xmms

fatal: I'm not surprised you're getting forks. The xmms program remains the most widely used audio playing in linuxland, and when the custodians of such an important brand don't provide leadership, other people inevitably step forward to try. We all want things to get better, and of course the right to fork is all about that being possible. Ideally such things either motivate you to finally do your own version, or one of the forks eventually becomes the official version again though clear superiority or popularity. But by telling people they can't call it 'xmms2' you're ensuring that someone else will try, until there really is a successful xmms2...even if it's still called xmms.

Re making it a video player, I've always been confused about that. Adding a general multiplexed media framework seemed the obvious step back when 1.2 was new, and the intent was obviously there at some point or it would just have been called 'xms'. I didn't know it was a schism between xmms.org and 4Front. (If I may define the groups that way; seemed like they were almost the same back in 2000.)

Oh well, someday soon we'll get a decent modern player. Pity it won't be called xmms, because it's a very cool name.

Hating computers

It looks like the hard drive corruption I complained about last entry was just the disk itself going bad. I started to get repeatable errors reading from the root partition, though the home partition remained thankfully readable. Coincidence with the DVD burner apparently. And maybe obvious in retrospect. Oops.

Anyway, I backup up a lot of stuff and moved the rest onto the newer 80 GB drive, now booting with a fresh debian install. That was kind of crowded though, so I bought a new 160 GB drive for general data storage. Yay free space!

London

I've finally been approved for an immigration visa to Canada. HOORAY! I'm cutting short the current stay in London to go home and finish the paper work. The plan is to 'land', as they quaintly refer to it, soon after xmas and start setting up in Vancouver again in January. Anyone in the area who knows of a free room we could rent for a while (even just a week or three while we look for a real place) please let me know!

S is keeping her post at UCL for the moment; she'll help pick out the apartment and then return to London, and I'll follow when everything is settled for a last round of europe. There are museums in london still on the 'must see' list. Ordinarily we'd avoid paying double rent, but the London flat is free in the sense that S hasn't found a job in Vancouver yet and I feel safer having somewhere to go to on the other side. Hopefully the chance to see more of europe will be worth the time apart.

Since I'll be in California anyway, I'm going to SCALE in November with a bunch of the xiph people, most of whom I haven't met in person before. Should be a lot of just, and hopefully we can drum up a little more interest.