Useless discussion bait #1697

Apple invents Galago:

For example, Apple said the framework will allow developers to programatically determine through their own applications whether a specific instant message user is online[...].

We're well known for nicking ideas from Apple, and they also like to steal some from us, which isn't surprising given some of the cross-breeding among the communities that's happened over the years.

They still have a much better record at bringing those features to the users (Beagle vs. Spotlight, where the latter is integrated in many many more applications than Beagle is), and even better at advertising them (with pretty moving pictures).

Love today

I spent my Saturday around B&Q and homebase looking for a pressure washer to clean up my patio and some garden furniture, finishing off watching a nail-biting/frustrating draw against Boro.

My Sunday was more helpfully spent drinking beers with a few guys in London after Pete Graner decided to drop in the city. The French presidential election results didn't come as much of surprise, but Chelsea dropping points did.

Mika's Love Today rocks the same way the Scissor Sisters rocked a couple of years ago. More things change, more they stay the same, which makes for good days.

Sqeaky bum time!

Fedora 7 is gearing up, and I'm spending most of my time fixing bugs. If you have a pet peeve (a bug, not a feature) for Rhythmbox, or Totem, be sure to let me know (by filing bugs in Bugzilla!).

I'm very happy that project for accepted for an SoC project. It means I won't have to do it myself, and that the person got the best mentor possible, the BlueZ man himself. And I'm never tired of hearing some success stories with the browser plugin. Changes a bit from all the bugs :/

I hope Aaron finishes his encoding profiles code in time for GNOME 2.20, as I don't won't to have to deal with gnome-media's profile code anymore.

Watched a couple of films: The Interpreter (I wanted to slap and drown Nicole Kidman for most of the film, certainly not her best film by a margin, and Sean Penn should stick to indie movies, which is what we like him for), and The Jacket, a tip-top if weird thriller. Bit like bath water near the end (soapy).

PS: In case you wonder where that title comes from. Plenty more goals where that came from.

Stripey #2

Following Ezio's stripey madness, the stripey headset!

I'm away

After a day of work at the factory^Wfixing bugs, I committed some more plugin work to Totem. Philip Withnall wrote a Galago plugin, as featured in the screenie below. It will set your Gossip (with Peekaboo support), or Pidgin (with the gaim-galago plugin) as away when watching a film fullscreen.



I added support for sidebar plugins, which means people can get cranking at an IMDB cover sidebar, a DAAP browser for videos, or even a tagger for Beagle or Tracker.

Thanks to David Schleef, I got libtool to like me (and my uninstalled shared library). noinst_LTLIBRARIES wouldn't compile a .so, so my plugin loader couldn't find it. The trick is install-pluginLTLIBRARIES:. Thanks David.

PS: fonts don't work one bit in Blogger, so no fancy monospaced font for the bits of code...

Easter trackback

I had a very calm and relaxing Easter week-end, some strolling in the castle park under the sun, drank plenty of Pimm's, and some bank holiday gardening. I managed to catch up somewhat on my films, and I watched:

• Domino (rubbish)
• The Prestige (full of twists and turns, A-class)
• MI: 3 (worse than the 2 prior iterations, by miles)
• Porco Rosso (not as good as I expected, but entertaining)
• Howl's Moving Castle (a magical must-see)
• Night At The Museum (guilty pleasure, and not as bad as the trailer made it anticipate)
• and the Pursuit Of Happyness (excrucianting rags to riches film, horrible to watch even if you know it's all going to end well).

I've also managed to add some covers to my MP3 rips of Mixmag cover CDs. Took a while, but the great discogs had pretty much all of them with decent quality.

What a night!

I got my evening out to go to the pub to watch my team play their quarter-finals return game against Roma, all expectant, a bit reassured that the result might go our way with the good passing in the first 10 minutes. I needn't be too worried as United showed Roma how to play. What a night!