This releases most obvious change is a potential speed up, and a genre drop-down. The UI for this will probably change over time so please don't tell me how crap you think it is.

• Add a genre drop-down
• Update CD code, and use HAL if available
• Depend on GTK+ 2.4 and use the new file chooser
• Don't corrupt data if the disc is changed whilst the Rip Complete dialogue is open (Sean Proctor)
• More charset escaping (Frederic Crozat)
• Add more GStreamer iterate functions to speed ripping (David Arnold)
• Be a bit more paranoid about incorrect GConf keys
• Allow the MusicBrainz server to be changed
• Lots of little bug fixes but lots of fabby people

Yesterday the wonderful Leaf Fall timetable kicked in, which is a rather pathetic substitute for cleaning the tracks more often. The deal is that trains leaving for London in the morning leave slightly earlier (8 minutes in my case), so that when the wrong sort of leaves fall with the wrong sort of rain, the trains can still get to London on time. Well, that is the theory. Today the leaves haven't dropped yet, the train left 8 minutes early, and yet managed to arrive in London 10 minutes late.

Larry Wall will tell you that the principle virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. I think the platform staff at Liverpool Street heard this and misunderstood: they have the impatience to tell the hordes waiting on the concourse that their train is arriving shortly on platform 7 instead of waiting for it to clear first, and hubris to think this was a good idea, and the laziness to just sit there when they realise that two full commuter trains have just arrivied on the same platform, and the gates have just gridlocked.

Argh -- I don't want to be obsessed by trains, but the state of the rail network seems to enforce it at times.

[calming pause]

In other news, Luis is clearly mad. The "New Jeff" is a pale imitation of the Original Jeff, clearly added as they couldn't get Jeff back and they knew he was the main attraction for viewers. The forth series of Coupling should have been taken outside and shot without trial for its own good, it was that bad. I would recommend you to watch out for Green Wing to travel across the Atlantic, but I don't know if Channel 4 are able to sell programming across the pond.

NP: Keep It Unreal, Mr. Scruff

First I had to move my address book from old phone (a T68i). This isn't as easy as just it used to be, when one could save it on the SIM, as both my old and new phones use a more powerful data format and you lose data when exported to the SIM. I knew that both phones supported IrMC, a synchronisation protocol, so I installed Multisync. Despite having a rather overly-complex interface, it pretty much does what it says. I created a new synchronisation pair, one end of which was a Bluetooth phone and the other end was the Backup source, which simply stores what it is sent. Doing the synchronisation was trivial: point the Bluetooth source at my old phone and ask it to sync, and seconds later I had all of my contacts on my laptop in vCards. Change the Bluetooth source to my new phone, tell the Backup source to Restore All, and ask it to sync again. Another 5 seconds later and my address book is on the new phone, complete with Home/Work/Mobile annotations.

Next, to do something about the look of the interface. The default theme is not too bad, but I do feel like a walking Vodafone advert. I quickly searched around the Internet and downloaded a number of .thm files, which are themes. I expected these to be some proprietary format, but Nautilus did a MIME sniff and swore they were tarballs. I doubted this, double-clicked, and the theme opened in File Roller... Themes for this phone are a tarball of images (PNG, JPEG and GIF for the themes I had) and an XML file to define the theme. Getting the themes onto the phone was no trouble at all thanks to Edd's excellent gnome-bluetooth tools, right-click on the file, press Send via Bluetooth and select the right phone.

But the surprises didn't end there... I had a look through the supplied images, most of which were photos but there were a few short (and mediocre) movies. One of them caught my eye as it had very sharp lines and flat colours, and found out that it is actually an animated SVG file. Invalid is may be (the xlink namespace isn't declared) but Inkscape could still open it, despite not understanding animated SVGs.

So what is next? The phone has a calendar/task list so I'll probably try (again) to use the Evolution calendar for more than birthdays, and export it to the phone (and my iPod, so I've no excuse for missing an appointment). All in all, a very satisfying play with a new phone. I'm don't expect the media player to support Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora, but XML, SVG and PNG is a very good step in the right direction. Kudos to Sony Ericsson!

NP: Music For The Mature B-Boy, DJ Format

Last Friday we went down the pub with Allen and Dave for a few pints. Good fun night, even had cold Newcastle Brown which is quite rare, and Allen won the award for Most Outrageous Statement that week. Vicky mis-heard and still was in shock, when she was corrected she nearly cried laughing. Don't worry mate, it's our secret [nudge nudge wink wink].

On Saturday they came over in the evening for a solid night of drinking, curry and films. Specifically:

Drinking

Red wine, lager (Asahi, Cobra and Honeywaggle), followed by Absinthe. Well, Allen and Dave had a small shot each, foul stuff.

Curry

Onion bahjees, lamb tikka masala, vege korma, lamb garlic chilla tikka, chicken tikka jalfrezi, rice and peshwari naans.

Films

We started the evening off on a low by watching The X Factor. The least said about that the better, to be honest. This was followed by Shaun Of The Dead which is excellent, Donni Darko which is also great, most of Deuce Bigalo: Male Gigolo (amusing, especially after the above) and A Fish Called Wanda.

Allen and Dave slept over in the front room, thankfully they were alive the next day and had failed to vomit into household appliances, so after breakfast and showing Allen some Spaced, fancying a bit of change we went... to see Anchorman at the cinema! Not a great film, and some bits dragged on, but the rest of the film is pretty good. My verdict is to go see it when it's cheap.

NP: The Godfather: Best of James Brown

• Fix the fullscreen action
• Set the Motif hint when setting the decoration hint (Vaclav Lorenc)

Downloads are in the usual place, a tarball is here. Debian packages being uploaded to burtonini.com/debian now and will be in Debian... shortly. The Sarge freeze will affect this, of course.

This all sounds good so far -- but there is bad news. Somehow in the past month I've put on half a stone. I tell myself it's my stronger leg muscles, but I think I've somehow developed a nice set of piecepts...

What more proof do you need that RPM-based distributions are inferior?

NP: Like Water For Chocolate, Common

I've merged the track numbers and extract status into a single column, and added an icon which will represent the currently playing or extracted track. The plan is to remove the extract progress popup and replace it with an icon indicating the current track and use the progress bar for more detailed progress, but I'm not really sure that this is a good idea. I'll also need some way of showing the currently playing track, maybe show a small "play" icon in the same place?

All comments welcome, but I am intent on turning SJ into a replacement for for the GNOME CD Player, so stop telling me I shouldn't!

Oh and Tigert, Jimmac, if you are reading: gnome-icon-theme needs stock_media-eject and stock_media-volume-mute. Eject should be easy to fit in with the other media icons, and mute is just the volume icon minus the sound waves (I've stolen from Totem which stole from Rhythmbox). Thanks! :)

NP: Spirit, Jewel

I opened it up on the way to the station, looked at the CD, was very confused for a few seconds, read the invoice and discovered this:

"thanks for a useful and often-used app."

Aaah, suddenly it all becomes clear. I knew it was a good idea to put a link to my Amazon wishlist next to Sound Juicer on my web page...

The invoice is anonymous so thanks, whoever you are.

Given the amount of anti-Bush protests, demonstrations, people and events going on in America I don't understand how opinion polls still put Bush and Kerry at ~50/50. Something is seriously wrong over there guys, and it needs to be fixed. Sadly I think Kerry winning this election won't be enough, for two reasons: the hard-right nutters politicians will still be around and the Democrats are still pretty right-wing when compared to some other countries.

Yes, I'm a tree-hugging nut-eating hippy. The highlight of yesterday was reading the excellent The Wrap from The Guardian, in which they slated The Daily Mail (a tabloid with aspirations of intelligence, meaning serif type) for running horror stories about how "half your income goes on taxes", assuming you earn £50400 a year. I quote:

But what is so unfair about the vast majority of New Labour's tax rises is the people they punish. The hard-working, home-owning, pension-building middle classes are ruthlessly targeted again and again, while the feckless and welfare-dependent are allowed to benefit from the Government's commitment to 'social inclusion'.

Erm, yes. That was the point.

NP: Blue For You, Nina Simone

First a new lens for our camera arrived, a 50mm f/1.8. It's not USM so the focus motor sounds more like a scream than a whisper, but at £55 it was a bargain. Now I get to play around with low-light photography.

Secondly, a new monitor, an Iiyama E431S 17" LCD monitor. They claim it's "ivory" which I was hoping would be white, but they mean "beige". However, the image quality is great and I was pleased to see a sRGB button in the menus. All I need now is a ICC X extension and my monitor calibration tool is useless.

I didn't tell Vicky about all this as she has been saying how ugly my computer is recently -- 17" monitor and a mid-tower, beige and clunky, until the original iMac came out I didn't have this problem :) -- and I thought I'd surprise her. When Vicky finally noticed yesterday evening she was really pleased, and having lots of space on the desk is... liberating.

NP: Best of Sting and The Police