New releases

bluez-gnome 0.10 was released, and now includes my patches for the "Browse device" functionality. I also released a new shared-mime-info and Totem devel version today. Everything's nicely sitting in rawhide now (or it will be if my last build worked).

Now, I'll go back to doing nothing, as I'm supposed to be on holidays.

By the way, the Simpsons movie was really nice, go and see it. That was my Wednesday morning AFK :)

All merged

I bought an M3 Simply for my Nintendo DS, to avoid carrying around the tiny little cartridges, especially when I travel (as per last week's GUADEC where I didn't bring mine). After downloading the ROMs for my games from some shady websites (uhuh), the filenames were less than helpful, but I realised all the sites had nice little icons. Sure enough, they can be thumbnailed. Shame I can't move my Final Fantasy III or Mario Bros saves to the micro SD card...



The Browse Device functionality is now all merged in bluez-gnome, thanks Marcel! Now to clean up the widgets, and finish off the wizard.

g-p-m/g-p-m integration

Richard sent me that little screenshot, showing off the gnome-phone-manager/gnome-power-manager integration, now in SVN of everything.

Yay! Integration! D-Bus! Buzzwords!

Hope I'm not stealing your thunder, but for once, you showed up on IRC after I did :)

Olivier! Ca va pas! (la tête)

Yesterday, Olivier Fourdan, of XFCE fame, was busy "compressing" pistachio shells into one metal can, and smoothing the aluminium covers, instead of porting XFCE to libwnck.

Compression in progress

Olivier, all happy with himself

Also, I've been told that Harry says Abracadabra! followed by Expelliadontcare! and that Voldemort is then kaput. But then again, that's just the Catalan speaking. Oh, spoiler. You're too old to read that anyway...

I's got some links

A bunch of post-GUADEC random linking.

Dieguito got me a new hackergotchi photo. He also sent a proper hackergotchi, which I won't post until I can get some vendetta photos of him being carried off the pitch by 4 people after getting real bad cramps. 4 people! Have you seen the size of the guy? Clearly a geek footie game.

Plenty of floods all around the south of the country meant I had to get the train through Euston instead of direct through Reading/Oxford. It was pretty fun seeing all those groups of GUADEC people in different locations: Birmingham New Street platform - "Hey kids", Euston tube station - "Hey kids", Tube to Waterloo.. well, you get the point. That also means I got to see Kate Silverton in wellies.

I kind of fell asleep, that really horrible kind of sleep when you're just feeling as tired and punch-drunk after waking up, and dreamt that I had to organise GUADEC again. I'm sure Paul and Thomas' similar nightmares will be much more vivid than mine.

The online desktop talks also meant I got to put into action (bug filing action for now) my ideas from last summer's "GNOME and Freud" talk. Feel free to comment on the ideas, in bugs 459505 and 458133.

Thanks to Vicky for:

• mentioning that I look like some Big Brother contestant. I don't. Isn't that rubbish finished already anyway? Hopefully they'll get flooded in.
• proof that some people live under a rock. Mmmh, pagan-ilicious.
• providing Daniel with some much needed literature.

I should mention that it was pretty fun picking on Xavier with vuntz, filing dozens of bugs against Empathy: Xavier! Ca va pas!

Still drunk?

Or is there another reason, Danilo?

My 3 GUADEC tasks

I had 3 main tasks when I came to GUADEC.

1. The USB keys
Mandriva provided us with 500 USB keys with a live distro, the usually-printed booklet, and loads of data provided by the sponsors (I quite liked that AMD chose to have compilers on there). If you didn't attend GUADEC, the booklet and data are available in the SVN repo. Shame they only arrived on Tuesday.

2. The football game
Apart from loads of bruises (and a huge nosebleed for me, thanks Glynn for ducking) and a map reading snafu to get there, it was great. For posterity, if you were there, please add the scores from your team and amend the teams if you got moved to another team. (My team finished second again, just one goal in it...). I should add that 3 hours of football is a bit too much.

3. Bluetooth and GNOME talk
Here's my slide, and the intro sound.

Slide 1

It was great not having any slides, but the video should be available very soon. As promised, here's a link to the use cases we have for Fedora.

More GUADEC-y stuff soon.

Tune In, Check This

Bad idea of the week. I went to jump up and down in a field park, in Guildford, to watch the Freestylers (of Raw As Fuck-fame, nothing to do with the Bomfunk MC's that sang Freestylers) at Guilfest.

I enjoyed myself, and talked a load of shite, but I'm knackered, and need to pack to head off in 3 hours for GUADEC. Bleh.

Ed the Duck, I've got your light.

FreeFA tournament 2007: teams sent out

The teams for this year's FreeFA tournament have been sent out by e-mail. You can check them out on the Wiki.

I've tried to balance the teams out, and the worst team in last year's tournament got nearly completely wiped out, which spells good things for the survivors (yeah, it was the whites, 20 to 1 isn't such a good result for your first game).

Be ready at 1 at the Conservatoire, or 1:30 at the ground
(It's on Monday by the way)

If you haven't received a mail, it's probably because you haven't entered your e-mail properly, or have a shite spam filter, so you found it fancy to omit characters in your e-mail address in the Wiki.

If you can't make it, please send me an e-mail, and I'll readjust the teams.

Bemused support in Totem

Should have been a one-day quick hack, ended up taking 2 or 3 if I include the research into the (poor) alternatives.

Behold! Totem now includes a plugin allowing it to run as a Bemused server. This means you can connect your phone/PDA/Palm to Totem, and use it to control playback.

First you'll need Totem SVN trunk, and compile with the Bluetooth library headers installed. More importantly, you'll need a client:

• J2ME phones: JamSE (and not bemused.java, see below)
  
• Palm: BTAmp
• Series 60 and UIQ versions available on the Bemused home page

Install the application (left as an exercise to the reader), connect to Totem, and voila! Ready to control.

Now, a comment on the protocol and the code of the different implementations:

• The protocol disagrees with the native Linux implementation (INFOACK, or INF2ACK for INF2 requests? Null-terminated strings, where?)
  
• Doesn't handle Unicode properly, all over the place, the protocol uses NULL characters strings as end of strings, which breaks UTF-8
• More protocol problems, what happens with empty playlists is a mystery
• bemused.java has problems handling empty playlists, and truncates movie titles when not.
• JAMSE isn't open source, and seems hell-bent on using skins, and different clients for different mobile phones ("skin" size)
• The Totem code is horrible, doesn't handle directory listings (the protocol for directory listings is utter shite, and unworkable), leaks all over the place, and is a security risk (seriously).

That said, the competition isn't that great either, as it doesn't even run (although I just notice that my e-mail was actually answered, but didn't get to my inbox). I guess I'll be looking into Remuco soon.

Tidbits

Some toys I've had in Ephy tabs for a while:

• Intel's Think Thin laptop
  
• Sony's 10th anniversary T-series
• Plenty of nice Bluetooth gear, for, hmm, software testing

At least the Sony Ericsson and Samsung phones would be useful for gnome-phone-manager testing.

Totem has made it on System76's list of recommended apps for their laptops. The laptops look quite nice on their own right.

After running into some problems with FC6's Firefox, I'm filling in this blog with a copy of Opera with static Qt (quick download, fast install), and noticed their new Speed Dial feature. It's neat, and if someone managed to integrate the HTML version of it in Epiphany, they'll get plenty of free beers at GUADEC.

GUADEC: No smoking

Not me, silly! (last year's diet didn't work out, and I kept my bad habit).



This is just a quick note to say that from the 1st of July this year, you won't be allowed to smoke in pubs, train station platforms, or other places of work.

So:

• Visit the official website to know more about the smoking ban
• Follow the ban (unlike the law makers)
  
• Bring me packs of cheap fags from abroad (it's about 5 quid for a 20-pack of brand cigarettes, or 25g of tobacco)

I know some of you will appreciate the heads-up.

PS: Thanks UncleGogo for the image