.. computers. LCA is in town, and there’s bands of nerds prowling the streets looking for their next innocent victim.

Haven’t seen much so far, been sick with a mild cold courtesy of Finn. Caught Robert Love bashing his head on a table and giving a quick demo of Beagle and F-Spot. Beagle is kinda cool, except the backends are very GNOME specific, which is kinda annoying for non-GNOME users. It also explicitly calls “nautilus” to open files and so on, although I have a patch to call “konqueror” instead.

F-Spot looks ok, although doesn’t seem to be as functional yet as digikam.

Did a bit of work while watching horms’ talk on SSL. I’d never looked into SSL but it looks like it’s actually a fairly well thought out protocol, although he was talking about essentially the fourth revision, so they’ve had time to get it right.

Saw a really interesting talk by Simon Burton (I think), about using these weird gloves to control music programs. Would have liked to have caught his act at Toast, but wasn’t feeling up to a night out.

Interesting shenanigans re BitKeeper today.

Being a non-BK-using kernel coder I’ll be interested in any new tool that emerges.

Although there’s some great tools out there to make life easier, being able to use a real version control system for kernel work would be sweet.

I had the pleasure of downing a few ales last night at the Phoenix while listening to the Bootleg sessions, or whatever they call it. Bascially it’s poor starving musicians playing for almost free, all they get is the tips people give them.

I was a bit late and missed the start of some girl’s set, which was a pity, she was good.

Next up might have been “Changeable Dan” but I didn’t really catch the name. They were really good, somewhat reminiscent at times of Aforafro, a great Canberra band from days of old.

Was good to hear some local musos for a change, check it out sometime!

Went for a stroll round Ainslie the other day, and took some random shots, just for the fun of it.

Some are of houses I liked, some I didn’t like, and a few sunset shots.

View the photos »

I promised Alli I’d put up some photos of the house looking nice, so here they are. These are from a few weeks ago (when I wasn’t sick!) when we thought we were having an inspection. As it turned out we never had the inspection, the agent forgot, but at least the house got cleaned up.

View the photos »

There’s a manky bug in QT 3.3.3 that causes my mailer to convert tabs to spaces. Needless to say that’s a little annoying. It’s fixed in QT 3.3.4.

I got sick of waiting for the official 3.3.4 Debian packages so I rolled my own. These aren’t Debian Packages®™, they’re packages for debian, or in other words they work for me and other than that I wouldn’t know.

Get ’em for x86 here.

ps. Before you say anything, my sources tell me this bug doesn’t affect fvwm so you’re safe.

Just a brief note to all my fans, despite the Lyme’s best efforts I’m still breathing.

I’ve been laid up in bed, and on the couch, most of the week, but am back at work today, feeling a bit better. Still quite fatigued, easily puffed and generally not very energetic. But on the mend.

I’ve got a patch I went to get sorted, tested and out the door before it’s too late for 2.6.12, so I’m keen to get back on the wagon. At the same time I’ve still got probably a fortnight’s antibiotics ahead of me and plenty of bacteria to kill, so I might work from home a bit here and there to help keep my energy up.

So it seems that one of the Ticks I brought back from the coast a fortnight ago was carrying Lyme disease and has now kindly donated it to me.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection treated with antibiotics, I’m currently taking Doxycycline for it. Out on the net there seems to be some disagreement as to whether it can be eradicated with antibiotics, some doctors believe it may be able to hibernate (my word) and cause recurring infections. Let’s hope not.

Symptoms are fairly varied and vague, something that has lead to Lyme being mis-disagnosed as chronic fatigue, MS and Rheumatoid arthritis. Currently I’m experiencing a non-descript rash (not Bull’s-eye), aches and pains, and extreme fatigue.

Perhaps interestingly I only went to the doctor after reading about Ticks and Tick-borne infections on Wikipedia, so thanks to the folks at Wikipedia.

No thanks to the folks at ebay (and Google pull your head in!):

Lyme Disease Tick

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Stumbled across this excellent article at Joel on Software today, via some tangential web surfing. (No relation to tantric web surfing)

I’ve been reading a lot of code lately, and I totally agree with him when he says “It’s harder to read code than to write it”. He argues that this is why programmers so often rewrite things rather than extend or even fork an existing implementation.

Of more interest to me, because as ambitious as I am, I’m not about to write my own kernel, are his comments on reading people’s code:

I think the best way to read somebody else’s code is just to SLOW DOWN… it’s like deciphering a code, not like reading.

Most people have trouble reading code because their eyes are used to reading at a certain speed from reading text written in human languages. But code is much more dense than English, and contains ‘secrets’ that need to be deciphered by looking elsewhere: for example, when you see that function call that says UpdateData(FALSE), unless you remember how UpdateData() works, you have to go look for it to figure out what the first argument is and what FALSE means.

My emphasis

I wrote before about amarok and how cool it is. At the time I was holding off judgement on the audioscrobbler integration.

As it turns out Jeremy has beaten me to it.

So far I think it’s pretty sweet, and looks promising as a way of discovering new music.

Amarok provides the “Now Playing” image on the sidebar of this page, and if you click it you’ll be taken to my audioscrobbler page which displays what I’ve been listening to.

For the tin-foil hat brigade their privacy policy looks pretty solid, to sign up all you need is a username, everything else is optional.