Since Kristian’s excellent GTK State of the Union talk was today his slot is now available for a Patchsquad BOF. So that’s tomorrow at 11am. Thanks Behdad for allowing us to grab this. A little background on the idea of a Patchsquad: Primarily the idea is to reduce the workload of maintainers by commenting, not reviewing, patches that are waiting in Bugzilla. This may include testing, checking for obvious issues and gentle pestering of maintainers. Lucas held a BOF last year to introduce the idea that was well attended and a lot said but interest seems to have twindled. Myself and Diego want to try reinvigorate the idea! Update: Whoops! Looks like we haven’t got that slot afterall. If you’re interested in the Patchsquad pleas some along and speak to either Diego or myself.

Lesson for today: avoid situations such that the GObject dispose vfunc gets called on the same object from different threads interleaved with each other. Bad things happen.

I’ve just finished listening to the broadcast of a radio play based on Blood, Sweat and Tea a collection of posts from by favourite blog Random Acts of Reality. Random Acts is written by “Tom Reynolds” (a pseudonym) an EMT with the London Ambulance service. I guess I enjoy reading this blog so much because it shows an insight into the lives of members of an essential but very much unappreciated occupation. Well worth adding to your daily blog intake. Direct listen again link. Playing in the browser is all garbled :-/

• I guess i'm boring but... at Rob Bradford's Weblog - I'd find an alterslash-style Skip link more useful than the recently-added "Hide Author" links on planet.debian. Also, why does google put that in a bookmarklet instead of using a simple link?
• Debian, and other stuff Trying to launch emacs only when needed - can emacsclient run elisp? It would be really useful to be able to remote-control Emacs like that.
• Bubulle's weblog: F1 and anthems - at least France has an anthem... England doesn't. The slightly-religious/King-supported/used-at-cricket/Labour-linked Jerusalem and pretty-aggressive/Conservative-linked Land of Hope and Glory are often used, but aren't official.
• Write a new license, every day - Ganneff's Little Blog - this is why I was scared SPI might create a new licence for the debian logo by accident, instead of using the MIT/Expat one requested.

I still can’t get the hang of RSS feed aggregators. There is something about the Google reader’s uniformity that I find unsettling. Block after block of text all neatly laid out. But… it is really useful to keep track of those feeds that aren’t listed on the the planets like Random Acts of Reality, MySociety and Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once. So, I was cheered up no end to discover they have a “Next” bookmarklet. Once added to your toolbar or whatever this lets you go to your next unread post in the page where the post comes from. Yay, no more uniformity, yay, personal expression. Oh, but everyone is using Kubrick.

Shoes get caught when trying to put on waterproofs? Simply place a carrier bag over your shoe. Your foot will then glide smoothly through without getting snagged. Essential advice for anyone braving the elements in the UK tonight.

So. I bought some fennel from Borough Market and couldn’t really decide what to do with it. Since I needed to make flapjack I thought i’d maximise the use of the oven and make a spicy roast vegetable soup. So here is the recipe: Take some carrots, peel them (despite them being the sort you don’t need to peel but they’ve since gone a bit ick in the fridge) and slice in half. Then chop fennel and two medium onions into the same size chunks. Place them in a deepish tray and drizzle with lots of olive oil. Then sprinkle over salt, sage and black pepper. Place in a lowish oven (~120) for half an hour or so. Shaking in the middle. Just before you are going to take the veg out of the oven melt around 50g of butter in a largeish saucepan and put the kettle on. Dump the veg into the butter and sweat for a little bit. Use some of the hot water from the kettle to scrub off any tasty bits from the roasting tray (not going to be much if it’s non-stick). Next, put two heaped teaspoons of boullion powder (or a stock cube or two) in with the vegetables and add water until they are reasonably covered. Add chilli flakes and some black pepper. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 10 minutes. Next is the messy part. Take off the heat and use a blender to blend until the texture is thick with the odd interesting bit. Put back onto the heat. Bring back to the boil and simmer for another 5 minutes. Season to taste, adding a bit of fresh parsley at the last minute.

Today I got a new toy from Ross, a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. He was one of my first victims. Inspired by Luis i’ve made all my photos CC BY-SA-NC. It seems like the next logical step since the main rreason I take photos and upload them to Flickr is to share with everyone else.

So, Ross went ahead and spoilt my fun by announcing the funky new Poky site with the awesomely cute Beaver mascot. I’ve been spending the last few weeks getting the release together and testing on some of our new hardware platforms. My main contribution to this release however was the awesome new Anjuta plugin that does lots of cool stuff to help you develop with Poky. Enough babbling, go for the screencast (OGG version).
Woooh! Anjuta plugin in action Thanks to the nice guys at iRex Technologies for sponsoring this work. As usual, packages are available at the OH repository.

Since Clutter 0.6 was released today i’ve been building packages like mad. You can fetch them for the components released today (core, cairo, gst and gtk) from the OH repository at debian.o-hand.com. This includes packages built for Ubuntu ‘gutsy’ and Debian unstable. Packages for the bindings will also be uploaded when the new versions are released over the coming days.

Awesomeness. Thanks to Jeff for organising it. My talks went really well, thanks to everyone who attended, asked questions and gave feedback. Huge kudos to the other participants. Some great things were shown off and discussed. I’d also like to use this opportunity to promote Josh Stewart’s Gloss. It’s a replacement MythTV frontend using Clutter. He’d love to get some more MythTV users to test it.

A Snowman in Melbourne

So, if i’ve put my Oyster card through the wash does that mean i’ve broken the money laundering rules? And, more importantly, is it still going to work?

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

Phew, Rob, I thought that was Debian's 50000th bug!

Fortunately, I haven't lost the bet!

The 500,000 bug was reported yesterday. Compare this with the rather lacklustre performance of the KDE bugzilla on only ~150,000.

It seems the Wordpress developers have made some wrong decisions in their use of MD5. Full details are in this announcement. In summary, the hash in the cookie for authentication contains MD5(MD5(password)) and the database MD5(password). This means that anyone with access to the hash from the database can pretend to be this user. Whoops. This shows that once again that security is hard as people consistently make the same mistakes. More details and background on the Security Group blog.

My friend Martin has started a blog on usability, Yes, No, Cancel? (or in German, Ja, Nein, Abbrechen). He appears to have stalled after a good start so perhaps this mention will get him going again. He offers usability consulting through his company, Ept Computing.
Martin, an early victim of the new camera

Howies have an excellent range of ethical and ecologicaly sound clothes. Whilst I was in their shop on Carnaby St I bought a bright orange Nalgene, They sell them to encourage people to use one bottle rather than hundreds or thousands of plastic bottles, to encourage this further they have a tap in their store where you can fill up your purchase. Smart thinking. Their blog is a little bit crazy though. On the way back from Carnaby St I got a bit lost and ended up at Playlounge which sells the cool vinyl toys that adorn OH cental. Whilst I was there I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Clutter Magazine.

If I had a grain of rice for every minute I have spent watching a progress bar over the years, I would be able to make you all a bowl of kedgeree. As it is, I shall cook you all up a weekly article instead.

Stephen Fry now has a geeky column in the The Guardian’s Saturday glossy.

Packages for Anjuta 2.2.2 were uploaded to Debian unstable yesterday. I also built packages for Ubuntu’s ‘gutsy’ and put them in a PPA on Launchpad. The packages currently available in ‘gutsy’ are liable to crash due to issues with the plugins. The sources.list line for these packages is:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/robster/ubuntu gutsy universe