as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Mark Pilgrim: Please take this opportunity to relate amusing anecdotes about your vasectomy.

• There’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve been kicked in the spuds, especially when that feeling lasts for two days. And I don’t mean “there’s nothing like it” in any kind of good way, either.
• When your daughter runs over and jumps in your lap, try and feel suffused with the joy of being a parent rather than, say, screaming.
• The worst job in the world is being the chap who sits by patients’ heads and talks to them while the operation is going on. I mean, what do you say? Conversation is strained at the best of times.
• The last word you want to hear from the dude with the knife is “Oops”.

From a comment by Aslam on Jono’s site:

I even heard someone say “GNOME devs will be truely happy on the day when GNOME reduces to a single button. Great usability and simplicity. No confusion. Grandpa and Grandma can use it. Functionality? How does it matter? Usability is the king”

If someone can deliver me a computer which has one button, “Do What I Mean”, and that one button works, that’s fine with me. If that’s Gnome’s goal, more power to them. Why would it possibly be a bad thing to have a single button that does what you want?

Unless of course you use computers for the sake of it rather than to actually get things done, in which case, well, good luck with that.

I’ve just found configuring Samba shares on Fedora Core 4 very easy (Desktop | System Settings | Server Settings | Samba) except that it didn’t initially work, and I couldn’t work out why. Some googling around led me to a note from Paul Howarth indicating that SELinux blocks Samba sharing by default (very sensibly); you can configure this in Desktop | System Settings | Security Level. Well done, Fedora people. That was the easiest time I’ve ever had setting up Samba.

(Note: I specifically configured a password for a Unix account, and people have to use that username and password when connecting to the share from Windows. It doesn’t use your native Windows username, or authenticate against the domain, because I don’t care about that.)

Because I have an ego the size of Jupiter, I occasionally run Google searches for myself to see how popular I am. I’ve been the top hit for “langridge” and “kryogenix for a while now, but it turns out that I’m now also the second most popular Stuart on the internet behind stuartmodels.com (no link! ha! no google juice from me, usurpers!). Nearly there, then. :)

At the moment, the Jokosher hackfest is going on. If you’re interested in getting involved with Jokosher, get yourself along to #jokosher on irc.freenode.org and chip in. Elleo’s already fixed channel splitting, and ensonic has patched GStreamer to fix a bug with the “adder” element, so it’s all looking pretty good. Jono is working on simultaneous recording and playback, mrben is working on having the pipelines start somewhere other than right at the beginning, bilboed is being helpful about gnonlin, among other things, and I’ve been hacking on the website a bit to provide decent bugtracking, as well as importing all the old bugs and wiki data to the new Jokosher Subversion site.

Today, the learning support assistant in Niamh’s class at school was called away to show someone around the building. One of her tasks is reading out a story — actually, a daily “diary” written by the children themselves — out to the class, which obviously she couldn’t do if she wasn’t present. So Niamh read the whole thing out instead.

In the middle of me feeling immensely proud of my daughter for being chosen as the best reader in the class, she knocked a tub of soapy bubble mixture over on the floor of my study.

I’m not sure I have a message here. But it’s fun having a daughter.

In the grand tradition of humour that gave us the pirate keyboard:

and the Microsoft keyboard:

comes (via Jono) the Scouse keyboard:

I’m still sitting here giggling at this :)

If you’re going to Guadec 2006, as are the LugRadio team, and you’re hoping to meet the four handsomest and most talented open source software radio show presenters there, then your best place to look is…well, the best place is probably the bar. Failing that, though, according to the Gnome wiki, you should be able to find us in bungalow 510 in the Gnome Village!

I’d like to think that, now that I’m thirty, I’ve got a handle on life and all its incessant complications. However, I’m forced to a particular realisation: there’s no way I can consider myself grown up until I don’t have to check the milk in the fridge to see whether it’s gone off whenever I make tea.

All my concerns with maturity seem to be related to milk, for some reason.

Bit busy for posting at the moment, as may be apparent, but I am pleased that I actually got to hack on Jokosher last night! We now have one mixing view rather than two separate ones, which is nice. The audio engine issues seem to be being resolved with a combination of us guys and the GStreamer guys and the GNonlin guys, so everyone’s a winner. Big thanks to bilboed and wim in particular, there. GStreamer’s just got so much promise; it’s normally clear, if we hit a problem with it in Jokosher, what that problem is and roughly what would need to be done to fix it. (Well, it’s clear at a high level: “make the adder correctly mix streams”. I couldn’t actually write the code to do that in a thousand years; I leave that up to hyper-clever people like wim and bilboed and uraeus.)

It’s nice, I think, that Jokosher’s exercising bits of GStreamer that weren’t previously being touched much. It needs this kind of multi-project usage to make it into a true media framework (as opposed to, say, a media player framework), and I have to say that the gst chaps have been pretty helpful. Wouldn’t hurt for more people to pay attention in #gstreamer, mind. :)

I’m going to Guadec 2006, along with the rest of the LugRadio team. It’s going to be cool, although not as cool as LugRadio Live, for which we nearly have the complete speaker list confirmed. All very exciting!