In the same way, if somone speaks a collection of dialects, you will only discover a great confusion if you do not separate the elements of which this ensemble is composed.

Want to join?

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Of course, sometimes i’m made to listen to slightly surreal stuff.

And yeah, the youtube plugin on blogs.gnome.org is lovely. I hope it starts to work in feeds…

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.” — Agent Smith

Woot for meeting new people, and some of my heroes to boot, within GNOME and Ubuntu

Upgrades. I moved servers! Everything has been moved over to a dedicated server from RapidSwitch. After 1 year of excellent service, my VPS will soon get switched off for good. I’m still a big fan of RimuHosting, but I needed a bit more power (OK, I needed lots more power..). Isotoma use RapidSwitch a lot, and we get an excellent service from them so I figured i’d try them out. I now have 2.2Ghz Core2 Duo, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive and 4,000GB traffic. Really pleased with it so far.

Wordpress also got upgraded, and i’m really loving the new control panel. Good work guys!

BuildBot. I’ve joined the Build Brigade on their quest to bring continuous integration to GNOME. My own efforts can be found here. The current solution needs to open up a port for each project, and we are trying to get it down to a single shared connection for all projects. When this is working I hope to set up continuous integration of the Debian/Ubuntu GNOME packages too.

I’m hopeful we can bring the same solution to the KDE and XFCE teams too.

Summer of Code. I will be mentoring 2 students for GNOME in this years summer of code:

• John will be implementing SyncML support in Conduit. His deliverables include python bindings of libsyncml, conduit support of SyncML clients and servers, simplified discovery and configuration of those devices and a demo of sync between EDS and a SyncML device.
• Alexandre will be implementing full support for the iPod in Conduit, and also improving integration with Rhythmbox. His deliverables include improved media transcoding, using GStreamer were possible, full dataproviders for audio and video support and work to provide a smooth, rounded “plugin and sync” experience for the user.

This is my first time mentoring in the summer of code, and i’m really looking forward to it.

Hardy. GNOME 2.22. I’ve just upgraded my work machine to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, after running the alphas since nearly the beginning on my main development laptop. Very pleased with both so far. The upgrade on my laptop was smoother as it has Intel graphics.

Conduit. We are proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.24. Exciting times. It seems clear so far that the biggest problem we have in acceptance will be a UI that really “works”. I’ve become quite fond of our current UI, but new users just can’t understand it at all. Anyone got any suggestions?

It’s all very nice.

I’m still not very comfortable with trusting companies with my data, but for now my geeky curiosity seems to have decided to risk it. Oh dear. At least i’m not hemorrhaging personal information like some people… You know, if you google hard enough you can /really/ find military secrets that have seeped out onto the public internet thanks to some careless contractor!