whizfoo

I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. The one feature making this worthwhile was the [ gallery] tag which makes it dead easy to add a gallery of images to a post.

I have collected all the desktop backgrounds I have made whilst mucking about in Inkscape and GIMP and added them in such a gallery.

I also added my newest creation, a poor attempt at recreating the poster for my favourite zombie movie:

I guess I now have the privilege to call myself a (very) minor GStreamer contributor! The patch was mostly a cut and paste job, with Sebastian Dröge doing most of the work (by supporting the [br] line break tags). Still, it’s very nice to be credited.

The GStreamer people are great, being exceptionally fast to respond to bugs and to fix them.

LibriVox was a nice find. They make audio recordings of public domain books, the recordings are also released as public domain works. Started in august of 2005, they have already accumulated a surprisingly large catalog of works.

My Rockbox player is now filled up with such diverse material as Heart of Darkness, The Communist Manifesto, and Romeo and Juliet.

Last time i messed around in Inkscape I started doing a wallpaper celebrating the (upcoming) release of Debian Etch. (It could be used as a logo or for some promotional material too).

I don’t think I will get around to finishing it, so I will simply post the SVG file here and now if someone want to use it. It’s licensed under the GNU GPLv2. Click the thumbnail above for a larger image and the SVG.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. [...] The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Howard Philips Lovecraft wrote this in 1926. I was surprised to learn that it’s apparently not about the “content protection specification” in Windows Vista.

I was recently given the privilege to work with pkg-gnome, the Debian GNOME maintainers and was even given commit rights to the SVN archive. With a little help, I closed my first RC bug. Great success. :)

November has been an interesting month in many ways. I’ve gotten not one, but two patches commited to free software projects. One for the Debian package of Einstein Puzzle.

einstein (2.0.dfsg.2-3) unstable; urgency=low

[...]
* main.cpp, res/resources.descr, debian/icon.bmp.uue, debian/rules: Window
icon.  Closes: #396113.  Thanks to Sven Arvidsson .

-- Bart Martens   Sun,  5 Nov 2006 13:32:08 +0100

And one patch for nautilus-cd-burner in GNOME(!).

2006-11-20  William Jon McCann

* src/burn-extension.c (nautilus_burn_get_file_items):
Try to burn cue for x-cdrdao-toc mime types.

Patch from Sven Arvidsson
Fixes #366909

They are both very, very tiny contributions, and the window icon for Einsten needs more work, still, it makes me pretty happy about myself.