It's That Time Of The Year Again
It starts off just as you'd expect.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. No sooner does an important traditional religious holiday roll around than the PC-brigade feel the need to strip-mine it of its original significance, just so’s no-one’s feeling get upset.
However, it doesn't quite continue as you were thinking.
It is the Christians who have the most gall of all, daring to attach the name of some first-century Palestinian to a once-proud British festival. ‘Yule’ I can live with, despite its being a continental bastardisation of our British pronunciation ‘Geola’, but ‘Christmas’ is just wrong. You even have to mispronounce ‘Christ’ to say it.
An excellent piece of satire from Nathaniel Tapley on Liberal Conspiracy, which is well worth a read for a good laugh.
NP: Giant Steps, John Coltrane
Pimlico on Maemo Chinook
Every since the Maemo Chinook beta was relased, people have been asking when we're going to make Pimlico packages available. I'll skip over the fact that Pimlico is open source, so building a package yourself is trivial (I suppose its a good thing that there are users who can't do that!).
Now, Pimlico consists of Contacts, Dates and Tasks. Contacts doesn't have a Maemo port as such and the device already has an addressbook of sorts, so I tend to leave that until last. That leaves Dates and Tasks, both of which require an all-new Evolution Data Server to be built, because Nokia strip down EDS for Maemo and don't install the calendar component to save disk space. This generally shouldn't be a problem as we've been building replacement EDS packages for some time now which adds the calendar component and restores some functionality to the common libraries. So, Rob set about re-syncing our packaging with the Chinook EDS (there are several Maemo-specfic patches we obviously need to include) and started a build. Then our plan started to fall apart.
To cut a long story short, the Chinook's Application Manager has an additional sanity check which wasn't in previous releases. The gist of it appears to be that a package foo from repository A cannot upgrade package foo from repository B. Or, libebook from maemo.org cannot be upgraded to libebook from o-hand.com. I can see how this can stop people accidently breaking their device by installing broken core packages, but it's also stopping us provide core packages with enhanced functionality.
Never fear, we have a plan. It's not incredibly pretty and will take a day or so of tiresome recompiles to get working, but we'll get there. That said, we've all been busy and now it is the Christmas holiday... so I wouldn't bet on being able to run Dates and Tasks on your N800/N810 before the new year.
As a reward for patience, however, there are Contacts 0.8 packages for Chinook in our repository.
NP: Last.fm Recommendation Radio
Sound Juicer "Sound Sculptures In Space" 2.21.0
Sound Juicer "Sound Sculptures In Space" 2.21.0 is finally out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
- Add a cluebar when the CD isn't in Musicbrainz (thanks Luca Cavalli, #452047)
- Fix the multiple album select dialog (thanks Rob Bradford, #500815)
- Install 48x48 PNG icon (thanks Andreas Nilsson, #502933)
- Change Deselect All shortcut to Control-Shift-A (thanks Ted Gould, #501442)
- Add Overwrite All/Skip All buttons to the overwrite dialog (thanks Michael Chudobiak, #130782)
No More 4400‽
USA Networks are evil, mean, nasty people.
NP: Bossa Très Jazz: When Japan Meets Europe, Various
Contacts 0.8
I did the quarterly patch review and translation update of Contacts last night, and rolled Contacts 0.8. Nothing amazing in this release, sorry, all of the hard work by Thomas has gone onto the all-new blinging rewrite.
NP: Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
Gypsy Hacking
Last night I sat down and hacked a bit more on my Gypsy status monitoring tool thingy. Basically, it shows you all of the information from the GPS, and is mainly useful for checking that the data being sent by Gypsy makes sense.
It still needs a fair amount of work, the layout of the labels on the left is clearly sub-optimal and I'd like to have a marker on the satellite image to precisely locate you, but apart from that it's coming together nicely.
NP: Storm, Heather Nova
Philosophical Sifting
The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer. The only tragedy is that one day, amongst the noise, they might genuinely be on to something, and we would simply laugh. That day has come.― A Rather Long Build Up To One Punchline
A classic example of the Mail taking a valid scientific press release (that is a surprise) and twisting it into a scare story for no real reason. I wish I could understand how this works to sell papers, although I guess at the end of the day regurgitating a press release with added anger and Moral Outrage without doing any relevant research is a pretty cheap way of filling column inches.
NP: F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Glib and Serial Port Help
So I want to write a small program to read and write data to a serial port (115200 baud, 8N1) using GIOChannel. No matter what I try, I can't seem to get input callbacks from the channel. :( Does anyone have any small working examples of using a GIOChannel to drive a serial port I can look at?
NP: Mungo's Hi-Fi at Exodus
