Friday 30^th 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

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

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

NP: Pieces Of You, Jewel

...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

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.

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

"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

In other news there are three new Henry pictures online. Everyone say awww!

NP: Lamb Remixed, Lamb. Thanks Ploum!

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

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!

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

• 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).

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

NP: Return Of The Boom Bap, KRS-One

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

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

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

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!

• 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

• Depend on GLib 2.9.1 onwards

Downloads are in the usual place.

• Fix compile with GLib 2.10

Downloads are in the usual place.

NP: Standard Time Volume 3: The Resolution Of Romance, Wynton Marsalis

NP: Groove Salad, SomaFM

NP: Selected Ambient Works 95-92, Aphex Twin

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