Sound Juicer "Fishy Wishy, Totally Addicated to Plaice" 0.5.8

Sound Juicer "Fishy Wishy, Totally Addicated to Plaice" 0.5.8 -- download the tarball here. Debian packages available in my repository, I'll upload to the archive once I've sorted out my keys after the break in.

17:09 Wednesday, 26 Nov 2003 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (5 comments)

Birthday!

Today I'm officially old -- one quarter of a century old.

I took today off and it has been a good day so far -- Vicky got me a funky black shirt and a very nice DKNY watch, and I also got Dude, Where's My County? and £100 in vouchers. I finally picked up The Two Towers (which has been sitting in the post office), and am currently watching more of Babylon 5 series 3. Life isn't bad despite the weather.

12:00 Wednesday, 26 Nov 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

GNOME in Pixar

Saw Finding Nemo last night. Very, very cool to see Sawfish all over the 'making of' documentary and one shot that briefly contained a gnome panel. - Luis Villa

I can inform everyone that Pixar is now using Metacity and, well, Devil's Pie. Sawfish was a little too crackful for them so they switched to GNOME 2 with Metacity and Devil's Pie to provide a small amount of crack.

18:17 Saturday, 15 Nov 2003 [#] [computers] (2 comments)

Sound Juicer "No no nos" 0.5.7

Sound Juicer "No No Nos" 0.5.7 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages in the upload queue already.

Basically, if 0.5.6 crashed for you, try this. I've nailed a few bugs which were causing frequent crashes.

14:34 Tuesday, 11 Nov 2003 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (11 comments)

Success!

Despite the continued chronic tiredness, today isn't going badly.

My tool to search the Evolution address book is working. The next stage is to clean up the UI (I'm stealing the vCard widgets from Evolution) and evolve (boom boom) it into a panel applet.

Finally managed to get a LDAP server running at work, thanks to Jeff Waugh and Chris Toshok. I'm glad to see that Evolution's use of LDAP is far, far superior to Outlook Express or Mozilla's.

And to finish it all off:

$ ./vmpTest
Running suite(s): Direct
100%: Checks: 185, Failures: 0, Errors: 0
  

That, my son, is a comprehensive test suite. The full suite contains 195 tests but 10 of them are not relevant here.

Dave: great news about the new Nautilus plugin API. I suggest you attempt a Subversion plugin first though using the lovely Subversion client API, otherwise you'll send half of your time parsing the damn CVS/* files...

13:33 Wednesday, 05 Nov 2003 [#] [computers] (3 comments)

URIs Considered Harmful...

Many people, specifically the Nautilus maintainers, but including me, consider the use of URIs in GNOME something which should be hidden from the user.

For example, to access the CD burning tools in Nautilus, you can navigate to burn:///. This is ugly and has zero discoverability, i.e. the user has to be told that it exists. The same for network:///, fonts:/// and applications:///. These are all magic URIs, once the user knows they exist, they should be able to remember them, but the point is that shouldn't have to. A good example of this is the integration of magicdev with nautilus-cd-burner, instead of having to go to burn:/// (or selecting "CD Creator" in GNOME 2.4) to open the correct location, magicdev will open it automatically when a blank CD is inserted on the assumption that you are likey to want to burn something to it. Joe User can just use it, and Lee T. Hacker remembers the URI.

Thats all well and good, and often-covered material. However, URIs have one thing going for them: at least they are not UUIDs. I found this gem in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit:

To open a new Explorer window which displays My Documents, use this as the command line:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,::{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}

Check out that snappy UUID...

19:19 Monday, 03 Nov 2003 [#] [computers] (1 comments)