Older blog entries for Uraeus (starting at number 283)

So after a little searching I found a place just an hour from Kristiansand which offers rafting and riverboarding; problem is that I have never heard about it so I am a bit sceptical. My current plan is that try and go down there myself when the open for the season and try it out before inviting a bunch of GNOMErs to come rafting before/after GUADEC. On their homepage they have a video which makes the river seem reasonably nice, but it could be misleading and the river be much tamer than it seems in the video. At the end of the video there is some girls climbing in bikinis and watching it I was struck by the fact the gman never features such stuff in the climbing pictures he put up :)

Been thinking a bit about the US Presidential election and the issue of wether Nader should run or not. In the begining I agreed with Lawrence Lessig's reasoning in that Nader shouldn't have run against Gore and for the same reasons should not run now in order to get Bush out the White House.

As much as anyone I would really like to see Bush trown out of the white house, but I think it is no excuse for Nader not to run, in fact I think its the opposite. As jamesh pointed out the system should probably be mended using Instant runoff voting.

But if Nader or anyone else never runs based on the idea that it might hurt the candidacy of the Democrats then I don't see why the democrats should even consider supporting changing the system, I mean why support changing the system if the current system 'forces' independent candidates to not run?

Instead he should run (and so should Pat Buchanan) and their main goal should be to 'cost' the major party, their policies are closest to, to lose the election. I promise you that if the Democrats lose a couple of more presidencies due to Nader running they will quickly start to consider supporting something like Instant runoff voting.

I don't believe aiming for the short term wins should be done at the cost of your (more important) long term goals.

Spent the weekend offline cleaning the house and doing a fresh install of Fedora 2. I was not able to get any of the Fedora 2.6 kernel rpms to work with my upgraded system so I thought a freshinstall would solve the problem. Turned out the problem was more sinister than that. Turns out that the 2.6 kernel is not able to mount any of the partitions on my old disk (standard ext3) instead I needed to switch to using my new disk. With the new disk everything works like a charm, but if I try to mount one of the partitions from the old disk I get a message saying that they are not valid blockdevices. Tried booting with my Java Desktop Live CD and it turns out that this is able to mount the partitions just as fine as Fedora 1 could. So there is definetly something strange with the 2.6 kernel in this regard.

With this upgrade I am also using ALSA now, which was part of the reason I did it, so I could help debug the ALSA mixing issue people report. Of course for me it seems ALSA mixing works perfectly....

Visited a friend of mine last night. We ended up talking a little bit about the upcoming GNOME 2.6 release and especially Nautilus new spatial mode. I ended up trying to defend it even though I too are mildly sceptical of wether it actually is an improvement compared to the old way. What struck me is that I have no idea what the rationale is for switching to spatial mode for the default. I think what needs to be done here is that someone takes the time to write a small spatial advocacy article to post on gnomedesktop.org or similar. If the proponents of spatial mode wants it to be positivly recieved I think they need to start spreading the message quickly or it might end up replacing the file selector as biggest nag issue :)

Also got of to a good start yesterday with some writings of my own. I have come to the conclusion that the hardest part of writing an article is actually writing the first draft. Once that first draft is finished it seems articles tend to just come together, even if I end up totally rewriting the article while polishing it. I think having the first version of the article done much makes it so much easier to continue because it gives me something concrete to relate to, so I can easier see what is missing and what is redundant, what is interesting and what is just blahblah. That said I am really curious to see how this article will be recieved as it is quite a departure in form from my earlier articles. Personally I think it will be an interesting article, but other might just see it as some form of ego gratification or something.

Got a rude reminder last night about how important it is to go to a movie with the right expectations. Saw Jex d'enfants expecting something rather cheerful and lively and instead got a depressing tale of emotionally damaged kids ending with a suicide pact. In that context the movie did not really hit home.

On a positive note I got kind of an epiphany this morning about what to do in the upcoming months. Think I will follow in thomasvs footsteps and take some months break between jobs. So that I probably leave my current job in early July and go traveling for a couple of months. To make it affordable that means I either will travel in the countries that where part of the old Soviet Union or in China, not sure which yet as the plan is still in a rather fluid state.

But first I need to get through this rather stressfull day at work. Two fullday projects doing a tug of war on me combined with two other projects demanding phone support. Nice.

Finally got fed up with a certain commenter to Lessig's blog so I started replying. Lets see how grows tired first :)

I also bought Linux User & Developer Magazine today as they featured a livecd with the Java Desktop from Sun. Wanted to take a closer look at what Glynn & Co. had cooked up. Some of their changes are quite nice and I do wished the opensourced their theme. Need to find some time to dig a little deeper to see all there is to see in the Java Desktop.

Anyway off to see a movie at the cinema :)

Spent the morning working on the GStreamer RPM packaging and testing stuff. I was able to play the Shrek Quicktime trailer in Gst-player today, which was the first time I got that format working in the player :)

While having a boring time at work yesterday I started clicking through my friends friends lists on Orkut and their homepages; I discovered Ylith posing in Ximian and Gnomemeeting t-shirts. Think we need to send her some Fluendo and GStreamer t-shirts ;)

My youngest sister is in town this weekend to celebrate her birthday. Going down there later with the L'or de Torrente I bought her. No idea how it smells, but it is what she wanted :)

On monday I plan on seeing Jeux d'enfants, which our french movie comentator hadess has not mentioned yet in his blogg for some strange reason. But many of the other french gnomies I know strongly recommend it.

Also talked with my boss yesterday about my future plans. She is simply wonderful and said that I should just simply send in a request for a sabatical when I know the details. I would then be able to return to my job here during the next 3-4 years if I so should wish. Getting a sabatical also makes me much more flexible as it doesn't have the 3 month notice period that quiting has.

Seems Sun came through and managed to work out a deal with ds. They will give David a Sparc box in return for the creation of a Solaris Audio plugin for GStreamer and some GStreamer and Java Media Framework integration work. Cool stuff.

Iain just reported that he watched a full movie with perfect playback in gst-player, which means we are getting somewhere on the stabilization front. Also cool stuff :)

Started to think about how to manage my finances in the year ahead. Theoretically so would I wish to move a lot of money out of Norway and the US and into the EU. But as you all know the exchange rates for moving money that way atm is very bad. So I probably move the money into the stock market instead, although I feel a bit jittery about moving all my life savings there. Then again, if I do move them into stock funds it should be relativly safe, especially since I could take a long term view on the placements.

Also need to talk to my boss tomorrow about my future. I am determined that this is my last year in Norway; with a migration South almost guaranteed. With Spain on the top of the list and Australia as the fallback solution :)

Back from Barcelona. My appartment feels very big for some reason :)

The program in Barcelona was non-stop and I don't think I went to bed before 0200 - 0300 any of the nights I was there (which is very late when you reach my age :)

Lot of really cool Fluendo stuff happening, with Johan having gotten rid of his Joey Tempest haircut being the only thing I will mention publicaly atm :)

Also met with Evangelina again. That was really great and I enjoyed talking with her just as much as I did at GUADEC. I hope to keep in touch with her. One of the days there we went to a Jazz club in Barcelona which turned out to have a really sweet Fusion band playing thanks to Evangelina. Think it might become one of my favourite hangouts when I move down there.

Also feeling good about knowing that Thomas and Kristien have a good game and movie collection for me to enjoy next time I come to visit :)

Some days I feel like work is intending to kill me. You people have no idea how tired I am of dba's and unix admins who don't know anything. I am so tired to having to explain to people how their own network functions, how their backup systems work, how to add something to the Unix path, how search for something on the web, how the browser proxy settings work and so on. I don't mind explaning such stuff to an end user once in a while, but it frustrates me beyond belief when I have to explain such incredibly basic things to people who are supposed to be system administrators.

Today I had to deal with just to many of these people. One even had the nerve to phone my project manager complaining that I where not available to help him with his job. Who the hell do he think he is? I am part of a project team working on a fixed price project which is supposed to be deliverd on record time. Yet this guy has the nerve to complain when I don't have the time to help him with a task not related to the project we where hired in to do and which has nothing to do with what I am supposed to know and everything about what he is supposed to know.

Or this other guy calling me around 10 this evening because he can't find 'unzip' on his UNIX box!! What friggin kind of Unix sysadmin is unable to download and install unzip on his own friggin server. And when he fails he has the nerve to call me at home in the evening asking about it. Have people no shame anymore?

Or this idiotic support person who had the nerve to suggest that I reboot the machine to 'activate' the new lines I added to the host file. Even when I told her I was able to ping the entries added to the host file did she insist I reboot the machine. Even when I explained exactly what the problem was she continued to insist I rebooted.

aaaah, this a just a small sample of the lovely people I had to deal with TODAY.