After reading Jame’s rant I felt compelled to do this as I feel the same way. You’re tech-savvy enough to what to use Foresight on your computer so presumably you have a qwerty/qwertz/dvoark/whatever keyboard. The least you could do is not type like you are using your thumbs.</rant>

Original picture by celebdu found with the awesome Creative Commons Flickr search looking for “kitten laptop”.

lulz?

As pcutler already mentioned, the latest Avant Window Navigator can now imitate Leopard style dock. Even though it breaks the laws of physics it’s still looks cool. This version also improves the ‘Change Icon’ dialog which was pretty confusing before. I actually use it a lot, to help distinguish epiphany windows for example.

The turn around time of this update was impressive but i has very little to do with me, I just pressed the buttons. Primarily its down the the AWN developers, that might sound obvious since they write it but also because of the code stability they maintain. The Foresight recipe pulls straight from the upstream subversion repository and its been rock solid. Since I swapped to using AWN full time I’ve had hardly any problems.

Secondly its because of the awesome suite of tools developed by rPath and used by Foresight. The update procedure goes like this.

1. Move to the directory containing the recipe
   cd ~/conary/src/foresight/1-contrib/avant-window-navigator
2. Update the svn checkout and build a new tarball
   cvc refresh
3. Build locally to check it still builds and there aren’t any new build dependencies
   cvc cook avant-window-navigator.recipe
4. Update the recipe if needed, in most cases its just a version bump
   vim avant-window-navigator.recipe
5. Build again in a clean chroot which confirms that the buildRequires are correct and ensures packages are built against a pristine Foresight system
   rmake build avant-window-navigator.recipe
6. Commit the package built with rmake making it available to everyone
   rmake commit <JobID>
7. Update to the latest package from the repository
   sudo conary update avant-window-navigator

During the rmake I also update to the package just built with cvc and check that everything still works. Then use conary rollback 1 to go back to the version from the repository.

Lastly, credit goes to pcutler for pinging me on IRC in the first place. Otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed until I checked Planet Gnome (given the Guadec traffic I might have even missed it). It also helps that I love eye candy, especially in the applications which are always visible.

Obligatory screenshot

Last Wednesday (27th) my brother and I were in Glasgow to see a gig at the Carling Academy. The venue was fairly small, the picture is taken from the back of the first level with about the same distance again to the back wall. We got in fairly early and got “dug in” near the stage. The atmosphere was relaxed and we barely moved the whole night. It reminded me of gigs I went to during my first year of University - except we actually knew who was on and it was Chris freaking Cornell.

Chris was on top form, the best I’ve ever heard him; although this was the first time I’ve seen him live. Before hand I wasn’t sure what to expect from his new band since I’d never heard them and I wasn’t sure what they’d make of the Audioslave songs. They quickly won over the crowd. Chris said later that he really enjoyed playing with them but by that point it was obvious. The set included Soundgarden, Audioslave and Cornell tracks as well as Hunger Strike.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole night, even when I was pulled out of crowd and politely asked to delete everything from my camara. Apparently they weren’t happy with me “recording” the gig on the pin hole microphone on my camara. Actually what I was doing was trying to do was get pictures that weren’t blurred. Since my camara isn’t great in low light it takes several seconds to focus in-between ever shot - which gets annoying quickly. Video worked a lot better. Once I’d realised that I could take over 30 minutes of video on my new 4G card I did milk it a little :P

So, lessons I learned:

• Export all your pictures before going to a gig
• Take two cards. Take a few pictures on one then swap; If you do get pulled aside swap back. All they were interested in was seeing I had a picture from the gig and that I deleted everything
• Take two batteries or better yet two camaras. That way you can keep on taking pictures after they take your battery; probably best if they don’t see you using it again though
• Read the manual so you actually know how to put it into a higher ISO mode, I got some pretty decent pictures with it
• Once you’ve deleted the pictures lock the card. Don’t do what I did and take a bunch more pictures once you have your battery back.

If you keep the card untouched then you stand a better chance of restoring the pictures. I’ll save that for a later post, not the ruin the surprise but this story has a happy ending.

There is a better review including set list of the gig over on last.fm.

We went to see Muse play Wembley Stadium on the 16th. It was an absolutely awesome show. We got to see Citizen Erased and Micro Cuts which both rocked. Our seats kinda sucked, too far up and forward. We couldn’t even see Dom on drums until they wheeled him out to the front for the encore. Totally worth spending the best part of two days on various trains back and forth. There are proper reviews, set list and pictures over on last.fm

Annoyingly on sometime on Sunday I managed to drop the SD card containing most of the pictures from the show and a video of Micro Cuts. Not that big a deal, I needed a bigger card anyway, the pictures of the stage are all pretty blurry because of the distance and my cameras lame zoom. Videos for most songs have already appeared on Youtube and rumor has it they were filming for a DVD, here’s hoping.

What really sucks is we lost the video of us dancing like robots to Super Massive Black Hole. Fortunately, we had another opportunity to act like dorks when we arrived at Euston for the train home.

As seen over on Planet Ubuntu Users (although I use ZSH so modified slightly).

narsil% cat .histfile | awk '{print $1}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
181 vim
105 cd
98 cvc
81 sudo
66 conary
49 rmake
29 hg
25 rm
22 mplayer
18 ll

Pretty interesting, I’m surprised vim was top considering I use gvim for most of my ‘heavy’ editing. Must be all those small changes to files I do without even realising. It’s funny that ll (an alias I use for ls -lah) came bottom, the last time I made a list ls was #1. Now I use tab complete all the time and use ll to check sizes and modes. I wondered which conary commands I was using most so I strung that together too.

narsil% cat .histfile | egrep '^(conary|sudo conary)' | sed s/sudo// | awk '{print $1, $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
44 conary update
40 conary q
4 conary scs
4 conary erase
3 conary rollback
1 conary updateall

Not all that surprising. I tend to do lots of updates while building packages then rollback the whole lot. I rarely, if ever, use erase - at least two of those were me removing Firefox to test MonoDevelop 0.14.

I only keep 1000 history entries though so its more telling off what I’ve been doing in the last couple of days rather than in general.

Hurray! Second post (Now actually tagged Foresight) :/

So the other day Ken post a Labyrinth mind-map I created ages ago which recently came up in conversation. Now I have a place to put such “useful” information I thought I’d fill in some back story. I made it back when I first discovered Labyrinth, Thilo was busy getting the Wiki into shape and he added a page about brainstorming (which I can’t seem to find now). I created the image as a joke but never got around to posting it. The other day while we were discussing the new QA process in #foresight this happened.

< pcutler_> i'm going to recap the qa email and send it out by this weekend too, maybe we can make progress on how we test as well
< kenvandine> good
< pscott> i think it needs a wiki page
< kenvandine> that is part of what we need to hammer out
< kenvandine> yes
< pscott> and lots of flow charts
< kenvandine> hehe
* kenvandine sucks at charts
* kenvandine notes gxti is good at charts :)
< pscott> lets just hope it goes better than the last foresight brainstorming session
* kenvandine wonders when that was…
< kenvandine> oh
< kenvandine> names for the editions
< kenvandine> hehe
< kenvandine> need more structure than that
< pscott> nah, it was a joke i can’t find the punchline to
< kenvandine> hehehe
< pscott> ooh, there it is http://pscott.yi.org/green.png
< kenvandine> hehehe
* kenvandine rofl
< kenvandine> that is great
< kenvandine> what is that bottom thing?
< pscott> i think its just where the cursor was at the time
< kenvandine> I gotta blog this

Now we have a transparent version of the desktop Foresight can actually be any colour you want!

In related news, according to the author of Labyrinth there is a new version on its way, awesome!