Been some discussion here in Norway if the attack on Iraq
is within the framework of international law or not, since there was no new UN resolution specifically approving the use of millitary force. Whenever I hear that I wonder what these people think the words ‘serious consequences’, that where used in the last resolution approved if Iraq did not comply, meant. For some reason I doubt they are actually so naive that they thought it meant sending in an old granny to tell Saddam he was being a bad boy and refuse him dinner……..

Ok, so I finally sent of the papers to the Australian government. If my understanding of the situation is correct I will very probably have my permanent Australian visa in hand in approximatly 2-3 months. Now gman just need to get moving on his moving plans :)

Been reading the second book in the Runelords series (by David Farland) for the last two days. I am really starting to take a liking to his series. He is one of the few fantasy writers who is not afraid to make his foes and heroes more greyish instead of pure black and white. He has not worries about maiming his heroes either, like the poor fellow who got his walnuts ripped off :)

Seems I be doing some talks in the not to distant future about GStreamer here in Norway, and maybe a SVG theme talk in Dublin. On a related note I been holding of a new release of my SVG metatheme waiting for a few new icons and other stuff, but I think I will manage to make a new sparkling release this weekend. I also got a new SVG theme called Nuvola from David Vignoni, looks very nice. Just need to alter it a bit to fit GNOME better, Sodipodi had a issue with the icons in this theme, but Lauris fixed it right away. Think I never understand how Lauris ticks, but he is a cool guy :)

Keith is forking X, I think GNOME should put its weight behind him, to much NIH and overconvervatism in XFree today.

Spent the first part of this morning getting my 1100 AUD check to get the final part of the Australian work permit process going. Not cheap trying to move to Australia :)

Also mailed a little back and forth with some developers. Got a reply that was in a vein I get from time to time, where developers say something along the lines that they are really happy that I got in touch or did this or that to help out because they feeling that they didn’t get enough attention/help from the core GNOME developers.
There are two issues about this, the first is that I feel a bit pressured when my attention/help or lack of such is to be considered the equivalent of ‘getting acknowledgement/attention’ or not from the core GNOME team. The second that people actually expect such a thing to exist. I mean the core GNOME developers (what the heck consitutes a core GNOME developer is another good question, but I leave that for another time) all have long todo lists and are just participating as private individuals like everyone else. So there is no people who can say ‘group/person x and y is doing some good stuff, lets set a team member to help them out and let them know we see and appreciate their effort’.

I mean such a thing would be nice in theory, I like everyone else love getting recognition and help in what I do, but in practice such a thing can not really exist. I mean yes, there are times when people ‘inside’ (another term that don’t really make sense, in my opinion you are ‘inside’ the moment you decide to be) GNOME decide to champion an application or library for inclusion in GNOME, distro XY or whatever, but this is always something that person do as a person, not as a ‘member of the core GNOME team’

Free software is about people doing something as private individuals, sometimes as part of their job, but more often not. But this image of a core team of developers/contributors who scans through the internet for new projects to give their blessing to is simply not in line with reality. In fact the frustration from people ‘outside’ that they are not contacted by the ‘people ‘inside’ is often mirrored by the people ‘inside’ being frustrated by the people ‘outside’ not contacting them.

The limiting factor is time and my personal opinion is that the more involved you are (which tend to corespond to wether you are a ‘core’ hacker or not) the less time you tend to have to reach out to ‘new’ people unless these new people activly contact you themselves.

I guess the essence of what I am saying is that free software is a system without bosses in the traditional sense, what happens is what each one of us make happen by ourselves taking the initiative to get things done and not expecting anyone to pre-approve our actions or tasks. Yes, sometimes this leads to stuff being developed/worked on and not being used, but usually not and by having some basic sense and willingnes to accept feedback anyone should be able to avoid investing a lot of time into something that will not be used. And no one will ever get help from GNOME for their project, they will only get help from some individuals who work on GNOME, which (and this is important) might be people who only contribute to your particular project. All people working on a project that use GTK+ and GNOME technologies are ‘GNOME’ hackers, that is the definition of a GNOME hacker, not some intangible mark of being ‘a core GNOME hacker’

Ok, enough ranting from me today, not even sure what I was trying to convey to who by this ;)

I was trying to figure out how to get the Xerox Docucenter printer at work going under Linux when I discovered that Xerox
ships a tool called xpadmin for Linux and Unix. With this tool I got a easy to use GUI that took care of creating printer queues very easily for me. Although the apps was not open source, but a precompiled Motif binary I had no problems of getting it going on my machine running Phoebe-3.

Having such a positive experience I tried getting Hewlett Packard webjetdirect for Linux to see if it would be as easily runable. Unfortunatly this tool was done using C++ which of course meant that it is unusable on any system other than the one it is compiled on. I think that making closed source software for Linux using C++ is as stupid as it can get considering that C++ binaries break compatibility for each new compiler/compiler version released, it is like planning for your application to be unusable for most of your users.

Been hopeing that we would be able to make a new GStreamer release this week, making such a release without thomasvs would be rather hard at this point. Unfortunatly he has been a little unavailable lately, which I think is related to getting a new girlfriend not long ago. New girlfriends truly are the bane of free software ;)

Been feel energetic and tired at the same time this week, not sure how that is possible. Guess it is a combination of a long todo list, feeling caught between what I want to do and what I actually can do and keeping a good balance between the different components that make up my life.

Anyway, on to free software, I managed to put togheter a first draft of a new GNOME Summary today so hopefully I be able to put it out tommorow. I also worked a bit on the spheres-and-crystals theme and got some nice little fixes in.
Also working slowly on two other theme sets.

Helped Leif out by doing a gst-editor testbuild which should enable us to do a new release now. Also did more testing on the Monkeys Audio support which is now doing very well.

So on my todo list for this week is tons of work tasks, some .au work permit tasks (and expenses) and a host of other little fixlets in the GNOME world.

Been a bit caught up the last week between a busy workschedule after returning from vacation and trying to catch up on sleep lost during the Oslo summit. Especially jorn ‘Casanova’ Baayen had a tendency to need transport at ungodly hours ;)

Talked loosly to cinamod the other day about what I should do next with the Spheres and Crystals SVG theme. Dom is contemplating moving librsvg to use libcroco for CSS2 parsing if possible. Anyway the CSS2 support in librsvg should already be good enough for a simple stylesheet to allow for changing the colour of the theme, so I will try this out next. Latest gedit and nautilus releases also fix the biggest themeing bug in GNOME 2 which makes my theme look so much smoother.

I also hope that we can get moving on doing a GStreamer 0.6.1 release this weekend. There are tons of nice fixes that it would be nice to have out in the stable series. Jeremy Apoc also commited his Monkey’s Audio decoder and encoder plugins to GStreamer head the other day. They are still a little raw, but hopefully the buglets gets cleaned out soon.

Been scanning the archives of the
KDE-multimedia list on and off a little for the last few days. Been lots of discussion there lately about choice of multimedia system for future KDE releases. Personally I hope they go for GStreamer of course, but judging from the discussion the issue is far from decided yet.

From my point of view I would think that the only real alternative they have to GStreamer is the NMM framework. I guess it will be tempting for the KDE developers to go for a C++ based framework, but on the other hand with Tim’s Qt-style bindings for GStreamer I would think GStreamer offers just as much of a KDE-style API as anything they can put onto NMM.

Personally the issue for me has always been the advantage of the two projects sharing big and important piece of infrastructure to reduce duplication of effort, but for the time being the jury is still out on if this will happen or not. I have considered joining the kde-multimedia debate, but I have a feeling that a ‘GNOME person’ ‘medling’ in their internal debate might do more damange than good.

Have been feeling energic the last few days. Managed to update the online GStreamer docs, put out a Gst-player release, merge lots of patches in bugzilla and continue following up on some bugzilla entries I have going. Extending my plans by trying to help dsandras get GNOME Meeting better integrated with rest of GNOME, get Lauris to improve GNOME integration in Sodipodi and of course just talking to walters and cinamod to get their library efforts merged.

snorp has also been very helpfull with trying to sort out the bonoboui problem that makes my Spheres and Crystal theme look suboptimal in Nautilus, Gedit and Galeon. Hopefully he will manage to get it fixed in the not to distant future.

ajgenius from #gnome-art has also been a great help in helping me figure out how to solve various problems I experienced with the theme.

Tried Linux Mandrakes new Galaxy theme for GNOME yesterday. It is actually quite nice. Made Red Hat packages last night that I will upload to my server for kanikus tonight, guess I am his personal RPM pimp ;)

Also went out yesterday with some friends to watch the latest James Bond movie. Entertaining enough even if the scene where he paraglides through the icebergs looks extremly CG like.

Plan for today is getting out a long overdue new GNOME Summary.

Been a bit tired after returning from Belgium. I guess the combination of ten days in a row with late nights, lots of food and drink etc., does that that to you :)

Anyway think my energy is returning as I managed to put out a new release of my Spheres and Crystals SVG metatheme for GNOME 2.2 yesterday, and today I got a mail telling me that the theme has been packaged for Debian now, which is cool.

Going to get the GStreamer documentation on the website updated today and hopefully make a gst-player release. I was testing it last night and with the Julien’s latest fixes it is getting really sweet.

Back from my 10 day trip to Belgium. I have an absolutly wonderful time visiting thomasvs, my cousin and Wim and Michelle. It is incredible how much you feel you have done during a vacation when traveling so much around being with different people.

FOSDEM was fun too, not really because of the talks (even if some of them was very interesting), but mainly due to being able to hang out with so many fun people in the GNOME community. I never liked going to LUG meetings and similar due to them tending to be way to nerdy in my opinion, but GNOME gatherings on the other hand tend to be attended by very outgoing and entertaining people. The fact that people are able to bring their non-techie girlfriends/wives and they actually enjoying hanging out with the GNOME crowd in the evenings is a testament to this. Not to say that there are no GNOME people out there lacking people skills, there are, but they do in no way dominate the field when Gnomes gather.

Anyway back in Norway now with a lots of things on my agenda, like making some gstreamer related releases, writing some business proposals, work related tasks, making a new GNOME summary, preparations for the Oslo Summit, try to get themeing more clean in GNOME2 and so on.

Also got to see a lot of Belgium during my stay, at least the Flemish part. Spent time in Gent, Brussel, Antwerpen and Leuven. I liked them all even if the weather was colder/wetter than what I had hoped for. While writing this I started pondering on how quickly I have come to consider the people I stayed with there my friends, then realized it hadn’t really been quick at all, considering all the time I spent chatting with them. Yet I think that having seen and talked to these people in real life from time to time over the last few years is what have made them true friends in my view as opposed to people I just have a friendly relationship with over IRC. IRC is a great way to get to know and keep in touch with people, but I feel that the medium do not allow for the forging of true friendships, you need to meet up face to face somewhere for that to happen.