digital home of MacSlow

I just made the 0.9.33 release of NotifyOSD. The main changes are:

• Logging to ~/.cache/notify-osd.log is off by default. You have to start it with the environment-variable “LOG” being defined (see LP: #904835).
• When notify-osd 0.9.33 is running under unity >= 5.4.0 it’ll pick up the average color from the selected desktop-wallpaper, computed and exported by unity, to tint the notifications background. This is to provide more visual consistency with the Dash and HUD (see LP: #810325).

This tinted background looks like this:

Big thanks for patches/branches/contributions go out to:

• Sebastien Bacher
• Luke Yelavich
• Martin Pitt
• Vincent Untz
• Ken VanDine

Fixed bugs/features:

• #810325 change background colour to use the same median colour used in the unity dash
• #827897 should migrate the user gconf keys values to gsettings
• #856071 accessibility broken due to recent GTK3 changes
• #904835 keeps on writing to .cache/notify-osd.log and waking up my drive
• #915389 wakes up for every key/focus event after showing the first bubble

The release page also holds all the needed information about 0.9.33 and a source-tarball.

Who, what, haeh? While you might have heard of Pixar, those people who made movies like Toy Story and Ratatouille, you probably don’t know who Colin Levy is. Hm… let me throw in some other keywords to help you narrow it down a bit more. Sintel, blender and OpenMovie (Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny) might ring more bells with you. Colin was the director of the last OpenMovie, Sintel. It looks like this last job, on Sintel, got him his new position at Pixar.

These are impressive news, because it clearly shows the big players are aware of and watching what goes on the OpenSource/OpenMovie community. It is a very delightful piece of news and I am happy for Colin and the blender project seeing them getting this kind of recognition!

I came across this on blendernation.

Finally there was a brief moment to catch the folks of novacut (Tara, Jason) and have a small chat with them in person here (the very very busy UDS-Oneiric). This video-editing approach they persue feels massively appealing to me. The idea to have the whole editing/cutting history of a final movie or clip in a revision-control like form - much like the change-history one knows from software-development - for others to investigate and learn from makes me grin broadly. Learn from the pros by following their example!

This project is young and they have a long way to go, but it’s the most promising and freshest approach to the old idea on non-linear video-editing, which certainly has the potential to set OpenSouce-platforms (Ubuntu) apart from traditional systems and applications.

I hope and will try to get some time to help out a bit however I can. Always looking for getting better tools in my hands to deal with my crude capoeira- and biking flicks… and hopefully improving them along the way

… Nexus One cell-phone cover/bag (these small black cloth things with the andoid-logo on one side) here at UDS-Oneiric? Could you poke me or hand it over to the nice folks at the info desk. I lost mine this morning after the keynote. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Got it back… thaaaaanks!

The past week’s traffic-experiences - while riding my motorcycle - were very eventful.

First, I’m almost run over by a woman in a car, while she was cutting me off, getting into my lane. She didn’t look, she didn’t use indicators, she didn’t react on me honking. Insane brakes on my Duc saved the day.

Second encounter was with a police-car. At night I was driving along the main road, thus having the right of way. At a small junction, out of a small side-street, a police-car dashes into the main road without sirens/lights turned on. Just the brief moment before being fully on the main road they switch their sirens/lights on. Again impressive stopping power of the Brembos prevented a nasty outcome.

Third, last and closest-to-death-experience happened yesterday. I made a small day trip to the famous Nordschleife at the Nürburgring. There some people seem to forget that the public country roads around there are just that… public roads and not the race-track Nordschleife. Going at roughly 100 km/h (~ 60 mph) some douchebag in the opposite traffic thought he needed to follow the racing line instead of staying within his lane and off my lane! I am glad this happened in a gentle curve only, so I could hit the brakes hard. My blood is still boiling when thinking about that moment! I regret not riding with my helmet-camera yesterday as I would have liked to press charges against that bastard! A few meters less myself and a few other motorcyclists behind me would have been history. It all happened so fast nobody paid attention to the licence-plate of that sucker.

I ride safe all the time. Always wearing full gear, no matter how hot it may be… helmet (visor down), gloves, boots, full leather-suit with protector-pads and dedicated back/spine-protector. Always staying within speed-limits. Always covering clutch, front- and rear break with both hands and foot. Reflexes are working well too I guess. But without luck I’d probably not be sitting here right now Will I quit riding my motorcycle? Not in a million years! Die of exhaustion (or because of douchebags)… not of boredom!

The latest version of NotifyOSD hit the natty repository a few hours ago. This is the “community rocks”-release (aka 0.9.30) coming with a nice bunch of fixes for these nasty insects:

• #353843 - fallback alert has leftmost button as default
• #500663 - needs to pause the timer during mouse-over
• #559109 - two notification bubbles at the same time
• #654921 - black border in the notifications when effects are turned off
• #655232 - should build without gtk+ deprecation
• #724842 - notification borders are cut off on the right bottom side

… and some multi-monitor fixes. All this was made possible thanks to the help from these people (in no particular order):

• Karl Lattimer
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Terry
• Tony Wang
• Peter Clifton
• John Ledbetter

If you are not running Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (upcoming 11.04), which allows you to pull this latest version of NotifyOSD via the SoftwareCenter or synaptic or with apt-get install notify-osd, the bzr-branch (r433) can be grabbed with:

bzr branch lp:notify-osd/natty

The release page also holds all the needed information about 0.9.30 and a source-tarball.

Share and enjoy!

This smells like bribery in action if you ask me. The german foreign office plans to switch back to proprietary software-solutions from their OpenSource counter-parts, which are currently in use. Here is the original article (german) and a translated version (english) of it.

The reasoning behind that move is cost. OpenSource costs too much, they say. That’s a bit odd, considering the very same office reported about huge money-savings, due to the use of OpenSource software. The foreign office states using OpenSource saved them 33 million euros during 2001-2007. Here is their report (in german) on savings. The same report in english.

I wonder what in OpenSource got so expensive in the last three years, that all of a sudden solutions from Redmond seem to be such a compelling alternative. The civil servants were probably fed up with not being able to find and play Solitaire

From reading summaries on the real reasons, it apparently came down to drivers (for printers and scanners), which they probably bought at Lidl or Aldi (german discount-chains), instead of spending a minute or two on the web researching what devices are properly supported. Another issue was educating staff about different office-applications and making them deal with a slightly different UI-layout *rolling.eyes* WTF… after ten years they could not adapt to something new!? Who are they trying to kid?

This is leads to an terrifying conclusion. IT-staff and clerks working at our foreign offices are less computer literate than my parents and friends (all non-geeks). Or the other way around, people like my parents and friends could work at the foreign offices and help saving valuable tax-money. (ok this last paragraph is stretching it a bit far, but you get my point)

Some people just don’t know when they crossed a line better left untouched. The dubious companies 3DMagix/3DMagixPro/IllusionMage try to rebrand and resell blender without giving credit or links to the original project and source-code. Ton Roosendaal, chairman of the Blender Foundation, provides more info here: 3DMagix, 3DMagixPro, IllusionMage, scam

I just came across a very interesting variation of billboards (as in computer-graphics). The variation is called volumetric billboards and was thought up by Philippe Decaudin and Fabrice Neyret. Their approach eliminates all visual drawbacks of conventional billboards (2D) as far as I can tell. Check out the theory behind these volumetric billboards and a demonstration video.

Music helps me a lot to get through really grief periods. Currently my favourite tracks are:

• “Sweet Harmony” by Danny Byrd feat. Liquid
• “Quantum Leap” by Danny Byrd feat. Terri Pace
• “Fail Safe” by Danny Byrd feat. London Elektricity

All these tracks are from the Rave Digger album published at Hospital Records, which coincidentally happens to be available via the Ubuntu One music store.

Don’t listen to those when you operate fast-moving machinery