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2003-12-31
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They fashion some of their own
GStreamer
Our new hire is arriving tonight. I'm very excited he's coming in. I hope we can help him find his place to settle in soon enough, and that he's motivated to get things done. I know I am.
Finally finished merging the new error handling into GStreamer. I'm pretty happy with it, but it needs some more documenting and cleaning.
Meanwhile, I finally have time again for nautilus-media and friends, and as I had noticed before, but didn't protest loudly enough, there are some things missing from the current core to restore nautilus-media's functionality. This is going to be a tough one because the person who replaced it with a better system didn't really implement everything it needs, and he takes things overly personal. It doesn't help that he thinks nautilus-media is a crap idea.
I've grown beyond caring about personal issues, I just want things to work and make good on the promises GStreamer delivers in general. We could be doing so much awesome stuff if we were all pointing our heads in the same direction ...
Fedora
I was very excited six months ago when I first learned that Red Hat wanted to open up and wanted to use our project's name for the new project.
Today, I feel that Red Hat doesn't have or want to invest enough resources to really open up development. You can sort of feel it on a number of levels, but just looking at some of the facts out there probably says enough already.
We're six months further and there's still no way to influence/submit/codevelop packages. The fedora.us QA queue is still completely full, and packages aren't really moving much to the new Fedora.
Worse, we have no idea what Red Hat wants to do with the public submission servers, what to use as the build system, and so on. Enrico Scholz has been doing marvelous work on the fedora.us build system based on top of mach and vserver. This guy is incredibly smart and talented, but Red Hat engineers haven't commented on it yet AFAICT. It is very frustrating, because there are some very talented guys willing to work on this together with Red Hat. To me it seems like the basis of getting this community project infrastructure into place, and all we get to see from Red Hat is them being busy on just working on Fedora Core 2.
The irony of it all only really sunk in when I was going through my backlog of fedora mail and came across this mail asking to make sure to have your packages built for Fedora Core 2. I thought I had missed some mails that detailed the submission had been opened up. Took me some time to figure out this really was just an internal mail to Red Hat employees that we happen to have the chance to see :)
I'm not really sure what can be done about all this. I'm sure it's not the intent of the Red Hat engineers to have it happen this way. I just think that Red Hat currently doesn't have the resources to pull off opening the whole distribution to outside contributors.
The extra cost they have to invest at this point to make sure people that have the ability to contribute - talented people that have proven they are dedicated to helping out, like Enrico, Matthias, me, Panu, Seth, Ville, and so many others - seems to be too high for them to actually do it. (Warren, I'm not mentioning you since you don't seem to get ignored :) But let's not go into that here)
Anyways, I'm not sure if the Red Hat people we know understand our concerns and frustrations. I do hope they do something about it sometime soon, though, because we're getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed to the point of losing interest.
Concerts
The first one in Brussel was quite alright. I didn't get to see Greg afterwards because he ... fell asleep. Totally ruined my image of him. Amsterdam was incredible. They were in very good form, tore all the way through the songs. The only drawback was the set was pretty much the same.
Best quote of the evening - "You don't pay a hooker for sex. You pay her to leave after sex." I tried taking some pictures, but they didn't turn out too well. With flash, the nice show colours are completely gone. Without it, the colors are right but the pictures aren't sharp. If anyone knows how to do this right, let me know.
Belgium
On the one hand it felt good to be back in Belgium again. I had a great time, and I realized how much I love Gent as a city. On the other hand, things had already changed; a department store was rebuilt, a delicacy shop in the street were I lived as a student had changed, and so on... I was getting homesick not for living there, but for living there as a student. I walked by my old apartment, and felt it wash over me. Silly, but true.
I am also starting to acquire traits some would describe as being feminine - I drowned my emotional distress in a shopping spree. I got home with 7 CD's, the Art of UNIX Programming, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer PS/2 game. As well as some presents for my girlfriend.
On the topic of her, she did the cutest thing before I left. She was still asleep, and she was flirting with someone in her sleep : pouting her lips, nodding agreeingly, grunting approvals, and so on. I just hope she was flirting with me in her dreams ... :)