I've just spent two days debugging Evolution and the DBus data server. When I click on a contact in the Address Book wth the DBus backend, Evolution crashes in a very odd manner. Stack traces are a little odd, and Valgrind's output is just plain confusing. It can't be anything directly related to DBus as there is no IPC occuring at this point, and the memory management in the DBus port is if anything better than the Bonobo version. Eventually I figure out what is going on.

A few weeks ago a new field was added to EContact, to store the URI of the book the contact belongs too. This seems reasonable enough, just add the new item at the end of the enumeration and all is good. However, EContact does some magic for optimisation and the enumeration is sorted by type and the position of key items in the enumeration is stored, such as the location of the last simple string, or the location of the last list. This means that the new field was added as the third item in the enumeration...

Yes, really.

Also the library versioning wasn't changed, so older Evolution builds just carry on as normal. Now when an older Evolution asks the contact for the list of all email addresses, it expects to get a GList, which it promptly tries to iterate over. It was actually passed a structure representing the contact's full name, and when it tried to iterate over that as a list... all hell breaks loose.

I really hope this somehow gets sorted out before 2.12...

NP: Best Of, R.E.M. (the 90's Best Of, not the 2003 one)

$ svn commit -m "Adding DBus port of the Calendar" eds-dbus/calendar

I can't take any credit for this, all praise must go to Chris Lord for the port, who is interning at Opened Hand over the summer.

NP: Birth Of The Cool, Miles Davis

ROCK ON. At the moment it only lets you see the image title on JPEG files (from the Image Description EXIF tag), but I'll extend that later. The good thing is that it's nicely behaved, using asynchronous I/O and only reading as much of the file as it needs.

NP: Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu

NP: X&Y, Coldplay

It's not yet perfect: some elements need more styling and links don't work properly yet (not sure what the problem is there though), but it's a promising start.

I'm very disappointed with the lack of bug reports about the new playing functionality in the 2.11 releases of Sound Juicer. It's either perfect or nobody is using it, and I think I know what the correct answer is... C'mon people, give it a hammering! Play your CDs with it for a day instead of your usual program and tell me what you think.

• Nicer icons when extracting (Luca Cavalli)
• Documentation ported to use gnome-doc-utils

Thanks to the hard-working translators who are diving into action now that the strings are frozen: Abduxukur Abdurixit (ug), Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Priit Laes (et), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Terance Edward Sola (nb), Terance Edward Sola (no), Vladimir Petkov (bg).

• Allow EContactEntry to be subclassed (Bastien Nocera)
• If GTK+ 2.7.3 is being used, allow the completion to be as wide as required
• Handle source lists which don't contain any groups
• Cleanups (BN)

You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid once I update my pbuilder...

NP: Sheryl Crow, Sheryl Crow

NP: Schoolhouse Funk, DJ Shadow

The weather in Finland appears to be a secret they keep from the world, I'm sure on the weather reports you never hear of Helsinki being in the 30s. They probably tell everyone Finland is always cold and dark to keep the tourists away from their beaches.

For anyone else out there with a new ThinkPad which throws a hissy fit when it resumes with SectorNotFound errors, the solution is to turn off the Hard Drive Pre-Desktop Area (or something like that) in the BIOS, under Security. Good old Matthew Garrett has a patch and I presume it will reach mainline kernels shortly. Now suspend/resume fails for other reasons, but Matthew knows about those too.

Da Boss Matthew introduced me to Iittala whilst on a wander around Helsinki to find food, a contemporary Finnish design store selling homeware (cups, vases, etc). Very cool stuff.

Helsink airport is a terrible, terrible place, for two main reasons. One: there are no power points in the lounge which is not good as I only had 5% charge left. Two: the Stockman sells a large amount of Iittala stuff... A surprisingly low number of Euros later I bought two espresso cups and a large bowl.

Very, very cool.

Now I best get on with work, I'm away in Cornwall all next week and have a huge patch to review.

NP: Asia Borninch, DJ Shadow

Again, another cool release with nice new features. Everyone give it a go, and see what you think of the new interface.

• Thread the extracting pipeline for faster rips
• Add a volume control when playing (Ronald Bultje)
• Remove the progress dialog (Raj M Madhan)
• Register our custom icons as stock so themes can set them (Luca Cavalli)
• Use Disc instead of CD in the menu
• Disable Play button when extracting (Raj)
• Set the pipeline to NULL when cancelling (Raj)
• Use gnome-common (Ali Akcaagac)

Thanks to the translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Michiel Sikkes (nl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Priit Laes (et), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), and Tommi Vainikainen (fi).

NP: Brain Freeze, DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist

As previously mentioned I've now got my EoG ICC patches in an Arch repository. Doing this was surprisingly trivial. Thanks to the Bazaar people at Canonical (I've been talking to Robert Collins, but there are probably more people involved) there is a selective mirror of the GNOME CVS modules on http://bazaar.ubuntu.com. Assuming the default archive is set, a local module can be created as a branch of another with a single command:

baz branch http://bazaar.ubuntu.com/gnome@bazaar.ubuntu.com/eog--MAIN--0 eog--xicc--0

This created a module in my repository called eog--xicc--0, which I can checkout as usual and edit as I want. At some point I'll want to merge any changes from upstream, so in the working directory I perform a merge:

baz merge gnome@bazaar.ubuntu.com/eog--MAIN--0

Note that I don't need to specify the full location as the branch command added the archive name to location mapping. Simply sort out any conflicts, and them commit the changes.

Easy! This Bazaar thing is really growing on me.

NP: Sounds From The Verve Hi-Fi, Thievery Corporation

Bad news: London was bombed this morning. Everyone I know in London is okay, but Allen cut it close: he should have been in Liverpool Street when it kicked off there, but luckily was starting work late today. So far explosions in six train stations and on one bus have been confirmed but hard numbers are very hard, even three hours after the event.

NP: Pre-emptive Strike, DJ Shadow (with the BBC news accompanying it)

NP: The Litmus Test, Cut Chemist

This is a rocking release as it's the first to feature a Play button, thanks to Ronald Bultje. Give it hell people!

• Can now play CDs (Ronald Bultje)
• The genre field is now an auto-completing text entry
• Fix various file writing bugs caused by the move to gnome-vfs

Of course thanks to the translators: Abel Cheung (zh_TW), Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Frank Arnold (de), Mário Vrablanský (sk), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Terance Edward Sola (nb and no).

NP: Animal Magic, Bonobo