In my quest to understand the world around me, I have discovered that dogs like to eat fingers. The pooch that lives in our gaff demonstrated this desire for digits last night. To be fair, he was gnawing on the wooden chair I was sat on as Sooz and I had our dinner. I had finished eating and as such decided it would be fun to poke my fingers in the dogs mouth as he was munching on the aforementioned chair. The result:

Here you can see the culprit and heinous blood curdling grotesque injury that I was afflicted with. Dogs and fingers clearly don’t mix, particularly if the owner of the fingers is an idiot.

Had lunch with Scott James Remnant today and it was good to hook up with him. He has been off on his travels all over the place and sounds a busy chap as usual. After lunch I came back to continue tying up some bits of work that I have been involved in. This week I am also giving a two day PHP and MySQL training course.

Thanks to Aq and Aquarion (not a double act, I assure you) for getting back to me about a PHP Blogger API implementation. It seems that Aquarion has written one, and I am going to see if I can use it on my new site. It is a shame there isn’t a PEAR library to do this sort of thing. What does astound me is the sheer number of XML-RPC libraries available for PHP – there are quite a few. The big two seem to be Edd Dumbill’s and Simon Willison’s. I have not looked at either extensively, but both seem pretty feature complete. Simon’s also looks a little easier.
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Went to Bedford yesterday for Susan’s sister’s 21st birthday. This involved drinking lots of beer, eating a stack of Mexican food and resultantly peeing like a horse at 3am in a hazy state. On the way down and back I hacked some more on my website.

One of the new features I want to implement in the site is support for the Blogger API. This requires learning two core technologies, (a) XML-RPC and (b), the Blogger API. Ed Dumbill has written an implementation of XML-RPC, and I have also found a PHP class for the Blogger API. From looking at the class, it seems that it is primarily intended for actually posting from a website to a Blogger blog. I am instead looking for an implementation of the Blogger API so I can use tools like gnome-blog to write blog entries. Has anyone done this? Has anyone done this in PHP?

Tonight I edited the last episode of Season 2 of LUGRadio for release tomorrow. Its been a great Season and awesome fun to boot. Adam and I jammed to the LR theme tune after the recording the other night, so I put that in as the outro and layered a montage of clips together. Sounds pretty I cool I think.

Well, back to work tomorrow…

Awesome. It seems some bright spark has decided to create an AJAX PEAR module called HTML_AJAX. The good news is that the module has been officially released, seems to be developed by a competent hacker and also has a decent roadmap. I find the concept of a widget library particularly intriguing in the roadmap. to be honest, this is the way I want AJAX to work – I want to specify something to be updated and something to trigger updates. I am also pleased to see this has been developed for PHP 4.x. There are still many, many people running on pre-5.0 versions of PHP, and I am pleased to see key modules like this are not assuming that we are all running latest, bleeding edge, gritted teeth, SVN versions of PHP. Hail!

It is sad to see some more bickering of notification tomfoolery on various GNOME blogs. This was really kicked off with Davyd, moved on by J5 and then followed up by jdub. To be honest, I can see all sides of the coin here, but the issue of Novell and Red Hat developing large chunks of technology behind the curtain is quite a sticking point. I understand the challenges of releasing innovative technology that makes people choose your distribution, but when something fundamentally affects GNOME, it needs to be at least communicated with the community.

You can see this to a point with the web interface for Hula. Sure, it is being developed behind closed doors in the gasman’s cubicle, but they have communicated pretty well the kind of work that is going on. Many will see this as not perfect, but basic communication is essential, even if it does not factor in code, screenshots and novelty penguins.

Coming from KDE to GNOME, it is interesting to see the different social structures in both projects. On the KDE side, there was less of an old boys club. Within the GNOME camp there seem to be a number of specific groups that work together and sometimes spar across blog entries. These groups are unfortunately most typified by their workplace. I never really noticed this with KDE. The employers behind KDE development did not really subconsciously divide people into different groups. Then again, in the KDE world there seemed to be less celebrity. I find this kind of social analysis fascinating, although I am perturbed to promote anything with the word ‘social’ in it otherwise I will start wearing sandals and sensible jumpers…

In other news, hacked more on the website fixing various interface bits. Still lots of work to do, but getting there…
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Great to see that some hacking on Gazpacho is going on. A few weeks back I was working to create some mock-ups of interface concepts for PiTiVi and a few other things. I tried both Glade and Gazpacho and I found both pretty difficult to use. They are certainly useful for creating dialog boxes, but seem rather unsuitable for full interface development. both tools are equally useless for configuring certain widgets that require further details. One glaring issue here was with the GTK tree widget. It looks like Jonathan Blandford pushed himself forward to fix this up though.

While looking into these tools, I did a bit of hunting around to see how much activity was going on with the projects. It seems that both Glade and Gazpacho were suffering from a pretty heinous lack of love and the mailing lists were getting few messages. Both projects seemed to be stalling. As we move forward it seems that Gazpacho may be leveraging itself as a possible replacement for Glade. Discussion of a better UI (using Yarrr! which is great) is all encouraging stuff. And…its written in Python. 🙂

On the OpenOffice.org front, it seems that there is good and bad news. On the good news side it seems that the Cairo work going into the suite is working well. This is going to be awesome for the drawing and presentations modules. The down side is that according to Michael Meeks, there were only 240,000 lines of code in the patches applied to OpenOffice.org, and the entire codebase spreads over 8 million lines. I honestly think the OpenOffice.org team need some help in encouraging more developers to come on board. I have a few ideas of how this could work from a community perspective, but my time is pretty limited at the moment. I might have a chat with Michael about this to see if we can flesh some ideas out.

Plenty of interesting discussion going on at PHPWM – glad to see the list is getting a bit more traffic. I get the impression it is becoming more and more useful. 🙂
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Today I travelled down to IBM’s Hursley offices to do a talk on the Linux desktop and where it is going. I got a train down to Reading, jumped in a car with Josette from O’Reilly and then we both got lost a few times on the way to Hursley.

The Hursley offices are huge. Around 3000 people are working there and the site is set in a massive manor on beautiful grounds. The talk seemed to go quite well, plenty of questions afterwords and the guys from IBM are cool. The talk covered Cairo, Xgl, X.org, GStreamer, Plasma, Topaz and plenty of discussion about usability. After the talk an IBM usability guy came over and introduced himself. 🙂

Got back in tonight and I am shattered. I have tonnes of blogs to read and a large stack of mail too. Over and out…
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Fixed up my presentation for tomorrow. I spent way too long digging out an image for a slide. Its a shame that the OpenClipart site only dishes out .svg files. I needed to load the file into Inkscape to convert it to a .png. Inkscape seems a nice tool to use, but it also seems quite a complex interface. I plan on fiddling with it later sometime.

My train gets into Reading tomorrow and then I hop in a car with Josette from O’Reilly to drive to Hursley. I am quite intrigued to have a poke around the IBM offices. I am looking forward to meeting some of the developers. It looks that the IBM developers are doing some cool work down there.

Yesterday I came up with an interesting interface concept that could be useful in a number of different situations. When I get some time I plan on writing it down and submitted it to d-d-l, usability or the GTK list.

Tonight is another LUGRadio recording and we are interviewing Joe Shaw about Beagle. Aq is away in a tent with a man so Adam will be stepping in for the show. This is the last show of the season and it we will have a month or two off before Season 3 kicks off. It has been great fun recording Season 2 and I can’t wait to see where LUGRadio goes in Season 3. 🙂

Headed over to Swansea on Friday to do a talk at the UKUUG summer conference. Good to see Alan, Telsa, Sladen, Josette, Matt Garrett and others. The talk went well, although the lunch provided was a Chicken Vindaloo and it burnt like a good ‘un.

This weekend was good fun. On Friday night Jon and I were booted out by our better halves. Sooz was throwing an Ann Summers party, so Jon and I ended up at the Pie Factory. We had a few beers and returned at about 11.30pm when the pub closed. On the Saturday I spend some more time hacking the new site. It is getting there, but this is taking quite some time to develop, particularly as I only get a chance to hack on it at weekends really.

Playing with GStreamer is continuing to go well. Wrote a few lines of code to test changing attributes in GStreamer elements. The general stack is starting to sink in a little better. Credit to Edward who is battling some pretty tough bugs in gst-python and gnonlin to bring it up to state for 0.9. Keep going dude, you are getting there!

My interest in usability continues to grow and I have been ploughing through The Design Of Everyday Things. The problem when reading this book is that you question even the minutest of usability issues. I have found myself looking blankly at car temperature control systems, drink dispensers, posters and of course general software tools. I added some new usability blogs to my reading list and I also joined the GNOME usability list. She doesn’t know it yet, but the new admin assistant who is joining us soon is going to be my usability Guinea pig.

Today I called a well known insurance company to make a claim for a digital camera that has gone missing. when I got through to speak to someone, I was confronted with a real pencil pushing jobsworth. She proved to be rather patronising and unhelpful so I asked to speak to her manager. Unfortunately my hopes turned to despair as the manager proved to be the yoda to all jobsworth jedis in the world. I hate this kind of thing.

The problem with this sorry story is that insurance firms seem to assume that you are fully versed in all of the terms and conditions in your agreement. Well, I must be some sort of idiot as I have not fully digested the 54 pages of terms and conditions that were sent to me. The problem was that I should have reported the loss within 24 hours. This ultimately proved difficult to do when my insurance details were back in England while I was away. I was told by Ms Jobsworth that I should have taken my policy with me. This seems crazy to me – why on earth would I take my annual insurance policy away on a trip? It certainly makes more sense to come back home, refer to the policy and then make the claim. It is as if after 24 hours the camera loss stops becoming their responsibility. What a bunch of money grabbing bastards. Not amused I can tell you…
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Been a hectic week this week as usual, and I am not entirely convinced I am recovered from What The Hack. I have been feeling pretty tired all week.

Finally got GStreamer 0.9 compiled. After getting the base system up and running I attempted to compile gst-python but it failed. Edward has since fixed it and it now works. Woo! I have had a fiddle with some of the examples in there and it looks cool. I also discovered Diva – another project to build an easy to use NL video editor. It is good to see some fresh development going into this area. I look forward to the day I can do all my video editing on Linux for good.

You know, I tend to find myself constantly asking questions of the world. The other day I drove to work in Sooz’s car. I got in, plugged her CD player fascia plate in and looked for a play button. Now, virtually all playback devices and tools have the play symbol ( |> ) and stop ( [] ) symbols. On this particular player there was neither. I sat there for a few minutes looking for other obvious choices and none were there. After about 10 minutes of looking and poking random buttons, I gave up and drove in silence. Argh! When I saw Sooz later that day I asked her which button to press and she said “Well its obvious, press the Source button”. It seems that in the context of this player you don’t play something, you select the source to play – either the radio or the CD player.

There are numerous problems with this sorry story. Firstly, why doesn’t it start playing the last source that was playing before the power went off. Secondly, the Source button does not use the well recognised |> symbol, and thirdly, dual function buttons make little sense – always try to keep a single function on a single button, or at least make an effort to make it clear the button has dual uses. The thing I find most surprising is that their product usability tests did not pull out this defect straight away. Oh, then again, maybe they did not have any tests…no…surely not… 😉

Oh, and never let your better half order shopping from Tesco.com. Sooz was responsible for this little lot arriving:

It also appears the devil is in my inbox:

That can’t be good.

Finally, one and all, go to the UKUUG conference in Swansea tomorrow and come and say hi. I will be talking about that odd radio show I co-founded…
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Spent the last four days in a tent over at What The Hack in Holland. Had an awesome time, drunk a shitload of beer and got to hang out with a great bunch of chaps. Thanks must go Aq, Adam, Bill, Gudge, Matt and Graham for an awesome weekend. The trip basically consisted of waking up, scratching something unscratchable, eating some food, hacking all day and drinking until your eyes fall out at night. It was utter class, despite Adam and I getting monsooned as we wobbled back to the tent one night. Returning to a tent to discover soaking wet plug sockets is a little unnerving.

While at What The Hack, the continued beard related japery happened. When many of us were kids at school in England, there was a running joke that if someone told a lie, you would rub your ‘Jimmy Hill Chin’. This friends, is Jimmy Hill:

Large chin, as you can see. For some reason, we found the chin so very funny. As such, we all came up with a variety of ‘chinny’ gags. Before we go any further, I must introduce you to the mascot for our chin related tomfoolery, Chinny Raccoon; a beast I bodged in the GIMP:

After this, it was inevitable that other artistic delights would come. Bill produced a fine specimen:

The next natural step was the kids classic, Chinny Chinny Bang Bang which took me ages to do:

Aq went on to produce a piece of art – rare for such a challenged individual:

Finally, I created our good friends Chin Chin and Snowy:

In other non-chin related news, I compiled GStreamer 0.9 on my Powerbook while at What The Hack. While we were there Edward was hacking on the Python bindings, so they should be fixed now, and the nice chap also wrote a few examples for me and chucked them in the archive. This will make hacking on bits of GStreamer related code much easier. I can’t wait to see how the new seeking code will work.

Got back into work today and spent most of the day hacking some old PHP/MySQL code back to life. The code in question was the ancient Tobe project that I released in a fairly primitive state a few years back. Its ugly. Filled with nested tables and other barnacles, I think I may need to take a shower when I get in. The cleanup operation is going well though. 🙂

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Headed to OpenTech in London on Saturday with Sooz, and met up with Aq there. After spending an extortionate amount of money on travel (train, cabs) and eating the most hideous bacon sandwich ever constructed, we finally made it into the event. It was good to finally meet Danny O’Brien and Dave Green, and it was also cool to see other people again such as Josette from O’Reilly, three guys from EuroFoo and some new people.

Been working on the new incarnation of the site and it is getting sweeter. I have not hacked on it quite so much this weekend as I have tried to have a break. In the last week or so I have been feeling a little burned out. I am one of these people who tends to get bored when sat around doing nothing, so I am always on the go. As an example, last week while Sooz was down in London at the BBC training, each evening I was doing something – Mon: Jamming on music with Emelye, Tue: same again, Wed: LUG meet, Thurs: Karate and Sooz back, Fri: a bit of rest and then OpenTech on Sat. This and working busy days can sap your energy.

Anyway, I did manage to get round to mixing and releasing a new tune – it is called Inside. This one is dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the bombings in London a few weeks back. I played acoustic guitar on it and Emelye (who is now Emelye Evans, not Emelye Penfold) lent her usual high standard of Cello playing. I am pretty pleased with it. Finally, for those who like to hear the more wackier side of music, I discovered Banger can actually sing. So, I lowered the mic stand down to his level, plugged the pooch in and recorded The Banger Beat.

The other day I wrote an article entitled Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required, and it seems to have sparked some feverish discussed. It was picked up on OSNews, GNOME Footnotes, LinuxToday and most interestingly, on the the Linux Audio User mailing list under the Poor Schmuck! thread. The reaction from the piece seems generally mixed, with those disagreeing with my view typically being existing people who do audio stuff on Linux. I am always keen to explore things further and possibly be proved wrong, so I joined up on linux-audio-user and posted a new thread. Currently it has over 35 responses with a whole range of points. The linux-audio-user community have been great and seem very eager to discuss the subject and feedback in a frank and objective way. This is going to be one mighty chin-wag. 😀

Finally, it seems the discussion about GTK 2.8 going into GNOME 2.12 is getting more and more interesting. Miguel, great sport that he is for Filthy Gamble on LUGRadio is convinced it is a bad idea. The basic gist is that GTK 2.8 includes support for Cairo, and this dependency for GNOME 2.12 has recently been confirmed on d-d-l. This has caused some debate about whether the new release could cause stability issues for GNOME, and Miguel also has some concerns over how he feels the developers have moved away from the timetable. Personally, I think it makes sense to head towards 2.8 – 2.6 would be largely unmaintained after the release of GNOME 2.12, and there has been weeks of rigorous testing. I can however, see Miguel’s point. As a late observer to the subject (hence no comment on the mailing list) it does seem that there was plenty of time for an objection, and GTK 2.8 was always in the release plan. What will be awesome is that with GTK 2.8 a dependency in GNOME 2.12, this means we should now start seeing Cairo based applications rolling in. 🙂

Three days till What The Hack…