I generally thought that LinkedIn was pretty useless for people like me. I have a community of like-minded associates available via Planet Gnome and so on, so apart from collecting friends it is pretty useless.
But recently it's been becoming quite useful. For large companies it generally appears to be company policy that contact with open source projects is done via anonymous email domains, like GMail. This obviously makes it tricky to guess where someone is from when they appear on a mailing list... but LinkedIn to the rescue. Search for a name and hey presto, their CV!
NP: Artists Like: Amon Tobin, Last.fm
Sound Juicer "It's Deeper Than The Darkest Sea" 2.21.3
Sound Juicer "It's Deeper Than The Darkest Sea" 2.21.3 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. More hot features!
- Add a Disc Number field, and magically populate it (Matthew Martin)
- Add content/* media types for Nautilus (Matthias Clasen)
- Set a11y relationships on the cluebar (thanks Rich and Willie)
- Fix play/pause (Bill O'Shea)
- Handle the cdio element not being cdparanoia
"About Freakin Time"
NHS primary care trusts are slashing funding for homoeopathic treatment amid debate about its efficacy and the drive to cuts costs, a study has suggested.
As Dan so succinctly put it, about freakin time. That said, the BBC are still a little wooly on the scientific side of things:
...and some scientists argue the solution is so diluted it does not contain any active ingredients at all.
Both sides generally agree it doesn't contain any of the active ingredient, that's pretty much the entire point of homoeopathy verses conventional medicine or poison (depending on what the active ingredient is). Scientists point out that a remedy can't do anything if there is nothing but water in it, homoeopaths insist that water has a mysterious (and bounded, unless tap water in old houses doubles as the homoeopathic remedy Plumbum Metallicum) memory which makes it magically work.
Akonadi Questions
I've recently been looking at Akonadi again, and trying to understand its design goals, implementation, and so on. The documentation on the web site is pretty thin on the ground, so I have a few questions which I'd love any friendly Akonadi developers to reply to (note that I'm biased towards the address book side for now).
- IPC. Akonadi uses IMAP for most operations, with DBus used for notifications and other "control" messages apparently. As IMAP supports notifications fine, why not drop DBus entirely? To use Akonadi there has to be an IMAP connection, correct?
- Data format. How is something concrete, like a contact, represented? In what format would it be stored in the "local addressbook", and in what format is it transferred over IMAP?
- Dependencies. For a GNOME component C++ I can just about handle, Qt is pushing it, and libkde is out. What are the real dependencies of Akonadi, and can they be reduced?
- Examples. Can anyone provide example code of basic operations against the addressbook, such as searches, handling live views, adding and removing contacts?
Thanks!
NP: Artists Like: Skalpel, Last.fm
Kernel Patching
In my recent PowerTOP adventures I discovered a few timers which could be removed. One was a polling loop in the PCMCIA driver, which I disabled because the interrupts are unreliable, apparently. This turns out to be totally correct, with the polling disabled it doesn't notice me inserting a CF, so I can't do anything. I'll leave this on the "something to pester Richard about when he is less busy" list.
The next driver related poll on the list was from a IrDA module. Now, it shouldn't be doing anything because I have nothing apart from the drivers loaded. Even unloading the real drivers and just loading irda.ko caused wakeups, so I hunted around and with lots of Samuel's help (he took my concept patch, and made it actually compile!) we produced a patch which was merged into David Miller's 2.6.25 tree today. Excellent, I'm now a kernel hacker!
Linux Wakeups
To satisfy an idle curiosity, I installed PowerTOP on my Zaurus to see how many wakeups a second it was doing. It started out at 112w/s, which isn't that great, but Richard told me that I should give our 2.6.24-rc8 kernel a go, because it has NO_HZ defined. To our surprise it booted, and to cut a long story short my Zaurus is currently idling at 5.4 wakeups per second, and 11% of those are about to be patched out of the kernel.
Selecting Quoting
As we all know, the Express are a load of xenophobic racist ignorant misleading cocks. Thanks to Iain who pointed me at this glorious post entitled something I won't repeat for fear of offending the children, I discovered what is probably the best example of selective quoting in the Express.
They said:
The Government's equality chief Trevor Phillips recently said the fear that migrants are jumping council queues for homes is fuelling tensions.
Well if the government are scared that migrants magically jump up the council house queue, then it must be true. Or is it. The Guardian has the full quote:
Mr Phillips [chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights] said tensions were driven by a widespread perception that newcomers often received unfair advantages. "Specifically, that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly-arrived migrants," he told the [Local Government Association]. "I have never seen any reliable evidence to back up this claim. And there can be no doubt that much of the public feeling is driven by the careless media and racist parties."
If you ever wonder how low the Express and co. will go to get a quote or statistic, this is a good example. In a quote where the essence of the message is that the scum-class tabloids and racist parties are fueling anti-immigration views, they managed to get a quote to support a story against immigration. Well done, Tom Whitehead, you really do deserve a special place in hell.
NP: Skreamizm Volume 4, Skream
Harsh Trolling
This has to be some of the harshest trolling I've seen for a long time. If it's not a troll, then someone needs anger management sessions.
NP: Central Reservation, Beth Orton
Sound Juicer "Now There's Emptiness In My Bed" 2.21.2
Sound Juicer "Now There's Emptiness In My Bed" 2.21.2 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Again, the response from the gnome-love and GHOP tasks has been great, and there is a lot new in this release.
- Update documentation (Andreas Freund)
- Check extracted filenames are not too long (Ed Catmur)
- Add a Year entry to the main window (Andrzej Polatyński)
- Add a Duplicate Disc menu item (Dave Meikle)
- Show better error messages if the target directory can't be created (MatzeB)
- Remove branding from the desktop file
- Fix initial playback (Bill O'Shea)
- Hide the progress bar unless ripping (Ghee Teo)
- Move the cursor to always been on the currently playing/ripping track (Dave Meikle)
- When editing album artist, only change track artists if it was the same (Bill O'Shea)
Why I Love Jon Snow
There are many reasons why I love Jon Snow: his eclectic ties and socks, his personal morals and ethics (his biography is pretty good), and of course Snowmail. Today's Snowmail contained this referential gem:
These are not just bad sales figures. These are M&S bad sales figures.
NP: Herbstlaub, Marsen Jules
Social Whoring
Linked In always had the atmosphere of a more serious and professional social networking site, unlike MySpace and Facebook where people seem to collect friends like stickers when they were younger. Then I discovered TopLinked, a site dedicated to letting people grow their network massively to people they've never met. The top member has 37 thousand connections. I just don't understand this, what is the point of having so many connections when there is no value in the connections themselves?
NP: Bricolage, Amon Tobin
Postr 0.10
A new year, a new release of Postr. This release has some useful bug fixes. Now to finish off that grand refactoring...
- Use the GNOME proxy if set
- Don't try and upload images over 10Mb, as Flickr will reject them
- Add a big Upload button to the window
- Fall back on ISO-8859-1 when reading metadata
- Don't show error dialogs with no message
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are building now.
Sound Juicer Loving
Over Christmas a load of gnome-love bugs in Sound Juicer were closed thanks to some wonderful people, so to keep people's interest (and try and gain some serious co-maintainers) I've gone through the bug list and marked more gnome-love bugs. There are thirteen bugs marked now, all of which should be no more than a few hours work each, making them perfect fodder for anyone who wants to get more experience with GNOME programming.
NP: Bag Lady (Dune DnB Remix), Erykah Badu
For Sale: Camera Bag
I'm selling my camera bag and lens case as I never use them, and thought I'd offer them here first before they hit eBay.
Camera bag: Lowepro Toploader 65AW. Very good condition: it's mostly been in a cupboard apart from three weeks in India a while ago. I'm thinking £25 including delivery to the UK.
Lens case: Lowepro 1W. This is as-new, and has never left the office. £10 including delivery.
If anyone is interested, drop me a mail.
NP: Another Late Night: Zero 7
Sound Juicer "Esoteric Quotes, Most Frightening" 2.21.1
Sound Juicer "Esoteric Quotes, Most Frightening" 2.21.1 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Special thanks to the wonderful people who worked on a few bugs I tagged as gnome-love, and Carl-Anton for working on the SJ GHOP task!
- Save custom genres (#382667, thanks Jonh Wendell)
- Make the progress bar smaller (#460650, thanks Stefan Oderbolz)
- Detect VFAT and NTFS filesystems and strip characters they can't handle (#321436, thanks Carl-Anton Ingmarsson and GHOP)
- Inhibit power management suspension when ripping (#344947, thanks Carl-Anton and GHOP)
- Don't crash when finished extracting (#498500)
- Remove the Rip Completed dialog (#504639)
- Set pipeline state to NULL when disposing (#495410)
- Escape the album and artist in the cluebar (#504862, thanks Luca Cavalli)
