Thanks to a Mr. Kandinski, I just learned about what looks to be like a really useful (and pretty) guide for graduate students and young professors.

Carpenter Mukti Mitchell has set off on a tour of the coastline of Britain in a zero-emission microyacht promoting low carbon lifestyles. During the course of his voyage, he will be stopping at 40 ports and towns around the country with events organised to promote low carbon products and services. He doesn't call at Clevedon or King's Lynn (I guess they're too far inland) but he's currently in South Wales and should be calling at Wells-next-the-Sea on 21 July and Sheringham on 23. More dates The Phone Co-op (agent 471) is a co-sponsor of this event with, among others, Ecotricity, Resurgence and Co-operative membership so at least two of my co-operatives are supporting it.

NTL blocking web sites?

Is ntl blocking access to thepiratebay or was ntl's Norwich cache broken? (Is this ntl Virgin Media now?)

BBC NEWS World Europe Gorbachev wades into piracy row

How not to make friends and influence people, the Microsoft way. With the result that:

BBC NEWS World Europe Piracy case collapses in Russia

Well, that was always going to happen!

Microsoft standards bid faces failure - Computeract!ve

and while I'm grumbling about Microsoft (which I don't do very often, but I may have a pop at Vista in a week or so), here's Open XML failing to get fast-tracked.

Denmark mandates open standards by 2008

...but they've still got friends in Denmark's standards body.

Random thought: Roomba scare

Self-improvement for Vacuum Cleaners! Now that would be bad tech.

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

I always sign up for plain text if it's available. HTML-only is a big discouragement. HTML with a useless plain text part like that is nearly always deleted unread. Protx, this means you!

VOIP IP Telephony: Skype dumps you BIOS info and sends home!

Yet another way that Skype is evil. See also:

pagetable.com Skype Reads Your BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number

Internet phones have a lot to answer for, including my imminent router upgrade:

Bagel Belly Blog: Future proof

The browser-awkwardness of the current router's web interface is another reason I'm looking at OpenWRT-like replacements.

FastMail.FM weblog: More greylisting details

Greylisting seems good, but xbl is a terrible blacklist. I don't know how it works and it has often listed new ISP mail relays (which were not open relays or exploited). Avoid xbl.

debian.org and SPAM - MadBlog

Using RBLs to trigger greylisting seems like a good idea to me.

Sue them all.

Finally, this would be funny if it wasn't so silly. Advertisers: be careful of your music placements or you might start a bomb scare. Although, musical bombs? Wouldn't that be a bit of a Hollywood film stunt?

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok.. Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.

I have Dreams I would be embarrassed to admit in public... that suddenly are not so embarrassing anymore!

I dream of winning 1 million Euros in the lottery, starting a Debian Foundation, buying a whole building in the best area of Madrid, making myself a nice home in the attic, with a huge terrace for Vi and Jazz, and having the Debian headquarters there. With that amount of money it would either be the Foundation or the building... So it really is wishful dreaming.

But sometimes I let this dreaming go on further, and I dream of winning more money, buying a whole island, starting a new country there, and calling it Debian Land, getting all DDs a Debian Passport, sponsoring their holidays with their families there, in the Debian Island, with great Internet connection, sun and wonderful beaches, so that they can gather, without waiting for Debconf, or just enjoy a break.

I learnt yesterday that The Micronation of Sealand is for sale and that the people behind The Pirate Bay want to buy it: With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizien.

So I guess I am not the only one who dreams of starting a country where one can be really free. And Sealand is so close to the Debian Developer Centre of Mass... it s so tempting...

They even have a Plan B: If we do not get enough money required to buy The Micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somewhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from USD 50.000). That s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it doesn t sound so stupid anymore.

I just need to be more constant in my lottery playing, and have some faith.

Swing dancing (i.e. Lindy Hop, Balboa, Boogie Woogie) is my big hobby these days. It started with Rock'n'Roll dancing some years ago, and when I was in Berkeley I picked up some Lindy. Since February I've been going to social lindy dancing every couple of weeks. This month I've become a member of Boogie Bären (yes, that is "boogie bears"), a Munich dance club, and started taking classes in Lindy Hop, Boogie and Balboa every week, in addition to my usual lindy social dancing on sunday. Right now I'm right in an "extreme dancing" phase. It started tuesday with the Lindy classes (yes, both of them, over 3 hours), followed by the boogie beginners class on wednesday and the balboa beginners class on thursday. Friday there was a great balboa and swing party in a bar, with top attendees: the teachers of the workshops on saturday and sunday (which I have attended and will continue to attend tomorrow), Andy & Christelle from Lyon and Marty & Valerie from Cleveland. They've been great teachers so far, and their skills are very impressive. And they showed us some really cute moves. After the second half of the workshop on sunday, there will be social lindy dancing in the evening again, monday evening there is swing dancing in another bar in Munich [Update: with live music, Route 66, in addition to the usual singing DJ], tuesday will likely feature a liveband and boogie dancing (it's a holiday, so no regular lindy classes that day), followed again by boogie beginners course on wednesday, balboa class on thursday, maybe balboa and swing dancing in a bar on friday. Maybe I'll then watch the German championships in Boogie Woogie and Rock'n'Roll on saturday, social dancing on sunday and monday again, and so on. It's getting somewhat out of hand, as you can see. I should focus more on my diploma thesis instead... so I'll skip saturday. ;-) [Update: did I mention that Munich has a fantastic Lindy/Balboa scene? Upcoming events include a big balboa weekend 11./12. november, the new years swing ball and the Rock that swing festival in February.]

You may remember that I've had trouble with BT's junk mail (twice) following leaving them in 2004. As mentioned in "A note on phone numbers and forms" recently, BT seems to have delayed my line from the Phone Coop to the new house (waiting for BT engineers to fix some problem at the exchange). Today I got a postcard saying "There's never been a better time to make savings with BT. [...] Come on, come back to BT's best ever offer and start saving." Where did they get my details from? I suspect it's the engineering request from the Phone Coop. I think I'll try to do some damage to BT now and make this bad practice more expensive for them. I can't believe this isn't abuse of a dominant market position. BT owns the only telephone network here and is the largest retail telco, despite having IMO the worst service.

The Philadelphia Orchestra just announced the launch of an online store, where they are selling tracks directly from their own website. Following in the tentative steps of MySpace, eMusic, and Yahoo!, the Orchestra is selling unencumbered (i.e., DRM-free) MP3’s. Even better, for a slightly higher price, you can download content in the higher quality (lossless) FLAC format. Performances currently seemed to be priced at approximately $5 for the MP3 version and $6 for the FLAC version. This seems just about right to me. As an added bonus, they’re offering Beethoven’s Fifth in C minor for free. I’d love to see more of the industry move in this direction, particularly for longer-tail type cultural content like classical and world music. These recent developments are certainly a good start. It will be interesting to see if the iTunes Store eventually is forced to respond to these pressures.

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

I hate debugging. I strongly prefer writing code that works to finding problems in code later. Because I hate it, I've never been good at it. I've never spent the effort to figure out a good, systematic way to find a bug. Instead, I've developed ways of avoiding them. In the long run, this isn't the smartest strategy: every now and then a bug slips through, and then I'm screwed. Worse, sometimes I need to debug other people's code. David J. Agans's book Debugging is a gem. It crystallizes an approach to debugging that feels very good to me. In summary:

• Understand the system
• Make it fail
• Quit thinking and look
• Divide and conquer
• Change one thing at a time
• Keep an audit trail
• Check theplug
• Get a fresh view
• If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed

None of these should come as a surprise to anyone experienced in programming, of course, but I've never seen them presented together, or so well. Agans's genius is not that he's come up with a new debugging method, but in presenting the obvious aspects of the debugging process in a clear, logical manner. Also, he has funny war stories. The book is written in a fairly chatty manner, with many jokes. The style, or the jokes, don't get in the way, and they may help remember particular points better. It's a fairly short book, at about 170 pages. I like that: I dislike the modern tendency of making computer books so thick and heavy that future civilizations will assume we used them for bricks. It's only been a few days since I read the book. It's already made me a better programmer. Highly recommended.

One of my former teachers told a reporter from the local paper that I had just gotten back from Israel and he called me to set up an interview to get my views on the recent conflict. I met with him monday, and the story is now in print. I haven’t seen where in the physical paper it is, but it’s position on the webpage suggests it’s a front-page story. It’s available online here: The Pilot: War Zone: Local Residents Flee Mideast.

This is what happens when you use fancy XGl/aiglx/whatever eye-candy too much. It will infect (remember the viral properties of opensource software) your body, and you'll start randomly flipping over, too.

Ding ding. (Round 1 - for those who missed it) Kidding aside, remember that I like and respect both of them. Libraries In the first article, I mentioned that Ruby has a lot of momentum, which is a pleasant change from Tcl's relative 'uncoolness' amongst the Web 2.0/O'Reilly/"next big thing" crowd. That said, there are still places where that momentum hasn't taken it. I set about writing some code that I'd wanted to play with that involves sending some email. Something that's very easy in Tcl: http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/doc/smtp.html (towards the end of thepage). Python seems to have a pretty complete email system too, for that matter: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-email.html. So it appears that, based on a sample of one attempted task (how's that for statistics?), that Ruby is still lacking a few things in its standard distribution. Note that this functionality is available elsewhere (TMail, to cite one), but email is ubiquitous enough that it ought to be in the standard library. Command line swiss-army knife While Ruby's OO system gives it a head start when you need to create a larger system with distinct parts, it can still be used as a quick'n'dirty scripting language for quick one-off jobs. From the man page:

% cat /tmp/junk
matz
% ruby -p -i.bak -e  $_.upcase!  /tmp/junk
% cat /tmp/junk
MATZ

Very handy. Tcl's command-based syntax just isn't quite as quick for those sorts of operations, so Ruby wins hands down here. I've suggested that the Tcl folks distribute a second program that takes a lot of the Perl-style command line arguments for this sort of work, but the idea doesn't seem to be of much interest. C API's On another tack completely, one of the things that originally drew me to Tcl was its very, very nice C API. It's documentation is clear, and thorough, and the API itself lets you get involved in pretty much any aspect of the language that you want. This makes sense, because when Tcl was originally created by Dr. Ousterhout in the late '80ies, the idea was to create a scripting language as a C library that would be loaded into other programs. The language has always been faithful to its heritage, and to this day I find it lots of fun to merge Tcl with C code. I have to admit that I don't know the Ruby API all that well, but what I have looked up looks pretty nice. To a certain degree, it's comparing apples and oranges, because Ruby requires you to deal with the very object oriented nature of the language, whereas Tcl is a lot more direct. The Programming Ruby book's coverage of the subject also leads me to believe that Tcl really gives you access to more stuff (interpreters, channels, events, and many other parts of the system). Ruby seems to take an approach that might best be described as letting you write Ruby in C - meaning that you create Ruby objects, use their methods, get their values, and so on, but you're still really dealing with Ruby. This has a certain elegance, but sometimes it's necessary to muck about with things at a lower level. I don't know how it works out in practice, but Ruby has a bit more infrastructure in place for actually building extensions once you've created them. Tcl has "tea", which is a set of m4 macros, but anyone can tell you that the auto tools are not much fun to work with (going to the dentist is more fun) - anything that keeps me away from them is welcome. Garbage collection One of the more interesting aspects of the different approaches to C interoperability is the fact that Tcl uses a simple, robust, straightforward reference counting system to keep track of, and throw away resources that are no longer used. Ruby has a mark and sweep garbage collector, which is probably more sophisticated, but also more complicated, and requires a bit more support from the programmer initially. The benefit is that once things are set up, they require less keeping track of, because you hand off memory management to the computer. From the end user's point of view, Ruby wins here, but if you happen to be writing a C extension, I could see it being more difficult to write and debug to this API, although Tcl has its own warts, one of the worst of which is the fact that Tcl values must be convertible back and forth to strings, so that for things like a file handle that can't really survive the round trip, because it's just a pointer, you use a hash table and some sort of string to hold onto the object:

 "file1" -> int fd1
 "file2" -> int fd2

which makes it impossible to GC these values. I suspect that both approaches have their merits - Ruby's is more elegant, but Tcl's is simple and rugged. Licensing Bouncing back to something completely non-technical, Ruby's licensing is either the GPL, or their own license. If I understand things correctly, you can get around the GPL's "viral nature" by simply renaming things, if you have a need to include Ruby in a proprietary product:

1. You may distribute the software in object code or executable form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following: a) distribute the executables and library files of the software, together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent) on where to get the original distribution. b) accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of the software. c) give non-standard executables non-standard names, with instructions on where to get the original software distribution. d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.

So it seems that you're ok if you just call it something else. However, the license goes on to talk about several other files in the core distribution:

1. You may modify and include the part of the software into any other software (possibly commercial). But some files in the distribution are not written by the author, so that they are not under this terms. They are gc.c(partly), utils.c(partly), regex.[ch], fnmatch.[ch], glob.c, st.[ch] and some files under the ./missing directory. See each file for the copying condition.

Looking through the LEGAL file in the distribution shows that there are files distributed under other terms. Of course, they're all free software, but some are LGPL, some BSD, and a few others for good measure. Tcl's licensing, on the contrary, requires very little understanding. The language was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and the license remains BSD. This goes for many of the libraries and extensions as well. If you need to embed a language in your proprietary system, Tcl and its libraries present no problems whatsoever. Of course, I prefer to work with open source code and communities, but that's not possible 100% of the time, so it's always nice to know things are free and clear, should that need arise. Internationalization This is something the Ruby folks know they need to fix, and are working on, so it's not worth dwelling on it much, but it is a proud point for the Tcl community. Tcl has had very nice i18n setup for many years, at this point - since the 8.0 release. It's built into the language, so that everything works with it. You have commands to set encodings of IO channels, and even munge strings. Tcl wins here - no contest. As I continue exploring Ruby, I think I'll find more stuff to compare with Tcl, so we won't ring the final bell just yet.

Sound Juicer "It's Not Very Pretty I Tell Thee" 2.14.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of bug fixes here:

• Change CD lookup query to allow MB to proxy requests to FreeDB
• Ship a copy of taglibid3mux and tell people to use id3mux when creating the MP3 profile
• Remove SjProfileChooser, use gnome-media's widget
• Preferences dialog isn't modal
• Don't show the main window if there is an error
• Handle NULL profiles without crashing the Preferences dialog
• The duration and track number column are not resizable (Wouter Bolsterlee)
• Don't hardcode compiler options, use GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS
• Volumn should not display stock_volume-0 for volume > 0 (Dennis Cranston)
• Handle sortnames being NULL
• Don't leak the GnomeProgram reference
• Ensure the Play/Pause button stays the same size (Christian Neumair)
• Don't progress change notifications from the pipeline (Christian Neumair)
• Handle all paranoia modes (Marinus Schraal)
• Check iterator access to shut up GCC
• Fix the program name not being translated
• Add MAINTAINERS
• Install icons mode 0644 instead of 0755

Translators: Ales Nyakhaychyk (be), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Ivar Smolin (et), Kostas Papadimas (el), Petr Tome (cs), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Vladimer Sichinava (ka).

I'm miraculously on my way back from London, after spending a week with daf, mvo and two guests, abel and thep, from Hong Kong and Thailand, working on improving some l10n aspects of the upcoming Ubuntu release, dapper. The most visible result of the stuff that we've been doing is that if all goes well, users of the Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Bengali, Lao or Korean languages will get their required input methods, fonts and dictionaries Just Working as soon as their drives spit their dapper install CDs. We've learned quite a bit about the state of many of the Asian languages in the Free Software world today. Daf and I can certainly tell when an app renders Bengali or Thai correctly and when it doesn't, after closely comparing how different browsers do the job on various websites and font test pages. We've learned more than we probably like about fontconfig, and thanks to mvo, there is now a mechanism to get custom fonts.conf snippets depending on the default language of the system set by language-selector, so users get the right fonts installed and used by default. Thep's and Abel's help to get this straight is invaluable. On Friday, daf and I went to the ExCel Novotel where the Launchpad team is having a sprint, in order to lend a hand with the dapper translation import that is going on right now, but for a series of reasons we ended up working on l10n sprint stuff. At least I got to see the team again, and specially kiko, who greeted me with a "Qu pasa, hijo de puta!" The real life side of this sprint has been less exciting than on other occasions, as due to being few in number and being quite tired, we haven't gone out of Earl's Court area until today. Still, our exploring around the hotel has yield some nice discoveries. On Sunday, mvo and I were looking for a place to have dinner, and stumbled uppon the Troubadour a place which can either be a pub, a restaurant, a social club or a theatre, depending on your mood. The food was excellent, and the staff was really friendly. I found a Dictionary of Slang in one of the book shelves, and learned a few funny phrases. Other days we've been to good Italian, Indian or Chinese restaurants, but we couldn't resist to go back to Trobadour again. On our last night, Mark took us to a place in the South Kesington area, with again was very good. Abel left just after dinner as his flight was at 5AM from Stansted, and we hope he made it OK to the Netherlands, as at 00:30 or so he phoned us and seemed to be pretty lost somewhere. mvo left early in the morning, so daf, thep and I went to visit some bits of the city. My plane was at 16:45GMT, and we calculated that I should be leaving the K&K at 15:00 to be well on track for my flight. We went to Monument to see the tower, went up and enjoyed both the great views over London and the Thames river, as well as the really cold wind which made me swear once again about the %*@!# lack of Spring in the UK. It was getting quite late for me, so we went to China Town for lunch. Despite the restaurant people being really quick, I only managed to leave the place at 14:50, but given my travel plan was pretty conservative, I was supposed to be safe still. Daf left me at the tube station entrance, and there I started my way too stressful journey back to Val ncia. If on our way to London Carlos and were quite close to find our flight closed, this time, I think I hit the limits. I really don't know how daf and I arrived to the conclusion that leaving Earl's Court at 15:20 was acceptable to get in Heathrow on time. I ran up and down the tube stations, grabbed by luggage, and rushed back to the station, but I had just missed a train to Heathrow and that made me lose some precious 10 minutes. As stations passed by, it became clearer that we had fucked up somewhere when deciding at what time I needed to leave. At 15:35 I was still in the Hammersmith station, with half of the Picadilly line ahead before arriving to the aiport. I sent a message to daf, so he started to get prepared about me staying to sleep somewhere in London. As soon as the train's doors opened, a number of people rushed out. Someone ahead of me fell when climbing the automatic staircase and I somehow managed to jump over him, with luggage and all. After a run that seemed like half an hour, I arrived at the Iberia desk and, panting, I could only articulate "Tarde para Val ncia?". The guy at the counter looked at me, and with a "this can't be true" expression in his face, he picked up a phone and asked "Is it already closed? [...] Can you open it for one more piece of luggage? Thanks." In the meanwhile, I had been busy removing a 500 ml yoghourt from my bag, fearing having all my clothes smelling like strawberry back in Val ncia. The guy handed me a boarding pass, and gave me instructions about the "Iberia Room" near my gate. I asked him what that was about, and he says "oh, of course, you're in Business Class". For a second, I was reminded of stargirl's tricks to get free upgrades when flying, and immediately I was reminded that I was still in a hurry, and I should rush to my gate. And so I did, forgetting to thank the guy for being so kind. I left my yoghourt there though, so at least he could get some food if he was hungry. The long line before the security check was exasperating, and when I finally went past it, I had to run all over terminal two to my gate, where everyone appeared to be waiting just for me. The doors closed as soon as I entered the aircraft, and I sat in the first row, got a free newspaper and a free meal. I couldn't believe my luck. As I write this, we've gone over the Pyrenees, which are not as snowy as a month ago, but they still look beautiful from up here. I'm glad to be back in Val ncia.

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know Why She's Ridin' So High" 2.13.6 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Yes, this is too late for the 2.13 RC, but I thought I best get the package out anyway. Bug fixes:

• Rocking new icon from Lapo Calamandrei
• UI Review attack on Preferences dialog
• Don't cache metadata, it's a pain
• Change the sample metadata to a real song
• Show file extension in sample filename
• Use rather than x in progress bar
• Untranslate strings that should not be translated

Translators: Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), I aki Larra aga (eu), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Kjartan Maraas (no), Kostas Papadimas (el), Lasse Bang Mikkelsen (da), Leonid Kanter (ru), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Priit Laes (et), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rhys Jones (cy), Rostislav Raykov (bg), Satoru SATOH (ja), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Tino Meinen (nl), Vladimer SIchinava (ka), Woodman Tuen (zh_HK), Woodman Tuen (zh_TW), ygimantas Beru ka (lt).

Very, very true:

Architecture is the stuff that you can't refactor in an afternoon.

(via The Pragmatic Architect)