gnapplet support

Thanks to Zaheer, who provided me with a Nokia 3650 some time ago, I've added support for gnapplet for the phones that handle it. This means better support for extended functionality, as the AT interface is severely limited on a number of those phones.

gnome-bluetooth kill kill

Last week, I did more work on the Bluetooth device selector, to avoid some of the problems we saw with the one in gnome-bluetooth (mainly the "I work with loads of nerds and there's 500 Bluetooth devices in the vicinity" use case). The patch is available on the bluez-devel mailing-list.

It looks pretty good, but would require some work before it's something bluez-gnome can export as public API.


Anyone fancying some cut'n'paste fest for gnome-phone-manager?

Poor Fonz

Talk about fallen icons. Vicky reminded me that I saw a poster for panto Peter Pan yesterday.

HOLLYWOOD LEGEND HENRY WINKLER STARS IN WOKING’S PANTOMIME ADVENTURE PETER PAN

You could also go check out Starsky in Bromley.

Being a stars's wicked, innit?

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.

Ross was right

It didn't take too long before people took offense from an idiot at the BBC saying there were 400 to 600 Linux users accessing BBC sites in the UK.

Interviews

After the Bluetooth interview a couple of weeks ago, another one popped up about codeina/Codec Buddy, starring my good friend Thomas.

In other news, I want to stab Nokia and Sony Ericsson (I stabbed Motorola a long time ago) for their inexistant proprietary protocols specs, and their sub-par AT protocol implementations. Look at the recent commits in gnome-phone-manager for proofs.

Update: I forgot to mention the interviews were the work of Jon Roberts. The interviews make a very good read if you're interested in what's new in Fedora 8.

Dear Lenovo

I want my face being recognised under Linux.

kthanx

Better workflow

I just finished writing the code for better Podcast handling in Rhythmbox (feel free to test it). The only thing we're missing is a way to tell the iTunes detection pages that we already have iTunes installed.

So, if you have a Windows machine with Firefox and iTunes installed, could you please attach the output (pertaining to iTunes) of "about:plugins" from Firefox to the bug?

Body popping

Apart from making plenty of security errata in the past week (thanks FLAC...), I've finally started on porting Rhythmbox to the new features of the Totem playlist parser, including using it for Podcast parsing.

What it means is:

• Atom support
• ITPC and iTunes Music Store podcasts support (thanks to PenguinTV)

I'll also try to make sure that those are better integrated into Rhythmbox, eg. when one launches Rhythmbox with a RSS or Atom feed. More on that when the full feature's available.

I got Flash working on Fedora 8 (on my x86-64 desktop), thanks to the integration work that's gone on with nspluginwrapper. And I can now listen to my songs and scrobble even when I'm hacking on Rhythmbox. Throat hurts from so much singing.

On a different note, my ankle problems have subsided (still a minor twinge), and I scored hat tricks on my last few outings, and a goal Thierry Henry would have been proud of (left side of the box, bent shot in the bottom right corner). Yay!

Website are old fashioned

Out with the website, in with the hosted blog. If you manage to read this, the old hadess.net is no more, and you'll see the blog. Most of the stuff will move to appropriate websites, especially the pictures. If you see this, then it must have worked.

Many thanks to Rob and Ross for their help.

Hell-o-ween

The great José has dodgy tastes in films. Very dodgy. Following a mention of Amazon UK's sale on scary movies for Halloween, he admitted to wanting to buy: The Refrigerator.

The best bit is the plotline:

A couple move into a bad apartment in a bad neighborhood in New York. The apartment contains a refrigerator, which is the only thing they like in the place. However, they slowly discover that the refrigerator is a monster which kills people in gruesome ways and then sends them to hell. The refrigerator is already gaining mind control over the husband. What will happen?

José now officially has the worst taste ever.

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.