This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

I get up each morning, dust off my wits, Pick up my paper, and read the "Obits," If my name is missing, I know I'm not dead. So I eat a good breakfast, and go back to bedgo to work, depressingly enough.

Actually, I am not that old. I am today, however, another year older! Traditionally you all get to guess my age, and this year is no exception. In the past I've been complained at for always making the quizzes mathematical (Well, duh. You are guessing a number. What were you expecting?) and so this year we have two separate tests. Also, there are points. I have a high opinion of my readers* and thus I feel confident that you'll do well here. As of today, and for the next 365 of your Earth days, my age is, in decreasing order of difficulty to work out:

Quiz for maths people, people who wear glasses, or people who consider themselves clever*

• the Saros number of the solar eclipse series which began on September 24, 1957 BC and ended on March 10, 460 BC
• the smallest number n with exactly 7 solutions to the equation φ(x) = n
• the atomic number of germanium
• 273.15K in Farenheit
• the fifth power of two
• my age in 2004 plus four

Quiz for thick people, liberal arts majors from the US, people who work in MacDonalds, and Jono

• the number of variations in Bach's Goldberg variations
• my age in 2006 plus two
• 32

If you got down to the bottom of the quiz most appropriate to you and still don't know the answer, try the other quiz. If you've done both and still don't know the answer, then your shipment of fail has arrived in style and you should give your computer back since I'm surprised you're able to operate it. I'll take it off your hands tomorrow; today I'm too busy enjoying my birthday. It started rather well, but now I'm at work. Still, we all have our crosses to bear, especially those who still don't know how old I am. Same age as Christ was when he was crucified, allegedly, although I thought that was next year. If the stigmata* show up I'll be sure and report it.

Blimey. According to Wired's report on a "well-regarded as being accurate" XiTi survey, IE usage in Europe is at 66%, with Firefox second at 28%. Safari and Opera are both under a twentieth of the browsing population. Interesting stats, although all browser statistics are unreliable. I occasionally forget to stick my head out of the overheated greenhouse that is the web hacker community; looks like in the real world, Firefox is doing pretty well! Good work the FF team.

We are now 74 days away from LugRadio Live USA at the Metreon in San Francisco, and the Call For Papers is open! We've already confirmed some great speakers -- Jeremy Allison, Aza Raskin, Val Henson, Ben Collins, Ian Murdock, John "Magnatune" Buckman, Robert Love, Dan Kegel -- but we want more. If you want to speak at LugRadio Live, and you can be in California on the 12th-13th April this year, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line before Friday 15th February and tell us what you want to talk about!

We're collecting names of exhibitors, too. This year we're really keen to get some cool stuff into the exhibition. If you're part of a project and want to demonstrate it, or you've got some cool technology you want to show off, or you think people would love to see what your company does, get hold of us and let us know. Exhibition space is free, too! To find out more about LugRadio Live, take a look at the website and what is LRL?.

I've spent a while trying to get Elisa to work on the computer attached to my TV (a PPC Mac Mini running Ubuntu). Video was slow and jerky, and there was a strange white bar graphical glitch. Anyway, after fighting all day with it, compiling the latest version of Elisa and so forth, I eventually gave up and installed MythTV. And it works perfectly. I don't really want MythTV. I prefer GStreamer-based applications, because I think GStreamer is the way forward, and Myth does a mountain of stuff that I don't want, like watching live television; all I want to do, for the moment, is watch recorded video files. I like Elisa's interface more than Myth's. I'm more able to write Elisa plugins than I am for Myth. Still, Myth (using VLC as the playback program) works fine, and Elisa doesn't, and I don't think Elisa will get better; it seems that the problem might be the open source ATI drivers, which aren't (apparently) as good as the closed source ones. I can't run the closed source drivers, though, because they don't exist for powerpc, which is what the Mac Mini is (even ignoring that I don't want to run them because they're closed source). So MythTV it is. There is probably a lesson here.

One of my big flaws with the VLC media player is that you can't use the arrow keys to skip backwards and forwards in a video. It turns out that this is because the left and right arrow keys are already configured to mean "navigate around a DVD menu" and you can't configure a key twice. So, if you need to use VLC for something, and you want the arrow keys to work, go into the settings and set the DVD navigate options to something other than Left and Right. Then configure "jump forwards" and "jump backwards" to Right and Left, and then it'll work. God knows why it has to be this way, but at least if you do that it works.

A random collection of things that I don't have enough time to properly write about but which ought to be noted for future reference:

• All sorts of news in the world of Humanized. Enso is now free to download, although disappointingly not Free Software. However, Jono di Carlo has left a comment suggesting that that might happen; my fingers are crossed. I'd love to see Humanized and the free desktop in partnership, because I think their work is excellent, and we have a dearth of good usability engineers. Another potentially great move in this direction is that Mozilla Labs have hired some of the Humanized engineers.
• We've announced dates for LugRadio Live USA: come to the greatest show on earth on April 12th and 13th 2008 in the Metreon, San Francisco. I'll shortly be allowing people to register for the event; at the moment I'm trying to decide precisely how to do it. Paypal's a pain (because they hassle you to create an account if you don't have one), Google Checkout requires you to have a Google account as far as I can tell: any other suggestions for how to do online registration are welcomed.
• Adam Jackson writes that the phrase "Linux is about choice" is holding everything back: "It strangles the mind and ensures you can never change anything ever because someone somewhere has OCD'd their environment exactly how they like it and how dare you change it on them you're so mean and next time I have friends over for Buffy night you're not invited mom he's sitting on my side again." I couldn't agree more, I really couldn't. Well said, that man.
• Stuart Colville (currently fourth in a a Google search for "stuart", one place behind me, ahaha, take that, Colville!) writes about the new Macbook Air and compares it unfavourably to the Eee PC. I'm a big fan of the Eee, because Asus have the right idea; there are lots of similar sub-notebooks coming out which all have the idea "we need to make a small notebook" but don't have the idea "and we need to not charge a thousand pounds for it". I know lots of people who have bought an Eee, precisely because it's two hundred pounds, and it's actually a really nice machine. We were keen on it on LugRadio, too (and don't forget that we're giving an Eee away; go enter the competition. Good work Asus, I say.

Philip Newborough notes that in the last LugRadio episode I said that I planned to release more odd bits of software. (He also illustrated this with a snippet of audio from the show; since we're trying to relax our licence to allow this sort of thing, it's great that people are taking advantage of that!) The problem I outlined on the show itself is that I write lots of little bits of software for me, but I don't release them. They're not generally applicable or easy to install: they're not designed to be polished, public-friendly software in any way. Now, I'm a huge opponent of this. There's a pervasive myth among non-Linux users that all the software on the free desktop is complicated and thorny and command-line driven, and it requires you to edit configuration files and compile it yourself. It's not like that, not at all, if you don't want it to be. However, these little bits of software I write purely for myself are like that; they're not for general distribution. So, I don't release them, because I don't want to add more fuel to the fire for the sneering hordes who say that Linux is hard to use. Over pizza earlier this year, it was brought home to me that that might not be the best idea; even though these little hacks aren't useful to the general population, they might be useful to someone. So, my resolution, if I have one for this year, is to get more of this stuff out there. Update: Greg Grossmeier is doing the same thing after I talked about releasing scripts on LugRadio. That's really cool; it's lovely to hear when people go with a suggestion! The first one is a thing to create DVD slideshows under Linux. My dad said to me over Christmas that a friend of his would, on return from holiday, give out DVDs with all the photos from the holiday on in a nice little slideshow that you could watch in your DVD player. Was it possible, he asked, for him to do the same thing on his (Ubuntu) desktop? Of course, said I, and then started looking into how to do it. The base way that everyone does this on Linux is with the dvd-slideshow shell script, which uses tools like mplayer and so forth to do the work. There are GUI clients for it but they're all really complicated; what you want ideally is something where you just drag photos into it, select transitions if you want to, and click the "go" button. There's also an extension for F-Spot, but it's not actually distributed with F-Spot yet and my dad doesn't use F-Spot anyway. (There isn't an extension that does this in a sane way for digikam, as far as I can tell.) I at first sat down to my keyboard thinking that I'd write a nice PyGTK + GStreamer application that would do this right, before discovering that you can't really take a load of photos and make a nice slideshow out of them with GStreamer. (You sort of can, with multifilesrc, but not really; you can't feed it arbitrary files, it doesn't do transitions, etc.) Then I thought: I'll do a nice application that wraps dvd-slideshow, and then I couldn't be arsed. So instead, I wrote a script for my dad: make-dvd-slideshow. The way this script works is that you hardcode the name of a folder into it. It looks in that folder, makes all the images in that folder into a slideshow, adds an mp3 as a soundtrack if it finds one in the folder, and then drops the resulting .iso file onto your desktop ready for burning. You'll need to change at least FOL="/home/aquarius/Desktop/Olivia Party 2" to be the location of the magic folder (I put one on my dad's desktop, called "DVD Slideshow", and hardcoded it into the script) and then run the script (I put a launcher on his desktop, in that folder, which launches the script in an xterm). Enjoy this: if you think it sucks then I'd love to see someone write something better, and tell me about it when you do; if you want to write something better but aren't sure how to do it then I'll happily write you a spec of how I think it should work :-)

Jeremy Keith writes about where the fault lies:

If I’m on the tube listening to my iPod—because, y’know, that’s exactly the kind of situation for which the iPod was invented—and somebody steals said iPod, which is illegal, is that my fault? If I publish my email address online—because, y’know, I actually want people to be able to get in touch with me quickly and conveniently—and it gets harvested by scum-sucking spammers who send unsolicted commercial email, which is illegal, is that my fault? If I utter my date of birth or my mother’s maiden name—because, y’know, I don’t believe that information should be a state secret—and somebody uses that information to “steal my identity”, which is illegal, is that my fault?

Nope. None of those things are your fault. In a similar way, another Jeremy, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, published his bank details in a newspaper in an attempt to prove that the furore over the UK government losing the personal data of 25 million people was a storm in a teacup. Of course, someone used those details to set up a £500 direct debit to a diabetes charity, so he's now a monkey out of pocket. That act is basically theft; theft is illegal. Was that Clarkson's fault? No, not really. He wasn't at fault. What he was was imprudent, deeply so. (And deservedly so, I feel. Clarkson is one of my favourite presenters, and I have boundless respect for his knowledge of cars and engineering and his personal style; he knows a round brown fuck-all about technology, though.) Look, it works like this. If you believe that the world should be open (which I do), then you can't insist that if someone takes advantage of that openness, it's Someone Else's Problem. It's your problem if they take advantage of your data. If you want to be open, to publish, to break down barriers that stop us properly communicating, then that's a great idea... but each person then becomes individually responsible for their own security. On the other hand, if you want someone else to make the hard decisions for you, to accept liability and take responsibility for problems, to protect you so you can go about your life unscathed, then that someone else gets to make the decisions about what you do with your data, and you don't. If you ask your bank "should I publish all my bank details online?", they'll say: no, don't do that. If you ask the police "should I leave my iPod visible on the tube?", they'll say: no, don't do that (and that's what the "byepod" posters are all about). If it's the police's responsibility to keep your iPod safe (by tracking down criminals who steal it) then they get to have some measure of control over what you do with it. If you demand the ability to do what you like with your stuff, then you have to take on some of the responsibility for protecting it. It can't work both ways; you can't have all the benefits of openness (I can publish my email address where I like!) and none of the deficits (someone else must solve my spam problem!). With great power comes great responsibility, as Uncle Ben tells us. It's not about blame, it's about prudence. It's not about taking decisions out of fear, it's about taking responsibility for life. We're all grown-ups now. No more hiding under the bedclothes and letting Daddy protect you from the big bad world.

Did you know that Epiphany puts a little icon in the notification area while it's downloading stuff?

Well, you might have mentioned it to me, because I didn't know. Anyway, that's really cool. A couple of minor issues with it; firstly, the icon has a right-click menu with only one option, "Show downloads". Since left-clicking the icon shows and hides the download window, I can't think what the point of the right-click context menu is; surely right-click should just do the same thing as left-click? (Bug #508151 submitted.) Secondly, and not really an Epiphany problem; I'd love to see the "downloads" window go away, to be replaced by a "Downloads" folder which has Special Nautilus Magic when displayed. The folder could show partial downloads in progress, with how long there is to go, a clickable link to the page it was being downloaded from, etc, etc. This requires some heavy co-operation between Epiphany and Nautilus (although it might be doable as a Nautilus extension; having said this, I can't find a way to add a top bar (like Deleted Items has or the CD burner has) to a Nautilus folder from an extension), and I'm certainly not the first person to suggest it, but I think it'd be deeply cool.

• A head-up display on my glasses (not something like the Lumus Optical ones that make you look like a tool)
• A data projector for my mobile that I can actually buy (everyone currently doing these is (a) still in pre-production and (b) not selling them to consumers (because they want to sell a million of them to Motorola, not one of them to me)
• Memory diamond
• My cigarette-pack laptop

Are we not in the future yet? Where's my jet pack? What should I be hoping for?