Wibble

So the conversation went something like this:

The Short Kid: "What's a vegetarian?"

Us: "Someone who only eats vegetables, no meat"

TSK: "Why? That's weird"

Us: "Some of them just don't like meat,or maybe they feel sorry for the animals"

TSK: "Oh. Animals. Yes, I feel sorry for the animals too"

Us: "Oh, do you want to be a vegetarian then?"

TSK: "No, I think I want to be a rock star"

Which is, I guess an improvement over when she was 5. Then when someone asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, the answer was "A dolphin"

Some of our tv channels don't broadcast 24 hours, they start in the morning,and shut down in the early hours after midnight. When they aren't broadcasting a show, they usually have a rolling schedule of what's on for the day, or just a sign saying when broadcast hours are.

Today though, was different. I turned on the TV and was flipping channels and saw:

"Detta är en hypnotisk skyllt.
När du läs detta kommer du att somna och sedan vakna upp och veta att sändningarna startar 08.30"

or in translation:

"This is a hypnotic sign.
When you read this you will fall asleep, and when you wake up you will know that broadcasts start at 8:30"

 

Some of us are due to circumstances outside our control, missing our favourite audio player because we're stuck on an operating system it doesn't run on. In my case, my laptop has an unsupported by X radeon video card that won't run at it's best resolution in X. And as much as I would rather run KDE, it's more of a shame to give up this gorgeous screen.

For the past while then, I've been running remote X logins to one of my workstations, and having the best of both worlds, all my favourite X apps, at all the resolution I can muster. That left
just one thing I couldn't do, use amaroK, because routing sound around the network is quite a task.

So, below are a set of steps to get a local installation of amaroK running in windows, using some freely available software. While this is in no way limited to amaroK, it's an excellent example application for the task, and it's one that is difficul to run remotely, so it's the one I am explaining.

Libtool rears it's ugly head and bites me again, with the terribly helpful error message:

libtool: link: cannot find the library `'

Neat. Not.

Anyway, I turned up a really useful hint, which I'm writing down again here mainly so I never lose it: Edit libtool (for KDE apps, that's easy, it's in the top level build directory) and change the line to

$echo "$modename: cannot find the library \`$lib' (lib${name}.la: $deplib)" 1>&2

In this case it turned out both libtunepimp and libxine were putting -pthread in their dependency_libs lines in their .la files, where it certainly doesn't belong. I feel sympathy with the FreeBSD folk who go around eradicating the bloody things, and would certainly be happy to see .la files out of KDE (before anyone asks, yes, we tried, no, it doesn't work, yes, we know it's FreeBSD ports policy, but it doesn't apply in this case, since KDE doesn't only use them for building)

Libtool hint courtesy ATG Blog. .la file rant courtesy of me being stupidly doing a fresh from SVN build of KDE while tired and grumpy.

Google continues it's attempts at world domination by taking a stab at web page hosting, a la geocities and angelfire.

As cute an idea as that is, it as usual fell down in a heap for me.

Our programming wizards tried their darndest to get Google Page Creator to work with as many browsers as possible. But alas, even the most expert practitioners of web sorcery must sleep now and again, lest their JavaScript magic run dry.

So, for now, you'll need either to download a new version of Firefox or download a new version of Internet Explorer (Windows only), and then come right back.

Because yes, being unbearably cute does in fact make up for being told you're not allowed to sit with the cool kids. Not.

With Gmail (and to a lesser extent the news reader) I was interested enough to change user agent in Konqueror and barge my way in anyway, but this one I'm not really that bothered. Being told to download a Windows browser didn't help much either (if you can already tell that my browser won't work, it's a very small job to grab the OS out of the UA string and you know, not rub salt in my wounds.)

I did think Nik Cubrilovic's page was pretty entertaining though, I'd love one of those email addresses.

Via TechCrunch

I have been trialling ajax libraries lately for work, and had halfway decided it was down to dojo or xajax. Then I came across the Yahoo! UI Libraries, released today under a BSD License.

First glance: wow, very cool stuff. The demos are awesome, and, I might add, almost all of them actually work out of the box in Konqueror from KDE 3.5.1 - way higher than most of the other effects libs. Although I don't actually imagine myself using the effects stuff for work, that was quite impressive. More to the point, they are very well documented. Adriaan would be so proud of their apidox.

There's also a very interesting grid of graded browser support, which is something that might be useful for more sites to adopt. Mind, they left Konqueror off that one.

Via: Nowhere! I actually found them quite randomly by accident while avoiding doing real work, although I didn't think to blog about it until I read it later on Digital Media Minute.

There have been big changes in our house lately. Youngest daughter started school. Oldest daughter is nearly finished and choosing where to do her higher education. We've both got new jobs, although mine is not permanent, and we're thinking of moving. We bought a new car. We've done a big finances rearrangement and other grown up things.

So when Matt says "Can you turn the TV off for a minute, we need to talk" I kind of expected something lifechanging was upon me again.

Just about the last thing on the planet I expected to be asked was this: "So, have you ever thought about caching proxy redundancy strategies?"

These mobile phones for kids are just about the cutest thing. My Sam is a little too old for them (she has a real phone) but I can totally see getting Kajsa something like this for when she's 10 or so, and I don't walk her to every after school playdate.

I remember a time or two losing Sam for an half hour here or there, because between school and the place she told me she was going, the giggling cadre of small girls she was with decided on another plan, and it didn't occur to any of them to tell a parent. Mind, living in a very small town, that's not as bad as it sounds: the half hour consisted of 25 minutes waiting to hear they showed up where they supposed to be, and 5 minutes to find them and pour a can of mamma whoop ass on them. Only for them to forget all over and do it again the next day, most times. 10 year old girls have the short term memory capabilities of a goldfish. In any case, we got her a cellphone (which she half the time forgets to charge, or have with her) when she was 12 or so.

Salient features: only 5 buttons, lights, sounds, coloured snap on shells, animation, and floating snowflakes on their website. What more do we need.

Ok, real features: 6 hours talk, 205 hours standby, GSM dual band, ability to reject calls from numbers not already programmed into it.

I expect they'd make a good present for those of you endowed with the kind of grandparents who don't like contraptions, or anyone with hand mobility issues too. My grandma, would probably rather have an X-Box 360 (*with* a flashy snap on face plate, thank you)

Yes, you read that title right. I want one of these for christmas so bad.

I can't explain, you'll just have to go visit artist Eric Joyner's site

Here's the stuff I have "in progress" just now, in case anyone cares.

• Porting MusicBrainz Picard to FreeBSD. Lioux helped enormously, not least by saving me from insanity with py-wx and wx-gtk and unicode. I've been pottering around with it intermittently for months, he fixed all the stuff I couldn't figure out in a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.

  
  

  He really needs to make a web page even worse than me though.

  
  

  And why can't people just use Qt since I already know how to bash that around into building.

  
  

  ETA: When the ports freeze is up, I will submit them.




• Working on making the KHelpCenter pages follow the user colour scheme. The holdup here is really the graphics. I can use CSS2 system colours to get at the colour scheme in use, but many schemes don't go too well with the dusty blue banner graphics.

  
  

  The obvious answer to this is to use SVG graphics, and colour them with CSS2. That's neat except, our SVG implementation currently assigns random colours instead. It makes for a nice psychedelic show if you refresh a few times, but it's not very useful or colour coordinated!

  
  

  Other answer is to strip the colour out of the PNG's and colour behind them with the system colours. Which is probably what I'll do, but right now the artists are in the middle of making new waves. Which are largely not going to be useful to the docs, but if they are going to redo everything anyway, they may as well make me some new graphics (the ones we have now are, convolutedly enough, a cut and paste of a recolouring of a cut up screenshot of a mockup!)

  
  

  ETA: Maybe 3.5 if I can get enough people to test it, and new graphics. More like 3.5.1 or so (no string changes, and not really a feature, I think I could justify that. In fact, it's quite a help to accessibility and will allow theming in general).




• Also in the works, redoing the layouts. You'd think this goes with the previous, but in fact they can be done quite independently, and the other partly depends on this being done. Currently fair chunks of the styling are written out during the XSLT transformation, partly for historical reasons, partly in an effort to be cross browser compatible, and partly for speed. Well, the historical reasons boil down to "we didn't change it yet" now, KHC doesn't need to be cross browser compatible, and Claudiu is working on fixing a version of the layout that is cross browser compatible for use on docs.kde.org and anyone else needing it. The speed, we'll see. KHTML is much MUCH faster than it used to be, and I think it'll work fine moving the remaining styling out of the XSL and into the CSS.

  
  

  ETA: 3.5, come hell or high water

  
  

Ok, there's some more, but then I won't have anything to write about tomorrow!
And Google's personalized home page tells me my quote of the day is:

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
- Stanislaw Lem

So let's all have a little of that, in the dream that I'll actually do this more regularly :)

Just testing that my little hack in the s9y code didn't break something

Since Sam has these hidden in some image hosting service, I'm saving them here for posterity.

Seems like only yesterday she was dressing up as an itty bitty goth witch for a party.

It's nice to see there are people out there who get obsessed by their wallpapers as much as I do. Ok, maybe more. Maybe he'll like some of the sites I posted earlier.

And in other news, there has been a firebombing at a Malaysian Teapot Cult headquarters. Those bastards.

Every year, I'm surprised how hot it gets here. 30C and humid as all hell, and the heat really doesn't let up until about 2 am. I much prefer the spring when it's still warm and pleasant but not quite so much of it.

Took the girls to Eskilstuna Parkenzoo again, had a great time, lots of photos of animals which I'd show you, except the usb reader refuses to work, and I'm too lazy to go find the other one, so you are spared a million pictures of close up tigers and lions. Too hot to do much else though.

Just a long week, and a little post to let anyone who cares know I'm alive

According to the NYT



I post a cute photo of one of the Herberts that was, to ease the pain. And in deference to sensibilities, I won't link to Lofi, he can find this one by himself.

Mostly I wonder if this story is going to explode like the zombie dogs did.