NP: Hinterland, Aim

• 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.

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...

• 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)

• 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).

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

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

<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)

I'm starting to re-adjust my belief that OS News is slightly better than Slashdot...

NP: Hot Shots II, The Beta Band