In my recent PowerTOP adventures I discovered a few timers which could be removed. One was a polling loop in the PCMCIA driver, which I disabled because the interrupts are unreliable, apparently. This turns out to be totally correct, with the polling disabled it doesn't notice me inserting a CF, so I can't do anything. I'll leave this on the "something to pester Richard about when he is less busy" list. The next driver related poll on the list was from a IrDA module. Now, it shouldn't be doing anything because I have nothing apart from the drivers loaded. Even unloading the real drivers and just loading irda.ko caused wakeups, so I hunted around and with lots of Samuel's help (he took my concept patch, and made it actually compile!) we produced a patch which was merged into David Miller's 2.6.25 tree today. Excellent, I'm now a kernel hacker!

To satisfy an idle curiosity, I installed PowerTOP on my Zaurus to see how many wakeups a second it was doing. It started out at 112w/s, which isn't that great, but Richard told me that I should give our 2.6.24-rc8 kernel a go, because it has NO_HZ defined. To our surprise it booted, and to cut a long story short my Zaurus is currently idling at 5.4 wakeups per second, and 11% of those are about to be patched out of the kernel.

As we all know, the Express are a load of xenophobic racist ignorant misleading cocks. Thanks to Iain who pointed me at this glorious post entitled something I won't repeat for fear of offending the children, I discovered what is probably the best example of selective quoting in the Express. They said:

The Government's equality chief Trevor Phillips recently said the fear that migrants are jumping council queues for homes is fuelling tensions.

Well if the government are scared that migrants magically jump up the council house queue, then it must be true. Or is it. The Guardian has the full quote:

Mr Phillips [chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights] said tensions were driven by a widespread perception that newcomers often received unfair advantages. "Specifically, that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly-arrived migrants," he told the [Local Government Association]. "I have never seen any reliable evidence to back up this claim. And there can be no doubt that much of the public feeling is driven by the careless media and racist parties."

If you ever wonder how low the Express and co. will go to get a quote or statistic, this is a good example. In a quote where the essence of the message is that the scum-class tabloids and racist parties are fueling anti-immigration views, they managed to get a quote to support a story against immigration. Well done, Tom Whitehead, you really do deserve a special place in hell. NP: Skreamizm Volume 4, Skream

This has to be some of the harshest trolling I've seen for a long time. If it's not a troll, then someone needs anger management sessions. NP: Central Reservation, Beth Orton

Sound Juicer "Now There's Emptiness In My Bed" 2.21.2 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Again, the response from the gnome-love and GHOP tasks has been great, and there is a lot new in this release.

• Update documentation (Andreas Freund)
• Check extracted filenames are not too long (Ed Catmur)
• Add a Year entry to the main window (Andrzej Polaty ski)
• Add a Duplicate Disc menu item (Dave Meikle)
• Show better error messages if the target directory can't be created (MatzeB)
• Remove branding from the desktop file
• Fix initial playback (Bill O'Shea)
• Hide the progress bar unless ripping (Ghee Teo)
• Move the cursor to always been on the currently playing/ripping track (Dave Meikle)
• When editing album artist, only change track artists if it was the same (Bill O'Shea)

There are many reasons why I love Jon Snow: his eclectic ties and socks, his personal morals and ethics (his biography is pretty good), and of course Snowmail. Today's Snowmail contained this referential gem: These are not just bad sales figures. These are M&S bad sales figures. NP: Herbstlaub, Marsen Jules

Linked In always had the atmosphere of a more serious and professional social networking site, unlike MySpace and Facebook where people seem to collect friends like stickers when they were younger. Then I discovered TopLinked, a site dedicated to letting people grow their network massively to people they've never met. The top member has 37 thousand connections. I just don't understand this, what is the point of having so many connections when there is no value in the connections themselves? NP: Bricolage, Amon Tobin

A new year, a new release of Postr. This release has some useful bug fixes. Now to finish off that grand refactoring...

• Use the GNOME proxy if set
• Don't try and upload images over 10Mb, as Flickr will reject them
• Add a big Upload button to the window
• Fall back on ISO-8859-1 when reading metadata
• Don't show error dialogs with no message

The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are building now.

Over Christmas a load of gnome-love bugs in Sound Juicer were closed thanks to some wonderful people, so to keep people's interest (and try and gain some serious co-maintainers) I've gone through the bug list and marked more gnome-love bugs. There are thirteen bugs marked now, all of which should be no more than a few hours work each, making them perfect fodder for anyone who wants to get more experience with GNOME programming. NP: Bag Lady (Dune DnB Remix), Erykah Badu

I'm selling my camera bag and lens case as I never use them, and thought I'd offer them here first before they hit eBay. Camera bag: Lowepro Toploader 65AW. Very good condition: it's mostly been in a cupboard apart from three weeks in India a while ago. I'm thinking £25 including delivery to the UK. Lens case: Lowepro 1W. This is as-new, and has never left the office. £10 including delivery. If anyone is interested, drop me a mail. NP: Another Late Night: Zero 7

Sound Juicer "Esoteric Quotes, Most Frightening" 2.21.1 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Special thanks to the wonderful people who worked on a few bugs I tagged as gnome-love, and Carl-Anton for working on the SJ GHOP task!

• Save custom genres (#382667, thanks Jonh Wendell)
• Make the progress bar smaller (#460650, thanks Stefan Oderbolz)
• Detect VFAT and NTFS filesystems and strip characters they can't handle (#321436, thanks Carl-Anton Ingmarsson and GHOP)
• Inhibit power management suspension when ripping (#344947, thanks Carl-Anton and GHOP)
• Don't crash when finished extracting (#498500)
• Remove the Rip Completed dialog (#504639)
• Set pipeline state to NULL when disposing (#495410)
• Escape the album and artist in the cluebar (#504862, thanks Luca Cavalli)

It starts off just as you'd expect.

Yes, it s that time of year again. No sooner does an important traditional religious holiday roll around than the PC-brigade feel the need to strip-mine it of its original significance, just so s no-one s feeling get upset.

However, it doesn't quite continue as you were thinking.

It is the Christians who have the most gall of all, daring to attach the name of some first-century Palestinian to a once-proud British festival. Yule I can live with, despite its being a continental bastardisation of our British pronunciation Geola , but Christmas is just wrong. You even have to mispronounce Christ to say it.

An excellent piece of satire from Nathaniel Tapley on Liberal Conspiracy, which is well worth a read for a good laugh. NP: Giant Steps, John Coltrane

Every since the Maemo Chinook beta was relased, people have been asking when we're going to make Pimlico packages available. I'll skip over the fact that Pimlico is open source, so building a package yourself is trivial (I suppose its a good thing that there are users who can't do that!). Now, Pimlico consists of Contacts, Dates and Tasks. Contacts doesn't have a Maemo port as such and the device already has an addressbook of sorts, so I tend to leave that until last. That leaves Dates and Tasks, both of which require an all-new Evolution Data Server to be built, because Nokia strip down EDS for Maemo and don't install the calendar component to save disk space. This generally shouldn't be a problem as we've been building replacement EDS packages for some time now which adds the calendar component and restores some functionality to the common libraries. So, Rob set about re-syncing our packaging with the Chinook EDS (there are several Maemo-specfic patches we obviously need to include) and started a build. Then our plan started to fall apart. To cut a long story short, the Chinook's Application Manager has an additional sanity check which wasn't in previous releases. The gist of it appears to be that a package foo from repository A cannot upgrade package foo from repository B. Or, libebook from maemo.org cannot be upgraded to libebook from o-hand.com. I can see how this can stop people accidently breaking their device by installing broken core packages, but it's also stopping us provide core packages with enhanced functionality. Never fear, we have a plan. It's not incredibly pretty and will take a day or so of tiresome recompiles to get working, but we'll get there. That said, we've all been busy and now it is the Christmas holiday... so I wouldn't bet on being able to run Dates and Tasks on your N800/N810 before the new year. As a reward for patience, however, there are Contacts 0.8 packages for Chinook in our repository. NP: Last.fm Recommendation Radio

Sound Juicer "Sound Sculptures In Space" 2.21.0 is finally out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Add a cluebar when the CD isn't in Musicbrainz (thanks Luca Cavalli, #452047)
• Fix the multiple album select dialog (thanks Rob Bradford, #500815)
• Install 48x48 PNG icon (thanks Andreas Nilsson, #502933)
• Change Deselect All shortcut to Control-Shift-A (thanks Ted Gould, #501442)
• Add Overwrite All/Skip All buttons to the overwrite dialog (thanks Michael Chudobiak, #130782)

USA Networks are evil, mean, nasty people. NP: Bossa Très Jazz: When Japan Meets Europe, Various

I did the quarterly patch review and translation update of Contacts last night, and rolled Contacts 0.8. Nothing amazing in this release, sorry, all of the hard work by Thomas has gone onto the all-new blinging rewrite. NP: Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man

Last night I sat down and hacked a bit more on my Gypsy status monitoring tool thingy. Basically, it shows you all of the information from the GPS, and is mainly useful for checking that the data being sent by Gypsy makes sense. It still needs a fair amount of work, the layout of the labels on the left is clearly sub-optimal and I'd like to have a marker on the satellite image to precisely locate you, but apart from that it's coming together nicely. NP: Storm, Heather Nova

The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer. The only tragedy is that one day, amongst the noise, they might genuinely be on to something, and we would simply laugh. That day has come. ― A Rather Long Build Up To One Punchline

A classic example of the Mail taking a valid scientific press release (that is a surprise) and twisting it into a scare story for no real reason. I wish I could understand how this works to sell papers, although I guess at the end of the day regurgitating a press release with added anger and Moral Outrage without doing any relevant research is a pretty cheap way of filling column inches. NP: F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed You Black Emperor!

So I want to write a small program to read and write data to a serial port (115200 baud, 8N1) using GIOChannel. No matter what I try, I can't seem to get input callbacks from the channel. :( Does anyone have any small working examples of using a GIOChannel to drive a serial port I can look at? NP: Mungo's Hi-Fi at Exodus

I sent this last night to my MP as a followup to his reply to my original letter.

Dear Mark Prisk, Recently I wrote to you regarding the "homoeopathic hospitals" EDM, and your response included the following paragraph: "All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments." I wholeheartedly agree that all therapies provided by the NHS should be judged on openly peer-reviewed evidence of their effectiveness, because otherwise we'd still be using leeches, performing exorcisms or practising blood letting. However, as far as I am aware there is no scientific evidence that homoeopathy is any better than placebo, so could you tell me where you saw the evidence for homoeopathy that you are using to justify homoeopathic hospitals because I'd like to see it myself. Indeed, evidence that it was in fact better than placebo would be welcomed with open arms by the scientific community, because this would open entirely new realms of both medicine and physics. Yours sincerely, Ross Burton