Tango PS3 Theme

Sony recently released a tool that goes along with the 2.00 firmware for the PS3, allowing users to create and set themes. Despite the original application being written in Python (you can see that by not passing any arguments to the application, and seeing that they forgot to check for the length of the ARGV before trying to poke at it), the converter to their home-grown image format (GIM) isn't written in that language. A wine install and a couple of DLLs later, I can run the tool on the sample theme.

It's been done before on the PSP. So here's my take on the Tango icon theme for the PS3:



Kudos to the Tango artists for their nice looking icons, and particularly Jakub who provided me with some icons that weren't readily available. Sources are here. It's still missing a few icons, can't say the theme format is well documented...

New gnome-phone-manager and Telepathy

I just released a new tarball of gnome-phone-manager, version 0.40. New in this version is the Telepathy backend. It's still a work-in-progress. But it allows you to send and receive messages from any number of phones.

Here's a little screencast:



There are obviously a number of bugs, including the fact that none of the contacts from your phone show up in the buddy list, so you can't send new messages. Try using gnome-phone-manager itself for now, but the future lies here.

PS: Get your distros to update gnome-phone-manager. Fedora has the latest versions in rawhide and Fedora 8. Some distros *cough*buntu*cough* still ship ancient versions.

Ross is offically evil

Bastien so owns this now

Just because I committed a few patches.

30 Days of Night, 29 Days Of Plot Holes

Went to watch 30 Day Of Night, and it's so bad that it needs to be mentioned as such. People looked very pissed off coming out of the cinema, and multiple mentions of the word shite were heard. A DVD of that film is, in fact, shit-in-a-box. If you have to go watch it, ingest large amounts of recreational drugs, and laugh when it looks most inappropriate.

The pedant in me found that in the "You wants to win £100" sketch, on the Peter Serafinowicz Show, the answer to "Which city is the capital of France" question was wrong. Vichy was the capital of France during most of the second world war, even more so during the London bomb raids. Still a great show.

Watch O News.

Dear lazyweb

Do you know where I put the charger for my piece of crap Motorola phone? I'm pretty sure it's not under the pile of bills on my desk, and I can't find it in my cables drawer (but I found out I have a spare Nokia charger, a DKU2 cable and a USB-powered hoover).

Update: I found it in the cable shoebox in my bedroom, after looking through my cable plastic box. Did I ever mention I hate cables?

Films list is back

Rather than pollute and bore people with films list in my blog (I'd rather do that with useless trivia, and self-deprecation), I thought I'd use IMDb's My Movies feature.

The hardest part was getting all the films from a variety of sources into the database, without having to click through all of them. Here comes the Mechanizer (in US English in the text). Given a list of @imdb_ids:

my $mech = new WWW::Mechanize;
$mech->get( "http://www.imdb.com/register/login" );
$mech->success or die "Can't get the login page";

$mech->submit_form(
  form_number => 2,
  fields => {
     login => 'email@test.com',
     password    => "mypassword",
  },
);

my $id;
foreach $id (@imdb_ids) {
  print "Adding $id\n";
  $mech->get ("http://www.imdb.com/rg/title-lhs/mymovies/mymovies/list?pending&add=$id");
}

I used my old code from film-gallery.pl code to grab the IDs from blogs, and various types of files. HTH.

Dear Corey

So, there were questions a couple of years ago, but right now, I'd like Corey to get in a train wreck.

Will you please stop looking like me!


Anyway, my last DVD release went well, thanks.