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).