This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The Lugradio team proudly present the first episode of series 3 of LugRadio, We're forking back. Go and download: we hope you like it.

Vote for Florian Muller as European of the Year to give him the chance to speak against software patents. Spread the word.

There's this whole big community of people out there making custom covers for their DVDs. These covers are really pretty, most of the time. People work on them for days and days and days, and then release them to the amazement of the community. However, when they do release them, they don't normally demonstrate them by just showing people the cover image; instead, they show a pretty drop-shadowed 3D view of the cover instead, looking like it's in a DVD case. To get that 3D view they tend to use either IMANDIX Cover, a closed-source Windows-only program, or a Photoshop Action (which is a plugin for a closed-source program available only on closed-source operating systems). We in the Free Software community need to get some of that 3D DVD cover action! We need to be able to turn into Well, now you can. Grab dvdcoverdisplayer.py and store it in the .gimp2.2/plug-ins/ directory in your home directory, and then make it executable. Then, get yourself a DVD cover image from somewhere, open it in the Gimp, and click Python-Fu > DVD Cover to get the pretty 3D version. GPL-licenced. I'd be interested in suggestions for other "views" it should do. Now I have one more reason to suggest to people that they can use the Gimp and move away from Windows.

I've now upgraded to the new Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) and so far it all seems fine. Things I have thus far noticed:

• The new "Add Applications" thing is, um. Not sure about that, because I don't know which category a new application should be in. I installed Best (the Beagle search tool) but had to search for it to find it, and I still don't know how to put a Best applet in my top panel. (There's no applet in the "Add to panel" thing).
• Best is cool, I think, although I'm not using it really yet. Kudos to the guys who built it.
• Totem plays DVDs! Woo! The bug that I was suffering from in Hoary has obviously been fixed.
• Most importantly...watch the "Ubuntu FAQ Guide / Networking" header in the following: See how the header dynamically adapts itself to the width of the window? I wrote that. My code is in Ubuntu! Woo! I mean, it's a tiny amount of code, but I don't care. :-)

Me, 2005-09-15:

I’m tired of Bloglines being down and slow and not telling me how many of the “unread” messages it indicates next to each weblog name are actually “Keep New” messages.

Bloglines, 2005-10-13:

There's a difference between "Unread" articles and those marked "Keep as New" (subtle, but distinct), so you will now see two numbers next to your subscribed feeds in parentheses. The number to the left of the colon represents the articles you have not read/seen before, and the number on the right represents the articles you have manually kept new.

Hooray! I first mailed them about this about a year ago, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to complain. That's much better. Now only the speed and uptime problems to solve, Ask Jeeves :-)

d.construct, "Europe’s first grassroots Web 2.0 conference", is taking place in Brighton on November 11th 2005. You should get in as soon as they start selling tickets, because I think it'll be good. It's time the UK had more stuff like this. And I'm speaking at it; if you need more incentive than that (and how could you?) there are also talks by Cory Doctorow, Simon Willison, Ben Metcalfe, Tom Hume, Aral Balkan, and Andy Budd, who's the bloke who's organised this. Get stuck in: keep an eye on the site for ticket sale details.

Jorge Castro:

A Mac friend of mine once commented to a user "It's things like user-friendly DRM delivered via iTunes that will change the market." ... It's unfortunate that so many OSS people don't realize that the goal was never "UNIX on the desktop", the goal is "A Free desktop".

I'm looking at Django and TurboGears, two similar Python-based web frameworks, for a project at work. Simon W has been on at me for ages to look at Django, so today I had a quick poke around. However, I have an absolute abhorrence of installing random packages into my system's Python directory. Last time I played with Django there was a lot of faffing around setting PYTHONPATH and whatnot, and it annoyed me, so I stopped doing it. However, this is what Python Eggs are all about: you can package up a library in one .egg file and then just drop that file on your python path (which includes the current directory), and the library will import fine. This means that you can package up a Python app (like, say, a Django app) with all its dependencies (like Django!) and not have to think "this will only run on a machine with Python2.4 *and* Django *and* pysqlite installed", which is much better. The problem here is that I'd prefer to use Django, since I know the chaps who wrote it, Adrian Holovaty and Simon (and a couple of others, but I don't know them; I'm sure the TurboGears guys are equally talented hackers, but I don't know them either). TurboGears is available as an egg, and Django isn't. So I've done a little hacking on the Django core, and filed a patch to make Django egg-able. I'm quite pleased with that. Tomorrow's project is to actually investigate Django long enough to know whether I want to use it for this project at all.

Ryan over at lesscode.org often speaks the truth, but never more so than in The New Application Server:

What’s more is that all that is needed to transform the basic setup into an integration platform is to stop thinking about the web as a bunch of “pages” and start using HTTP for what it’s worth.

In an effort to prove that I am not like Jono, I come before you to speak now of poetry. Specifically, jazz poetry. More specifically, the poetry of Vachel Lindsay, and to place our discussion right on the button, his most-famous (probably) ode, The Congo. Under one's breath, parenthetically Actually, it's called "The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race)", but we're here to talk of rhyme and metre, not politics. Inquisitively, as of a church mouse How's your poetry knowledge? Better than mine, no doubt. The world is divided into two categories, those who think poetry is all effete verbiage and those with a favourite poem. My favourites are all epics, by which I mean that they're long and they rhyme: The Lady of Shalott, with her magic web and now-cracked mirror; Alan Moore's This Vicious Cabaret, which isn't even a poem but a song; Hiawatha, and Don Juan, and A Shropshire Lad with its elevation of beer above Milton. Rightly so, since Paradise Lost doesn't rhyme. Poems should rhyme. Yes they should; you know it in your soul. And why should they rhyme? Boomingly and with malice aforethought Because they are to be read aloud! Everyone knows this, too! No-one does it, though. Unless you're the sort of wet bleeding-heart sap who goes to poetry readings, that is. (I must go to a poetry reading one day.) As that great orator Josiah Bartlett told us, words when spoken out loud for the purpose of oratory are music; they have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume [and] these are the properties of music. Which brings us back to jazz poetry, which is both words and music and should be spoken out loud for the purpose of oratory. Read The Congo. The first verse: Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision, I could not turn from their revel in derision. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Lightly Read it out loud. You have to read it out loud to get at the centre of the thing. With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom. Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice Starling about the "pease porridge hot" quality of Sammy the schizophrenic's poetry: "the meter varies but the intensity is the same." Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old. Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom. It's compelling, syncopated. Once you've started reading, it's difficult to stop. Wistful and reflective Speaking out loud for the purposes of oratory is not as easy as it could be, I feel. This is much on my mind with my agreement to speak at conferences. I'm not too bad at it; after doing the reading at my aunt's funeral I was asked if I was thinking of becoming a priest, seemingly because I made eye contact with the congregation rather than muffling my words into the lectern. That's because I treated it like a business presentation; perhaps a bit unfeeling, but if I'd have chosen the reading then I would have put my hands in my pockets and talked about how much I missed her, not recited a passage from the Bible. I'd love to be able to do what Lindsay does in Congo. Jed Bartlett's speechwriter, Toby Ziegler, talks (in words given him by his speechwriter, Aaron Sorkin) about "the science of listener attention". If you can get your audience to follow the words along, if they have to sit on their hands to avoid clapping the beat, you've won. On I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue, when they sing, sometimes the audience will start clapping along with the song. Builds up a rhythm, just like Toby says. Just like Lindsay says, "a rapidly piling climax of speed and racket." I'm dimly perceiving that this is the approach of great speechmakers. Churchill repeated the word "fight" about thirty times in quick succession in the speech everyone remembers. You can be sure he wasn't just reading off the bullet points on his Powerpoint slide one after the other. These things turn from general to specific pretty quick, you may have noticed. Those of you with oratorical abilities, any suggestions are welcomed. Note that I'm not trying to overcome stage fright here, nor am I inexperienced in public speaking; I would, however, like to be better at it...

There are times when this weblog is silent because I'm not up to much. There are also times when it's silent because I'm up to too much and don't have time to post. This most recent silence has been the latter sort, although a couple of nuggets (like the thing about mousewheel scrolling and the thing about defineSetters came out of my current work. Still not ready to reveal it, but I do have one other thing to say: I'm going to SxSW 2006! Yes indeed. I shall be there in Austin. I got well sick last year of everyone going on about it, and Simon ragged on me for thinking about not going, pointing out that it is great and fantastic and now he works at Yahoo, and I examined his argument and found it compelling. We'll ignore, for the moment, all the 64oz steaks for $0.99 that you get in Texas, although I shall not be ignoring them when I get there, no sirree. Bring me another. And another plate of chips, too. Oh yes. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be cool. I'm also speaking at a couple of upcoming conferences; details when they go public. Blimey -- jetting off to other countries, speaking at conferences...I'm turning into Jono. Heh.