Older blog entries for xf (starting at number 11)

etrepum: Hrm, not complaining at all, don't think elanthis was either. Personally, I'm just impatient :-)

elanthis: I waited over 2 months for my AlBook - be patient, it might be a while :-(

In other news, getting back into coding pretty heavily - last few months has been insane, more organisational-style stuff at work (documentation, planning) due to the fact our company expanded, and my position turned from sole developer to project leader. What a change of worlds. I think the boss is still having difficulty understanding that adding programmers to a development team doesn't result in linear productivity.

I've got months of code I need to commit back into the moregroupware CVS tree, just so bogged down at the moment with all sorts of work. Having slower-than-dialup speed Internet certainly isn't helping things - plans to move soon too, which will help hugely in the long term (I'll actually be able to work at home!), isn't exactly the best thing right now.

Still editing video for LCA2004 - fortunately it's the kind of thing that although does take gobs of time, I'm able to do it simultaenously whilst coding or such as it doesn't require 100% attention (dubbing tapes, syncing in speex audio, and just playing through things to make sure nothing strange happens) - and it's a welcome change from my usual work. Still might be a while away until printing, but any attendee will recieve the DVD in the mail once it's completed, and there'll be videos up for download, too. Plenty of funny stuff :-)

Hrm, think I'm starting to get old - remember when going to concerts and playing games was loads of fun. Haven't played games for almost a year now, due to lack of interest, and Big Day Out yesterday was a huge dissapointment. Eep :-(

elanthis: I'd say you'd be fine with an iBook. If you're worried about it getting dirty, remember that an iBook /is/ plastic, it's a hell of a lot easier to clean (where'd you read that it was hard to clean?), and much harder to scratch than the AlBook's. It's sturdy as hell.

Me, I'll stick with my AlBook (it's a purchase you won't regret), as I need the extra CPU cycles, better video card, and desktop res, but my girlfriend's iBook G4/12" is still a great machine, and for the price difference, I can understand why the iBook may be the more sensible purchase. Certainly, lots of iBook owners running LinuxPPC at Linux.Conf.Au; surprising amount of PPC users, actually.

salmoni: Email me - UI design with mgw is something our company's been working with for almost a year now, and I've been wanting to give back to the open source community for ages now, but headache galore timewise. I'd really like to bash brains together on this one.

The official LCA "Linus getting dunked" video is available here. The version that'll end up on the DVD will probably have multiple angles (linus-vision!), but this seems nicer than what's already floating around out there. Mirror it if you wish, but the guy insists this server can take a beating :-)

I'm the guy doing the video editing and the DVD (fun, fun), so I'm super, super keen to get feedback on how well the file plays on various people's players, I'm proposing the same format. It's a MP4 file, which should play on most Linux/BSD media players compiled against a recentish version of ffmpeg - it's been supported for yonks, and seems fine here in xine/mplayer/vlc. It also appears to play fine on a stock standard XP/OS X system in their default players.

Email me at ryan [at] qbalt [dot] com

Hmm, is it just me or is Advogato dog slow at times? I always thought it was my crappy home connection, but the nice aarnet connection here at LCA is just as slow - often I'll go to view a diary, or post a post, and things will just completely hang.

Server load? Anybody know the issue?

Woo, jeez - you wouldn't believe how much work this conference (linux.conf.au 2004) is - like the other organisers, I'm running on less than 3 hours sleep, and tonight doesn't look much better (if I'm not making sense, you know why).

That said though, we hope the conf is a huge success and everybody really enjoys it. Hopefully the video recordings which I'm undertaking turn out well and we'll have a DVD to send out to attendees after it's all finished - Apple are *really* cool, they've given us almost a terabyte of capture space to use for post-conference editing, with more if we need it :-) Kudos.

That said, it's no substutite for being at the conference - the vibe here is amazing, and it's way cool to be involved with so many active developers, and nag people about bugs in their software you want them to fix ;-) I also found it rather amusing today talking to somebody about why software Y was better then crappy old X, and found out that person was actually the author of software X. That said though, it's brilliant to talk to people like this face to face; you get a much better understanding of the mentalities behind their decisions, and everything suddenly clicks and makes sense.

If you're not here, there's still some registrations open - remember, the main conference doesn't start until Wednesday, so there's still time to come. It's really, really, really worth it.

Still have more things to organise, tapes to stripe (timecode can suck, grr), and video to dump. If you see me wandering around the place (Ryan Verner), feel free to say g'day - and there's still room for more FIXIT sessions :-)

linux.conf.au 2004 have just announced another reason to attend - enter the hackfest, and build the best tetrinet bot (client library supplied), and you could win an IBM pSeries deskside server model p615 with Dual 1.45GHz Power4+ CPUs, 4GB RAM, 2x146.8GB Ultra 3 SCSI 10,000 RPM Hard Disks, DVD ROM drive, 21" Colour Monitor, with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.2 preinstalled - worth over AU$39,000. Registrations are filling up quickly, though.

mrd: Haha, that's a copy of Apple's Exposé, which wasn't an entirely new concept anyway, but the first time it was properly implemented IIRC. (Why are all my posts about Apple stuff?) It's definitely a cool feature, something that ends up becoming absolutely essential, and I was wondering how long it'd take somebody to hack something together.

It's always great to see innovative, original concepts surface first in OSS (Gnome seems to do this a lot, which is brilliant, and why it's my desktop of choice), but it doesn't hurt to bring good ideas to the masses. Let's just hope Apple didn't patent it, which is something they seem to like doing :-(

haruspex: I've found Opengroupware quite fragile, too, and I'm not really a huge fan of it; I look forward to future developments, though. Have you checked out moregroupware at all? It's a project I'm involved with (plug plug), but IMHO it's the nicest web-based groupware out there; the interface is consistent, logical, and easy to use; the backend is very, very capable (the user/group rights system rocks); and it's under /very/ heavy development; new features continually (I'm currently working on a new module right now; the company I currently work for have a few commercial modules, such as stock inventory, which I'm trying to get GPL'ed). Grab a CVS snapshot. There's currently two calendar modules; Calendar2, which is based off PHP iCalendar, and the original Calendar1 module, which is currently being rewritten to be a far more corporate calendar. Calendar2's currently the most usable, and it's quite capable for group calendaring.

Argh, how long do Apple want to delay these 15" G4 Powerbooks for?

I ordered one going back a month now and keep getting told all sorts of stories about them being recalled due to memory issues, LCD issues (RevA AlBook white spots, apparently due to spacers in the back of the screen?), shipping mistakes, the list goes on; I'm guessing that the people I'm speaking to don't actually really know. I've given up hope of seeing it anytime soon.

What I don't understand is why the 12" and 17" models don't appear to have the same issues; they were never recalled, and I've seen plenty get sold in the last month. Surely they'd share some of the same issues, whatever they are?

Now that I'm doing some artwork for Linux.Conf.Au 2004, currently the maps, I /really/ miss my old TiBook. I'm super keen to see some of these open source vector Desktop Publishing tools (sodipodi, scribus) properly mature on Linux; they're really very cool, but still have some way to go in terms of features IMHO. At least, though, they don't seem to be as damn buggy as most of Adobe's products on Windows (@!*&$#$).

Wonder if the delay's just an Aussie thing.