A while ago, I blogged about the impossibility to have a shared agenda between multiple OSes (here, a Linux / OS X dualboot) running local tools. iCal getting slower as my calendar grows made me finally decide to move to GCal and synchronize both sides client-side. I don’t like it, but whatever, at least it works. That was last week, before my screen broke and I sent my computer off for repair to the MacStore (with my calendar still available online, yay!).

Now, I wish I’d done that with my email also, because when the computer came back 2 days later, everything was gone. I had backups of my thesis work (yes, kids, make those - TODAY), but not of my programming (this is a good test to see how much I synchronize with bugzilla / svn) or my email (GMail, here I come…), I mean, seriously, who would’ve thought they’d remove the Linux partition along with fixing the screen? It means anything I’ve ever worked on that was not in a svn/cvs somewhere is now lost. Also, patches in progress or under review no longer exist.

… or, really, Brooklyn. J. invited me to go to a bar for some live music. I was into it, not having a clue who was performing. Well, in short, first it was a sucky singer who couldn’t sing. However, there was a really hot girl in front of the crowd. She had brown hair, half-long, was distinguishably the only person actually moving on the - ahem - music and disappeared as soon as the band finished. Then, second, Jenny Owen Youngs, she got the voice. Best remembered for her cover of Hot in here with some piece of Oasis’ Wonderwall in it, also.

L’entree was Jonathan Coulton a.k.a. CodeMonkey. Let’s say that again, Shopvac, You ruined everything (in the best possible way), Your brains, Baby got back, First of may and of course Codemonkey. Some will know what this is, but just for those who don’t, go to Youtube or just read this:

“codemonkey get up, get coffee, codemonkey go to job; codemonkey have boring meeting, with boring manager Rob; Rob say codemonkey very diligent, but his output stink; his code not functional nor elegant, what do codemonkey think; codemonkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself, codemonkey not say it out loud, codemonkey not crazy, just proud; codemonkey like freetos, codemonkey like tap and mountain dew, code monkey very simple man, big warm fuzzy secret heart, codemonkey like you.”

Thumbs up!

I accidently made myself update to Feisty earlier today. I think it started with an email from someone telling me that my iSight driver didn’t work for him, me deciding it was time to boot back into Linux and see what’s wrong and getting annoyed that Gtk+ on Dapper was several minor versions behind on the svn that I have installed on OS X.

See, it could be so easy. “sed -e s/dapper/feisty/g sources.list” and Debian all the way. Somehow, Ubuntu suffers from the Fedora disease where they fail to create proper update paths, although fortunately, Ubuntu is still lightyears behind on Fedora when it comes to providing a completely poor and crippled user experience for those of us that wish to not re-install from scratch every six months. Thumbs up here, sort of…

After dist-upgrade worked relatively well, and Feisty rebooted, I got no X and no virtual consoles. In short, I was in a running system with everything ready & working in front of me, just me not being able to enter a command in any way. Nice, so close, yet so far away. Seems that in the end, it was a combination of bug 95210, 89853 and a quirk in the update process that caused gdm to magically disappear (?).

Result: the webcam module for the iSight in Feisty is just svn trunk, i.e. it’s not iSight-aware, and works fine otherwise. Updated my (one-year-old!) patch against svn trunk and modified it to allow for both iSight and native UVC devices (they’re somewhat different in their USB data transfer protocol), re-sent to Laurent, let’s see if this goes better if I update again one year from now… What a waste of a my day.

The AACS (those people that try to own your high-resolution video player) has attempted to take down numerous sites (examples provided in the link) that try to express a number (13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640, that’s ~13×10^36) as hex (0×09.f9.11.02.9d.74.e3.5b.d8.41.56.c5.63.56.88.c0, which happens to cover 31 hexes, or 15,5 bytes). Apparently, knowing this number is a violation of federal law and makes you a murderer, atheist, prostitute, terrorist and some other things that they have yet to figure out. It also lets you copy high-resolution DVDs, just like that. What’s in a number, right? Sites that are being harassed include Google, Digg, and so on.

What a waste of lawyer money, history is already done guys. You lost, and you’ll never learn.

I went to see the immensely poopular movie Pan’s Labyrinth (imdb) this weekend. This Spanish-spoken, half-war / half-fairytale movie, nominee for a Golden Globe, is without doubt going to be one of the most popular of the year.

The movie plays at the end of World War 2 in Franco’s Spain, at a site where resistance and military are fighting out their fight. Ofelia, daughter of the flirt-of-the-day of the military’s captain, is caught up halfway between on the one hand this world of very explicitely and realistically pictured misery and violence, and on the other hand the world from her fairytale books. Wonderful scenery, convincing play and just a very nice story, not at all suited for kids.

EDIT:
This entry showed up on planet.gnome.org on May 1st, 2007, with all content deleted and tons of spam trackbacks dated on May 1st, 2007. I don’t know how or why. Using google cache, I was able to re-find the post and re-enter it. Please ignore the noise. All images and links are lost…