Life is so good, it gets better every day

State Side

Took some time out and finished off the short footage of my time in the states this summer – travelling State side [35MB].

Behind Closed Doors On the Poker Table

Interesting to see that Novell have bought SuSE. Good times for GNOME it seems. Wonder where that will leave the rest of us. I figure the organizational headaches involved must be pretty scarey, since Ximian are quite new to the fold, and now SuSE. Interesting times for the Linux Desktop as the movers and shakers reveal their hands.

I Feel Like I Have Achieved Nothing Today

It’s amazing how life goes from really productive cycles to completely wasted ones. I think I had one of my wasted cycle days. I probably shouldn’t have gotten up. Still, all that said, I had some pretty interesting discussions with Havoc, Nat and Dave all on completely different topics. So nice to feel activity around you 😉

Did some mockups for the sound capplet, neither of which I’m entirely happy with. Found out that the poor results in the usability study were probably due to Sun changing the default panel setup. Oh well, you live and learn.

One of the good parts of today, was finding a nice park to run in and even a children’s playground to monkey around on the bars.

Another Hoary Chestnut

I started to briefly look at sound in the GNOME Desktop. It’s nice to see that good progress seems to be made with GStreamer, but we’re still kind of sucking at a desktop level. Sure, we have some nice apps with Rhythmbox, Jamboree, Totem and others but some of the more simple tasks that user might do involves the current sound capplet. The user interface is pretty dreadful, and although we have a ‘Sound Events’ tab in, gnome-audio isn’t even part of the desktop release.

I took a few screenshots of XP and OSX for comparison purposes. I think it’s pretty easy to see which one is more favourable. A simple set of tasks might be something like

• Toggle sound on/off/mute
• Adjust the sound volume
• Adjust the balances/channels
• Test sound
• Enable sound for alert events
• Choose a sound to be played for an alert event

I’m not convinced that we need sound themes, especially given the few sound files we current have for the desktop. Hopefully we’ll be finally able to re-use the work that Ronald, Ted, Christian & Co. have been doing on the current mixer and get some of this work rolled into gnome-control-center. Would be also nice to sit down and figure out the API to replace the libgnome stuff.

Well, I can hope. Meanwhile, Jonathan pointed me to the AT&T Natural Voices text-to-speech engine. Audrey saying ‘Welcome to the G’NOME Desktop’ sounds very well.

linux.conf.au 2004

I just registered. Have you? However, I will not be taking part in this.

Together Standing Tall

Dawn and Martina have been staying the last few days as a stop off on a 6 month round the world trip. Last night we went out in Christchurch to watch the Ireland/Australia rugby match. Initially we thought there would be a great atmosphere in town, as the match was late enough on a Saturday night. There are a few Irish pubs in town, so we headed in with the expectation of finding a big screen. We were pretty disappointed with the Irish pubs – they seemed pretty quiet. After wandering around for a bit, we ended up in The Holy Grail, a sports bar with the biggest screen I have seen. It was pretty awesome, and luckily most of the Irish contingent had found there too, so it created a pretty excellent atmosphere.

Many beers later. Many many beers later, the sports bar turned into a nightclub. Night clubs aren’t really my scene. I think you have to be outgoing and, um, rather forward. Very definitely survival of the fitest. At about 5:30am I wandered out and walked home. The place had no indication it was closing in the very near future.

Today I have a hangover and a sore throat.

Delighted to hear that Maeve got her driving test. This will make things easier when they arrive next week.