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

• 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.

NP: Black Sunday, Cypress Hill

• 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!

• Fix --device

• 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).

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. :)

• 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.

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

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

NP: Do You Want More?!!!??!, The Roots

[1] Well, maybe just two^[2]
[2] That's me and Matthew

• 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).

NP: Elementalz, The Brotherhood