So I guess bananas has nothing to do with it, although all you monkeys will be jealous to know I had one with my dinner, and it was tasty.

However the real fruit of the day is (you guessed it) Firefox Three.  I’m pretty happy to see this release; I’ve used the betas on and off for a while and been impressed how far it’s come.  It’ll still struggle to compete with the simplicity of Epiphany, but that’s just because I’m human.

It should also be noted that the Spread Firefox group has coordinated a campaign to start a new Guinness World Record for “the most software downloaded in 24 hours.”  So far since they opened the download floodgates about 18:16 UTC, and in the past ~ten hours or so, the Spread Firefox Download Day page is reporting over three million downloads, although I’m willing to bet that this is thus far an unofficial number.

There’s been a lot of commentary on the bad choice of starting time, the lack of advertising, some issues with the map not showing all the countries accurately but please spare us.  This is supposed to be a fun thing, so have fun with it!  Three million downloads thus far implies that the masses are quite happy.  You can’t seriously expect the organizers of this to make everyone just oh-so-peachy, so just roll with it!  Go download Firefox Three and enjoy!

Well done to everyone working with Mozilla!

Go ahead, laugh.  I know it’s funny that I somehow managed to break my old camera while making dinner.  What can I say.  I like to take pictures of things that I cook.  It just seems that it’s a bad idea to do so while excessively drunk, which is what finally did it in the end.

I’m one who loves old things, particularly when it comes to electronics.  Like sting, my P2 router.  Or my truck.  Or…well you name it, it’s old. So let me introduce my old camera - a Fujifilm FinePix A205 with a whopping two megapixels which I bought sometime in 2003:

So here’s my shiny new camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000:

For laughing effect, here’s tonight’s dinner:

(mmm, tasty!)

(no cameras were hurt in the process of making this dinner.)

To make life tastier, it worked right out of the box w/ gphoto and f-spot.  Wohoo!

I did however learn that the latest trunk of libgphoto2 is breaking ABI, which upsets f-spot’s crufty old version of libgphoto2-sharp.  Perhaps I’ll get back on the horse and get that sorted out sometime soon…

At work we always marvel about the comments we come across in our code. Indiana Jones stories that somehow get related back to the code by it, how tired the programmer was when writing the code, indications of the [lack of] sobriety of the programmer, random musings about various wildlife…you name it. There’s nothing better than finding a gem. Feel free to submit your own stories.

Actually, I take that back. There is! Discovering your own gems!

So this isn’t exactly code, but it really got me. When I upped to GNOME 2.20, I noticed my task list applet had some gibberish on the right-hand side of it. Strange, eh? Perhaps some sort of bug, perhaps? Naw, something that obvious would’ve been spotted a long time ago. I’ve done something strangely, I was sure of it. As always, a visual is best [red indicates my thoughs at the time…]:

It took me a few weeks of not being able to read such small text and not bothering to even try to before I even thought twice about it. It’s scary. It’s new. It’s something. It’ll go away. Or I’ll figure out what it’s there for.

Ah hah! All it took was a few drinks, and it all made sense. Those must be workspace names! But…uh…gosh, those are strange names when you manage to look close enough to read them. “comes after 11″ — who the hell named these things?!

Yep, that’d be me. Guilty as charged.

And I remember. Years ago. Naming my workspaces because “Workspace {1..4}” simply was unacceptable to me. But there was no good reason to stick a proper name on the workspace anyway, so I didn’t. I bet I childishly giggled to myself while writing those. But now it seems they’re used. And I’m laughing even more. Yep. Gem discovered.

Moral of the story: It’s better than finding $20 in your back pocket!

For those of you who can count, what /is/ after 11? I could never figure it out.

[but then I looked it up on Wikipedia…lo and behold!]

/* note to reader: it’s the american dream! [eddie izzard] */

I’ve been travelling for the last two weeks and have been trying (oh so hard) to get internet calling set up properly on my laptop.  The router in the flat I’m staying in is a POS, and is giving me a very hard time, so I have yet to make a proper phone call other than just testing.  However in the mean time, I’ve discovered Diamondcard as it is the recommended service for PC-to-Phone calling in Ekiga.

Diamondcard not only has a gateway for PC-to-Phone calling, but they also provide an international calling card service that you can dial to from most any country in the world.  The rates for the US are incredible - 1.7 cents/minute.  I talked with my family last night (bragging about le tour) for an hour — and it costed me all of $1.

I’m looking forward to getting PC-to-Phone set up properly, but regardless I have to recommend Diamondcard if you’re looking for a calling card + IP Phone service.  Thanks to the cool crew at Diamondcard!

Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ‘07 together.

My favorite bits:

• Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
• There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
  • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
  • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
  • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
• And my favorite sessions:
  • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
  • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
  • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
  • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
  • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
• The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

So, I’ve recently converted my laptop to Gentoo, and before I even had the base system merged in, I thought I should research NetworkManager. I was running Slackware 10.2 on the lappy, and I had never considered NetworkManager due to the fact that I’d probably have to hack at it until it wasn’t Slack anymore. The wonderful Google led me to various blogs of attempts (some working, some failing) and various mailing lists, usually of obscure issues with NetworkManager or dhcdbd not behaving. I also ran across Gentopia, hosted on the Gentoo Experimental project’s site. The Gentopia site itself isn’t anything much to look at…covered in spam and with tons of missing and outdated pages (makes me want to hook up with the developers and help set up some security). Regardless - the Gentopia overlay is there and it fine, so I went with it.

When I finally got everything merged in and logged into my Gnome session, it took me some time to get things really rolling. After poking around, I learned that NetworkManager on Gentoo doesn’t just “take care” of everything and make all the existing network scripts obsolete (like I was thinking it might do) - it actually just detects devices and calls the proper /etc/init.d/net.eth* script to make it go. I didn’t realize this - but once I did, things started to roll!

TIP #1: start your net.eth* scripts _after_ NetworkManager is loaded - this seems to make things work right for me. I fought NM up and down trying to just get it to grab a DHCP IP off my wired network and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t. Turns out that dhcpcd was running for eth0 - and when NM requested an IP over the interface, naturally the interface went to shit and lost it’s IP.

TIP #2: get your interfaces all working properly _without_ NM running. When I tried to get it to work with my wireless card (Cisco Aironet 350), it would recognize that I had a wireless card plugged in but would show no available networks and just scan all day. Stop the NM & dhcdbd services, and tinker with your /etc/conf.d/wireless config until your card is recognized automatically on plugging in and automatically associates correctly and grabs a DHCP IP. If your device isn’t working w/o NM, odds are low that it will work with NM. My biggest conflict is that my card seems to have some memory of an old network (University network) that I used to connect to and defaults to that ESSID. Thus, I have to override it in my /etc/conf.d/wireless.

And some lovely command line output, for proof :)

So…I will probably post more here when I learn more about NM and how it works with Gentoo…but in the mean time, consider trying it out yourself Gentoo’ers!

….in unrelated news, it turns out that you can drag ‘n drop images from wordpress’ inline image uploader, but it’s a really bad idea. Firefox + WP allows it to happen, but the images all come up with broken links as they loose the site’s prefix. Turns out this isn’t a feature of the inline uploader, but just an “unhandled possible feature”. Argh.

So I’m pleased to announce that another linux user has had a smooth upgrade to the modular X.org.  I’ve spent the last 24 hours making a jump from xorg 6.8.2 to 7.1, and right now I’m in the process of remerging a bunch of packages that depend on X just for sanity’s sake.  It’s exciting to see Xorg already on a 7.1 release - the power of the modular system is clearly paying off.
They all still run from the looks of it, but it can’t hurt to rebuild things to recognize any library changes.  This was all inspired by a quest of mine the other day to get DRI support working again, which I haven’t had in years on my ugly Radeon 9200.  I bought this card ‘cos it was cheap, and I had no idea that ATI had created a separate chip (rv280) just so that developers would spend little time on it and the support would be flaky.  Regardless, with the modern invention of MergedFB (and me actually getting it working), I now have dual monitor with full acceleration support, using the xorg drivers.  Sweet, I say!

The next step in cooking up some X server changes is to demo up XGL on here.  I hear that dual monitor support is in need of some love, and that most Radeon 9200 cards don’t work properly with XGL.  Sounds like my kind of daunting quest!

In other tabs open on my browser right now…yes folks, it’s true, THE TOUR DE FRANCE STARTS IN LESS THAN A MONTH!  July 1st, to be exact!  This will be the first year I ever have to spend these 22 days of bliss without a TV to watch it, so streaming radio applications, don’t fail me now!

I haven’t written any code in a while…seems i’ve got a bit of coder’s block.  I don’t know what’s going on…
Finally…the reason I haven’t posted in a while…I’ve moved my web hosting to a new company, 1 and 1. They’ve been pretty good to me (a lot better than my old host, who will remain nameless).  It seems that 1and1 is caching my homepage tho, so trick.vanstaveren.us still is borked even tho the files are there.  I’ve also had the ability to get sting.vanstaveren.us up and pointing to sting, my router & server box, to host some things like a little subversion repo for my crazier code, and other fun things :).  It also seems that Charter is a bunch of bitches and won’t open port 80 for me - they want me to buy their business package ($150/month) for that.  Ass holes.

I’ve always been wondering how I can make use of the FreeBusy export in Kronolith, and I’ve been looking for a php script to parse it into a simple calendar…so I’ve decided to write one for myself! It’s nowhere near complete and has been borked by this weekend’s time change, but it oughta be cool :) I’ll post a link to my FB calendar and the source for it as soon as I get it fixed with the time changes :)

Has anyone out there seen anything like this?