Evolution Lovers and Haters
Evolution (the email client, not the theory) really seems to bring out extreme emotions in its users.
RP: pgc: I'm with you, I hate evolution dodji: yay dodji: evo haters fanclub chris: I also hate Evo, but everyone here loves it and wants to have its babies ross: I've had evo's babies chris: ross: I bet there were random duplicates
Poor Evolution.
NP: Directions LP, Acroplane
Python Packaging Help
pyclutter just got accepted into the Debian archive, and I'd love some review/assistance from anyone who understands the new Python Packaging Policy. Bonus points if any patches also work on Ubuntu Feisty (which has python-central 0.5.12). Thanks in advance for any feedback!
NP: Sweetness, Bonobo
OpenMoko
Sean Moss-Pultz from OpenMoko announces the new interface:
We went back to the drawing board with OpenedHand -- lead by their vast experience with GTK+, Matchbox, and mobile user interfaces -- and redesigned an incredibly promising new interface.
I finally got my hands on a GTA01 last week, which was promptly flashed with the latest software. The new interface is pretty damn cool, with smooth colours, clear icons and subtle gradients. I'm sure Thomas will blog with more details and screenshots at some point.
Postr 0.8
Finally, a new Postr release. Nothing amazing here, just some internal refactoring and better error handling. If an error occurs when talking to Flickr a dialog box will popup, which will help a great deal.
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian/Ubuntu are building now.
NP: Sleep, DJ Olive
Mini PC Loveliness
I've just discovered the AOpen MP965-DR mini PC, and blimey it's lovely. Does anyone out there run have one? If I got one it would be under the television and always on, so heat and noise are important factors to me.
Tip Of The Week
This fragment of shell doesn't do what you'd expect at a quick glance:
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
exit $?
fi
The act of checking $? causes $? to be set to the result of the test, so this executes exit 0 if $? is non-zero.
NP: Cosmos, Murcof
Tasks 0.11
I'm pleased to announce that Tasks 0.11 is now available from the Pimlico Project. A few bug fixes:
- Update the window title in an idle callback, fixing crashes (#401)
- Persist and restore the window position (#397)
- Fix compile with non-gcc compilers (#408, #405)
- Set a title on the New Group dialog
- Fix package checks for the Maemo port
- Implement open URL in the Maemo port
- Hide button and menu images in Maemo port
Burton's Law
Can I propose Burton's Law, a variation on Godwin's Law:
As a discussion about climate change grows longer, the probability of stating that China is building a new coal power station every week approaches one.
When used as a defense for not attempting to reduce climate change I'd like to also invoke the sudden death variant, where the discussion is finished immediately.
Sound Juicer "G D M F S O B" 2.19.3
Sound Juicer "G D M F S O B" 2.19.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
- When removing sources be more paranoid. I hope this fixes the many-duplicated crasher
- Translate the program description (#450161, Gabor Kelemen)
- Bump libmusicbrainz requirement
Wanted: Black and White Icons
As people who have seen my laptop know, I use the wonder Darkilouche theme by Jakub. To complement it I'm after some decent black and white (ideally #F5F5F5 as the primary colour) icons for Network Manager, seahorse-agent and so on. I just tried redrawing the NM status icons in Inkscape, and basically it's obvious that I should never attempt to draw an icon ever again. I thought that the High Contrast icon theme would have what I want, but it doens't cover Network Manager yet. Does anyone know any suitable icons?
NP: Backup 01, TRS-80
Idiotic British Press
Daniel pointed me towards this blog today, a great mix of insightful thought and humour to generally ridicule the British right-wing tabloids. This article for example is fantastic.
Poky Autobuilder
God bless buildbot. Once Poky was released Richard, Marcin and myself started pushing upgrades into Poky trunk, resulting in 96 commits during the day. These generally worked on our personal machines, but thanks to the incremental autobuilder (which compiles all of the packages for five different targets) all of the problems were caught rapidly and fixed by the end of the day. As a well-done present the nightly autobuilder (which does a clean build) managed to build everything successfully for almost all of the targets. Impressive stuff really, without buildbot I doubt we'd have been able to upgrade autotools, Linux, X, and GNOME in one day and still produce working images the next.
NP: Butterfly Wings Make, Orla Wren
Evolution Love
If anyone fancies getting their hands dirty with some Evolution Data Server code, I just marked #314709 with the gnome-love keyword. This patch involves adding support for per-contact geopositioning to EDS. Half of the patch is trivial: adding a #define. The other half involves creating a struct to represent the GEO field (two floats), and hooking it up to the EContact accessors. I'm willing to mentor anyone who seriously wants to implement this.
NP: (), Sigur Rós
I've Finally Had Enough
$ mail -s unsubscribe debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org .
The continual bickering and resistance to any change is driving me mad. I'm switching to reviewing the threads in gmane once a week from now on.
NP: Pocket Symphony, Air
Poky Linux 3.0 "Blinky" Released
After much blood, sweat and tears, Poky Linux 3.0 (also known as Blinky) is released. Poky is an OpenEmbedded derivative, focused on building GNOME Mobile-based images for embedded and handheld devices such as the Sharp Zaurus or the Nokia N800.
Aside from the usual set of software updates and infrastructure improvements, Blinky contains the first public release of Sato, an example GTK+/Matchbox based PDA environment aimed at devices with high resolution, physically small screens. This includes a new Matchbox panel and desktop, the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, and a fast, clear GTK+ theme.
Pretty much everyone at OpenedHand has been involved in Poky to some extent, so it's great to see a release. Personally I'm really pleased with how far Blinky has advanced over the last release, Clyde, and will shortly be working on a branch of Blinky to integrate the complete GNOME 2.20 release set.
If anyone is interested in Poky then it is easy to try: there are for a several devices: the Nokia N800 and several Sharp Zaurus models; and Qemu images for both ARM and Intel. Give it a go and tell us what you think!
NP: Love and Affection, Joan Armatrading
Daily Mail vs British Medical Journal
From an article in the Daily Mail this week:
Previous studies have found that cannabis claims 30,000 lives a year by causing cancer, heart disease and bronchitis, and that it can double the risk of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Now, I wonder where that data is from. Oh look, the British Medical Journal:
It may be argued that the extrapolation from small numbers of individual studies to potential large scale effects amounts to scaremongering. For example, one could calculate that if cigarettes cause an annual excess of 120 000 deaths among 13 million smokers, the corresponding figure for deaths among 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30 000, assuming equality of effect.
Genius. Thanks to Dr Ben Goldache for spotting this.
NP: The Good, The Bad & The Queen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen
