Movie

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…

Posted in General | Comments Off on Movie

GNOME 2.18 – underwhelmed?

At linux.com, I just read an article about the new GNOME 2.18 release (although 2.18.1 was just released). the line that caught my attention is the following:

“[..] I’m underwhelmed at the changes between 2.16 and 2.18. It’s a solid release, but it doesn’t move the ball forward very far in terms of improvements, new applications, or new features.

I’ll be hated for saying this, and am partially responsible for this (I’m spending only limited time at gnome-media at this time) myself. But I felt something similar when I saw the GNOME 2.18 release announcement. There’s simple things that make me feel this way. Compare, for example, the 2.18 and the very detailed and excellent 2.14 release notes. Of course, all honour to those who do the actual work, but somehow the 2.14 notes look very professional and like they were done with a lot of love. Compared to that, the 2.18 release notes look like they were pulled together at the last minute. Not very impressive, not very impressed.

But there’s more, it’s not just this. Compare the still very sketchy developer pages for GNOME (I know, I know, people are working to migrate to a new web service system, but the thing is: it’s not there yet) and compare that to KDE’s plasma, phonon, decibel or solid pages (and for fun, compare those to some comparable GNOME technologies: GStreamer, Telepathy or HAL). There’s a multitude of differences. The KDE pages are targetted at both developers and users. The GNOME (basically FDO) pages are only targetted at developers. They lack information for the user on what it is. More importantly, they don’t associate directly with GNOME. Unfortunately, GNOME doesn’t associate with those projects either, even though all of them have large backing by GNOME developers and community.

Lastly, apart from the obvious pimping of those very cool technologies, those technologies should be embraced also. If GStreamer is the one true love, then make it work for Totem (and ditch Xine). The Firefox plug-in, for example, should work with playlists, which is what every internet site will stream. While I’m at it, please know that GStreamer can still not play DVD menus, shame on you, go fix it instead of make up excuses (or just rip it from Xine and release it under the GPL in a separate module). GConf, Evolution and the panel should use DBUS (work is being done on GConf [see Jeff earlier today] and Evolution, but none of this is upstream yet…). Let’s integrate Telepathy, add Gossip (even if it only does Jabber and GPhone). There’s some very obvious stuff out there which basically already exists (and it’s far more than the examples I’ve mentioned up here, e.g. Novell’s new start menu, GnomeScan, etc.), it only has to be brought back upstream. GNOME as a whole would profit greatly, those projects would attract more developers making them (hopefully) develop quicker (releaseintegrate early & often) and reviewers would be a whole lot more happy.

In addition to all of the above, I’d love to see exciting new experimental projects such as Gimmie enhance my experience (and I’m as excited when Mirco puts new screencasts online), but some of that is probably further away than “the next release”.

Posted in General | 14 Comments

OOM killer feature in OS X

Yesterday, I was playing with software that eats memory. Lots of memory. It’s the 3D analysis software Volocity. I loaded a pretty big image (basically several M per Z, and then several hundreds Zs), and made the mistake of trying to rotate it along multiple axes and then letting it go at the result.

In the old days, when Linux was a shiny new and hip OS, the OOM would come in and kill your app – if you’re lucky. It may first kill OO.o with that very important spreadsheet that you were working on. Otherwise decent, in a way. Nowadays, your system usually trashes beyond any reasonable repair and a reboot is the only option. If you’re patient enough, there’s a ~30% chance that the app actually kills within 5 minutes (out of ~10 times that it happened to me over the past ~2 yrs – since then I’ve given up and just reboot, a reboot takes less than 5 minutes anyway).

<Advertisement>Meet the Mac</Advertisement>. It pops up a warning saying that my system is low on memory (and later on it complained about diskspace also). The operation in the software, which is getting kind of sluggish up to this point (swapping?), eventually aborted with a nice error dialog. It actually told me that I was out of memory. In addition, the OS gave me suggestions on applications to close so I could retry the operation. No data was lost at any time during the +/- 10 times that I re-tried this. For a geek, there is no way to describe the feeling when you see this. In short: when will GNOME have this? [*]

In the end, I had to quit Photoshop and free up to 5GB HD space so it could complete the operation. Of course, at that time I had moved to the graphical workstation that we have since it would do that in a few seconds.

[*] glib actually has provisions for this, such as

g_try_malloc()

instead of

g_malloc()

, but I doubt that any OSdesktop (through HAL?) interaction exists to tell me that I’m OOM and suggest apps to close when it happens. So to say, if it exists, they’ve done a good job hiding it, because I’ve never seen it.

Posted in General | 12 Comments

What is wrong with the world?

Why is there only non-free software in this? GNOME is free software, we promote, we dream and we advocate free software. This’d not be on by default, please?

Posted in General | 23 Comments

Dear world

I’ve been looking for a while now, and can’t find it. I’m using a Mac in the office, and would like to use Linux at home. However, I’m stuck with all my appointments in iCal and mail in Mail. I can basically never decently boot into Linux because I will miss appointments. I need something that can interoperate with iCal and use the _same_ calender under both OSes (I sppose IMAP could do mail). Web-interfaces are not acceptable, I want to use iCal under the Mac and Evolution under Linux.

Does anything like that exist? I basically want Outlook and Exchange without Outlook (and probably without Exchange 🙂 ). Can GMail do that, for example? Bonus points if it can import an existing calender from iCal.

Posted in General | 17 Comments

It really is true

I work in a pretty good research institute in Manhattan. Like any other, we’ve got a bunch of computers, one for each employee plus some general ones for microscopes, electrophysiology and imaging, and they all run IE, except for the ones that someone manually installed Firefox on already. Today, my professor steps in (he’s usually in his office). If you’ve ever seen a genius college kid, this is him but 10 (or 15) years wiser, I swear, genius. He can code Matlab faster than me and has a brain like nobody else. He opens up the webmail and notes that it looks different and asks – confused – “is this the new internet or so?”.

I really actually thought people were kidding when they said this sort of stuff about their granny…

Posted in General | Comments Off on It really is true

Bug-fixing spree

Today, I looked at bugzilla, and noticed more than 130 bugs in gnome-media. Most of them I had never looked at. Yes, I’ve been busy this past year. Considering whether I should maybe just give up maintainership, I decided to just go through the bugs and see how hard it really is.

I should firstly really compliment all the members of the bugsquad team, because I quickly noticed that many bugs had useful comments about possible dups, and even more bugs had already been closed thanks to the ever-lasting energy from those people. Without them, my day would have ended right here.

Since this morning, I’ve cleaned it up such that pretty much all of the patches lying around have been applied, I’ve set gnome-love keywords for relevant bugs, fixed something like 20 bugs myself, and bugzilla now shows less than 90 open bugs (i.e. 1/3rd of all bugs are no longer in my list). Not bad. End user effects:

  • gnome-media-profiles now comes with MP3/AAC profiles. Profiles are only shown if all relevant plugins are installed. Should please all sound-juicer users. (At the same time, Aaron blogged about his new audio profile config system, looks promising at parts but still has many issues…)
  • gnome-volume-control should now look a lot better for relatively advanced sound cards. The one reported was an Audigy, showing many duplicated and useless sliders.
  • Many HIG- and i18n-fixes.

There’s more easy bugs lying around in bugzilla, for example #355085 (window sizing issue, someone familiar can probably fix it in 2 seconds). All gnome-love tagged bugs are also interesting to look at. If anyone wants to, please look at them, I’ll help where I can.

I’ll roll 2.17.2 tomorrow, hopefully finally contributing back some real time to GNOME once again.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

De oplossing

English readers: apologies for the dutch post, but this is mostly targetted at dutch readers.

De afgelopen jaren heb ik vol verbazing het politieke spectrum in Nederland aanschouwd. Niet omdat Theo van Gogh of Pim Fortuyn werd vermoord, hoe verbazingwekkend ook, maar vanwege de houding van stelselmatig nee-knikkende partijbonzen. De persoon die ontegenzeggelijk de meeste kritiek te verduren heeft gehad is zonder twijfel Rita Verdonk. Meerdere moties van wantrouwen heeft deze minister over zich heen gekregen, omdat hier een persoon was teruggezonden, daar een persoon zogenaamd in gevaar was omdat hij toch maar wel homo was, of daar nog eentje omdat zij het in haar hoofd haalde 26,000 mensen niet toe te laten.

Maar waarom? Als men puur naar de prestaties van deze minister had gekeken, dan heeft zij een goud-glanzende paar jaren achter de rug. Alle achterstanden zijn zo goed als weggewerkt, zonder enige vorm van nieuwe regels. Het enige wat zij hoefde te doen is om niet nog meer regels te maken, maar in plaats daarvan deze regels uit te voeren. En dat deed ze met glans.

Ze heeft dus gewoon een duit uit de toverhoed van paars geplukt? Absoluut niet waar: zoals het volk vroeg zijn er zeer strenge eisen aan immigratie gesteld, met name aan familiehereniging en buitenlandse bruiden. Een inkomen ruim boven het minimumloon en kennis van de Nederlandse taal en cultuur voordat men binnenkomt, fantastisch gewoon! En er mag dan lachwekkend over worden gedaan, maar gezien de intolerantie in landen als Iran is het niet vreemd dat ook kennis en acceptatie over publiek naakt en homo-wezen als onderdeel daarvan wordt gezien.

Rita did it all. Gerrit Zalm himself is de enige minister die ik hoger aansla dan mevrouw Verdonk, en helaas is hij niet herkiesbaar dit jaar.

Verdonk heeft aangegeven graag een ander departement te leiden de komende vier jaren. Laten we kijken naar de opties:

  • Onderwijs en wetenschap: laat het aan uw verbeelding over hoeveel zij aan de bureaucratie in het onderwijs zou kunnen oplossen. Leraren klagen al jaren dat zij steeds meer achter het bureau zitten, en steeds minder individuele aandacht aan leerlingen kunnen schenken. Het personeelsbestand in scholen wordt steeds groter, maar de hoeveelheid leerlingen per leraar/klas vreemd genoeg ook. In plaats van meer mensen in een tussenlaag te zetten, zou Verdonk deze administratie warboel voor eigen rekening kunnen nemen! Leraren weer voor de klas, laat ons land weer een voorloper op onderwijsgebied zijn!
  • Gezondheidszorg: wachtlijsten zijn al jaren een probleem, en de gezondheidszorg is de afgelopen jaren regelmatig opgeschrikt door kleine maar noodzakelijke wijzigingen in het verzekeringssysteem om het behandelbaar en betaalbaar te houden. Echter, elke wijziging neemt jaren bureautijd in beslag, om maar niet over de kosten te spreken. Laat het in een keer goed en af zijn, laat Verdonk in hemelsnaam de bezem door gezondheidszorg halen. Gooi die bureaucratie eruit, schop wat mensen onder de kont en zorg dat artsen weer kunnen doen waar zij voor opgeleid zijn: zorg!

Ondanks deze ongekende mogelijkheden lijkt “links” een ongekende persoonlijke vendetta tegen Verdonk te hebben opgezet, en het waarom hiervan is al even onbegrijpelijk als waarom links tegen dit soort plannen zou zijn. Het zijn fatastische vooruitgangen, die over tien jaar zullen worden herinnerd als “toendertijd hadden we nog wachtlijsten”.

De keuze moge duidelijk zijn. STEM WOENSDAG VERDONK!

Posted in General | 24 Comments

Linux UVC driver update

If you had issues with previous versions of the Linux UVC driver for the Apple iSight, particularly errors when loading the firmware (“test: 1: ==: unexpected operator”), then try this new release (0.0.1-e; patch). It depends on glib (for GMappedFile) and gcrypt (for sha1sum checking) – this shouldn’t be an issue, everyone has those installed. Other than that, it supports the same firmware versions as the previous release.

Posted in General | 9 Comments

Verkiezingen

(Sorry for the dutch intermezzo; the below is a post about the dutch elections this november. For practical purposes, the post is in dutch. In short: there’s a dutch test – see link below – to see how much you agree with each political party on a select number of questions, and the results are as expected; regardless, as previously, I will vote for the liberal party VVD.)

Dus, deze herfst gaan we weer stemmen. Zelfs in het buitenland kun je tegenwoordig via internet je stem kenbaar maken. En bij stemmen hoort een vernieuwde stemwijzer. Zelfs als je al weet wat je wilt stemmen, altijd interessant om te zien bij welke partijen je in de buurt zit met je ideeen (althans, op de gebieden waar ze vragen over stellen). Mijn uitkomst was, ietwat verrassend, als volgt:

  • Aan kop met een vrijwel gelijk percentage (in volgorde als gegeven in de stemwijzer): EenNL, Fortuyn, VVD en Wilders,
  • Dan met een ongeveer half percentage vgl. met de eerste vier: SGP (!),
  • En de enige andere partij met een positief percentage, zij het vrijwel nul: CDA.

Niet verrassend dat ik in de rechterhoek zit, maar dat de SGP daar tussen staat, daar kijk ik toch even van op. Overigens moge het gezien mijn verleden duidelijk zijn dat ik VVD zal stemmen.

Posted in General | 11 Comments