Author: calum

Mini Me

Cool, Antonio made me a new hackergotchi… better than my effort, hopefully Jeff will drop it in when he has a rare minute :)

ObPubServiceAnnouncement:

Please mention everyone at planet that I’ll be happy to help
with any new or renewed hackergotchi if they drop me mail at
gnrfan at gnrfan dot org. Cheers, Antonio.

Streaming: mostly awesome

I can only imagine the work involved from the Fluendo guys to get and keep the GUADEC streaming going, and it’s been mostly awesome… but sadly today I’ve missed pretty much everything of interest to me because of connection failures or (as is the case right now, as I’m watching Goodbye GUADEC) video but no audio.

Ah well, good job anyway guys… hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some of it in the archives, and I’ll just have to bully the rest of the gossip out of Gman and yippi when they stop off here on their way back home next week…

Wonderful Copenhagen

Experiencing the GUADEC streaming first-hand this year, in conjunction with running across my presentation from GUADEC2 in Copenhagen while linking to Anna and Pete’s slides on usability.gnome.org, got me all nostalgic for the videos of that 2001 conference. I guess not all that many people might have seen them, because they don’t live anywhere obvious, the files are huge MPEGs, the filenames are useless, and they’ve never been edited.

Undeterred, I tracked down the video of my 2001 talk, and converted it to ogg/theora for good measure. I converted a couple of others along the way, giving them sensible filenames as I was going, just for the hell of it.

Would anybody be interested in my carrying on this little conversion project, or is 2001 just too much like ancient history now? (Or, indeed, would that be the *best* reason to do it..?)

Remote GUADEC

Feels a bit weird not going to GUADEC this year… I blame that guy that we’re sending from New Zealand for blowing the travel budget for the rest of us :) Luckily Stuttgart is the first GUADEC host city that I’ve visited before anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much on that side of things… and hopefully I’ll be able to watch many of the talks via the live video feeds that were so successful last year.

In case any GNOME folks are worried that our low attendance this year are a sign that Sun aren’t interested in supporting GNOME any more, though, nothing could be further from the truth… we have as many GNOME/JDS projects on the go at the moment as we’ve ever had, and with OpenSolaris just around the corner I expect we’ll be ramping up even more. So actually it’s probably just as well we’re not sending so many engineers to GUADEC this year– we’re too darn busy :)

Money for Nothing

As I mentioned last week, we were off to The Point again this weekend, this time to see noted guitar picker and former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler.

It’s been ten years since I last saw him live, and in some respects the set wasn’t a lot different, bar a wider repertoire of solo material– fortunately he does at least now seem to be over his pedal steel guitar phase, which started with the last couple of Straits albums, and bled into his first solo outings. Otherwise the staging and arrangements haven’t changed much in a decade, which isn’t a bad thing, just a little surprising. I was a tad disappointed that Private Investigations didn’t feature this time around, but we did get a satisfyingly-rousing version of the epic Telegraph Road instead (although the pianist did sound a bit like he was playing it out the Alchemy song book– the tinkly bits on the Money for Nothing version remain the definitive ones for me…)

Modern-day critics often look back sneeringly on Dire Straits, but as somebody who was learning to play guitar finger-style at the time while most kids were happy to go the plectrum-and-power-chords route, their omnipresence (and of course, Mark Knopfler’s in particular) proved to be a big influence for me. He might never really look like he’s trying, and he still sings about as well as Bob Dylan on a bad day, but I could have listened to him all night.

Real football

Good ‘ol Motherwell… last day of the season, losing 1-0 at home to Celtic with 2 minutes to go, Celtic are on course to win the league. Two minutes and two Scott McDonald goals later, we’ve won the game and handed the title to Rangers.

It’s a pity either of those teams and their glory-hunting followers had to win again this year (particularly the one managed by Alex McLeish, whose mis-management broke up the best team Motherwell ever had in recent times, and then did much the same at Hibernian), but it doesn’t half feel good to have screwed it up for one of them :) With a bit of luck, maybe some of the droves who flock from here over to Scotland every week to watch Celtic and sing their sectarianism-inducing songs will finally realise that they’d be much better off diverting all that disposable income towards their local teams in Ireland instead, and then we’d all be happy.