunatly it seems that mach needs some love to work with RH9 and thomasvs is away for the easter.

Also spending the last day of my easter vacation at work. Reason being that I have a training course I want to attend the coming week, so I need to get some task done so they will not sabotage my week.

Life is never easy, but I like it that way

Been a busy week at work so far working on setting up a linux based solution we are planing on selling to the SMB market. Customer interest is high, which is cool.

Discovered yet another SVG theme by coincidence today, BeOS style, probably port it to GNOME2 format this evening.

My more s3cr33t theme project is progressing a bit slowly atm, mainly because of lots of boring trial and error work with it atm :)

Did a small stunt interview yesterday with Scott Violet of Sun about the GTK+ integration in Java 1.4.2. Was kinda fun, I might do more of them with different people when questions arise in the community in the future.

Got a mail from the .au immigration authorities today. It said that the check I had sent them wasn’t cashable as it wasn’t written out to a Australian bank. My copy of the check says ‘National Australia Bank ldt.’, with an Adelaide address, but I guess that is not Australian enough for them.
So they will charge the whole amount to my credit card instead now (which was what I actually wanted to do, but originally was told they couldn’t) and return my check. argh, argh, argh, argh and double argh

For some reason I felt very productive yesterday and managed to do lots of stuff, like fix some API docs, do some gstreamer testing, work on a little theme project, do a libcroco testbuild, add a spec.in to libcroco, write most of todays GNOME summary etc.

Been having some trouble getting Lush ready for a relase due to a bad cut’n paste bug in Sodipodi. Hopefully some friendly prodding of Lauris on my part will get that issue resolved, hopefully he also fix the way sodipodi cut’n paste in general to allow for pasting into Abiword and Gnumeric etc.

A lot of my time yesterday where spent on trying to understand the Metacity theme format. It took me some hours, but I think I finally figured it out, and increased my understanding of XML at the same time. Havoc do offer a file describing the theme format, but of course looking at other themes is the primary source of documentation. And here XML shows what in my opinion what amounts to both a weakness and strength for this kind of use. You see I had big trouble comparing two theme definition files yesterday, and this is partly due to me not having been exposed to enough XML yet, because although they did the same thing and both where valid XML the syntax of a XML file can vary a lot within the boundaries of valid XML. So of course people who have learned XML in different settings/contexts will write the XML theme files in quite different ways, making taking something done in one file and just pasting it into the other not so easy since the files will look and be organized very differently. So while XML do provide flexibility and easy programatic access to the configuration data, its extreme flexibility do give graphics artists and other non-coders a hard time trying to follow what happens since so many themes do it differently.

The GStreamer team finally got moving on 0.6.1 yesterday. Ronald, Benjamin and Wim seems to be both fixing bugs and merging patches full speed now, so hopefully a great 0.6.1 will be out soon. I hope Thomas manages to find some time to help out too, since there are lots of build related bugs in bugzilla it would be nice to get fixed before 0.6.1

The strange effect beautiful women have on me. This morning I was sleepy as hell going to work, got there, discovered I was to work with a beautiful woman, was fully awake, full of fun little stories, listening attentivly at her little stories etc., then at miday back to the main office, tired as hell again :)

I added some more GNOME api docs to developer.gnome.org yesterday, but it seems the RH people have some autobuild stuff overwriting the index.html file so I need to redo that part today (but this time figure out how the autobuild stuff creates that page first :)

Working on switching bank for my house loan. The bank I used to use was a small, cheap and efficient online only bank, that has been merged to death (after three mergers is it now big, expensive and inefficient). Discovered today that by switching I will probably cut the interest rate on my loan by around 0.5%, which is not an insignificant amount of money per year, in fact in will probably save me around 150 Euro a month.

Which reminds me that I would like to keep on owning the place I live when I get down to Australia, the prices where approx the same, but I guess it might be harder for me to get a loan down there since I am an ‘unknown’ to their credit rating systems etc.

Released a new version of Spheres and Crystal SVG metatheme for GNOME 2.2 last night. Many nice small fixes in this release. I am considering moving it into the gnome-themes-extra module, so it is located together with Nuvola and Gorilla SVG themes. But I think I wait until the full Crystal set is released so I can get that in.

Got admin rights on the BlueSphere website so I need to update that website with new info and get a proper build system going for the icons soon.

Talker to cinamod last night. Dom is fantastic as usual and offered to look into fixing another rendering issue I had come accross. A nice side-effect of the work Dom and Lauris have been doing, as I point out issues I discover, is syncronising the featureset of Sodipodi and librsvg so that they both support the same stuff. I mean neither of them support the full SVG specification, but as long as they both support the same subset then at least people can feel confident that the icons that are made in Sodipodi displays perfectly under librsvg. Or that icons that are displayed with librsvg can be edited with Sodipodi.

As Sodipodi is getting quite featurefull and powerfull now I think more and more graphics artists will use it to make SVG artwork for GNOME so the compatability of these two systems is rather important.

Was asked yesterday if I knew of a good free font editor to which I had to say no. I know that raph started on such a beast a long time ago, but I think the code never really got to a usefull stage, and I would think the code is severely bitrotten at this point in time.

Things have been kinda slow on the GStreamer front the last two weeks. Wim have been busy working on Gnonlin, his GStreamer based non-linear video editor, and thomasvs have been busy with work stuff. The others have commited small fixes and additions here and there, but I feel we really need to get a new release out now to get the latest set of fixes out. I also want to change the setup of our plugins SPEC file so that is creates RPMS that they integrate better with the standard RPMS Red Hat will be shipping in Red Hat 9.