Wow - after days of fruitless trying, ap-get up(date|grade) finally gets me some new stuff on my Ubuntu box. The successor to Hoary is called Breezy. And for some unknown reason I do apt-get update several times a day. I am *so* bleeding edge.

Oh, regarding my previous post, it seems that the analog clock in gdesklets is burning insane amounts of cpu cycles. Remove that and I am grand.

Wrote a perl script to conjugate Finnish verbs; it works nicely and my Finnish colleagues couldn't even find a misbehaving verb; well he probably did not try hard enough (well, there are few irregularities in Finnish verbs. How nice). Now if only I had a perl interpreter in my head...

Last year I wrote a similar program for *Dutch* verbs; and I used Haskell that time. I find perl easier to program, but maybe that is this low iq thing people keep on telling me about.

As a proud AMD64/3400+ (note the '+') owner, I am happy that I can now use more of the abundance of processing power on candy for the eye. So, I run xcompmgr -cCfF -r8 -o.63 -l-10 -t-8 -D7, enabled the nvidia cursor-shadow feature, and now everything is all-singing, all-dancing and all-shadowy. Beautiful. There seems to be a new focus on getting all kinds of eyecandy features on our Free desktops, and it is good. We have of course the work of Seth and friends, but never forget Rasterman and friends.

Still, I hope they can speed it up a bit; virtual desktop switching will make Xorg jump to 90% or more (in top). And there seems to be some bad interaction with gdesklets, which causes both to eat *a lot* of CPU-cycles when run together, even while not switching virtual desktops.

I am also interested in ear candy. Since I bought a sound card somewhere in 1993 or so (they were not a standard part of PCs in those days), I wanted to have auditive feedback for my interactions with the computer. But, apart from the occasional beep and ploink, current desktops don't seem to fully exploit the possibilities, to put it mildly. But of course I have to admit that I don't have a Plan in this area, on the fine line between useful feedback and annoying beeps. Has any research been done on this?

My AMD64 is a really nice machine, but unfortunately, I keep on running into incompatibilities. jhbuild is a problem (already in gettext. And today I wanted to try the new übercool Enlightenment (well, I loved it in 1999, and the avi looks cool). But of course imlib2 broke down on the assembly code; there might be ways to solve that, but apt-get (which I could not use for E17) has made me lazy.

I released a new version of ttb. I am slowly learning Python while coding; and slowly using more and more Python idioms. I got Learning Python and Python Cookbook from the company library. I am trying the the time-based releases, weekly at the moment.

Wow, I am looking at Ubuntu's March Desktop Background, a yummy blond girl lying naked on top of my taskbar :-) Not bad.

Weekend. I'm working on integrating some patches in ttb teletekst browser; I was lucky enough to have found a major contributor, who has been feeding me a lot of patches this week. In the open-source world, there are various ways to deal with incoming patches... people like Linus might loudly reject patches, even if people spent a month or longer working on them. In other projects patches may be ignored, or spend their life in Bugzilla (Firefox, Gnome), like the Ark in the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Of course, in my tiny project, everything is different. I try to encourage contributors by at least tell them I have received the patch and I am reviewing it. And, luckily, the patches are pretty good so far. That does not mean I will apply them blindly - I prefer to type them by hand, looking at the patch and the exising code. Thus, I get the advantages of still understanding my code afterwards, and also of reimplementation, which usually gives better quality. Well, I assume a lot of people like to do it that way, which may explain why many big projects cannot seem to digest the patches that are submitted.

I also saved some webserver from impending death - the website was mentioned in some magazine, and suddenly 600k people are trying to access it. The database got pounded *really hard*, and I got a desperate call for help... Well I did some ugly hacks to help it a little, but then discovered the mysql query cache... that did the trick.

So, finally got the teletekst thingie working for python 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. Hurrah. The weird thing is that I don't actually understand what caused it suddenly to work... hmmm...

Of course I am writing way to much about such a pathetic litle program. But I like it anyway, and so do the users. And while having little available time, for me it's still providing me with the free software feeling - that is, getting suggestions, bug reports, thank-yous and flames from users, and even patches! So I try to keep momentum and enthusiasm by quickly respoding, and thanking people for their contributions.

I have to admit that I prefer the little-work-high-visibility projects; but those are important too :-) And I try to make my program attractive to normal users, to Just Work. It's hard for hackers to think like that, because we are not normal users. At least not of our own programs.

Example: last weekend, I wanted to make a little video with Kino, a nice video editor, surprisingly (considering the name!) a GNOME app. Well, it *can't* load MPG-files; I first need to convert my homemade pr0n to 'dv' files using ffmpeg by hand. Now, for every time your GUI program requires the command-line, you loose about 75% of the audience. [And yes, I am sure the CVS-version does this automagically...]. I must say, apart from this - Kino is really nice, and the best of breed on Linux AFAIK.