4th Week: Song projection...

So, I'm going to try OpenSong and/or Lyricue at the OICCU central meeting on Wednesday. Neither of them, though, let me do as I would like to and run the lyrics with a transparent background over a video window.

Lyricue has an experimental transparent display... but to get it working I've had to hack in Perl a couple of times, and the flicker makes it simply unusable in a production setting. I also don't think Lyricue handles verse transition well at all (it's actually hideous unless I'm missing a trick); OpenSong at least lets you jump from verse to verse as you need to. With the keyboard.

It took me a little while to get Lyricue's Gnome2::Canvas display working... for some reason none of the deb packages I tried had the right Perl bindings as a dependency.

Writing my own song lyric projection software has been on my "to-do" list for a while now, but realistically it's not going to happen before Wednesday at 5pm! And there's only one central meeting after this at Wes Mem, we move back to St. Aldate's next term (thank goodness) where looped video backgrounds are fast becoming the norm. I wonder what OICCU will make of them...

3rd Week: I'm Not American...

...which means Amazon don't want me to pay money to download MP3s. I don't run Windows or Mac, which means iTunes doesn't want my cash. I'm not going to "upgrade" from what Walmart thinks is Windows 98, so they won't accept any finances from me. Neither Virgin nor HMV have heard of Chris Tomlin, PuraShop doesn't do downloads, and I don't see the point in paying vast sums of money for things I won't use (eg a physical CD) and don't need (the packaging, shipping costs etc).

Does the music industry still wonder why people use torrents?

1st Week: SJC MCR Fire

You heard it here first*, folks...

On Friday night an electrical fault with the dishwasher in the MCR kitchen caused a fire at St. John's College. Several fire appliances were in attendance and at one stage seven firefighters were reported to have entered the building in breathing apparatus. The fire had been put out by 11.30pm; MCR members are waiting to be allowed back in to the building to collect possessions, it is hoped within the hour.


*Or maybe second, depending on if you've heard it elsewhere first.

1st Week: From absurd to absurd-er

The ITV-F1 website reports that an FIA scrutineer is to keep an eye on McLaren during the final Grand Prix of the season in Brazil next weekend, due to pressure from the Spanish motorsport federation.

WTF?? Alonso can't hack it that a rookie driver might beat him to the title, and has already thrown his toys out of the cockpit several times this season. And now the FIA are joining in?

The political fight, while usually adding extra tension to a season, this year has overshadowed the real fight on the track. The constructors' championship has been decided by an FIA hearing (which resulted in a completely unprecedented fine for McLaren). The reigning world champion has been acting like a seven-year-old brat being forced to share his toys, and nas asked his bigger friend in the year above to protect him from the "bullies" of his team. And the FIA have shown themselves to be at best incompetent, and at worst corrupt.

Which is a shame, because we've had some of the best races since I started watching Formula 1.

I really hope Hamilton can win at Interlagos. Not because he's British, not because he's been the best driver, and not because it would be the perfect end to the completely unprecedented run of success he's had - let's not forget, at the start of the season we were all amazed he had three consecutive podium finishes! I want Hamilton to win because it would be the perfect two-fingers-up to everyone who's smeared F1 with dirty politics this year, while he's just done his job: get in the car and drive damn fast.

1st Week: From Kubuntu To The World

OK, so after my last post I was feeling a little fed up with the world according to Mark Shuttleworth and the rest of Ubuntu. I decided to take a peek at what else was out there...

I'd picked up a copy of Linux User & Developer magazine, with a cover CD of Sabayon Linux (based on Gentoo). I plugged the CD in and booted my (non-work-critical) laptop, and saw what I could see...

First off, it plays music while it boots. It's an interesting quirk, and not one that gets repeated with the installed version! Incidentally the DVD also came with live options for Tor web browsing plus a handful of games. The CD prompts you to set up Compiz Fusion graphics when X first loads - the first distro I have tried that has integrated such eye-candy from the off. The app package selection was good, and even for a live CD it was very responsive and fast.

Then I decided to see if there are packages to update.


Following instructions found somewhere on their site, I did the "do this after new install" thing... and waited.

And waited.

And then, after three hours of thinking, it came up with a non-error message, telling me to run a different command to find the real error message.

I ran this command. It told me that the package that it was trying to update didn't exist, apparently.

I like Sabayon. I like their attitude: forget finnicking about this license or that license, people want to be able to play MP3s, dammit! A whole lot better than Ubuntu's left-hand-vs-right-hand approach, not including proprietary drivers yet writing a whole lot of code to simplify installation of the same. But I really don't have the time to hunt through pages of documentation just to get at an error message! Not giving the user a useful error message at the off isn't just bad design - in this day and age, it's just rude.

So, Sabayon was out. A mate of mine raves over Fedora (no-longer-Core) 7, so I thought I'd give that a go. They have a KDE spin now. I like KDE, so I tried that.

For some obscure reason, it installed both KDE and Gnome despite me only selecting the former, and ensuring the latter was deselected. I'm fairly certain amaroK doesn't depend on Metacity, the GNOME window manager... The GUI package tool was more clunky than Adept or Synaptic, and the package selection more limited. Beryl was installed by default but not running by default. With it running, it had a tendency to forget to draw parts of the screen, a problem I had not experienced running it under Kubuntu Feisty or with Compiz under Sabayon.

Fedora is known as a good distro in terms of art, and indeed it looked gorgeous for the most part; though the login screen truncated the words "Username" and "Password", and try as I might I couldn't get the fonts to render just as I like them (it reminded me, in fact, of MS ClearType).

Niggles though they were, they were minor ones, and if I had to I could probably get on very well with Fedora. However, I simply just don't have the time to learn all those little differences between RPM and deb-based distros...

Tryint out Gutsy now, a week before launch. Let's see what happens. From Kubuntu, to the world, only to find out I'm back where I started...

1st Week: Gutless Gibbon beta...

GutsyGibbon/Beta/Kubuntu - Ubuntu Wiki

"Kubuntu 7.10 now includes Dolphin as the default file manager.
Dolphin has not replaced Konqueror, but was chosen as the default file
manager to introduce new users to file management a bit easier than
what Konqueror could do. The main focus of Dolphin is usability with
the following features:

• a navigation bar for URLs allowing quick navigation through your file system

  
  

• split views

  
  

• and more...

  
  

Dolphin, unlike Konqueror, does not provide browser support as well as some of the advanced KIO slaves and options that Konqueror provided, therefor easing the use of the application."

Typo aside - removing features != ease of use. I'm sorry, it just doesn't! Grammer desaster as this entry is, it otherwise seems rather flawed...

• Hiding the file tree from new users simply means they do not know that their filesystem is a tree. The locations seem disparate and unconnected. (The exact opposite of Windows' infinite-loop thing, I guess.) Most users will (should) be familiar with hierarchical file trees anyway from Windows (though I admit I don't use it often enough to be able to say for sure).
  
• Konqueror has split views. The Kubuntu devs disabled that feature by default. Go figure.
  
• So being able to just drag files from a local directory to (say) an FTP server, an SFTP server, over infra-red or Samba is more difficult than navigating to your local directory (without seeing the tree), then thinking, "Ah, that *is* where that file is... now what app do I need to load to transfer it using method x?", loading the app, navigating AGAIN to the directory...

But it's OK, they haz sexy graf1x! (Yes, I'm falling out of love with this distro.)