Go Joey.
June 2006 Archives
Good things about the weekend:
- Discovering KLM's internet check-in.
- The fact I can walk from home to the airport in about half an hour.
- Getting upgraded to a Penthouse Suite for no extra charge due to the hotel overbooking.
- Finally getting to go to the Heineken Experience (I'm a beer bottle!)
- Checking in for the flight home at the automated terminal with just my passport (I'd forgotten to print out my ticket details and was worried I was going to have to go and find some net access to get them).
- And of course, having a nice weekend with some good friends.
On the flip side I only actually saw Andy (the reason I was in Amsterdam at all) for a few hours thanks to a combination of BA delaying his flight for over 2 hours and my body deciding at 2am that it was really time to wander back to the hotel and sleep.
I got some bounces today from Nationwide (no doubt spam backscatter), but the interesting thing about them was that they were PGP signed. Some digging reveals that Nationwide seem to sign their outgoing mail, which is nice to see. Further digging fails to find any nationwide.co.uk keys on pgp.net, keyserver.net or pgp.com. Well that's useful, isn't it? They're not the only people who do this - I regularly see posts to mailing lists that are signed but the key isn't available. Why bother signing mails if your public key isn't out there? It doesn't really give the impression you understand why you're signing things.
I've just had a pigeon (I think) fly into my study window, making a rather large bang, and then fly off again. It's the first time I've notice this large a bird do it, but there have been several instances of something sparrow like doing the same. At first I thought it was some kids throwing something at it, until I managed to actually see the bird flying off again afterwards.
Are their magnetic direction sensors adversely affected by all the technology in this room perhaps? :)
Google's not very helpful about this one. If your Linux kernel is spewing this message then you no doubt have IPv6 configured and have a route via a global address rather than a link-local address. I think this should only affect machines that are being used to forward IPv6 packets for other hosts. Anyway, replacing the route to a global IP with a link-local one should make the log message magically go away.
As previously mentioned I run evilwm as my window manager. The only way to spawn a new process in it is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Enter, which opens an xterm. So I have a single xterm that I use to launch whatever apps I need (I choose this. I'm aware of many options if I felt the need to point 'n drool to open apps.).
I don't think application authors can do this much, judging by the amount
of crap that gets output in this xterm. For example, today I installed
evince (I normally use xpdf) to have a look. I launch it by typing evince,
up pops the window, I go to the File menu and choose Close. What do I get
output in my terminal? The following:
(evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_tree_model_foreach: assertion `GTK_IS_TREE_MODEL (model)' failed
(evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_list_store_clear: assertion `GTK_IS_LIST_STORE (list_store)' failed
WTF? A 'critical' error for simply starting and exiting the app? It's not
the only offender. liferea spews
Unhandled property: 12 border-collapse messages,
gajim defaults to calling aplay rather than
aplay -q so you get a message every time it plays a sound. Does no one
else care about this crud? Is it unreasonable if I file wishlist bugs every
time I hit an app that does this? Should I just learn to live with it?
I had a rant about Firefox today on
#debian-uk. Mainly the fact it seems to like to guzzle memory and bring
my system to a crawl when it feels unloved. Which is every time it loads
an animated image as far as I can tell. Matthew
suggested Epiphany so I thought I'd
give it a try.
Seems ok, but looked a bit blocky, like GTK apps do for me. Not shiny
and curvy like people who run a GNOME desktop (I
run the excellent evilwm). So I had a poke
around. And the magic is to run
aptitude install gtk-theme-switch gtk2-engines and then switch2 and
pick a theme and marvel as your GTK apps become sexier.
Of course you probably all knew this. I'm impressed with how it's affected GNUCash, liferea and workrave as well (yes, yes, that's the whole point of theming, but I'm a simple creature who mostly runs xterms).
Time will tell if Epiphany actually sucks less than Firefox. And there's still the leaking bucket that is liferea (253MB? Eh? And that's with the optimise for memory option enabled).
This is silly. We get our few days of summer and suddenly we all can't cope with the heat. Or at least I can't. Especially when my neighbours decide it means they can play loud music that I really don't like (I don't do doof doof, sorry doop), or when it is music I like it's too distorted to actually be enjoyable. And if I shut the windows it just gets hotter and hotter inside. sigh. Sometimes I wish I worked in an air conditioned office again.
Spent all weekend being too hot and avoiding writing my UKUUG talk for the end of the month. It's done and submitted now; thanks to #alug, Simon and Paddy for constructive criticism. Now I just have to produce some slides.
Not much else happening. I have a u-boot patch for the E3 against their current git tree, but I haven't heard anything back about my JFFS2 compile patch so I'm not sure whether they'll take it or not. I've sent it off to Mark for comments first.
Kathy's disappeared to New York with her sister again, leaving me at a bit of loose end. Off to the Fat Cat on Wednesday with the other Simon which can't fail to be nice.
And, er, that's it really. I suppose I should go to bed.
My E3 is currently sitting running KPhone/Pi under OPIE. Annoyingly I currently have to have a USB mouse attached due to lack of a suitable pointing device on the E3, but I'm sure that's solvable in time.
More disappointing is the fact that it doesn't really work. :( I can successfully SIP register with my local Asterisk instance, and dial voicemail successfully. I only hear a fragment of the "Chameleon mail" prompt and attempting to send DTMF to choose a mailbox doesn't work either - I don't know if this is because I leave it too late or if they don't get sent at all.
OpenEmbedded doesn't have any other OPIE based SIP or IAX clients, nor anything text mode that I can see. I found ZiaxPhone but it seems to be closed source so I can't rebuild it. Guess I'll have to find a text mode client and try to work out if it's KPhone, the audio driver or the E3 not being fast enough that's the problem.
