Random Albums
God bless Amazon Wishlists! Today we got a veritable mountain of mail which wasn't totally unexpected as Vicky ordered some U2 albums yesterday. However, one package from Amazon was for me...
Opening it up I found Divine Madness by Madness, with this comment on the dispatch note:
Its madness out there. Thanks for sound juicer.
Amazon don't put the sender's name on gift purchases, so whoever you are, thank you!
NP: Divine Madness, Madness
Howl? Avahi!
Planet Debian appears to have caught the mDNS bug, and as expected everyone is mumbling that Howl is non-free, has bugs, and generally sucks. Obviously not enough people noticed the recent ITP I filed for Avahi, a LGPL mDNS server stack and client library. Packages are making their way into Ubuntu Breezy shortly and then the we're going to try and get it into Debian Experimental (it depends on python2.4-gtk2 and DBus 0.3, neither of which are in Sid).
Sound Juicer "Managed To Save Just A Little Bit Of Money" 2.11.92
Sound Juicer "Managed To Save Just A Little Bit Of Money" 2.11.92 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
- Reset the interface when a CD is manually ejected
- Improve the volume control (Ronald Bultje)
- Fix distcheck
- Use automake 1.9
Thanks to the ever-working translators: Duarte Loreto (pt), Frank Arnold (de), Jordi Mallach (ca), Leonid Kanter (ru), Maxim V. Dziumanenko (uk), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Nikos Charonitakis (el), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rhys Jones (cy), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Woodman Tuen (zh_TW), Young-Ho Cha (ko), Žygimantas Beručka (lt).
Favoured Photography
When in doubt, alliterate.
From the critique queue of photo.net I'm developing quite a taste for black and white photography. I like the simplicity that the lack of colour gives a scene, and the way the use of light for increased contrast gives more impact than colour often does. I've only tried B&W a few times before and my attempts generally were quite washed out and lacking in contrast, I probably need to be more aggressive with the Levels control.
Anyway, the pictures I've liked on photo.net today are: Winter's Evening, The Wharf, B/W Water, Wind In Grass, and Drop 1. Plenty of inspiration available there!
I also liked Coming Back, partly because it's a great photo with great tones with the sea fading into the distance making the boat really stand out, and party because it reminds me of our holiday in India. Jeremy Parker has some great photos on his site, with a clever site design which changes the background colour of the gallery pages to complement each photo.
NP: Best Of, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
5000 Days
Now that I've started a photography course I'm supposed to be keeping a log book of my photography and any photography I see. So, I've created a new category (cunningly called 'photography'), and will note down my thoughts here.
Last weekend whilst browsing around a book shop I found Five Thousand Days. There are classics that we all know and love, warming personal photos of famous people without their public masks on, and some absolutely haunting war photography. Flicking through the book is quite an emotional journey, I recommend it for anyone interested in photo-journalism.
I've registered with photo.net and subscribed to their New Photos feed, so I get to look at a hundred different photos a day. So far not a lot has stood out to me, but I do love this for some reason.
I'm a big fan of Noah Grey at the moment. We've got two of his prints awaiting frames in the front room at the moment, and I love the cleanliness of his Charlotte and Blowout galleries.
The C# Conspiracy?
Oh fun, the great Novell vs Red Hat war rears it's ugly head again. Now that Sound Juicer and Totem both play CDs we're nicely on route to dropping gnome-cd totally. To this end, a few weeks ago Ronald filed a bug with gnome-volume-manager asking that the default be changed to Sound Juicer (I'm thinking this should be Totem, but that's just my opinion).
Today the bug was closed. Hooray, I thought, SJ is the new default CD player. But no:
we're going to default to Banshee instead.
Pardon? We, the gnome-volume-manager maintainers, who happen to be Novell employees, have decided that the default CD player in GNOME will be Banshee. Not only is this not part of GNOME, but it's written in C#. I'm pissed off as this isn't a valid reason to close the bug, considering it isn't even proposed for Desktop, and I bet Red Hat will be pissed off if C# enters the Desktop.
And on that note, I'm going to cook.
Update: all sorted now. Totem is the default CD player. Die gnome-cd die!
Class
Banksy strikes again, this time in the West Bank. Sheer class.
NP: Feed Me Weird Things, Squarepusher
Gtk-Doc Tip Of The Day
Today's gtk-doc Tip Of The Day is that everyone should put <index></index> into their module.sgml file. Then gtk-doc will generate a nice index in the HTML for you! You can even get really extravagant and do what GTK+ does:
<index> <title>Index</title> </index> <index role="deprecated"> <title>Index of deprecated symbols</title> </index> <index role="2.2"> <title>Index of new symbols in 2.2</title> </index> <index role="2.4"> <title>Index of new symbols in 2.4</title> </index> <index role="2.6"> <title>Index of new symbols in 2.6</title> </index> <index role="2.8"> <title>Index of new symbols in 2.8</title> </index>
Sweet.
NP: Red Bird, Heather Nova
Sound Juicer "But There's Some Magic Out There"" 2.11.91
Sound Juicer "But There's Some Magic Out There" 2.11.91 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
- Spanish Manual! (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)
- Add Previous/Next Track menu items (Ross, Raj M Madhan)
- Play the selected track when Play is activated (Raj)
- The Extract checkbox is now titleless
- Respect the check boxes for playback (Ronald)
- Handle playing state changes in an idle handler (Ronald)
- Improved Play/Pause behaviour (Ronald)
- Better volume control (Ronald)
- Disable Reread whilst playing (Raj)
Thanks to the ever-working translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Alan Horkan (en_GB), Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Gnome PL Team (pl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Kjartan Maraas (no), Michiel Sikkes (nl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Nikos Charonitakis (el), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Priit Laes (et), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rostislav Raykov (bg).
