Ubuntu!

I'm sure that article's gone around already a fair bit, and the geek jokes that go around with it. Yesterday, I went with my ex to watch an NBA game at the O2 (né Millenium Dome).



It was about 10 years I was playing (and interested) in basket-ball, when I was still in lycée. The feeling was the like of a party I didn't really want to be at (Why did you bring me here? I don't know anyone.). But it was pretty fun, although the "Irish" mascot wished England good luck against France in the rugby would certainly be considered a faux-pas by real Irishmen. I enjoyed the timeout shows though.

Quote of the day:
- Did you used to play basket-ball?
- Yeah, that's how I broke my wrist the first time.

Evil!

Now, that wasn't funny. I asked for nice souls to send me stuff via my Amazon wishlist. Braindead and American Beauty DVDs, great. But this:



is sick. A copy of This is Anfield. Liverpool's Kop songs. I'd have preferred a ManU CD. The jury's still out on the fate of the CD, and the constables on the identity of the culprit(s). Call your local police station if you have any evidence on the perp, or your Daily Mail correspondent for possible punishments. Or leave a comment either way.

Update: The perpetrator has been identified. Comments included:
«Of course...if you send me a tom jones CD... I will retaliate» (the accused)
and:
«Frankly after sending mr jones, you are lucky you only got dvds and cds, and not shit-in-a-box» (his defence attorney).

I found a new home for the CD. Will be on its way when Royal Mail stop striking.

Introspection

Tell me we're not going that way! That's why Totem is just a movie player. I hope we can manage to keep it simple and fast (although the Python plugin support does nothing for its startup speed I've been told).

ITMS and the podcast parsing

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to Podcast parsing in Totem, so it can be used for some plugins, such as my favourite Quicktime trailers sidebar feature, as well as giving Rhythmbox Atom parsing.

After finishing Atom and RSS parsing support, I set out to add support for itpc and itms links, as used by iTunes, and supported in PenguinTV. I re-discovered the inadequacies of old-style Unix libraries (when they don't work as advertised, at all).

If you live in NYC, or Seattle, and have a Starbucks at hand, you might be able to help with this potentially nice feature. Clicking on the song would add it to a personal wishlist (a feature which would also be useful for streaming radios as well).

Go! Package!

Thanks to work by Olav and others, I've been able to create a new SVN repo easily, and I've committed the Nintendo DS Rom thumbnailer to SVN, and made a release.

Good mojo for the person that'll get it in Fedora.

Update: And obviously, there was a bug in the Makefile which meant that the release didn't work. 1.0.1 is out. Thanks Laurent :)

Another Update: Third time's a charm. Trying to put garbage in GConf really isn't fun. I'm done for today, don't care if it's broken again.

Hmmm, networking multimedia

After working around (read: that's not a proper fix) some stupidness in MythTV's frontend, my DVB-T experience just got a lot better, as I can finally watch the stuff I record. That includes recording all the Match Of The Day shows (just in case), as well as the kinky Secret Diary Of A Callgirl.

After switching the Mac Mini to wired, the network is fast enough for the MythTV sources in GStreamer to stream to Totem, as well as streaming via UPNP to the PS3. The UPNP framework in MythTV doesn't export a lot of the things it could, such as a thumbnail, the length of the movie, etc.

Just like chpe, I've been getting increasingly frustrated at the Web going to Flash Video for streaming, instead of sticking to the embedded movie player. I guess that targetting one platform (Flash) as opposed to the big three (WMP, Real and Quicktime), is a boon for Web developers. And that's how EA pushes the online replays from FIFA.

And to the PS3 again, with Frank's help, I've fixed up Rhythmbox' UPNP source.

So, on the TODO list:

• Better UPNP in Rhythmbox
• Finishing MythTV support in Totem
• More work on the browser plugin

Feel free to help, or send me stuff from my wishlist. It's just like writing code.

Free work?

While I can only applaud Greg-KH's Linux Driver Project, you have to wonder about the projects on offer. It seems to me like most of the work to be done is on embedded drivers, with companies skimming on driver development costs. I hope we see more offers for consumer hardware in the future.

Simple additions

I got my copy of FIFA08 this morning, and I'm having plenty of fun. The gameplay is much less robotic, and pretty flowing once you get used to it, the online play doesn't lag on bit (unlike the mode tacked on the FIFA07 PS2 version). PES fanatics should try it before they knock it. For music lovers, the EA Trax include stuff like Yonderboi, Travis, CSS. I particularly like The Hoosiers and Wir sind Helden. The Play like a Pro mode, where you play a single player in a game is also quite something. Get sick like in an FPS when the screen starts shaking and your view narrowing when you're sprinting the ball at your feet.

I've been playing with the rest of the PS3 as well. Rhythmbox' UPNP plugin doesn't work yet, seems to be something related to the way Coherence sets up its mainloop, but I've been able to play a few recordings direct from my MythTV machine (although the MPEG-2 decoder of the PS3 seems to be sub-par for slightly broken streams).

I'm hadessuk on there, if you fancy a game of FIFA, or a conversation typed at the speed of a tortoise.

Zonbu does run Totem

The guys at Zonbu finally fixed their multimedia page to mention they use Totem for DVD playback, after I e-mailed them a couple of months ago. And obviously, they don't use KDE but XFCE. Mr. Fourdan told me so himself... a couple of times.

14 years ago

Just like Thomas, I can remember when I bought my first CD. 14 years ago, I was 14 and bought my first CD (a single) with my hard-earned money (ie. pocket money), in the supermarket near my new school.

I can still remember the beautiful words and the great bass. So beautiful I could cry.

Thank you Culture Beat.

I know what I want and I want it now
I want you 'cause I'm Mr Vain

More website videos and sports

This week-end, I added yet a bit more functionality to our NarrowSpace plugin (ie. the QuickTime compatibility plugin), implementing another bunch of missing Javascript functions.

If you have a website where some buttons don't work, take a look at the output of your web browser (using firefox -debug for Firefox, mozilla -debug for Mozilla, etc.), and you might see things like:

** Message: WARNING: Site uses unimplemented function 'totemINarrowSpacePlayer::GetRate'

Then file a bug against Totem's browser plugin component, with the debug output messages, and the URL to access the page in question. Hopefully, we'll be able to implement the missing functionality, as we've done for the Apple site above.

As for sports, I caught the France - Italy game on Saturday in a local French pub, after having watched England - Israel. And my cousin has made the Solheim Cup team this year (it's the Woman's equivalent to the Ryder Cup). Starts on Friday, I hope she does well.

5 years ago

I found this e-mail in my Inbox today.


Dear Bastien Nocera,

Commitment is a core value at Red Hat because our success depends on dedicated individuals. We would like to thank you for your expression of commitment in achieving 5 years of loyal service. Congratulations on reaching this milestone in your Red Hat career.

Thank you

When I was 16-17, I wanted to work with Linux, and Red Hat was the Linux company, and it still is. And I'm glad I spent 4 years working for the support organisation, I learnt a lot, even though I'm still nodding my way through when Bryn or Jose explain some intricate device-mapper or PAM stuff they've been working on. I don't think I'm done learning.

MythTV setup

I spend a bit of time yesterday and today, in between watching footie games, setting up my Mac Mini as a MythTV machine, after having tried it out successfully on my laptop.

The low-down:

• I needed to buy a USB keyboard with a proper cable. My 2 wireless USB Logitech keyboards weren't kicking off early enough to be able to press 'C' to boot from the CD.
• Colin's guide to installing Fedora on the Mac Mini is still up-to-date, pretty much.
• Getting the display to work (ie. outputting to the TV) was a real pain. The DVI-to-HDMI output didn't work under Linux (and even if it would, it would have clipped the image to the 720p resolution, 1280x720, when the full resolution is 1280x768). The manual only advertises 1024x768 as a resolution for the VGA input, but a lot more got listed when using my laptop with the XRandR 1.2-capable drivers. 1280x768 works.
  
• Wireless works, given the right version of the firmware.
• MythTV is pretty easy to install if you follow Jarod's guide to the install (the RPM is mythtv as opposed to mythtv-suite).
• I already had the firmware for my DVB-T tuner, I don't remember where I got it...
• I wondered what the reason for no menu items was when starting MythTV, but a quick Google fixed it.

I'm sure there's plenty to be done still. I'll probably switch to a different recording solution, if Sony's PlayTV ends up being any good. Now to get recording and fill the HD up a bit.

Does anyone know where I can get screen quirks added, so that people don't struggle like I did setting X up?

Random links

Jeez, I'm bad at blogging.This afternoon's footie game brought up some interesting new connections. But after watching MOTD, Philip pointed me to this bug. Peculiar choice of videos to watch.

I've also written a small bookmarklet so that I can swarm (mugshot parlance) with Epiphany. And my VAIO's gone.

A year-old picture, FIFA isn't quite tuned up for my first season as a manager

Behaving like a kid (Part 1)

Thomaschine sucks at FIFA :)

PS: Behave you start leaving messages here, I wholly expect tonight's results to be quite different...

Lists

I came back nearly two weeks ago from my holidays in France. Very relaxing, 4 barbecues with merguez each time. Wicked.
I brought back a few things though, and pictures of it!

Ezio "Stripes-guy", wearing a (too small) gift of mine

Noddy made it to France. Stop nodding already!

There's frogs in France. Who would have guessed.

I got to watch Le Viager, as Michel Serrault passed away shortly before.

Next post is about behaving like a kid.

Lazy^WWindows web, can you help?

Trying to fix a little Totem bug, could anyone with a Windows machine and Windows Media Player 11 copy the output of this page in the comments (of the blog, or in the bug)?

Thanks!

Note that I tried to install it with Wine, but no luck, at all.

New releases

bluez-gnome 0.10 was released, and now includes my patches for the "Browse device" functionality. I also released a new shared-mime-info and Totem devel version today. Everything's nicely sitting in rawhide now (or it will be if my last build worked).

Now, I'll go back to doing nothing, as I'm supposed to be on holidays.

By the way, the Simpsons movie was really nice, go and see it. That was my Wednesday morning AFK :)

All merged

I bought an M3 Simply for my Nintendo DS, to avoid carrying around the tiny little cartridges, especially when I travel (as per last week's GUADEC where I didn't bring mine). After downloading the ROMs for my games from some shady websites (uhuh), the filenames were less than helpful, but I realised all the sites had nice little icons. Sure enough, they can be thumbnailed. Shame I can't move my Final Fantasy III or Mario Bros saves to the micro SD card...



The Browse Device functionality is now all merged in bluez-gnome, thanks Marcel! Now to clean up the widgets, and finish off the wizard.

g-p-m/g-p-m integration

Richard sent me that little screenshot, showing off the gnome-phone-manager/gnome-power-manager integration, now in SVN of everything.

Yay! Integration! D-Bus! Buzzwords!

Hope I'm not stealing your thunder, but for once, you showed up on IRC after I did :)