What did I miss?

Pfff. I go away for a couple of days to watch a football game, and both RHEL 5 and GNOME 2.18 get released in my absence. In a somewhat related way, I didn't know Zara had a men section. Hoooo, manic monkeys!

Less connectivity please!

Today was mostly spent wondering why France couldn't repeat their Ireland heroics to snatch victory against England, and getting Linux installed on A's laptop, in place of the virus/malware/spyware/bloatware infested Windows.

I was quite lucky to manage to find Grub4DOS, and associated tools. The laptop's busted CD/DVD drive (it can only read pressed CDs, and not even that fast) didn't make things any easier, and thank fsck I have a floppy drive in my desktop machine. The first install, bootstrapped from WinXP using the NT version failed halfway through with a network error, leaving me with a bricked laptop. The second try was more successful after I managed to get FreeDOS installed on the hard disk, got all the Fedora images over via floppy, and finished the install over the network.

I also saw for the first time the ACPI error message telling me that the BIOS cutoff date was past (the BIOS claims to be from 1997, even though the machine is 5 years old). I still managed to get quite an impression after showing suspend-to-disk, and boot/login of under 5 minutes (Windows is so shit).

Some old film news: Hot Fuzz, Bienvenue chez les Rozes, The Italian Job

Comic genius

I can make farts with my armpits. That is all.

The return of the Bluetooth stuff

I spent my day (and a large part of a very late night yesterday) playing with BlueZ' D-Bus API. I ported nautilus-sendto to use it instead of gnome-bluetooth (even though it still uses the crappy spinner widget).

It looks (quite) nifty, and warns you if the destination device doesn't support OBEX.




Could someone please make it look a bit less arse? (it's already in SVN)

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.