Who wants leg surgery?

Thanks Benoît for the link to SUN's JDS patches.

If anyone ships this Totem patch, they get to fix all their bugs themselves. As if X worked that well with threads, they're making all the display locking no-ops. If it hangs, your libraries are broken, and you're just 4 years late fixing it.

Update: Damien kindly posted a link to the original bug report. And it confirmed my above assumption. They have a broken libXi. For reference, the original Totem bug report.

MacOS X can suck loads too

That's what I got when testing QuickTime's helpers when a codec isn't supported (which happens fairly often). It doesn't ooze ease-of-use.

Films

Way late on that one, so plenty of films.

• Zodiac: very good, if a bit long, closure definitely not up to par with All the President's Men, or similar journalistic investigation films.
  
• Ma petite entreprise: funny, little French film.
  
• Tenacious D: just as I would have expected it, plenty on fart and rock jokes, for the fans.
  
• The Kind Of Comedy: I was disappointed, hostage situations should have more to them, and we don't feel like De Niro and Bernhard are quite as psycho as they're supposed to be.
  
• Laputa - Castle in the Sky: funny title, way below Howl's Moving Castle in the fairy-tale business.
  
• Goal II: shite, but there's not many footie films about. Goals were ludicrous (anyone remember Olive et Tom?), and plot is more straight forward than an episode of Neighbours.
  
• Sicko: he should do television, it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary, as usual, but very caricatural in its handling of foreign matters (like the visit of the NHS hospitals, or the discussions with bourgeois American expats in Paris, not mentioning the falling standards and rising debt of those medical systems).
  
• The Last Boy Scout: one of my all-time favourites, one-liners and broken noses.
  
• Shrek 3: I think I laughed once, not sure if it wasn't an acid reflux from the dinner.
  
• This Is England: an interesting view into what the Falklands, Thatcher, and skinheads brought to England in the '80s.
  
• Une Liaison Pornographique: intimist French film, definitely a good late evening film, if you want to question the nature of relationships.
  
• Ghost Rider: Marvel is scraping the barrel, let's hope there's no sequel.
  
• Knocked Up: feel-good comedy, they get together at the end (as if you'd expect it any other way).
  

And quite a few TV series as well:

• ATHF: I want to see the film now!
  
• House MD: went through Season 2 and 3, although the latter muddles a bit in the weird/not so interesting medicine (and probably inaccurate at times), but the dry-wit and soap hold it together.
  
• The Smoking Room and The Book Group: two great sitcoms, without the canned laughter. As per usual, short series, and only 2 seasons each.
  
• Monkey Dust: onto season 3, the Paedo-Finder-General gets on my tits though. Dobsky is still wicked.
  

And, finally, if you want to see some good films, that nth Channel 4 best stuff or other countdown show is nicely accurate: 50 films to see before you die. Time to fill your Netflix account.

Mo' Bluetooth

In Bluetooth++, I showed the cups bluetooth backend enhancements. Marcel is currenly reviewing those, and should merge the code upstream next week. In the meantime, the code is available in bluez-utils-3.11-2.f8 in rawhide.

I've also been working on James' gnome-vfs-obexftp code. While the old code needed you to make hcid launch with the -x option to enable the experimental features (in this case the now-defunct RFCOMM service). Marcel told me it should be using RFCOMM sockets directly, and we now have a version of gnome-vfs-obexftp that works without any tinkering, and is also more reliable, and quicker.


It's also available in the repos for Fedora Core 6, Fedora 7 and rawhide under the name gnome-vfs2-obexftp.

Paul Smith isn't that stripey

A couple of weeks ago I went to a leaving-do. It was Paul's do. I play football with the guy, and I didn't realise the event it was until I saw his name on an e-mail. He's Paul Smith!

And he isn't that stripey.



We also have a running contest. We need to lob him when he's in goal. I'll have another go tonight at the old-timers' footie match.

More stripes from everywhere.

The Italian fridge by excellence.

And the stripes generator. Fabulous.

Bluetooth++

Bluetooth (and Bluez especially) is such a pleasure to work with compared to old crummy non-standard protocols. With this little patch, the printers show up directly in system-config-printer, and in the CUPS web interface. Whoohoo!

Je devrais avoir su mieux

Thanks John for providing me my pickup lines (via Google's translate feature).

I did watch some half-decent, and some crummy films:

• The Aristocrats, some pompous unknowns, but also some very good actors/stand-up comedians. For the late nights in front on the sofa, with the laptop where it should be (that's on your lap).
  
• White Chicks, I'm afraid to say I laughed, it's funnier than anything Eddy Murphy wish he'd done in the past ten years (minus Shreks). Actually, I looked at the filmography and it's 19 years since Coming to America.
• Babel, I remember being torn between this film and Blood Diamonds when both came out at the same time at the cinema. The latter was a better film to watch at the cinema, but Babel stands up on its own as a character movie. I think I set my expectations too high, still good though.
• Idiocracy, I can see why it went direct to video here, it's not worth showing in the cinema. This is no Office Space. Time for Starbucks!
  
• Spider-man 3, oh the expected disappointment. I was pressured into watching it by a super-hero lover that didn't read the reviews. Read the reviews, kids! It's for your own good!
• L'Empire des Loups, a horrid pile of crud. Looks like a Luc Besson-produced film, and certainly smells like it (but isn't one, despite how the saying goes). Ewww!
• The Krays, just a film to polish my accent, a half-decent cock-e-ney gangster film. You're no Italian Job, mai love.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a film for the evening, with a few good belly laughs. At least, unlike Eddie Murphy, Ivan Reitman made something half-decent after the eighties with this one.
  
• And the best for last, Flushed Away, during which I felt just a little bit of wee come out. Especially when the frogs are called into "Action". I just love it. Rent it, buy it. I think I'll watch it again now. No I shouldn't. But I COULD! It's that good...