Older blog entries for xf (starting at number 16)

A question if I may; I apologise for asking here but I know this is widely read and somebody may know the answer, and given the poor responses I've had in the past, I'll bet others are in the same boat.

I'm absolutely _sick_ of keeping "todo" notes in a plethora of disorganised text files. I'd love an simple, logical application where I can have categories and subcategories, and to be able to sync this between computers; mainly my desktop (Windows/Linux), my laptop (OS X), and most importantly, my PDA (Zaurus, running a modified Sharp ROM - Cacko). The one-tiered "todo" applications in standard PDA's are _too_ simple, and with the dozens of things I have on the go at a one time, they become incredibly inefficient.

I once posted a detailed request in a forum at http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7786&hl= but none of the applications suggested really did it for me. Simplicity and syncing-between-machines is the key, here; I want to easily be able to note down stuff, and have it laid out in such a way that it's actually efficient on later referencing and not a complete mess.

Surely there's something decent out there? All the solutions I find are all bulky and horrible to use, and I keep going back to the trusty-but-bloody-disorganised mess that text files are.

Shoot me an email at ryan [at] catstick.com, if you have any suggestions, please! If no such application exists, I'll start hacking on one myself, but I'm convinced there has to be many applications out there specifically targeted for this. Beats me why I can't find any...

And I hate to sound redundant, but feedback on the LCA2004 videos is good, especially considering it may happen for LCA2005 - I've heard very, very little back. I can only assume everybody either really liked them, or really hated them. :)

jamesh: I'm the guy that handled the video stuff for LCA2004, and sudo-handled the audio (as the guy who very competently organised it had to work during LCA - d'oh) - we had some last-minute issues with the university A&V equipment; not all audio got recorded properly, unfortunately, so not all talks are available as speex. It might explain why a few videos on the DVD have suboptimal audio; it's from the microphone inside the camera :-)

It reinforces some rules about production, really; testing repeatedly is paramount, and something will /always/ go wrong (the trick is in how you handle things when they do). We managed to get most audio, fortunately (after running around like madmen making sure everything worked like it should), so I hope we did reasonably well.

I would have liked to release more video, but considering all up we had almost 3 terabytes of raw DV footage it wasn't feasable for just myself to edit the lot. I have encoded some more, that I hope to make available as downloads via the LCA2004 videos page soon; most of it bits of miniconfs and random video taken.

I'm curious what people think of the videos, as there's a good chance it'll happen for LCA2005 (fingers crossed); please shoot me an email at ryan[at]qbalt[dot]com with any comments, negative or positive.

It is just me, or is the new feature in Apple OS X 10.4, Spotlight, "innovated" from an open source project often mentioned here, Dashboard?

I'm such a geek. It's my 21st birthday today, and how am I celebrating it? Flying to Perth in a few hours to work on some wireless Linux installs for a client (HostAP based stuff, it's really neat). Not to mention today's a Sunday, but like weekends ever stopped anybody :-)

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?