Re: Handling GNOME Bugs

Richard, you should also mention that we don't care what they're watching, smoking, or whether it is of any interest to us.

Football

Plenty of footie lately, never enough really, but still a lot. I watched a couple of games on telly, including the great FA cup tie against Reading on Tuesday. I'm also going to watch Man Utd v. a Europe XI at Old Trafford Tuesday a week. Hopefully a good game of football given the talent on show.

I'm enjoying my 6-a-side football, putting in some decent performances. Defensive midfield is where it's at. I've scored a couple of interesting goals: coming from a defensive position, I wasn't closed down in midfield, and whacked a swerving and dipping 20-yarder in the middle of the goal. I also like my pass in the net from the left of midfield. Lots of bodies in between me and the goal, but my cross just evaded everyone. The defense wasn't happy at the goal keeper, and vice-versa. The last one was a right-footed volley from the right of midfield, for Erkut's last game with us. And today, I'll be hoping my new jersey gives me some skills.

Keybindings, they're back! and they're hungry for blood!

Everybody remembers (or should remember) the "Unf*ck my keyboard" session at the 2006 Boston Summit.

Thanks to Jens Granseuer, the old multimedia keys that needed keybindings assigned to them now work just as they should with players such as Totem, and Rhythmbox, using D-Bus to pass along the keypresses. A 3-year old bug goes dead.

Today, I just finished another part of the fun, which was making it possible for 3rd-party applications to add shortcuts to the Keybindings c(r)applet. I hope the patch will make it early in 2.19.x so that applications like Beagle and Tomboy can use it, instead of adding this sort of thing in their own preferences dialogue.

Last part of the problem is being able to update keymaps in a reasonably user-friendly way. Metacity, and all the other apps using GTK+ to translate the "keybinding" string to something Gdk understands, don't know how to handle keys without keysyms. When such a key is pressed in the keybindings applet, we should allow the user to map the key to a keysym, name their keyboard map, and send it off to us (or keep it for themselves, it's supposed to be dead-easy anyway).

That's a much harder problem though. For later, yes, later.

Totem was on Heroes too

Christian mentioned it to me some time ago, but I completely forgot to mention it in my blog. Totem was on Heroes, in the midst of all that KDE desktop.




You can see the very recognisable old-school window icon by Jimmac, as well as the distinctive menu entries. We don't have the nifty equaliser bits showing on the right implemented though.

(I actually thought it was an old version of GNOME with Sawfish/Sawmill the first time I saw this episode...)

Film update

And more blogging, this time films:

• Bombs and blockbusters, a documentary about blockbusters, and how to make one. Not ground-breaking, but interesting nonetheless.
• Confetti, a very very disappointing British comedy. I was expecting better from reading the casting.
• Melinda and Melinda, a Woody Allen that's a bit more like the old stuff (ie. good)
• The Brothers Grimm, a very entertaining fairy tale (with scary bits and decent plot included)
• Children Of Men, excellent post-apocalyptic (ie. in 10 years time) Britain, solid acting, and interesting characters. I want more!
• Blood Diamond, I got more! Di Caprio with a Zimbabwean accent for most part of the film, except when dying/yelling while dying.
• The Last Kiss, I wanted to see more Zach Braff, and was a little disappointed. A film about relationships and "freedom" (ie. lack of responsibility). Doesn't really dwelve into the reasons for Braff's cheating, or that lack of commitment all the characters seem to be looking for.
  

Time for an update

And you thought that was a blog update. But no!
Really, I would need to update my website. I've already moved my blog to a less shabby place, on blogspot. Some explanations needed about the website. I built it upon some "Slashcode" from back in the days (around 2000), in PHP, with no regards for possible upgrade, and plenty of hacks. I moved my blog there using PHPbloxsom (or something like that) when Advogato first folded. So, cleaning up my mess, you could find:

• WindowMaker themes, dockapps and a bunch of GNOME EWMH 1.x hint patches
• the infamous Bobbi video ("Hi, my name's Bobbi...")
• Plenty of patches for the rio500 utilities, including animation support, and Walk500, the tip-top song manager for your Rio500
  
• An original PPC "port" of xine 0.3.7
• graphics for the Linux.com kernel 2.4 release contest
• Eject button support for PPC iBooks and iMacs (July 2001, and already into keyboard malarkey)
• A kudzu patch to send D-Bus messages when new mount points are available, and the corresponding magicdev patch (gnome-volume-manager... in October 2003!)
• a video of Chema Celorio sky-surfing
• mentions of me having an iBook, or an iMac
• an hiragana input method for GTK+
• used-to-look-cool screenshots
• the crazy SEGA Chu-Chu Rocket advert

It will all be gone soon, but the Internet Wayback Machine will keep it all for some time.

Update: I corrected Chema's name, and uploaded the video to Google Video, it should show up on the link above when Google has finished processing it...

Like everyone's new toy

I received my new Nokia 800 yesterday, and got to play with it a bit. Apart from having been able to settle an argument about which CPU the XBox 360 uses (thanks Wikipedia), and toying with the chat apps, I've added a few apps to it, including a terminal (which will please my housemate), Chris' Dates, Tuomas' Plankton theme. No luck getting Plazer installed (some missing deps).


The web browser has a great resolution, and makes browsing large web pages easy, some bits of the interface are rather immature though (2 buttons to click to select the "Off" button action, the spinner showing up when clicking a link in the browser, etc.), and the application manager is a bit flaky and the error reporting blows.

The other disappointments, hardware-wise: no screen protection, apart from the sleeve (not really rugged), and the smaller power connector than my current Nokia phone (there must be some adapters so I don't need to carry 2 power supplies...).

The VMWare SDK image could turn out to be useful.