gnome-app-install Moved
Mainly a heads-up for the translation teams, but gnome-app-install is now maintained in GNOME CVS instead of an Arch repository on burtonini.com. Translate my pretties, translate!
NP: Hinterland, Aim
Statistics
Some random statistics of the last fortnight:
- Number of emails to download: 6274
- Number of photos taken: 626
- Disk space used by photos: 1.7G
- Number of photos printed: 266
- Percentage of buses and autorickshaws in Delhi which use 'green' fuels: 100%
- Duration of outbound flight: 8 hours
- Duration of inbound flight: 13 hours
- Number of different 'most important fort in India' seen: 3
- Cheapest meal for two with drinks: 380 Indian Rs (£4.64)
- Most expensive meal: ~2500 Indian Rs (~£30)
- Biggest Buddha (height): 30 metres
We're mid-way through sorting the photos out, but to get something online now, here is one.
Back!
It's 2:18 and we've just got back from India. We're knackered, it's quarter to eight in the morning India time and we've been travelling since midday yesterday. The ~550 photos can wait until tomorrow, we're off to bed.
Free The (Crispy) Bits!
Recently I've been joining the memory reduction mission in a hard-core stylee, by poking at the lower libraries in the GNOME stack.
A few partial patches to Pango were submitted which chipped away at the non-constant data bit by bit, before Owen decided to knock the wall down and do a comprehensive review, saving 12K per process.
Fontconfig is an interesting program to work on, and during the hacking it is quite easy to end up with a Fontconfig which doesn't think there are any fonts, or more amusingly gives you Isabella or Mistral when asked for Vera. However, I did eventually fix these bugs and now Fontconfig patterns (the core data type) use less memory and are a lot faster. Excellent stuff, but Fontconfig is still allocating a lot of memory when there are many fonts (fc-list | wc -l says 435 faces on my desktop), which Pango then copies for some reason (probably a sensible one but what do I know).
Of course, working on this more will have to wait until I get back from India...
Contact Lookup Applet 0.11
Version 0.11 of the Contact Lookup Applet is available from here. It requires GNOME 2.10, but don't worry if you don't have that as there are very little actual changes. Because of this I don't have any Debian packages yet, but Ubuntu Hoary already has this version.
- Request the focus when pressed so that it works with GNOME 2.10
- Follow the panel background (Vincent Noel)
- Handle the sources gconf key not being set (Sylvain Pasche)
Sound Juicer "Smile Kindly Then Rip Your Life To Pieces" 2.10.0
Sound Juicer "Smile Kindly Then Rip Your Life To Pieces" 2.10.0 is out!
- Rocking updated user guide (Shaun McCance is a hero)
- Trivial UI fixes
- Some more const keywords
- Use G_DEFINE_TYPE in SjExtractor
And of course, thanks to the translators: Abel Cheung (zh_TW), Emrah Unal (tr), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Rajesh Ranjan (hi), Danilo Šegan (sr).
Life, T-Shirts, and Music
Life? Life is good. We're off to India and Nepal for two weeks tomorrow, which promises to be totally excellent. This weekend was quite busy, we went to my parents on Friday evening for a family meal and drinks, which was good fun. I finally got to show my dad the 300D, and took some photos during the evening.
To try and finish off the series I had to get Vicky to take one of me on Saturday.
Then on Sunday, we went over to Vicky's mum's house and cooked a meal for six people. We had salmon, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, and vegetables, with apple crumble for pudding. Thankfully there were no major panics and it all tasted good, so that is okay. We normally cook for two, so cooking for six was quite a shock!
Oh, and on Wednesday or Thursday or some time we actually had snow which lasted more than an hour. It had gone by lunchtime, but I took some photos of the grass peeping out through the snow in our garden and with a little GIMP magic blew the snow right out (I would be a man and use a flash gun, but mine isn't quite strong enough). Very simple picture, but I quite like it.
T-Shirts? T-Shirts are cool, especially ones from Threadless. Last week I bought Death By Music and Captain Awesome, both of which are really cool. They'll be getting more of my money later.
Music? Music is plentiful. Recently I've been listening to lots of music I've wanted to try but have never listened to, so I borrowed some Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Squarepusher, and Tricky, and picked up more Miles Davis, DJ Shadow, and Thievery Corporation. All in all I've been pleased, it's all interesting and enjoyable, although Vicky doesn't entirely agree with me... I think she called GYBE "crap", and didn't like DJ Shadow.
NP: The Cosmic Game, Thievery Corporation
mDNS Name Resolution
Today I made mDNS name resolution work, but first a little background about my network. I have a desktop PC called eddie, a laptop called hactar, a Netwinder cunning called netwinder, and an iPaq h5500 called ipaq. All of these machines connect to a wireless ADSL router and ask it for an IP address using DHCP, it gives them one and the DNS server, and all is good... until I want to ssh into the Netwinder from my laptop, and then scp files onto the iPaq, as I don't know the IP addresses.
Until now my solution has been to do a broadcast ping with ping -b 192.168.10.255 and try the IPs which respond, but now I've finally found a sane mDNS name resolution plugin for NSS. This is trivially installed and configured (add mdns4 to the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf), but depends on a mDNS responder to be running on each machine. Luckily, Howl is currently in Debian (though not for long), so after quickly installing it on all of the machines to my surprise it Just Worked:
ross@hactar ~
$ getent hosts netwinder.local
192.168.10.104 netwinder.local
$ getent hosts ipaq.local
192.168.10.105 ipaq.local
Excellent!
NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada
jdub!TV
Jeff announced that jdub!TV was back up again, so off I dutifully went to watch Our Glorious Release Manager at work. Of course, this meant pausing my musics so I could hear Jeff.
<ross> what a choice, do i listen to jdub occasionally talk, or put Fear Of Fours back on
<jdub> ross: rock!
<jdub> ross: i will put it on for yoU!
Problem solved! Of course, I did spend the next minute or so getting the jdub!TV and my hifi in sync...
NP: Fear Of Fours, Lamb (twice)
OSNews Does It Again
Yet again, OS News has taken a simple post to a mailing list and turned it into a full article, complete with corporate overtones and stating that it's a final decision.
I'm starting to re-adjust my belief that OS News is slightly better than Slashdot...
NP: Hot Shots II, The Beta Band
