"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
Tonight I fixed the GTK+ timeouts and made the random & repeat checkbuttons work. In the pipeline are some neat playlist dialogs, including a database browser & search tool, as well as a set of gconf keys to store my configuration options (and yes, that means a Preferences dialog).
My port of Lindelë is coming along well. Tonight I got the previous, play/pause, stop and next buttons all working almost perfectly. The "now playing" text is updated too. I've got a few bugs with my idle updating functions, to watch for changes in the song status and such. It'd be easier if mpd emitted some sort of signal, but idle timers will work too. Next on the list is stabilizing this playback stuff, and getting the timers working. Then comes playlist management. I've got some slick ideas for the playlist. Very easy to use but still permits most of the features of mpd playlists.
I've recently discovered the wonders of the Music Player Daemon, and so I've decided to move Lindelë away from a GStreamer based player to a mpd front-end. It will take some major re-writing of most of the backend code, but I think in the end the application will be simpler to manage. I can finally remove all the copy & pasted playlist writing and reading code. Most of the music management is in the mpd itself, so I just have to make the callbacks call the right mpd functions and update the GUI accordingly. Now if only I had time to work on it.
So a couple days ago I got the axe from Google. They finally got around to sending me a rejection form letter. I was expecting it though, so I wasn't really that surprised, but it still kinda got me down. But, about the same time, Ngoc told me that my Star Wars DVDs came. That was very exciting. Then today, I got an email welcoming me to the World of Warcraft beta. Which just compounded my excitement quite a bit. So I'm doing okay with not getting any further at Google. Ahh consumerism as a method of dealing with rejection. What a great concept.
Just patched up my GNOME panel with the Ubuntu patches. I really like this way of desktop management much better. It sort of reminds me of the Windows XP start menu, but this seems to have so much more class. And once again, my desktop is (almost) icon free!
This is the coolest thing ever. Even though Garrett calls it "Industrial" for Firefox, it looks great with any theme that uses the stock GNOME icons. I've been wanting something like this for so long!
Just a quick post from work. I can't get this horrific event off my mind. It reminds me of another disgusting human act. Makes me lose faith entirely in the ability of humans to sustain peace for longer than 30 seconds. And you wonder why American's live in fear of their neighbors. Why 70,000 Americans use Bay Alarm systems on their homes. I feel safer when I'm up in Yosemite. Oddly enough, the further away from people I get, the safer I feel. Probably because I know its 90% more likely that a human would attack me than an animal. What a jacked up world we live in.
Got a lot done today after I got home from work. I updated a bunch of my packages for Arch Linux, including the new ati-drivers-3.12.0 (after downgrading back to xorg-6.7.0. I don't get all the hype about the compositing stuff). My glxgears framerate went up by 400 FPS with the new drivers. So yey, ATI is getting a bit better. Ubuntu finally finished; its polished, but I don't think I could ever use it. I need more control over my system than distros like Ubuntu and Fedora provide. I'm too used to just editing text files I think. Ubuntu would be great for someone interested in getting into Linux and doesn't really care (or need) to know about the deep dark secrets of the OS. After all, people use Windows and barely know anything about it. "My Windows won't save my Word documents." "Well ma'am, that's because Windows doesn't. Microsoft Word saves your Word documents." "Yea, that's what I said"... if they can use an OS without understanding, I think people should be able to use Ubuntu with little advanced computer skill. This is an exciting day for Linux on the desktop. Nearly everything in Ubuntu "just works" after an install. And this is only a preview release.
Picasa ran with no trouble at all under WINE. I was very surprised. Its a bit klunky to add photos though. WINE mounts / as the Z: drive, and Picasa doesn't recursively search the directories you add. So I had to add a whole bunch of directories I have. That was rather annoying, so I think I'll stick with Gthumb. Hello wouldn't run at all. It said my operating system was too old. I tried setting my OS version to winxp in ~/.wine/config, but that didn't work. I'm open to ideas. Ubuntu is still installing. My laptop's really slow. Oh yes, and I installed this other neat program in WINE, and it worked great too. I can't remember the name of it now though. And now, I'm off to work.
Had a nice dinner with Ngoc this evening. Vietnamese food is always good. I just got home about 10 minutes ago, and now I'm going to install Ubuntu on my laptop to see what all the talk is about. I'm also going to try installing Hello and Picasa in Windows, and seeing if I can get them to run in Linux under WINE. Those two applications are so damn cool. I wish we had something like those applications for GNOME. GThumb & F-Spot seem like they're about halfway there on the photo album management (I think they still need a bit of polishing, and maybe even built in blog posting!). And there's a slew of GNOME blogging applications out there. But none are quite usable, in my opinion. I think they should all combine into one killer GNOME blogging application, and work on integrating blogging into the entire Desktop.
Sitting at work right now & I've SSH'd back to my home machine & am IRCing, since we have a bit of downtime right now (either the users with problems aren't around, or there aren't any problems). So DT in #topgamers just pasted a URL to Sorrycow.com, a site apologizing to cows and thanking them for everything they've given us humans. Its amusing and cute at the same time. The things people find on the Internet is amazing.
Just found this interesting article in my morning browsing of news.google.com. Its nice to see Firefox getting so much attention. And that comment about Firefox's "recent vulnerability" is totally bogus. Its a vulnerability on Win32 only. So its not exactly Firefox's fault, more the underlying OSs problem. Firefox on Linux doesn't have that problem.
I just stumbled across a very inspiring website. And so I have decided to join the thousands of Firefox users, and put a banner on my site here. So click and be counted! And join the movement to take back the web.
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