Blog

I’m blogging from my n810[1] while having breakfast, in a hour I will be on a train to Heathrow, destination: Istanbul. See you all at GUADEC!

[1] Having a real keyboard is fantastic, but how do I insert the angular brackets?

After my desktop computer died over a year ago I have had no space for mp3s on my hard disk, so I only used the music on my mp3 reader.

A week ago I was able to free some gigabytes of disk space and finally I put my music back on my computer. The first problem I faced was choosing a music player, after some testing the only two competitors were Banshee and Rhythmbox. In the end I chose Banshee, but I have to say that this was a completely subjective choice as both programs are nice and have almost all the features I wanted.

Then I decided to cleanup a bit my mp3s removing duplicates. This is a “once in your life” task, so I didn’t want to spend hours finding a suitable program, understanding how it works and tweaking it: I just needed something that worked without too much hassle.
The first program I found was DupeMusicMatch, you just have to run it passing on the command line the directories where your mp3 or ogg files are and "-r" for a recursive search. DupeMusicMatch just works, it seems to finds some false positives but it seems also able to find duplicates if the file names differ a lot. Thanks Todd Korody for your easy to use program!

Why I love icecream:

$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real    21m52.649s
$ make clean > /dev/null
$ PATH=/usr/lib/icecc/bin:$PATH
$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real    8m15.954s

Note that about 4 minutes are spent linking the program, not compiling.

And then, while waiting, you can watch the hypnotic icemon showing where your source files are being compiled:

Today Adobe released a beta version of Flash 10, from the realease notes:

“Ubuntu OS Support — Flash Player 10 now supports Ubuntu, one of the most popular flavors of Linux.”

1. “Ubuntu OS”?
2. Previous versions of Flash already work on Ubuntu
3. How can you say that you support a .deb-based distro if you only release a .tar.gz and a .rpm?

The bad news is that it crashes both WebKit GTK and QtWebKit. This is a perfect example of why I don’t like closed source software, it isn’t because of political reasons but because interoperability with it is hard: you don’t have any simple way to understand what it’s wrong and it’s impossible to fix it.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Flash plugin in the WebKit GTK demo application

Flash plugin in the WebKit Qt demo application

Since a few hours ago both WebKit GTK and Qt support plugins! Thanks to everyone who worked on this, in particular to Rodney Dawes (who wrote the original patch in the past months) and to Marc Ordinas i Llopis (who maintained the patch and worked on the Qt port, and who recently joined us at Collabora). A thank you also to Alp Toker and Simon Hausmann who reviewed the patch.

Update: See also Marc’s blog for details.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
368 cd
355 l
274 git
231 vi
131 u
130 q
101 find
94 time
86 grep
79 svn

Some clarifications:

• “l” is an alias for “ls -lhA --color”
• “u” is an alias for “cd ..”
• “q” is an alias for “exit” (I also use CTRL-D for that)
• “time” is there because I use “time make” to see how much time I need to compile things

This blog post was brought to you by the huge time required to link WebKit (I want gold as the default linker!)

“People who open a blog should be identifiable and they should ask people writing comments to be identifiable too.”
– Maurizio Gasparri, from punto-informatico.it

Do I have to use my passport every time I write a comment on a blog? And what do I have to do if the server is hosted in another country?

The sad thing about this is that Gasparri is not just a random ignorant politician: he is the former Italian Minister of Communications, and maybe also the next one as his party is probably going to win the elections on Sunday.

Speaking of which, yesterday I watched a report on BBC about Italian elections and now I’m very sad .

Dear LazyWeb,
  Every time I log into GNOME I have to disable the “Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard” option in “Keyboard Preferences” if I want to be able to use the numpad on my external keyboard. Why disabling it once is not enough? How can I permanently disable this option?

Matthew is leaving the house to move to London:

I wonder why I took a OS/2 Warp box (21 floppy disks + 14 for the bonus pack), a KDE bag and a linux.conf.au 2007 bag…

The LazyWeb was not that useful but I was able to find a plugin that does what I need. It is listed in the plugins page on xchat.org but for some reasons I didn’t find it the first time I searched.

The notify channels plugin has every basic feature I need, and it’s also simple enough to be modified adding some other useful features I would like to have.

Thanks Vlad!

Update: the plugin doesn’t work anymore, xchat-gnome doesn’t load it even if it’s listed in the gconf key /apps/xchat/plugins/loaded. The plugin is not even listed in the “Scripts and Plugins” tab in the preferences dialog. Suggestions on how to fix this?