Today I went into town and submitted my tax return. I never enjoy filling those damn things in, but they need to be done. All sorted out.

Great to hear some interesting things from you comment-leavers. 🙂 First of all, Senji, yep, I do need to fix the rendering of the site when I insert an image that may be a little to large within my design for a given resolution. Thanks for posting the screenshot, but which browser is it? It looked like some kind of contorted Mozilla browser. Next, Damocles, thanks for pointing out that I am a satanist. Never really noticed that. There were times when I would come home from work and find a sacrificial site in the living room, but I figured I just needed to tidy up. What was funny about this book is that my dad is actually called John Bacon. So, in my eyes, it seems my dad is a satanist. Considering my dad looks like Ned Flanders, this is pretty unlikely. 😛

Peo posted a comment about GNOME iRiver, and I have a bit of news on this front. I have spent some time hacking on the next version, and I have fixed some bugs with it. This includes fixing the program so it does not crash when an iRiver is not plugged in, removing the pointless ‘No devices found’ label that really served no purpose other than demonstrating my inability in designing the UI, and finally I have been working on fixing GNOME iRiver so that when you have the program open and you add/remove an iRiver, the device list will be updated. I am hoping to have version 0.2 released fairly soon. Oh, and I have added a GNOME iRiver page to the site.

Recently it seems that Hoary has been tightening up a bit and moving towards increased stability. This includes fixes for the annoying GNOME VFS crashes that occurred a few weeks back, and some other fixes. There are however, still a number of potential showstoppers that I am personally looking for a fix for. These include:

• When I shut off my hoary laptop, the machine appears to shut down, but the power does not go off. Bug reported
• When I am connected to my home wireless network, after a certain amount of time, the wireless card seems to switch into unassociated mode and there is no connection. I have not discovered a way to get the card back into IEEE 802.11g mode without rebooting. I filed this under this report but I suspect it is a different bug.

Those are the main showstoppers, and other than a crufty keyboard map, which I need to still look into, everything else seems to be running smoothly. 🙂

Oh, and it seems that gaz thinks I am a Googlewhack. Don’t both words have to be real words though?
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Went to the quacks the other day and it turns out my specific problem at the moment in Bronchitis. Not nice. It looks like I will need some more anti-biotics, and the doctor has asked me to call if I need them. I called today and the surgery was shut! Typical. 😛

Last night we recorded LUGRadio. It is weird, as I was expecting to have to cancel due to my current state of health, but I seem to be ok so long as I get lots of sleep and don’t get cold. I decided to go ahead with it and the recording went well. On the show we interviewed Jeff Waugh (GNOME main-man and Ubuntu hacker), and I am really pleased with the show. Unfortunately Matt could not make the show, but he should be along to the next one. The episode (Season 2 Episode 8) should be out on Monday.

You know what I find increasingly cool about LUGRadio? It is just how far it seems to be spreading. On the last episode, we read out some emails from some of the listeners. This included one from a Canadian guy living in China and also someone living in Long Island, USA. We also know listeners from France, Germany, Spain, Scotland and our native England. It never ceases to amaze me just how far our little show is spreading. I am also pleased that now we are over a year down the line, each episode is still as simple to do as when we started. I was a little concerned that it may get a little stale and we may feel the pressure to keep the quality of the show up. Luckily this isn’t the case. We just show up and have a laugh. 🙂

Oh, and thanks must go to my orange haired pal who was browsing the web and decided to send me something he considered most amusing:

Well, the good news is that I am feeling a bit better. I am hoping that I am finally on the mend, and I have my fingers crossed that I will be back into work tomorrow. I will have to see how I am tonight.

Don’t you just love online translators by the way. I was doing a bit of snooping around the net to see how far the LUGRadio Shuttleworth interview episode did, and I stumbled across a posting to the French Ubuntu forums by regular LUGRadio listener and all round good chap kNo. Being the language idiot I am, I did not understand a word of it, so I relied on Google to fill me in. Either kNo is a nutter, or the translation was not exactly accurate:

“For those which would not know, LugRadio is an audio program (in English) carried out by four British pure juices, resulting from the LUG of Wolverhampton, in West the Midlands. This program has as a framework the free logiel, open source and new technologies, but the ton of the discussion is extrement free, as if good buddies discussed around glass, in a pub.
The language is grown sometimes enough, which shocks certain American fallen by chance on this program. Me, I listen since the 3 episode, and I adore. They are very sympas, really.”

Not entirely sure how I feel about being thought of as a British pure juice, but there you go…

After some rough days, I tried my damnedest to get better for going to see Chas and Dave at the Rock Cafe. Although I felt pretty bad, Sooz and I headed over to meet up with Aq and Sam and we went out. The honky tonk kings were not on until 9.30, so we headed out to a few pubs, and my condition (as well as Sam’s, who was also very ill) started to worsen. Despite this, we trooped on, and Chas and Dave were just incredible. We stuck around to watch most of their set, but at about 11pm I was coughing a lot and feeling pretty bad (I have been tending to feel at my worse at around 11pm – 12pm), so we headed off. As we drove, I seemed to be a lot worse than I expected. Despite resting for the majority of the week, my condition was awful, and we decided to call into the emergency doctors surgery in Wolverhampton. I headed in, spoke to the doctor, and he informed me that I have contracted a pretty nasty virus, and I needed to be on a course of antibiotics.

A few days later, I am still not feeling that much better, but I suppose I need to give them a chance to kick in. After being denied an appointment from my doctors as it was assumed that I had the flu that everyone else has, and despite I have had this for over a week, I am just a little narked that I seem to have suffered unnecessarily due to this worse kind of virus. Nevermind, all I care about now is getting over this damned thing.

Part of the reason why I am so keen to get over it, and apart from the fact that I am sick of feeling sick, is that I want to get back to my life. Next week I have two really important meetings, lots of training, lots of loose ends to tie, a tax return to fill in, a gig, LUGRadio and my parents visiting. All of this is pretty dependent on me feeling better, and I also want to get back to the day to day things I enjoy doing.

Thanks by the way for all the feedback and nice comments about GNOME iRiver. When I can grab some time to work on it, I plan fixing up some of its quirks and adding some new bits and pieces into it. 🙂

I won’t bore you too much with the latest health situation. Still rough, less coughing last night, but still feeling very heady. Tonight we embark out to see Chas and Dave, and I am hoping that some cockney knee slapping music will get me going. 🙂

I got up today and I had recieved an email from a chap called Andy Shaw. Andy had mailed me with regards to GNOME iRiver, and was wondering when I was going to release the code. After a few emails, I decided I would try to get it out in some form today, and I tidied up some of the loose ends to make an initial release. The result of these efforts was the 0.1 release of GNOME iRiver, and you can get the code here if you want to give it a try. Make sure you read the README file!

Andy sent me a pretty quick reply and graciously mailed me a screenshot demonstrating the program’s success on his system:

I am really pleased to see that something I have been fiddling around with has already been of use to someone else. I still have some things to clear up before I consider it anywhere near complete, but I will keep you posted. 🙂

I hate to sound predictable, but I am still not very well, and I am in fact, worse. On Wednesday, we were doing a seminar on LAMP, and I was set to do the main talk. I spent Tuesday at home working on the talk and I got up early on Wednesday to head over to do it. Aside from a few technical hitches (both Paul and I are running Hoary, and hence seem to have the same bugs), the seminar went very well and we are helping some of the delegates move to LAMP. I didn’t feel too bad during the day, but as it crept towards 6pm, and Aq came to the office to hitch a lift to the LUG meeting, I was starting to feel a little drowsy.

We went to the LUG, and in the space of a few hours, my condition worsened, and I eventually left at 9pm. I got home and I had no energy and was feeling very ill. I then seemed to develop a horrific cough and spent most of last night coughing and spluttering. This was a real bummer as I was due to head down to the OSS Watch conference today and my tube and train tickets were booked. I felt awful about letting the chaps at work down by not going, but I honestly think that if I got up at 5am as I needed to today, I would be pretty unwell. Today I spent most of my time sleeping and trying to stop coughing. Sooz presented me with some horrific medicine that is supposed to help, but it worked for about 10 mins and then the demonic cough came back. I have now had this thing for a week and it is really bad. I did call the doctors, and they were adamant that they can’t do anything; I just need to sit it out. Shit.

I am now hoping that I will be well for tomorrow night, as Aq, Sam, Sooz and I are going to see the mighty Chas and Dave. Then, on Saturday, we are due over for dinner at a friends house. I am hoping things will ease off soon.

I am pleased to say that my little GNOME iRiver program became actually useful today, and it now detects an iRiver and displays it in the box:

I now have enough information from HAL so I can easily write the main functionality in the program. Thanks must go out the HAL maintainer himself, David Zeuthen, for all his help. I have promised David I will write this up as a tutorial when I am done. 🙂

In my life, I have been known to do some odd things in my sleep. When I was a kid I used to sleepwalk quite a bit, and I twice locked myself out of the house doing so. One particular time, I wandered outside and as soon as the door locked shut, I woke up. There I was, at 6am in the morning stood in my Dennis The Menace boxer shorts as people started to drive to work. I knocked on the door and a startled mum let me back in. A few years later, I was asleep at Sooz’s parents house on the couch and I took a bite out of three apples in my sleep. I also locked myself out there one night and tried to pick the lock with a branch. Yes, I know. It is a bit strange. Anyway, last night I went to bed, and I was still feeling pretty rough. I didnt really sleep well, and in the middle of the night, I got up and run myself a bath, in my sleep. I was under the impression it was 9am and it was time to go off to the doctors. Until last night, I had not done much sleepwalking for a while, and I had certainly not done any sleepbathing. Weird.

I woke up this morning and still felt awful, so I called to see if I could work from home today. I have spent most of today working on a LAMP presentation for a seminar we are doing tomorrow at OpenAdvantage. Paul will be kicking off with an introduction to Open Source and OpenAdvantage presentation, and then I will give an introduction to LAMP and then give a quick demo of creating a PHP script. Should be interesting.

Guess what? The latest and greatest episode of LUGradio was mentioned on Slashdot. There has been some pretty fervent discussion about the issues of Canonical and Marketing on the various threads and in the IRC channel.

Still ill unfortunately. Despite the fact that my throat is pretty bad and I still get the shivers, I cracked on with a day of planned PHP training with Sooz. This kind of worked out well. I was in no fit state to leave the house, but I could still be productive and do some work. Sooz has taken the training really well, and she spent all day today learning about how the LAMP system fits together, how to abstract out header/footer files, connecting to a database, creating forms and more. I will be resuming the training with her on Friday when I will cover more complex database stuff and sessions.

Today LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 7 went live. I am quite pleased with the show, and it has triggered some interesting discussion about Marketing and Open Source. It seems people have very different views of it all. Fingers crossed the show may get mentioned on Slashdot or some other such large news site due to the Mark Shuttleworth interview. If jonobacon.com disappears for a while, it could be because Slashdot is abusing our bandwidth. Then again, it could be because our annoying Apache problem has returned…

With my current state of illness, I have had an opportunity to sit in bed over the weekend and ponce around with Python. My little GNOME iRiver project currently looks like this:

What I am pleased about with this is that I have managed to get some information (admittedly, the wrong information) from HAL, and display it in the tree view. I have since posted to the HAL mailing list, and I am going to work through some of David’s suggestions. Unfortunately, I might not have an opportunity to look into this until the weekend. I have a remarkably busy week this week including preparing a seminar, doing the seminar, visiting a conference and doing some training.

I had an email from Jon Lim about how I have gone about learning Python. Well Jon, I started out with Dive into Python where I read a few chapters, and then I read how to create Python GUI software the visual way. I have then just messed around with code, wrote some little test scripts, and posted to the HAL mailing list. I have also been fortunate enough to have a few pals who code in Python to answer some of my silly questions.

Oh, and see my new O’Reilly Blog entry called A brief history of simplicity

Take a look at this:

Sure, it looks pretty simplistic and the screenshot does not really convey its purpose, but that is the point – it is simple, and it has no point. This is a little test script that I wrote this morning to get a GtkTreeView working with Python. Although it may not seem it, the tree view in GNOME programming seems to be an ubiquitous beast at best, in which few people have manage to tame it easily. I wanted to mess around of how to get it working and I creating this little test program.

What is interesting with Python is that in about a week of learning it, I have gone from knowing nothing about Python to (a) writing GUI applications, (b) getting more-complex-than-newbie-level widgets working, and (c) even getting some HAL/DBUS bongo working. In the latter case, I managed to pull out some data from my USB keyring through Python, and it was all quite a substantial chunk easier. This is one heck of a productive language, and it is great to be productive so quickly.

I spent about three years wasting my life learning C++. To be honest, C++ sucks at this kind of stuff. Although I think Qt is a wonderful widget set, and it abstracts much of this away, C++ is a beast to glue together even the easiest of Qt code. Memory management, pointers and strange OOP concepts litter the language. Despite having a beard, I found that C++ was a tough ride, and I really found it difficult to get used to. Since those dark days, I have found two languages that I adore; PHP and Python. Sure, some Python fanatics are going to suggest I write jonobacon.com in Python, but we already have one inefficient Python site clogging up the server at the moment. 😛

I suppose I should do the honors before he comes on, but yes, Aq ranted at me for many years about how Python was so good. I didn’t take much stock in his message purely because it did not serve a purpose for me at that time. I am a pretty inefficient and simplistic programmer though, and I have subsequently wanted to learn an equivalent to a bash scripting language for writing GUI/XML/Database tools. I wanted to be able to hook in with GNOME and write nifty little applets and programs. Python offered the answer. I now consider Python as my scripting language of choice – so long bash.

Anyway, still feeling pretty crap today. Although the aches and pains have mostly subsided, I have since developed my sore throat into something akin to a camel’s jockstrap; it feels like I have just eaten a tree trunk with a mohican haircut. I am going to spend tomorrow as we spent today – lazing around and taking it easy. I hope I feel better tomorrow. Thanks for all your kind words about getting well soon. It means a lot. 🙂