Sound Juicer 0.5
Sound Juicer "Ευχαριστω" 0.5 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages Coming Real Soon as usual.
What's New:
- A user guide! (Mike Hearn)
- Editable album artist and title! (MH)
- HIGified .desktop file (MH)
- Updated libbacon for better drive detection (Bastien Nocera)
- sound-juicer.spec fixes (Christian Schaller)
- When Musicbrainz doesn't know the track size, calculate it (BN)
- Display a sample of the directory to save files into (me, BN)
- A decent eject function which doesn't depend on /usr/bin/eject
- Do runtime checks for encoders instead of compile time (BN)
- Fix disabled HTTP proxies (BN)
- Free old pipelines when creating new ones (me)
- Removed use of GtkFrame in the prefs dialog as some (broken IMHO) themes display always display borders (BN)
Debian GNOME Policy
After a brief discussion about the naming scheme for GNOME applets on debian-gtk-gnome, I realised that the GNOME Policy I have online is out of date.
This is the latest version, 20030502-1, in Docbook and HTML. Expect a new revision today or tomorrow as I add changes from Gustavo about DevHelp.
Excitement
And I though receiving a free stuffed Ximian monkey would be the most exciting thing to happen to me this week...
Wednesday afternoon my eyes were playing around again, being sore and itchy. As I suffer from occasional hay fever and had continually disabled DrWright today, I thought it was just obvious why. I spent a few minutes looking out of the window, and noticed a familiar but unwelcome sensation in the corner of my left eye. A quick trip to the toilets confirmed the presence of allergic conjunctivitis, yet again.
I was totally un-decisive for 10 minutes whilst I weighted up the options: go to the local hospital in Croydon and possibly come out several hours later, a long way from home; go to the walk-in clinic at Victoria station and be told where the nearest eye clinic/A&E is; or hope it doesn't get too bad and go to the A&E near home. In the end the itching got worse and I didn't want to travel looking like a freak, so I jumped in the cab to Mayday University Hospital, Croydon. Nice place.
That was sarcasm.
I was pleasantly surprised by the speed at which I was seen, around five minutes -- I'm always seen within 10 minutes at my local hospital but I had assumed that was due to the rather posh eye unit in A&E. Mayday's (great name for a hospital) wasn't as posh: the "eye unit" was a desk in a corner, with a piece of paper taped to the side. It was the eye unit as opposed to, say, the ear unit, as the desk had one of those small eye examination widgets on. Come to think of it, it looked just like the ear examination widget... Anyway, he had a look at my eyes, confirmed exactly what I thought (yes I have hay fever, probably an allergic reaction, yadda yadda) and gave me some eye ointment as they had "run out of drops". I wondered if they had "run out" of anything else, such as bandages or pain killers.
Anyway, I'm not a fan of things touching my eye so not having to use drops seemed like a good thing, but now I think I prefer drops. I'm supposed to pull my eye lid down and run a line of this sticky yellow cream along the inside of the eye lid, then shut my eye for thirty seconds. What the doctor didn't mention is that when I open my eye again there will be a noticeable sticky feeling and the cream is so thick it's like viewing the world through a soft-focus lens for the next 10 minutes.
So I stumbled out of the hospital, called a taxi and found out the next cab wouldn't be available for 45 minutes. Great. I have no idea where I am apart from "north(ish) of Croydon (possibly)". After a quick call to Dan who lives locally, we decide that the best thing would be to walk down the road and find a bus stop. Thank God for Dan's total recall of the area (maybe he should become a taxi driver), as within a minute I could see a bus stop going in the right direction, exactly where he said it was. The right numbered bus was even coming around the corner.
At that moment a young bloke (early 20's I'd guess) ran past from an alley and ran across two lanes of traffic. I thought he must be in a rush. Then I found out why.
Two police men ran out of the same alley, one shouting into his radio, "He's crossed the road". The man was running towards a car waiting on the other side of the road, his get away car I assumed. Apparently not, from the shout of "Drive you $*!*" and the ensuing fight for the car. The woman driver gave a good fight before the man undid her seat belt, opened her door and just pushed her out onto the pavement. As she fell he started to try and drive away, but by now the police men had crossed the road and were all over the car, trying to stop him drive away. It was close, but the man managed to escape the police man's attempts at stopping him and threw the policeman into to road, who ended up about a foot away from being ran over by a large van which luckily wasn't going too fast (this was 18:00 in Croydon, 20mph is fast). He stormed down the road as the bus turned up, and as I was getting my ticket a description of the man and the car he just stole was coming over the bus intercom. Cunning, I thought: nobody notices a London bus, but they are all on the lookout for people the police are looking for. As the bus made its way back to the town centre three more police cars and a police van screamed past, sirens wailing. I don't know what this man did, but it must have been quite serious.
All of this happened over 30 seconds whilst I was still on the phone to Dan. He the admitted that this area of Croydon is probably the scummiest, seediest more dangerous area of Croydon. Croydon isn't a great place: walking down the busy high street flashing a posh mobile phone is an invite to have it taken from you, but around the hospital it felt like wearing posh socks was going too far.
Anyway, I made it home, ate a large pizza (Pizza Hut "Edge" pizza's are not worth it, the base is too thin) and watched The Whole Nine Yards. Not a fantastic film, but perfectly watchable.
So Sad
Last week just after we got back from holiday our washing machine broke down. The washing machine repair man had a look, and said it's best just to buy a new one -- to replace the main broken part would be £150 and that is without looking at fixing the leaks and the broken filter...
Saturday we went down the road armed with a Which? report on washing machines and a price list from QED. After a little haggling ("When I say price match I mean to high street shops...") I splashed out on a new Bosch Exxcel 2465 . This is very sad, but I was getting excited over a washing machine... 20 minute "freshen" cycles, delayed start, cold "handwash" cycles. It rocks. :)
Sound Juicer
Yes, everyone, I will add a setting for quality. Will people please read the documentation and bug reports before doing feature requests!
Please be patient -- a nice interface is not trivial.
Stuff Happens
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers again! Will the torture never end? The RHCP albums are continually playing at work, and when they are not its The Cardigans. We have two weeks of music here, and it's the same three albums over and over and over...
No wonder I've started listening to Secret Agent and Groove Salad (from SomaFM) recently!
It struck me today how redundant much of chatting is. This is a fragment of a real conversion I overheard this lunch time (with an attempt at the distinctive Croydon twang):
Person 1: I just lost my mobile phone, didn't I.
Person 2: What do ya mean ya lost it?
Person 1: Well, I can't find it can I!
Is online conversion more terse as you actually have to type the letters? This sort of conversation is common when spoken, but rare in my experience online.
Finally managed to get the Kefalonia photos back. I'll scan some more when I have my own scanner working, but here is a photos of the local goat, resting in a tree. I can't decide whether the goat is thinking "look at me I'm a cute goat" or "you looking at me?"...
Speaking of photos, why is it every time I go to Jessops it's raining. Seriously, every time.
Gnome Chat debs
Gnome Chat debs are available again! You'll have to purge your currently installed gnomechat if you installed it from here before, I fubar'd the version number :(
Packaging Duties
A hell of a lot happened in two weeks... Gossip had two releases, so Jordi updated my LoudMouth packages and uploaded a Gossip package for me to take over later (should be uploading today).
Also gtk-doc 1.1 finally made it into Sid, so I can build libgircclient again. Yes, this means that updated GnomeChat packages are building as I type. I'm pointing people to my Amazon.co.uk wishlist for this :)
In other news, it appears that GNOME 2 is entering testing well, as most of my packages have finally been accepted.
Back from holiday
I got back from Kefalonia late Sunday night. For now I'll just say that it was excellent and elaborate later.
nautilus-dpkg 0.2
nautilus-dpkg 0.2 is now available, download here. At the moment, this is only a Nautilus property page for .deb files.
This release simply adds a Show Depends button, and starts towards working correctly with Nautilus 2.4. Debian packages are also available from my repository (in experimental).
