Life is so good, it gets better every day

Patch For Bastien

Dear Bastien,
I noticed a bug with the Totem source code. Here is a patch to put that right.
Love,
Gman.

Index: totem.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/totem/src/totem.c,v retrieving revision 1.301
diff -u -r1.301 totem.c
--- totem.c 9 Nov 2003 01:04:44 -0001 1.301 
++ totem.c	9 Nov 2003 21:51:14 -0000
@@ -1813,7 +1813,7 @@  	
  GdkPixbuf *pixbuf = NULL;
  const gchar *authors[] =  	{ 
                       -		"Bastien Nocera ",
                       +		"Bastien '30 second Frenchman' Nocera ", 
                                         "Julien Moutte  (GStreamer backend)",
                                         "Guenter Bartsch ", 
                                         NULL

There Were No Prawns

I had my first experience of a Kiwi bbq. It’s a lot like a potential Irish one – in that you shoudn’t really arrive until at least 3 hours after the set date. Of course, not really knowing the territory, I arrived on time. At least that meant a steady start at the beer.

It was Doug’s bbq, and he only organized the bbq at the last minute. It seemed to go well though, and I stayed drinking beer for long enough. Tommorrow I meet Patrick and Maeve, who arrive in Christchurch. It will be good to see them again.

I am pissed.

The Travelling Pinball Machine

I went into town to see if I could get a flight to Bangalore, India to visit the Wipro guys early in December. It also would have coincided with the Bangalore Linux conference. The girl at the desk was extremely helpful, and started looking at the various options that she had. Seemingly November through January isn’t the best time to make your way to India as a lot of Asians are travelling home from NZ and Australia. At one stage I think I was routed through about 6 different places, which might have been fun for a rainy day. Finally we both gave up, after trying all possible combinations and put my name down on the waiting list. With needing to get a VISA [and perhaps shots?], I think I have a window of about 10 days, before there is no chance. Seems that I should book my flights to Sydney for Christmas as soon as possible though, otherwise I’m swimming across the pond. And probably the flights to Adelaide too!

Canterbury Showtime

The Canterbury Showtime festival is on for the next 2 weeks. From what I can figure, it seems to be a festival of the arts and other pretty random stuff. Still, it’s creating a good bit of life around Christchurch at the moment. Tonight was the Meridean fireworks show, out by the New Brighton pier. It was pretty cool to be sitting out on the beach watching the fireworks being launched from the end of the pier. The show was put to music, which seems to be the norm with most fireworks displays these days, with the local radio station there in full force. All in all, a pretty good show.

Body Tension

The New Zealand climbing scene intrigues me. I guess I really haven’t figured it out to any great degree. I’ve been going to the YMCA wall pretty regularly for the past 3 weeks [in fact, heading there for a few hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday]. There’s been very few indication of ‘regulars’. Even though New Zealand holds some of the best bouldering in the world, the indoor bouldering wall is always pretty quiet. I guess this suits me in many ways – it’s nice to have the whole wall to yourself, but I really lack having a training partner. The exciting part of the wall is here but I haven’t totally figured out how to get my body moving gracefully over it yet.

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.