Older blog entries for dgh (starting at number 20)

serious change

My friend Francis has launched Serious Change, an initiative to represent UK citizens who want climate change to be taken as seriously as it deserves to be, and who believe it can be an opportunity and not just a threat. As a MySociety dude, Francis knows a thing or two about getting people engaged via useful websites.

Francis rightly points out that climate change is not a partisan issue. Nor is it a ‘green’ issue. It affects us all. It's not just another environmental problem. It changes everything. Individual, voluntary action will not solve it — even the Confederation of British Industry is calling for the government to legislate (and is in the meantime getting proactive). Furthermore, what we do (or don't do) about it now can seriously affect how things turn out.

Given the urgency and magnitude of the problem, why don't we seem to be taking serious action?

If you feel similarly, I urge you to join in.

Syndicated 2008-10-24 16:37:40 (Updated 2008-10-24 17:19:27) from Dafydd

Control-click

The fact that you can use Control-click to open URLs in Gnome Terminal is not very discoverable. (Just clicking doesn't do anything; perhaps this is to avoid breaking text selection?) I can't remember how I found out about it myself, but somebody I pointed it out to recently was delighted that they didn't have to use the context menu to open URLs, so I think it deserves wider publicity.

Syndicated 2008-03-25 16:59:29 (Updated 2008-03-25 17:01:04) from Dafydd

Internet cloud

This is my new favourite depiction of the Internet, courtesy of RFC 908:

Given that the Internet is a bit like a game of Robot Finds Kitten, it only makes sense that it look like one. Alternatively, it's reminiscent of the swearing in Asterix, which is also appropriate.

Syndicated 2008-01-06 23:44:29 from Dafydd

do not confuse

stationary stationery shop	mobile stationery shop
stationary mobile shop	mobile mobile shop

Syndicated 2007-12-24 02:15:16 (Updated 2007-12-24 02:34:09) from Dafydd

identity management

Crypto-Gram recently recommended a study by Utica College's Centre for Identity Management & Information Protection. They do not limit their interest in personal information to the abstract: indeed they require your name, job title, company and email address if you would like to read the study.

Syndicated 2007-11-25 21:54:16 from Dafydd

Loudmouth 1.3.2 released

I just released Loudmouth 1.3.2. This has been some time in the making: the goal has been to provide new features and keep compatibility with the stable 1.2 branch while Loudmouth 2.0 matures. We managed to add support for STARTTLS encryption, SASL authentication and DNS SRV lookups with minimal additions to the API. Together, these changes mean that Loudmouth will Just Work with your Jabber account in more cases, and that Loudmouth complies better with the XMPP 1.0 standard.

Users of Gossip and Telepathy will benefit from these improvements, and they should land in Maemo in the Diablo timeframe. We anticipate some stabilisation work on the 1.3 branch followed by a stable 1.4 release.

Senko deserves much of the credit for this release; he worked hard to make this happen. Thanks to Micke for supporting me in getting my first Loudmouth release out. Thanks also to Nokia, who supported Collabora's work.

Syndicated 2007-10-31 16:54:47 (Updated 2007-10-31 17:34:17) from Dafydd

kasa

Yesterday I borrowed Mika's umbrella.

mi kasa es tu kasa

Syndicated 2007-10-09 16:02:28 (Updated 2007-10-09 16:05:17) from Dafydd

Eat / Don't Eat

• Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit
• Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
• Eat This Book: The Holy Community at Table with Holy Scripture
• Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavors
• Eat This Book: The Last Diet Book
• If the Cops Come, Eat This Book
• Eat This Book
• Eat This Book!

Of these books, only the last is edible.

• Don't Eat This Book: Foundations for Marvelous Meals
• Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America

Neither of these is edible.

Syndicated 2007-10-04 14:16:45 (Updated 2007-10-04 14:17:39) from Dafydd

chopper

Turns out turning a bicycle into a chopper is not so complicated.

Syndicated 2007-09-23 02:35:56 (Updated 2007-09-23 02:36:12) from Dafydd

D-Bus API in DevHelp

The Telepathy API has until recently only been available as a single large HTML document. The HTML is generated from D-Bus introspection XML with extensions for stuff like enums. I hacked up a conversion to DevHelp's index format, meaning you can use DevHelp to browse the documentation.

To set it up:

• check out the telepathy-spec repository
• run make
• copy doc/spec.html and doc/telepathy-spec.devhelp2 to a directory /usr/share/doc/gtk-doc/html/telepathy-spec/

This might also work for other D-Bus APIs; I haven't tried.

(If you're developing using Gtk/GLib/Cairo/Pango/GStreamer/etc. and not tried DevHelp, I heartily recommend it. It's really handy, especially with the Ctrl-S shortcut.)

Syndicated 2007-09-22 15:16:28 (Updated 2007-09-22 15:16:56) from Dafydd