It's been nearly 10 months after the previous Tasks release, for which I profusely apologise. I wanted to fix one final bug before releasing, which sadly took five months to get around too... I eventually fixed it last night, so here is Tasks 0.14.

• Magic date parser when adding tasks
• Support libunique in the GTK+ port (Jonny Lamb)
• Support OWL window menus in the GTK+ port
• Save and restore the edit window size
• Add a clickable note icon (#548)
• Ellipsize the undo/redo menu items (#741)
• Make sure the date popup doesn't go off the screen (#752)

The most interesting change in this release is the magic date parser, which first landed back in March. This lets you use Google Calendar style descriptive tasks such as "release tasks today", "do shopping next tuesday" or "pay bills on 2nd". There are many patterns that are matched but I need two things from any users of Tasks.

1. Translations. At the moment there are only English and French translations for the strings, which are critical for the parser to work. Translators, please update the translations!
2. Feedback. The parser handles all of the natural language expressions that I thought would be useful. There are probably plenty more which are not handled, so if you find one which isn't handled (or is handled incorrectly) then please file a bug.

Oh, and one last thing. The OpenMoko and Maemo ports have likely bitrotted. New functionality has been added to the platform abstraction and I don't think those ports were updated. If someone actively uses Tasks on either Maemo or OpenMoko and is willing to test builds before release, please contact me.

Sound Juicer "Why Should You Know Better By Now" 2.24.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

Sound Juicer "Stab Stab Stab! This Is More Than A Message" 2.23.3 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Don't crash when exiting
• Don't distribute full GFDL with docs
• Correctly parse CDDA URLs (#550131, thanks Matthew Martin)

I hate September because it is in September that I finally get my mobile phone bill from GUADEC.

Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402

Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call. NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

• Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
• Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
• Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
• Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
• Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
• Fix playback track switching (MM)

Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:

• Fix play+pause+play (#523182, thanks Matthew Martin)
• Add %ay, album year (#522909, Juan F. Gim nez Silva)

Hmm, so I never did blog a GUADEC roundup. In two words: it rocked. Congratulations to Baris and everyone else who organised it! In other late GUADEC news I finally reviewed the rest of my GUADEC photos and uploaded them to Flickr. I'll try and not take a month to upload next time, honest!

I've just been informed that Rob Bradford has one large "I3<OH" left. If you want one, then find him fast! The grapevine also says that there is a crack team of rouge OH Men on the loose, so watch out!

I've just been informed that Rob Bradford has one large "IOOH" left. If you want one, then find him fast! The grapevine also says that there is a crack team of rouge OH Men on the loose, so watch out!

Action around GUPnP has been really hotting up recently. Jorn is back from the dead studying and demonstrating that he hasn't lost his touch by refactoring the various audio/visual widgets spread around our toy projects into libowl-av, adding Vala bindings, and then writing a MediaRenderer implementation on top of that. This means we now have reference implementations of the full media specification in the form of gupnp-media-server (server), gupnp-av-cp (control), and gupnp-media-renderer (playback). Also Johan Kristell posted to the list for the first time with an implementation of the Digital Security Camera specifications, both server and client. GUPnP Network Camera currently only supports still images, but as it is based on GStreamer video can't be far away.

As a followup to yesterday's post I profiled the speed of various ways of executing shell scripts on both my laptop using Bash and Dash, and on the Zoom OMAP3430 development board. The results are fairly predictable although the relatively small difference between . foo and ( . foo ) is useful to know. We all knew that Dash was faster than Bash, but this microbenchmark demonstrates it very clearly. It also demonstrates how much faster my laptop is than the (relatively powerful) Zoom development board. Overall conclusion: don't use Bash unless you needs the extra power, and source when possible. NP: Aerial, 2562

case "$1" in
        *.sh)
                # Source shell script for speed.
                (
                        trap - INT QUIT TSTP
                        scriptname=$1
                        shift
                        . $scriptname
                )
                ;;
        *)
                "$@"
                ;;
  esac

OPTIMISATION FAIL. NP: Roseland NYC Live, Portishead

As one of the maintainers of debian.o-hand.com I use the always wonderful pbuilder and cowbuilder to rebuild packages originally build for Debian Sid for Debian Etch, Ubuntu Gutsy, Hardy, and so on. Continually typing the commands to update the cowbuilders can get tiresome fast so last week I scratched the itch and produced Zebu. As of version 0.1 it is barely functional but it does let you update or login to a cowbuilder. It requires that the cowbuilders are named /var/cache/pbuilder/*.cow and doesn't support "traditional" pbuilder rootstraps yet, but that is planned. Anyway, cowbuilders are the future. If anyone else thinks this could be useful there is a tarball and a Bazaar repository. I must also thank the wonderful Ulisse Perusin for the rocking icon he created. NP: Cosmos, Murcof

I'm hacking on a small tool at the moment and need an icon for the launcher. A simple icon of a cow's head would be perfect: anyone know of something like this, or willing to quickly draw one for me?

Another point release of Postr which should fix Flickr authentication for good this time. Also the file size limit has been increased to 20Mb to match the new Flickr limits. The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are being worked on next.

One of the more useful features of the UPnP specification is that devices have a standard way of specifying a "presentation URL", a human-readable web page representing the device. For example, my SoundBridge has a web page which shows the currently playing music and lets me switch radio station, whilst my router's presentation URL is the administration page. Useful, but not exposed anywhere. Until now... This is a small Epiphany extension which adds all presentation URLs it finds to the Nearby Sites menu, just like the URLs discovered using Avahi. It needs a bit more work as it doesn't yet handle being unloaded or devices disappearing, but it is certainly usable now. If anyone else wants to have a go with it, the source can be fetched using Bazaar from here. Watch out for the currently hard-coded paths...

What started off as a quick tutorial to writing a service using GUPnP turned into a week of reviewing and writing more GUPnP documentation. It's all landed in our Subversion repository now but if anyone wants to see how to write a UPnP client, implement the UPnP networked light bulb service, or just browse the beginnings of the glossary, then I have a local copy of the latest documentation online. NP: Aerial, 2562

Growing nicely.

Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0 has finally been released.. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Hot new features!

• Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
• Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
• Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
• Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
• Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
• Add []
• to the special character list (MM)
• Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
• Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp M ller)
• Require intltool 0.40

I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.

Not done one of these round-ups for a while and I'm really pushed for time today, so here are some sites that I've written on:

1. Property of a Lady Wicca on House
2. Ross Burton: The End Of Homeopathy?
3. Enough with the dried yoghurt covered raisins Korerorero: Just random ranting and raving
4. How to host a free software advocacy event Free Software Magazine
5. Raw Output: AGPL
6. One for the Morning Glory: Facebook comments
7. Sam Liddicott GPL3 Questions and Implications
8. Drugs and an Election etbe
9. New Tropicana images
10. robmyers - Support BY-SA/SFDL Compatibility, Not BY-SA/FDL Compatibility
11. Internet Psychology: Teenagers do not need our help online - we need them to help us oldies by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
12. Wanting Your Opinions about Blog Comments and City Attorneys : David Lee King
13. Zookoda - I Don't Recommend them Anymore
14. Solar Water Heating :: ShowBlog
15. Internet Psychology: Forget email - it's old hat by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
16. Drake.org.uk: That's a wrap! Time to roll the end credits..
17. Internet Psychology: Internet criminals are going to have a field day by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
18. A Cambridge Co-operator: Rebranded Stores
19. robmyers - Two Common Errors
20. Lucas Nussbaum's Blog Blog Archive Where is the NM bottleneck?
21. NM: FD is fixed - MadBlog