Ross Burtonhttp://www.burtonini.com/blogA potted account of Ross' lifeen60Ross BurtonIt's That Time Of The Year Againlife/that-time-of-the-year-2007-12-21-16-50http://www.burtonini.com/blog/life/that-time-of-the-year-2007-12-21-16-50It starts off just as you'd expect. Yes, it’s that time of year again. No sooner does an important traditional ... 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

]]>/life2007-12-21T16:50:00ZPimlico on Maemo Chinookcomputers/pimlico-2007-12-21-15-30http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/pimlico-2007-12-21-15-30Every since the Maemo Chinook beta was relased, people have been asking when we're going to make Pimlico packages available. ... 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

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