Company Meal 2003 Walkabout
On the 19th December, it was our company meal, I took the scenic route with my camera and took a few photos en route. It was not a lovely sunny day as you will see...
Liverpool Street train station, nice and quiet.
Just outside Liverpool St. station, and possibly the strangest location for
a Christmas tree I know of.
This is just off Moorgate, there is a large old building with its roof
covered in satellite dishes. Here they are reflected in the
neighbouring office block. Possibly would have worked better with B&W
film.
Me, reflected in a mirror inside Moorgate tube station. Sadly I was actually
wearing a black coat, there is a rather blue cast on the photos.
Around London Bridge. Old school and 60's architecture crammed into a small space.
Tower Bridge from London Bridge, the Millennium Bridge and the
Tate Modern, and a underground
section of the Thames Path.
Spot when I swapped to black and white film.
A funky piece of bark from along the Embankment, the London Eye across the river, and Temple
tube station.
Now some photos of my colleagues at work.
Aradna, Alvin, John, Russel.
Ric, Peter, Rob.
Helen and John; Ric, Helen and Russel; Helen and Russel.
And finally, a cuddly pig.
Photos
So I've scanned the photos on my Dad's cheap-and-cheerful scanner (fast and colour-accurate scans, but the images are slightly blury) and will put them online in a series of blog entries. First of all, a final photo from Kefalonia:
My God, I'm not pulling a silly face!
From: installer@ftp-master.debian.org
Jeff, congratulations on your first upload to Debian. I think I still have a copy of my first mail from installer@ftp-master.debian.org in my Debian/ maildir somewhere. Glad to have done the actual upload for you.
Book Database
I was about to quickly catalogue the books and DVDs we got for Christmas, but after a 30-second Google I can't find an online book database. If I wanted to provide links to movies I'd use the wonderful Internet Movie Database, does anyone know a database for fiction and non-fiction books?
Christmas (nearly) Over
Back home again after a few days at Vicky's mum's house, which was good fun. Lots of cool presents (funky shirts, DVDs, books) and lovely food -- a wonderful tuna steak on the 25th, and salmon on the 26th (Vicky's family is vegetarian).
Christmas good news included a rebate from overpaying the phone bill, and my sister getting engaged. Good luck to her and Elliott!
In two hours time I'll be out again for a few days, off to my mum's to see them for a while. Tomorrow will be my second Christmas, which will be fun. ;-)
Finally, I just got some colour and B&W photos back from the developers (Boots do reasonable B&W developing for £8), I'll try and get them scanned on my Dad's scanner. I have a horrible feelings certain pictures of me will be the incentive Vicky needs to start creating her own web site...
Merry Christmas
Last blog before Christmas, I'll probably sneak one in before the new year
when I check my spam email.
I'm off to Vicky's parents later this afternoon for a few days, and then off to my parents with Vicky for a belated Christmas Day on the 27th. I'm sure my sister will have managed to get several rolls of film developed overnight from her trip to India, hopefully she won't make me too jealous... :)
Happy Hogswatch everyone, have a good time.
Web Developing Under IE6
...is a Right Royal Pain In The Arse.
The pain started when I needed to be in Windows and thought I'd check how my web site looked in IE6. Bad, is the answer. Firstly, IE6 doesn't know what a "thin" border looks like and renders it several pixels thick. That isn't too bad, but then IE6 also decides to ignore the margin-right: statement and lets the content spread across the entire page, over the side bar. Finally I made the mistake of using a PNG with an alpha channel, which of course IE renders with solid 50% grey background. There is a work-around for this bug, but its incredibly ugly. Developing for Internet Explorer causes the red mist to appear...
Thomas Vander Stichele: web shopping in .es sounds painful. I was surprised by this as in .uk we have many online stores, and its pretty rare to find a site which does not work correctly. The normal problem is JavaScript assuming IE and some parts of the site not working correctly. Much of our Christmas shopping was done at Amazon.co.uk, which was delivered quickly as usual, even if in amazingly over-sized boxes (a trait Dabs appears to have pioneered with 2' × 1' × 0.5' boxes for a stick of SDRAM)
Nearly Christmas
'Twas a few nights before Christmas
And not a sound could be heard
Apart from the sniffing of Ross and Vicky
Thanks to their nasty colds.
Massive Chinese meal last night -- partly due to ordering the large set meal, and partly due to a mistake and us getting more than we expected -- and I'm still feeling fat. We spent all of last night sniffing instead of sleeping, which was fun, so I'm also tired. Grand plans of hacking thrown away, instead I've got to do last-minute card writing and present buying.
NP: Sensations of Tone, by Gol.
Busy Christmas
It's been rather busy the last few days -- too busy to blog at least.
Last Thursday (the 18th) I took off ill, with a cold which is coming and going like the tides. Friday was the work Christmas meal, at the wonderful Blue Elephant on Fulham Broadway. I arrived a little worn out as I had already walked from London Bridge to Temple with my first black and white film, snapping en route. The Thames Path is a nice walk, one day in the summer I shall have to load up with a pile of film and do it from end to end.
Blue Elephant was excellent as usual (this is our third time there I think) and I staggered out at 2130, full and rather drunk on Harvey Wallbanger's, red wine and a few glasses of Laphroaig. Discovered that I had Dan's present still in my bag. Phoned Rob at 2330 to tell him that he forgot to take the present from my bag, and discovered he was still in the Blue Elephant... glad to hear my boss was there too, relaxing for what is probably the first time for quite a while...
Saturday involved nearly-last-minute Christmas shopping and then going into London to see Sexie. Eddie Izzard was as glorious as ever, in his leather mini-skirt, black boots, and breasts. Possibly the best sight of the evening was the touts selling tickets for "a man in a dress" outside Wembley.
Sunday mainly involved large amounts of sleep, and more nearly-last-minute shopping. Hopefully I've got everything for Vicky now, but there is still a few more days left of shopping in case... In a few minutes friends will start arriving and we'll be off for the now traditional Christmas Chinese Meal. Hopefully the Thai at the Blue Elephant won't have accustomed my taste buds too much.
NP: Out of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin' Man. How festive can I get?
Good News
Quickie: Good news for Sound Juicer -- I shall be shortly buying a new hard drive for my laptop (thanks to Christian Schaller) and thus have the space to build GNOME 2.5 and GStreamer 0.7. Expect migration to these to start in the new year, hopefully without losing GNOME 2.0/GStreamer 0.6 support of course.
New Design
Huzzah, a design for my blog which isn't stolen straight from Movable Type, though in hindsight it does remind me of Jeff Waugh's design.
It's not totally finished yet, the padding/margins still needs to be sorted out in places, but overall I'm happy with it. Apart from the header, the entire design is layed out in ems so it should scale very nicely. Even the sidebar is "20 ems" wide and the main content expands to fill the space remaining, which took a while to figure out.
Finally, thanks to Jose Luis for taking some wonderful photos, one of which I used as the header.
Photography Hell
Photography Hell is when you want to, but can't, take a photo.
A few months ago when I was going home I was treated to an incredible sunset on the way out of London, cumulating in a gorgeous deep purple to bright orange sky reflected in a lake. This made me wish that I could just stop the train, get out, and take some photos. However, after a week or so the sunset started occurring when I was on the tube, so the wish faded.
The wish is back again, though now I am treated to dawns instead. Sharp frost and mist across rolling fields, a clear sky and the half-moon, trees masked against the sun rising, with aeroplane vapour trails crossing the sky. I really should find the time to take a photography course, or just experiment, and try and capture some of this.
Shoddy Compilers
Last Friday I got an email saying that the old compiler we use at work is actually generating the test/branch code in this snippet:
do {
/* foo */
} while (0);
I signed, recited the habitual "crappy IAR" line, and blamed someone not turning on the optimiser.
Until now. I tried with the new "improved optimiser" compiler they sent us, which is supposed to be a lot better. The compiler isn't as brain-dead as the older one, which is nice. However, this new optimiser still sucks:
main:
?0012:
LDI R16,LOW(?0013)
LDI R17,HIGH(?0013)
LDI R18,(?0013 >> 16)
CALL puts
LDI R16,LOW(0)
TST R16
BRNE ?0012
RET
Oh wonderful. This is with full size optimisations, and the result is the same with full speed optimisations. Curse the proprietary world and their shoddy compilers!
The Usual
It's the usual Monday morning. Currently I've got a pile of patches for evolution-data-server sitting in my checkout, which are getting increasingly harder to separate for the lists. The contact lookup applet finally works using EBookView (don't free stuff you don't own, stupid), but sadly uses an API which is only in the previously mentioned patches. I've been talking to Chris Toshok about this API change, hopefully he will approve the commit today. And the video conferencing addition to EContact. And the improved API docs. I need patch approval love -- why did I start hacking on Evolution so close to the holidays! :(
Ettore
I've written and deleted this first paragraph five times so far.
I never met Ettore. However he was always willing to help with my stupid questions about the code in #evolution, and had a fabulous blog from which I stole his photos and Italian recipes.
I can't write any more, the right words refuse to form in my head. Ximian, my thoughts are with you. This had been a hard month.
Contact Lookup Applet 0.3
Autocompletion in the entry! There are still some niggly bugs to fix, but this is looking fabtastic now. This release requires GTK+ 2.3.
Download it here.
More on the "Wishlist"
It appears I got lots of comments on my blog last night... I'll field them here. Note that the long post by Andy which ends "powertools are not part of GNOME Desktop" was actually by me, no idea why it says Andy.
"If you do a skin of GTK+ 2.x for EMACS" -- there is a GTK+ 2 port of emacs already -- "like there is one for OOo" -- all OOo does is copy the theme colours, my patches to the GNOME control center (in 2.4) mean that emacs should do that for you too.
Paul Gnuyen -- you don't want "viewports" over "workspaces". You want the implementation of virtual desktop to include spanning windows across desktops. That is fine, I thought there was a bug about this but I can't seem to find it at the moment :( The spanning issue I think might be possible if you fiddle with the X virtual desktop size too, but I've only got a single screen so I don't know the details of this.
Eugenia -- I was waiting for your reply. :) I understand that low-tech journalists and "normal" users will bitch, moan and generally complain about things which annoy them without going through the proper channels to get the problems solved. However, I expected you, someone who was recently a member of the nautilus mailing list, to be up to date on what is happening in GNOME development. It is a little late posting a wishlist for GNOME when 2.5 has just his the API freeze, and contains a large number of the entries on your list. I expect you to file bugs all the time, to be active on the usability lists, because "you care" (as you say). Or I'd expect such an article to be passed to some of the people close to GNOME development first so that they can point out the differences in direction/features which already exist/etc etc.
I want GNOME to be a commercial desktop. I want GNOME on the NHS desktops, in our government, one as many desktops as possible. I wrote Sound Juicer to be a CD ripper for normal people, as the existing rippers are not very user friendly. It is this focus on end-users which GNOME has, 800,000 users inside the NHS will not want a powerful text editor, or an integrated IDE, but a powerful email client, a easy to use web browser, a easy system to use. Yes, there should be comprehensive CD burning software using the GNOME library, and video editing software using GTK+/GStreamer, but at the moment there are larger fish to fry. We need the best email client (luckily Evolution 2 is looking excellent) and the cleanest browser (Epiphany is developing so fast and so well) before we can look at other, less important, programs.
In a related note, I see Federico has fiddled with the new file chooser, and renamed the Frobnicate button... For people who didn't know what "Frobnicate" meant, the Jargon File is a handy reference for "Lart" too.
Finally, contact-lookup-applet now sports auto-completion. I hope to get 0.3 out soon.
The "GNOME Wishlist"
So the every amusing OSNews is running a GNOME Wishlist. Sigh. Where do I start?
Nautilus Scripts/Addons
Nautilus 2.6 will support funky new plugins, with a clean API and decent menu merging. I though Eugenia was keeping up with Nautilus development, she certainly posts on nautilus-list now and again.
Spatial Mode
It's not finished -- either help make it totally rock by commenting/fixing/patching, or wait until is it finished.
Metacity Features
The standard rant about "viewports" and "workspaces". Again. Jesus people, ask for a feature and not the name for a subset of available features that you have used before. Please. I'm about to ask God to extend his kitten-killing to Metacity... For glueing windows to the corner of the screen... well, press shift once you are close to the corner and it will magically glue itself, without snapping to the windows it sees en route.
File Selector
Eugenia's comments are pretty useless: "...is pretty bad". Not really a comprehensive UI review, but thanks anyway. But that's not what I'm confused about -- I'm confused about the number of people who think that the "Frobnicate this file" check box in Frederico's example screenshot is part of the default UI! Please engage brain before posting. What would "frobnicating" do to a document I opened in gedit? In galeon? Did you ever consider the possibility that this widget is an example of an extra widget the developer can add to the file selector?
Volume and Showdesktop Icons
Honestly, compared against some of the bugs in GNOME this is laughable. Extract the patch from Red Hat, and file it as a bug upstream. It will probably be applied. Not Hard Work.
Development Tools
"Glade is junk, end of story" -- Eugenia. Right. Personally I consider Glade to be a wonderful interface designer, and makes coding GTK+ interfaces trivial. I hope this isn't referring to the "Generate Source" button in Glade, which is generally considered to be A Bad Idea when using C.
Personally, I hope that Eclipse's C support will mature and someone integrates Glade somehow, even if it is just a button to launch the binary. But I'm happy with Glade + libglade + xemacs.
Copy/Paste still misbehaves after all these years
File bugs! There is no fundamental reason why copy and paste shouldn't work, as is shown by the recent gaim hacking to copy right text to/from the gaim chat window into the Evolution composer.
GConf Editor
A search button for gconf-editor could be handy, but generally tried looking in /apps/[app-name]?
Samba on Nautilus
GNOME 2.4 I believe had a new smb: implementation, and in GNOME 2.6 it will rock even more.
Rhythmbox and Totem
"Use the XMMS visualization plugins" -- not possible. It is impossible to link GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.x code in the same binary.
"Totem ... use either Gstreamer or Xine on the fly" -- why? I'd say that everything GStreamer can play, Xine can play. If you want a player for everything, use Xine. In the future when GStreamer has the required features, we'll all be able to switch over to that instead.
"I would like Totem to recognize the file format and show an alert to the user "would you like to download from the web these formats and install them?" -- Totem already does this when it can, and has done so for a long time.
Epiphany
The usual minor issues which get blown out of all proportion as show-stopping bugs for the entire desktop. File a bug, create a patch, do something!
Text and Video Messaging Integration
I think the gnomemeeting maintainer covered this one...
Burning Application
GNOME the desktop is going towards tools to help end-users. Thus we have nautilus-cd-burner which is wonderful for the very common task of "burn these files". I have a patch (honest, I do) for Rhythmbox which lets that burn audio CDs from playlists. I don't see the need for a fully-featured 100% coverage CD burning tool in the GNOME desktop.
Contact Lookup Applet 0.2.1
Right, I removed the Search button from the applet. I added in the past as it was the only way to reach the applet context menu, but now that I have a little icon that works well for the applet context menu. That is the only change here apart from a file rename, so don't get too excited.
Download it here.
JDS
So Sun's GNOME-based JDS appears to be kicking some serious butt. After the Israeli and Chinese government, our own NHS is trialling it too.
PS: Damn it is cold today. I hate it when it's cold enough that my headphone cables refuse to flex and thus keep on falling out of my ears. Dammit.
NP: Macy Gray, Relating to a Psychopath, live at the Old Vic Theatre, London. Maybe I like Macy Gray after all.
Contact Lookup Applet 0.2
Sweet news in the form of Contact Lookup Applet 0.2, which I believe will work for more than 1% of people so I'm announcing it to the hordes. Download it from here.
In case you are a little slow today, this is an applet for your panel which will lookup contacts... specifically in an evolution-data-server addressbook you specify. Yes folks, you'll have to build Evolution from CVS to make this baby work. But it's worth it, trust me. ;-)
There is still a substantial To Do list, but it works well enough -- assuming you type enough to get a single match from the address book, as only the first result is displayed. If you try it and want to make feature requests, please check TODO first. I also recommend running the factory in a terminal the first time you use it, several (read as "all") error conditions are handled with g_warning() and they will disappear to the bit bucket otherwise.
Every time someone asks why I haven't yet put a quality setting in Sound Juicer, God kills a kitten. I've asked him to extend the same practise to feature requests for Contact Lookup Applet which are already in the To Do. Please, think of the kittens.
Some people seem to like screenshots:
NP: Distractions - Zero 7. I forgot to record Mr. Scruff onto a minidisc last night, dammit.
Arbitrary Content
Quick diary update: feeling a little less tired which is good. Feeling like a cold is slowing working its way into my head, which is bad.
Got more fabulous birthday presents -- Simpsons, Hot Shots! and circa 1980 Billy Connolly on DVD, a pornographic heat sensitive mug (classy...) and a lovely bottle of whiskey (actually classy), Last Chance To See and Three Men In A Boat. I think that was all... but I probably forgot something and insulted someone.
And now, the news update:
And finally, everyone should Share the Groove. Online music trading, by artists who don't object to recorded gigs being distributed for non profit. Currently listening to an excellent Otis Reading gig, and yesterday I grabbed Beth Orton at the Royal Albert Hall and Coldplay at La Hanger.
Update: as expected I forgot to mention that I also got Westwood Platinum from Bastien. Some "slamming joints" (apparently) and Westwood being, well, himself. Also Share The Groove has an, erm, lazy-evaluated list of artists who don't mind their gigs being distributed. In that they share everyones, and restrict artists who complain.
Evolution 2
I've been having a play with Evolution 1.5 recently. It's looking really nice, the clear evolution and evolution-data-server split should lead to more programs using the backends.
Some screenshots: the mailer, the address book, the calendar.
My address book search applet is rocking nicely now, its nearly complete apart from the auto-completing magic.
PS: I promise a decent diary entry soon. Honest.
