Back to back

Dobey, I’m sure you’d rather avoid iTunes, but it does let you do what you want, in a roundabout sort of way– you can tell it to rip any two or more consecutive CD tracks as a single file, so they’re always played back to back. Of course you then lose all the ID3 info for one of the tracks, and you can’t apply it retrospectively to already-ripped tracks, so we could certainly do better.

DTrace your Macintosh

From the OSX Leopard sneak peek:

When you need a bit more help in debugging, Xcode 3.0 offers an extraordinary new program, Xray. Taking its interface cues from timeline editors such as GarageBand, now you can visualize application performance like nothing you’ve seen before. Add different instruments so you can instantly see the results of code analyzers. Truly track read/write actions, UI events, and CPU load at the same time, so you can more easily determine relationships between them. Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.

Cool or what? Now, if they’ll just open source their GUI so we can reciprocate by including it in OpenSolaris… 🙂

Model Behaviour

I do wish mobile phone companies (well, Nokia in particular) would print model numbers somewhere on all their handsets. I’ve had three different ones now, and every time I go to buy an accessory, I can never remember which one I’ve got. (I think I currently have a 3100, and Julie has a 3220… but it could quite conceivably be the other way around. Or neither.)

Ee aye adio?

Congrats to the Scotland U19 fitba’ team, who’ve reached the final of the European Championships in Poland tonight– although they’ll probably get humped in the final against Spain, having already lost 4-0 to them in the group stages. But what with that, the big team winning the Kirin Cup (against Bulgaria and Japan) in May, and our subsequent 18-place climb up the FIFA rankings, you could almost believe we might have a respectable team again soon. If nothing else, we’ve reached two more finals than England this year* 🙂

* Okay, I expect England have probably reached some equally-diddy finals this year, but why let research get in the way of a good story…

"Don’t you just love being in control?"

I don’t know who designed the heating system in our house, but they could do with attending a usability course or two.

We have a gas combi boiler, which has three controls. One is a master on/off switch, with two settings– “off” and “radiators” (according to the icons). The second is a thermostat, with no numerical legend, just another “radiator” icon. The third is a 24-hour timer with those annoying tiny pins you have to pop in and out, which also has its own three-setting on/off switch (on, off and timed).

On top of that, there’s a thermostat in the hall with temperature markings on it, and a lever beside the hot tank to switch between “radiators and water” and “water only”. Add to that the variable controls on the radiators themselves, and it certainly becomes quite a challenge to decide what to adjust when you’re feeling a bit chilly.

Anyway, right now we have it set to “water only”, and all the radiators are off, as it’s 25C+ outside most days at the moment. This morning, I went for a shower (which takes the water from the hot tank), and there was no hot water…. the combi boiler hadn’t come on in the early hours like it was supposed to. Went downstairs, checked the gas supply on the cooker… fine. Switched the timer switch from ‘timed’ to ‘on’, which should light the gas immediately… nothing. Tried switching the boiler off and back on again… nothing. Pressed the Reset button… nothing. The boiler doesn’t have a pilot light, so I knew that wasn’t the problem. And the front is screwed on, which suggested I shouldn’t really try poking around in it.

Was on the verge of calling a heating engineer when I decided that the only control I hadn’t played with was the thermostat in the hall, which was set to a reasonable enough 24C (if you disregard the fact that the radiators are turned off anyway). Turned it down… nothing. Turned it up, and… click, the boiler lit up. That’s right, in our house you can’t have hot water unless the radiator-controlling thermostat is set to something above room temperature, even when the radiators have been turned off for months. Marvellous.

What a beautiful, er… horizon

Now that Kathy’s said it, I hope I can say it myself without sounding like an MCP: there was, indeed, an infeasibly high proportion of gorgeous young women in and around Barcelona… I fear that’s one battle that Brummy GUADEC has already lost 🙂 <flamesuit action=”on” />

Unlike Kathy, though, to my eyes an equally-unusual proportion of Mediterranean women (and men) seem to look old before their time, and I didn’t really see much to change my mind in Catalonia… maybe it’s the wrinkles from all that squinting into the sun, which, to be fair, I’d happily accept as a side-effect myself if I lived somewhere that sunny. (But preferably not quite so hot.)

Dliute to taste

Today, I heard about something on our wiki that I should probably have known about months ago. But I have no real way of knowing when somebody adds something that might interest me, unless they announce it somewhere at the time, or happen to tag it with one of the categories I’ve asked for notifications about. (Most wikis have a recent changes feed, ours currently doesn’t, but I don’t have time to read my feeds more than a couple of times a week anyway, so I could easily miss stuff that way too.)

With the GNOME web team embarking on a re-think of its web presence, perhaps it’s time to think about the distribution of “live” information around the project generally. As it is, I just about have time to keep track of mailing lists and bugzilla. I only monitor a tiny number of IRC channels, I don’t have time to read planet.gnome.org often enough to guarantee that I won’t miss something interesting, I’ve never read the GNOME Journal, and I probably manage to glance at our support forums about once every couple of months– particularly unfortunate as they’re probably about our best source of end-user feedback, but I just find web-based forums such a drag to use1. Sun’s own JDS forum has the same problem.

So, how are we supposed to keep ourselves well-informed, and still have time to do some real work? In the past I’ve advocated “feedback meisters” who would trawl all those sources and collate user feedback into a central repository (maybe bugzilla, maybe not), so we could all be safe in the knowledge that we weren’t missing anything important from our users. But sometimes it feels like it’s getting to the stage where we need something like that just to keep in touch with what our fellow contributors are up to… and that can’t be good, can it?

1 I’ve just discovered this somewhat hidden RSS feed, which helps a little, but it’s limited to 20 items and topic titles only, so I’m still likely to miss a lot of things that way too.

GStreamer hackfest Thursday

<bilboed> GStreamer hackfest tomorrow at 12:00 in Carpa.
<bilboed> Is there somebody who has planet gnome access and who could blog about the GStreamer hackfest ?
<bilboed> calum, could you specify all the main gstreamer hackers will be there... please ? :) Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey, Tim Muller, Thomas Vander Stichele, ...

Consider it done 🙂