I fixed it! I swear!

It looks like some pretty simple issue was keeping gnome-phone-manager from working with non-Nokia phones. And it should all be fixed in 0.20!

As an added bonus, you should be able to send and receive text messages with international characters. It's only lightly tested, and there's not really any ways to calculate the length of the message using gnokii. So whether your super long message in Arabic will work is anyone's guess. Stick to short messages.

Tom, I also had some vivid dreams recently. One was about being the owner of Aston Villa, and the "Philadelphia" basket-ball team (yeah, I know they're the Sixers), I kept waking up in a black cab somewhere near a park on the East Coast of the US thinking I should go back to England to check if I really owned that team. I need to stop the crack before going to bed, bad trip.

Zoom zoom zoom!

Audio preview

After gentle poking by Matthias, I cooked up a patch that allows the sound preview to work again for Fedora 8. It will hit rawhide shortly.

Make sure Enable software mixing is enabled in the Sound preferences, and that sound previews are enabled in the file manager prefs. Obviously, you'd want pulseaudio running rather than esd, if you
don't want to tear your hair out when playing video.

Let go?

Cameron at a Google conference? Is this like a fox in the chicken coop, or rather John Major at an Halliburton board meeting?
Hopefully, he hasn't got access to the search results.

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).