Paul Smith isn't that stripey

A couple of weeks ago I went to a leaving-do. It was Paul's do. I play football with the guy, and I didn't realise the event it was until I saw his name on an e-mail. He's Paul Smith!

And he isn't that stripey.



We also have a running contest. We need to lob him when he's in goal. I'll have another go tonight at the old-timers' footie match.

More stripes from everywhere.

The Italian fridge by excellence.

And the stripes generator. Fabulous.

Bluetooth++

Bluetooth (and Bluez especially) is such a pleasure to work with compared to old crummy non-standard protocols. With this little patch, the printers show up directly in system-config-printer, and in the CUPS web interface. Whoohoo!

Je devrais avoir su mieux

Thanks John for providing me my pickup lines (via Google's translate feature).

I did watch some half-decent, and some crummy films:

• The Aristocrats, some pompous unknowns, but also some very good actors/stand-up comedians. For the late nights in front on the sofa, with the laptop where it should be (that's on your lap).
  
• White Chicks, I'm afraid to say I laughed, it's funnier than anything Eddy Murphy wish he'd done in the past ten years (minus Shreks). Actually, I looked at the filmography and it's 19 years since Coming to America.
• Babel, I remember being torn between this film and Blood Diamonds when both came out at the same time at the cinema. The latter was a better film to watch at the cinema, but Babel stands up on its own as a character movie. I think I set my expectations too high, still good though.
• Idiocracy, I can see why it went direct to video here, it's not worth showing in the cinema. This is no Office Space. Time for Starbucks!
  
• Spider-man 3, oh the expected disappointment. I was pressured into watching it by a super-hero lover that didn't read the reviews. Read the reviews, kids! It's for your own good!
• L'Empire des Loups, a horrid pile of crud. Looks like a Luc Besson-produced film, and certainly smells like it (but isn't one, despite how the saying goes). Ewww!
• The Krays, just a film to polish my accent, a half-decent cock-e-ney gangster film. You're no Italian Job, mai love.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a film for the evening, with a few good belly laughs. At least, unlike Eddie Murphy, Ivan Reitman made something half-decent after the eighties with this one.
  
• And the best for last, Flushed Away, during which I felt just a little bit of wee come out. Especially when the frogs are called into "Action". I just love it. Rent it, buy it. I think I'll watch it again now. No I shouldn't. But I COULD! It's that good...
  

Yay, less code

GTK+ now contains the old BaconVolume widget, called GtkVolumeButton. I hope we get GTK+ 2.12 for GNOME 2.20, so that Rhythmbox, Sound-juicer, Totem, Banshee, etc. can use the widget without cut'n'pasting bacon-volume.[ch].

Useless screenshot (you have to try it to believe it)

Many thanks to Ronald for writing the widget in the first place, and Matthias and Christian for the code reviews.

Licences and copyrights

A couple of problems have recently cropped up in the latest development of Totem, and we've tried our hardest to solve them.

One problem was that some files contained the exception to allow the linking of proprietary GStreamer plugins, but the addition of that exception wasn't agreed upon by the copyright holders.

This was the case of the plugins system (fixed), and the sidebar widget (fixed as well). The nautilus properties page was a draw. If we make it GPL with an exception, it wouldn't work anyway, as nautilus is GPL, and the properties page is linked directly in nautilus. The plan is to write a D-Bus helper, which would allow us to avoid hangs when checking the properties of some file.

Those relicencing was what kept me from making a release for 2.19.x, but it's sorted now. Many thanks to the copyright holders that allowed this to happen.

Ooh, free games

Totem bug reports had mentions of free games that look of good quality. There's Tremulous, and Battle of Wesnoth. Look neat, and both are in the Fedora repo.

Stripey #... huh, I forget...

Andy Burns sent me a (unrequested) picture of this pair of Wellingtons. Thanks Andy.



Ezio is green with envy, but just replied "You guys are obsessed with stripes ;-). Yeah, right, that's all our fault now, is it?

Fittingly, I watched the Italian film Malèna. Some reminescence of Cinema Paradiso, that I haven't seen in a long while.

Well stripey week-end (aka stripey #5)

Lapo Calamandrei went a bit mad, and produced a clever piece of artistic genius.

I'm sure he'll post the full icon theme somewhere soon for all of us to enjoy (he sent me a copy, but it didn't install properly).

Another little computer gets on the market (where you at Jeff? missed the Zonbu?), runs some form of Linux with KDE, but uses Totem for their movie player. Can I get a free one, guys?


On Friday, I managed to solve that really annoying problem that made the browser plugin with the xine-lib backend just not work at all.

Good and bad things this week-end:

• Cello, creepy, although not the best of the kind
• Man United finally won it! After the debacle of last Wednesday against Milan, we'll get a row of honour against Chelsea on Wednesday evening.
• Pan's Labyrinth, a special fairy tale. Beautiful. Narnia is for weenies.
• Ma Mère, a couple of tits, but horrible French art-house malarkey
• Arsène Lupin, pretty shite
• Michel Vaillant, pretty fun if you remember the comic from when you were a kid
• Les Poupées Russes, where you see that Romain Duris can be a good actor
• Shite results in the French elections (not that the alternative was much better, but it still was). Berlusconi, I'm sure Nicolas can show you how to be a better crook, his predecessor has quite some experience too.

Stripey #4 (aka #3 bis)

We're still going stripes crazy. As I was (trying to) cleaning the patio, I realised that the crappy foldable chairs I have were of that kind. Stripey!



Now I have Ezio going absolutely bananas, and bidding 500 quid for my crappy camping chairs.