LFTP, I Love You
lftp rocks. I always loved it in the past as it let me do tab completion in FTP, but now I discover that it not only handles HTTP and SFTP, but has a mirror command.
lftp -c mirror sftp://o-hand.com/srv/foo/bar ftp://user:pass@ftp.example.com/pub/bar
That is very, very useful right now.
NP: The Antidote, Mocheeba
GUADEC Rejections
Well, I just got back from the Desktop Linux Summit to find an email awaiting me telling me that my proposal for a talk on NetworkManager was rejected this year for GUADEC. ... I can see why getting contributors into GNOME is rather difficult. Even though I'm going to continue working on GNOME because I'm paid to, it's rather disheartening to go through this. Looks like it will start to be a work-only thing instead of a work-and-free-time thing. To all you who have somehow made it into the "in crowd", have fun in Catalonia. I probably won't be going.
To be fair there were two Network Manager talks submitted, one by Christopher and another by Robert Love. What is worse: telling one of the two that their talk isn't accepted, or having two talks at GUADEC on the same subject?
NP: August and Everything After, Counting Crows
Die Evolution Die
This may well be en_GB sucking really badly (until recently in Ubuntu it didn't have 24-hour time either), but this is really bad form for a birthday field:
Someone will be first up against the wall, mark my words. A bug is filed, fingers crossed it gets fixed soon.
Update: Richard "bork bork" Hult, running in sv_SE, has a four digit year field. en_GB sucks.
NP: Gonzo Jazz, Margin of Safety
Genius
Well, for starters, it's a system put together by a bunch of
hippies.
This is genius. Worth the build-up just for the final line, in my opinion.
Sound Juicer "The Winds Are Blowing Telling Me All I Hear" 2.15.1
Sound Juicer "The Winds Are Blowing Telling Me All I Hear" 2.15.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This is the first release in the 2.15.x development series and isn't that exciting, sorry:
- Only manipulate the track store if there is stuff in it (#333402)
- Fix progress bar calculation (#339062, John Thacker)
- Check for cdio >= 0.70 (#339303, John Laliberte)
- Use new intltool for po/LINGUAS magic (#339197)
- Use GString when creating the paths (#336725, James Livingston)
- Update the file/path pattern documentation (#337638)
- Update the about dialog (#328181, Brian Pepple)
- Save and restore playback volume (#334170, Marinus Schraal)
- Improve --help (#335016, Vincent Untz)
- Translate an untranslated string (#334509)
NP: Out Of Season, Beth Bibbons and Rustin Man
Berkeley DB in Evolution Data Server
------- Comment #13 from Devashish Sharma 2006-04-24 11:07 UTC ------- Patch committed to cvs head.
Always a good thing to see, and especially so when it's this patch. The patch allows Evolution Data Server to be built with a system install of Berkeley DB, instead of always with the copy shipped in EDS. This is designed for systems where the version of Berkeley DB won't change over time, such as embedded systems or Debian-derived distributions (which allows multiple versions of libdb to be installed). There are several reasons for doing this:
- Security: bug fixes and security updates don't need to replicated. If there is a security fix in Berkeley DB it doesn't need be back-ported and applied to the copied code in EDS.
- Performance: EDS ships with Berkeley DB 4.1, but Berkeley DB 4.3 works, and is faster.
- Memory Usage: this is the fun one. In a standard EDS build, both the "file" addressbook backend and libedataserver link to Berkeley DB. However, as the library is an embedded copy and isn't installed, it is statically linked. Yes, a 600Kb library is statically linked into EDS twice.
As you can imagine, I'm glad this patch has finally landed upstream!
NP: Protection, Massive Attack
The Good Stuff
This arrived in the post today:
Brazil Sitio Boa Sorte coffee, freshly ground yesterday. It won Cup Of Excellence last year and Has Bean bought the entire supply. It's good. At £4.99 a packet it's not really expensive, but it's not cheap. I must avoid buying the other Cup Of Excellence winners, for example El Salvador San Roberto which is fourteen pounds a bag.
I'm probably going to buy most of my coffee from Has Bean in the future: the coffee is good and the delivery is fast. They freshly grind on demand so it's always fresh, and it comes in airtight re-sealable bags (none of that fold it over and sticky bit of plastic nonsense) that sit nicely in the fridge. All in all: heavily recommended.
NP: Buena Vista Social Club
GStreamer DVD Transcoding
Dear Lazyweb...
So I have a number of VOB files from a DVD, and wish to turn them into a single Ogg Vorbis file. Does anyone have a GStreamer pipeline that works directly on VOB files (and not reading via dvdreadsrc) and will combine the multiple VOBs into a single output file?
Sound Juicer "Don't Just Sit There Going Crazy On Your Own" 2.14.3
Sound Juicer "Don't Just Sit There Going Crazy On Your Own" 2.14.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. A small selection of bug fixes before I branch:
- Fix reversed check for invalid iterator, allowing playback to work!
- Add some buffering to the playback pipeline
- Reset the window title even more
- Namespace the copied gsttaglibmux to avoid conflicts
NP: 1st Born Second, Bilal
Building Debian Packages In Scratchbox
Every week I spend half an hour wondering why I can't build Debian packages inside Scratchbox. The error is "you must be root" which is solved with fakeroot, but I'm already running debuild with fakeroot...
That, of course, is the problem. debuild will clean the environment before starting dpkg-buildpackage, which wipes all traces of the Scratchbox magic away, breaking fakeroot. Despite debuild being an essential wrapper around dpkg-buildpackage in the normal Debian world, in a Scratchbox it's a big no no. I really must remember this!
NP: Debut, Björk
Lunacy
Andrew Brown has an mostly interesting editorial in the Guardian's daily news summary The Wrap, which can often have some fantastic lines.
Criminal lunacy is an accurate shorthand for a lot of the Bush government's actions.
NP: Pieces Of You, Jewel
Sound Juicer "Come Back Stronger Than A Powered-up Pacman" 2.14.2
Sound Juicer "Come Back Stronger Than A Powered-up Pacman" 2.14.2 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Just a few bug fixes:
- Don't set incorrect sortnames (Peter Oliver)
- Don't write encoder tags, write duration tag
- Reset the window title more
- Use po/LINGUAS (Wouter Bolsterlee)
- Fix id3tag plugin initialisation hopefully
- Remove gcc-sim (Damien Charbery)
The 2.14.x series of Sound Juicer releases is dedicated to Iain Holmes,
who said he loved the Kaiser Chiefs. Or was it loathed
, I can't
recall. Anyway, the long and never-ending series of 2.14.x releases are
dedicated to him.
NP: DJ TeeBee live at The Breezeblock
Spam Poetry
I could blog about work, or Sound Juicer, or new albums, or my trip to the Very Very Cold Helsinki, or the subsequent cold/lost voice I've developed, but no. Instead, have some Spam Poetry:
Their death row raid
in means lethargy high jinks
as exhumation fault.
dynamo or spring chicken
Inspired.
NP: He Has Left Us Alone, but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms..., A Silver Mt. Zion
Sound Juicer "It's Not Very Pretty I Tell Thee" 2.14.1
Sound Juicer "It's Not Very Pretty I Tell Thee" 2.14.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of bug fixes here:
- Change CD lookup query to allow MB to proxy requests to FreeDB
- Ship a copy of taglibid3mux and tell people to use id3mux when creating the MP3 profile
- Remove SjProfileChooser, use gnome-media's widget
- Preferences dialog isn't modal
- Don't show the main window if there is an error
- Handle NULL profiles without crashing the Preferences dialog
- The duration and track number column are not resizable (Wouter Bolsterlee)
- Don't hardcode compiler options, use GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS
- Volumn should not display stock_volume-0 for volume > 0 (Dennis Cranston)
- Handle sortnames being NULL
- Don't leak the GnomeProgram reference
- Ensure the Play/Pause button stays the same size (Christian Neumair)
- Don't progress change notifications from the pipeline (Christian Neumair)
- Handle all paranoia modes (Marinus Schraal)
- Check iterator access to shut up GCC
- Fix the program name not being translated
- Add MAINTAINERS
- Install icons mode 0644 instead of 0755
Translators: Ales Nyakhaychyk (be), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Ivar Smolin (et), Kostas Papadimas (el), Petr Tomeš (cs), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Vladimer Sichinava (ka).
