Older blog entries for Uraeus (starting at number 268)

So it is official thomasvs thinks I am a slacker. Not sure what to do about it though :)

Tried writing of a little mail to gst-devel today asking for status reports. While things are moving fast in CVS with lot of fixes being commited, I felt we needed some sort of public airing of plans going forward as I was kinda feeling everyone was sitting in their own bubble working on their own issues without a clear understanding of the big issue. Teoretically every major issue is being handled by someone, but until we speak up I felt that it was a bit in the air what everyone was doing. And the timeline is so tight that I felt that letting things sort themselves out over time was not an option.

Who said there isn't native ports of great games to Linux :)

Happy to see donscarletti on advogato know. I hope Jeff ends up adding him to planet.gnome.org, but I guess he have to considering that Caleb is a fellow Australian :)

Been spending the first part of this week installing the Oracle E-Business Suite on Red Hat 3. Some troubles getting things going but a combination of these steps and unsetting the LANG variable made things hum along just fine.

Merged the updated NAS plugin into CVS this morning. There are still some issues with it, but hopefully some of our caps masters can figure out why the NAS plugin has some issues still. A big thanks to Arwed for getting the job done. The recent switch to using the ChangeLog file in GStreamer has worked out just great. Personally I think being able to go to the Changelog to see what has happened recently is so much easier than the old 'use the CVS web changelog'.

Happy to see David Schleef and Benjamin Otte hacking on the new autoplugger. The current autoplugger, called spider, has been known to have issues for some time, but time restraints and other priorities in the codebase has postponed the issue until now.

I also got this running to have GStreamer join the Linux Audio Consortium, think the goals of the Consortium are still a bit vague though, but hopefully being members we can both influence the development of the consortium or at least get a clearer understanding of what they are about.

I watched Wing Commander on DVD last evening, all I can say is that this movie really sucked. Many things pulled this movie down; like horrible sets and a some horrible secondary characters, but once the main quality killer was an enemy that was made toothless and gigantic logical flaws in even the core elementes of the movie.

Yay!! I have finally gotten the 'new' toilet installed. After having it standing in the hallway for almost 2 years now I finally got a plumber to come and use it to replace the old one for me. It will be strange to both have a new toilet in the bathrom and also to finally not have a toilet standing in my hallway. No matter what people say, toilets do not look that decorative :)

I am really excited about how things are going with GStreamer these days. A lot of long standing issues are being sorted out, with a new autoplugger being developed, proper Ogg and Vorbis plugins (not using vorbisfile), new and improved error system, DVD playback being polished, gstplay design. I am also very curious to see how our now 11 person non-linear video editor team will manage. Having 11 people work almost fulltime on this for almost a year makes we believe they should be able to get something started that is truly usable and something which will continue to be worked on afterwards.

Ok, sometimes I do something and I wonder how I could possibly do such a thing. A couple of days ago I reported back to someone at work that the tar.gz files he had uploaded to me was broken. Turns out they are ok, the reason they 'appeared' broken was because I tried to run tar -xvf on the tar.gz file. Consider I have unpackaged a gazillion files over the last few years I honestly feel it should be impossible for me to do such a basic mistake, but the facts here leave little room for any other explanation.

It also seems I might have been a little rash in my characterization of Everaldo the other day. Turns out the reason the icons are not released are because they are made using an illustrator extension that hinders conversion to SVG. So I appologize to Everaldo for calling him petty. That said I can't help but feel that there is some irony to something being marketet as 'Crystal SVG' when it is not even possible to easily convert the images to SVG....

So my GStreamer article is available on osnews :)

argh, having been involved with librsvg, gnome-themes-extras and sodipodi/inkscape and the flag collection the use of SVG has become something close to my heart. Ok, so I get some friendly mocking for it, but I really believe that scalable graphics is the future of the desktop and that the use of bitmaps will fade away (hopefully).

Through this efforts I have come in contact with many of the great artists and developers out there, and there has been a very friendly tone among those I have been in touch with, both those who are part of the GNOME and KDE camps.

In gnome-themes-extras I have a total of 5 themes, three of which originally came from KDE oriented artists; Lush, Nuvola and Amaranth. The other two are Gorilla from Jimmac and Wasp; which is a theme based on icons made originally for Mac I think, but which I have extended together with the original artist for use with GNOME. I am also happy that say that both Gorilla and Wasp has been ported over to KDE by others and posted to kdelook.org.

I have for some time been wanting to include a metatheme using Crystal or Outline in g-t-e, but neither of those has been available in SVG format, at least not in complete versions. I have noticed Everaldo saying the SVG's to be forthcoming for a long while, but there has always been one thing or the other holding it up. Today I sadly discovered that the reason for the SVG's not being released was simply a petty attitude of not wanting to see GNOME use the actual SVG's as icons before KDE can do so. The following quote from the release announcement for Crystal 1.0 says it all: Altought this version is known as 'SVG', the icons are still in PNG format, the SVG files will be relased once the support for the format improves in KDE. So much for adopting SVG's in a big was as a recent announcement on Slashdot proclaimed ;)

Well guess this at least gives me more time to come up with a nice metatheme using the Gartoon icons, icons which don't use SVG in their name, but which which really are SVG's :)

Ok, edited this somewhat as it seem some found it offensive. Wasn't meant as such, but sad irony doesn't always translate across language and culture

On a more upbeat note I did a release of gnome-themes-extras package yesterday. It contains updated Wasp and Lush themes and also includes some Gaim icon themeing which I think is nice. Well send out the formal announcement today as I wanted the GNOME ftp mirrors to catch up.

Spent a large part of yesterday trying to merge the NAS plugin into gst-plugins. Made some progress, but there is still some way to go. Since the package has some weird placements and no .config or .pc file it is a bit of a pain to get working correctly. Using the SDL configure stuff as the example for getting it to work, especially since GStreamer's scripts are relativly advanced (in a good way) compared to the auto stuff used in other projects. Learning more and more about auto* stuff, which is always a good thing I guess.

Did some good work this evening. Finished up my article and sent it of to Eugenia. Also updated the sodipodi flags package with the latest editions and did a release. We have 310 different flags now. Tobias Jakobs has been doing most of recent additions (all being highly detailed and quite hard flags to do.) We are just 6 flags away from covering all of ISO 3166. Will send out the announcement tommorow when the SF mirrors have had a little time to sync.

Tommorow I guess I get my appartment cleaned up again after a few weeks of Christmas and Spain. And maybe even get the NAS plugin finally merged into CVS :)

Guess there has been some frustration about the criticism on OSNEWS regarding the frobnicate checkbox in the old screenshot of the filechooser. Fun to see both Federico and TigerT address this :)

For those that don't know so is the first screenshot a in-progress report from Federico towards the mockup made by TigertT in the second screenshot.