Changes
Ch-ch-ch-changes, in the immortal words of David Bowie.
So Dan pestered me to blog about something which isn't Sound Juicer or Devil's Pie, so here I go. What's been going on recently? Quite a bit really, and it can be summarised in three words: house, dog, chicken.
House. We've finally found a house which isn't too small, or too expensive, or too damn minging (and we saw plenty of those) to move into, so we're finally about to step onto the property ladder. Hopefully we'll be moving in sometime before Christmas, assuming everything goes to plan with the mortgage, surveys, etc. The house was build around the 50s, has a 40' garden, good size lounge, two bedrooms and a kitchen/dinner. Oh, and the foulest carpet in the front room imaginable by man.
Dog. To make a mess of our new house and eat all of our new furniture we're also trying to find a Cocker Spaniel puppy to buy around New Year. There are several potentials at the moment and if it's male, he'll be called Henry. I hope he is male, as we've totally failed to think of a good name of a female dog...
Chickens. Many years ago when we were living in South Norwood Vicky saw a documentary about people who rescue dying chickens from battery farms, and nurse them back to health. After a little treatment and care, they generally recover and will live for many more years. Vicky really wanted to do this, but a third floor flat isn't the idea place to keep chickens. Now that we are moving into a house with a decent sized garden the dream of rescuing chickens was revived, and co-incidentally a friend told us about Omlet, who make home-friendly chicken houses amusingly called "eglus". This is also on the wishlist now, although Vicky won't let me name the chickens Fried and Roast...
NP: The Essential Billie Holiday
Devil's Pie "Wind The Frog" 0.13
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.13 is out. This release is far more exciting than 0.12!
- Total rewrite.
- No, really. A complete rewrite, no file left untouched. Many thanks to Pixar Animation Studios for sponsoring this work.
- Use s-expressions instead of XML as the configuration file format, allowing matches to be combined in new and exciting ways with (and) (or) and (not) operators.
- Read configuration from both the users home directory and /etc, allowing centralised configuration.
- Add the beginnings of a test suite.
Downloads are in the usual place. I'll have Debian packages uploaded shortly I expect.
Thanks again to Pixar, for without their kindness this release would never have happened.
Evolution in Maemo
So Philip Van Hoof has started to build our D-BUS port of Evolution Data Server in Maemo, with the aim of building Evolution itself. I've not actually tried running Evolution on a 5 inch screen, but I've a feeling it might be a little cramped. How about trying something designed for smaller devices? Dates is being written by Chris Lord, who is working for OpenedHand during the summer holiday, and has been kicking arse.
NP: Black Sunday, Cypress Hill
Devil's Pie "Trying To Make Their Paper" 0.12
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.12 is out. This release is very boring and is mainly a cleanup release:
- Quit if no flurbs were loaded
- Use GOption instead of popt
- Major code cleanup
Downloads are in the usual place.
Thanks to a little help from a very nice Devil's Pie user, expect another release tomorrow. Brace yourself, it's going to be surprising!
Sound Juicer "Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, You Just Keep On Pretending" 2.12.2
Sound Juicer "Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, You Just Keep On Pretending" 2.12.2 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This release is an emergency release to fix a stupid bug:
- Fix --device
Sound Juicer "This Is The Bright Frontier" 2.12.1
Sound Juicer "This Is The Bright Frontier" 2.12.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. A few fixes have been made:
- Add --device command line argument to override GConf
- Set the maximum read speed on every extract
- Fix an i18n bug
- Fix typo in documentation
- Add a DOAP file to the distribution
Thanks to the ever-working translators: Baris Cicek (tr), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francesco Marletta (it), Frank Arnold (de), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio (eu), Rostislav "zbrox" Raykov (bg), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th).
Is It Crack Or Not?
Now for the second Is It Crack Or Not? competition. This one is short and sweet, so everyone can play.
Sound Juicer has a genre list containing the most popular genres, such as Rock, Soul, Jazz, and Spoken Word. The question is: should Soundtrack be considered a genre?
My take is that it shouldn't, as Soundtrack means "music from a film",
which must have a specific genre. For example, the soundtrack for The
Commitments is Soul, and the soundtrack to Star Wars
is Classical Orchestral.
And yes Shaum, I'll add Funk once I've branched, honest. I noticed that you entered it into the documentation screenshots to spite me. :)
Devil's Pie "Used To Love you" 0.11
Devil's Pie (everyone favourite window manipulation tool) 0.11 is out. This release fixes a few bugs which meant that the window type and execute actions were not usable, and adds a shading action.
- Add an action to shade windows by Anonymous. I didn't write it but I've lost the mail the patch came in...
- Fix the window type action
- Fix the execute action
- Check for xsltproc in configure, as it's required
Downloads are in the usual place. I'll have Debian Sid packages uploading shortly.
Audioscrobbler / Last.fm
Like the sad geek I am I've wanted to use Audioscrobbler (now Last.fm) for some time now, but I don't really use a media player on a computer to listen to music, but a hifi with real CDs. This poses a bit of a problem as there isn't a way of uploading playback data without using a media player... until now that is.
With a little Python and MusicBrainz magic, and an Audioscrobbler upload implementation by the mighty Matt Biddulph, cdscrobbler can submit an album as if you just played it from either a MusicBrainz album ID or by reading the CD from your computer's CD-ROM drive.
I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's been working great, so I'm releasing it to the world. At the moment it's only available via Bazaar from http://burtonini.com/arch/cdscrobbler--MAIN--0/, but I'll make tarballs at some point I'm sure.
NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada
Gizmo Project
There are many "Skype-killers" out there at the moment, but until GoogleTalk has a Linux client for it's VOIP service the best of the bunch appears to be the Gizmo Project. It uses SIP, an open standard unlike Skype, and they just started shipping a Linux client (albeit in beta form). Even better news is that it appears that the source for the client will be available shortly, and it uses GTK+ 2.
It also has a dependency on Apple's Bonjour, so I guess it will automatically find other Gizmo Project users on the local network. If the client will connect to a local server, then that is a really nice it-just-works implementation of VOIP for internal office calls.
NP: Dub Come Save Me, Roots Manuva
Simple Things
It's often the simple things which make me happy, for example how Epiphany monitors web pages it opens from the local disk and will reload them automatically when they change. Only one key press removed from the edit - regenerate - view cycle of DocBook authoring, but it's a very nice feature.
Xoo
I know there are some Xoo fanatics out there[1], so I thought I best tell the world that I've just rolled Xoo 0.7. We never actually made a tarball of 0.6 so this release is quite an improvement over 0.6. I'll also be updating the Debian packages shortly.
NP: Do You Want More?!!!??!, The Roots
[1] Well, maybe just two[2]
[2] That's me and Matthew
Sound Juicer "Down The Middle Drops One More Grain Of Sand" 2.12.0
Sound Juicer "Down The Middle Drops One More Grain Of Sand" 2.12.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Very few changes since 2.11.x:
- Bind F1 to Help
- [update] Kick-arse updated documentation (thanks Shaun!)
But plenty of changes for people who haven't used 2.11 including CD playback, threaded extraction, uses gnome-vfs to write the songs, and genre support.
Thanks to the ever-working translators: Danilo Šegan (sr), Mohammad Damt (id), Clytie Siddall (vi), Jean-Michel Ardantz (fr), Michiel Sikkes (nl), Roozbeh Pournader (fa).
LinuxWorld
We're at the UK LinuxWorld Expo this October in London. See you there!
NP: Elementalz, The Brotherhood
