Furious Anger, Part Two
Thursday 23rd March:
Friday 30th March:
In the space of seven short days, they've managed to go from hard-line right-wing, give us tax cuts, don't "throw it away" on the state; to full-on fund the NHS more "Daily Express Crusade" your childen are All Going To Die.
If these headlines were in The Onion they'd be a fine example of tabloid spin and use of language. But they are serious, and I hate this paper.
NP: Ágætis Byrjun, Sigur Rós
Recent Files in Sound Juicer
Now that fellow Opened Hander Emmanuele has landed the GtkRecent code into GTK+, I started to think about if I could use it in Sound Juicer. Consider this a personal Is It Crack Or Not.
Should Sound Juicer add songs it successfully rips to the recent files list, so they are trivially opened from the Recent Documents menu and so on? Answers on a postcard, or if you don't have my address, in the comments on this posting.
NP: Regulate, Warren G
Furious Anger
Today's Daily Express front page:
That nasty Brown throwing away
your money on state spending, such
as the NHS, schools, pensions... A week later the same paper will be
moaning about the state of the NHS, another pension crisis, or how
education standards are falling.
Actually, that's wrong. Another paper will moan about that, the Express will just have Diana Exclusives.
NP: Trouser Jazz, Mr Scruff
Flapjack
This may be a little rash, but I have just knocked up the best flapjacks in the world. Never before have oats, butter, golden syrup, grated apple and a tiny pinch of cinnamon tasted so good.
NP: Pieces Of You, Jewel
Name Dropped
Jeff Waugh was kind enough to name drop Devil's Pie at FOSDEM whilst being interviewed for Source21.nl.
...We haven't been talking about some of the really cool stuff you can do with gnome. Things like Devil's Pie or Brightside, which make the window manager work in totally different ways: they take Metacity which is a very conservative, very simple, it just manages your windows kind of window manager, and they turn it into something which does edge flipping and all kinds of cool stuff, a programmable window environment, those kind of things.
Yay Jeff!
NP: Last.fm Neighbour Radio
Go Rowan Go
Vicky and myself have said this before, but I'll say it again. For the top man in the Church of England, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is surprisingly moderate, progressive and possibly even cool (via The Guardian):
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has stepped into the controversy between religious fundamentalists and scientists by saying that he does not believe that creationism - the Bible-based account of the origins of the world - should be taught in schools.
…
Dr Williams spoke of his determination to hold the third-largest Christian denomination together in its row over the place of gay clergy. He was also highly critical of parts of the church in Africa and said he did not wish to be seen as "comic vicar to the nation", speaking out on issues where he can make no difference.
WinXP Madness
Recently I had to reboot my laptop into Windows so that Vicky could use iTunes. After a few minutes, this little dialog popped up.
Some automatic updates had been downloaded once I'd logged in, and I now had to restart. The day before I had a similar dialog which had disabled the Restart Later but didn't have a countdown, so I moved the dialog to the side and carried on (luckily it wasn't system modal). However a five minute timer is just amazingly bad: did installing the security fix break the system so much that it has to be rebooted now, and applications will start to crash and die shortly?
NP: Maxinquaye, Tricky
Gates FUDing Again
Man, Bill Gates is pissed that the OLPC project isn't using Windows (from Reuters):
"If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Gates said.
Interesting, considering just a few months ago his opinion of OLPC was subtly different (via New York Times, quoted in Linux Pipeline):
According to several people familiar with the discussions, Microsoft had encouraged Mr. Negroponte to consider using the Windows CE version of its software, and Microsoft had been prepared to make an open-source version of the program available.
For the potential market of a million schoolchildren Microsoft will do anything. Take that market away and give it to Linux of all people, and they'll FUD you to death.
NP: Motion, Cinematic Orchestra
Borgified Hamsters
Yesterday's news but still pretty cool (and grim at the same time): injecting peptides into a hamster's damaged brain caused spontaneous repair and recovery of vision (from The Guardian).
In other news there are three new Henry pictures online. Everyone say awww!
NP: Lamb Remixed, Lamb. Thanks Ploum!
Herd Like Behavior
Last week on the magnificent (for people with puppies at least) It's Me Or The Dog they featured a battery-powered bacon-flavoured bubble machine. Wow! we thought, and ordered one over the weekend.
And so, it appears, did the rest of the nation:
Dear Customer
Thank you for ordering Fetch Pet Bubble products from Seapets. Due to the unprecedented demand following the Channel Four television program, all stocks of these products, that were in this country were gone within hours of the broadcast.Fortunately we work very closely with Fetch Pet and have been assured that we will be the first to receive supplies as the next batch is flown in from the USA. We expect this to clear customs within a few days and we should be able to resume deliveries next week.
Poor Henry has to wait for bacon flavoured bubble goodness. In other news my 28-135mm IS USM lens arrived today, and it's lovely. Shots online later.
NP: Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
DOAP World Domination
Edd chumped that Apache are using DOAP on their projects site. This is very cool, and I really think that GNOME should follow their example.
I've been thinking for a while about building a DOAP-based software map for GNOME, and the Apache Projects site provides a very useful starting point... Time to find the source code and try a GNOME-branded version!
Dates Screencast
Chris has been a busy man for the last few days, improving the performance of Dates. It's now a really usable program: previously startup took several minutes (I've four calendars, two of which are large webcals) but now it is just a second.
It's so cool I even made my first screencast. I used Byzanz so the dithering isn't part of the application, and the mode changes should be smooth animations but happened too fast for Byzanz to capture. But you can get a feel for the application, and I hope you agree it kicks arse.
NP: Motion, Cinematic Orchestra
Sound Juicer "Let's Go Back, Let's Go Way On Way Back When" 2.14.0
Sound Juicer "Let's Go Back, Let's Go Way On Way Back When" 2.14.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Bug fixes:
- Fix multiple album results again (John Thacker)
- Depend on new GStreamer, remove copied code
- Depend on new libnautilus-burn, fixing the drive selection
- Return an error if the pipeline cannot be linked
- Don't translate new strings
- Set the read speed on every extract
- Fix up cleanup logic after extracting
Translators: Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Duarte Loreto (pt), Elian Myftiu (sq), Francesco Marletta (it), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Gnome PL Team (pl), Hendrik Richter (de), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Jérémy Le Floc'h (br), Jordi Mallach (ca), Kjartan Maraas (nb, no), Lasse Bang Mikkelsen (da), Leonid Kanter (ru), Maxim V. Dziumanenko (uk), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Petr Tomeš (cs), Priit Laes (et), Rajesh Ranjan (hi), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rhys Jones (cy), Rostislav "zbrox" Raykov (bg), Satoru SATOH (ja), Tino Meinen (nl), Žygimantas Beručka (lt).
Slicing Tree Models
Sometimes there is a need to take a slice of a GtkTreeModel, for example if you have a tree of data and want to show a particular layer of it in a GtkIconView. GtkIconView widgets will only work on list models so there needs to be a way of taking a slice of a tree model and presenting it as a list model. I hereby present OwlTreeModelSlice.
The tree view on the left is a GtkTreeStore. The icon view on the right is displaying a OwlTreeModelSlice, that has been told to use the Applications node as the root.
There are a few methods left to implement, and I need to get someone masterful in tree model fu to review the code, but hopefully I'll be releasing the source shortly.
NP: Motion, The Cinematic Orchestra
Detox
Nice to see that Cecil considers detox diets to be bunk. People, we have two kidneys and a liver for a reason.
NP: Return Of The Boom Bap, KRS-One
Cretinism
Oh sorry, I meant creationism
(via The Guardian):
Pupils in England will be required to discuss creationist theories as part of a new GCSE biology course being introduced in September.
Why can't we keep the scientific theories in the science classrooms, and the religious counter-arguments in the religious education classrooms?
NP: He Has Left Us Alone, but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace The Corners Of Our Rooms, A Silver Mt Zion
Shared File Metadata Specification Madness
From the Shared File Metadata Specification on freedesktop.org:
The only requirement for metadata names is that they are unique and do not overload or cause confusion with each other. To make this possible, all metadata is namespaced by an appropriate class based on the type of the file or the application name (if the metadata is application specific).
What isn't confusing about having all of the following metadata types:
- File.Description
- Audio.Comment
- Doc.Comments
- Image.Description
- Image.Comments
Another stroke of genius flaw is File.Accessed (and so on): Last
access date in format "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss"
. What timezone is this
in? EXIF made this mistake, and it hurts.
Why this specification didn't soak up the years of work done by people on RDF, Dublin Core, EXIF-in-RDF and so on, I don't know.
NP: Sounds From The Verve Hifi, Thievery Corporation
Lotus Notes On Linux?
From Groklaw:
At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM's new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers. Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.
Does anyone know more details about how the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows is magically turned into native Linux code via Eclipse? I don't entirely understand what they've done here. Maybe the backend is the original C++ with a new frontend built using SWT?
NP: Liquid Swords, GZA
New Phone, SyncML Hell
Yesterday my new phone, a Nokia 6230i, arrived. This morning I tried to use Multisync to restore the backup of the contacts I took trivially (via IrMC) from my old K700i.
Well, that wasn't trivial. The 6230i uses SyncML which is groovy and everything, but is also hell to configure. Has anyone actually made this work? Ideally I'd have the phone as the SyncML server so that I can start syncs from my laptop running Multisync, but the manual for the phone doesn't exactly make it obvious how I'm supposed to connect to a machine via something other than GPRS (I want to use Bluetooth of some sort).
Help!
Double Plus Ungood
I'm really not liking the way things are going at the moment.
the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill ... gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament
[South Dakota] has signed into law a bill banning most abortions
Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and warned
the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime.
NP: Ambient Mix, DJ krill.minima
Devil's Pie "Out Of Gas, Still Burning" 0.17.1
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.17.1 is out. This time I actually declare the dependency on Glib 2.10...
- Depend on GLib 2.9.1 onwards
Downloads are in the usual place.
Devil's Pie "Stay With Me While We Grow Old" 0.17
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.17 is out. Nothing interesting, just a fix so that it builds with GLib 2.10.
- Fix compile with GLib 2.10
Downloads are in the usual place.
FOSDEM Quote Of the Weekend
Relative to the rest of X, [XKB] is complete crack. That is quite an achievement.
-- Daniel Stone.
NP: Standard Time Volume 3: The Resolution Of Romance, Wynton Marsalis
Another Tutorial
I just found Yet Another Devil's Pie Tutorial online. That puts the count of unofficial tutorials up to three... obviously people out there want to document Devil's Pie but everyone is doing it in their own corner of the world, so I've just added a skeleton structure to the Devil's Pie wiki page. If anyone out there has a passion for Devil's Pie and wants to start adding documentation for the configuration file format, feel free!
NP: Groove Salad, SomaFM
Photos from FOSDEM 2006
Last night I finally got around to putting up the photos from FOSDEM 2006. They still need to be captioned though, and Oh My God I need to create a new theme for Tate.
NP: Selected Ambient Works 95-92, Aphex Twin
Sound Juicer Merchandise
Sadly arriving two days late for wearing to FOSDEM, my trial-run of Sound Juicer t-shirts arrived on Monday. They rock!
The back reads freshly squeezed audio
if you can't make it out. Go
and get yours now!
NP: Ben Folds Five, Ben Folds Five
