jon.dowland.name log

The ring

Back in August, I asked Sarah to marry me, and she said yes!

It took a little while to get the proper engagement ring sorted. I proposed with a stand-in, because I had a heirloom diamond that I wanted to offer Sarah for the ring. Happily she loved the idea, and so we had a ring made around the diamond.

I prefer the classic Cybermen.

The only mail-filing feature that is consistently available across all mail clients (web, mobile, desktop) and most often via a convenient button, keypress or gesture, is Delete.

A big gap since the last Debian Day. On request I reviewed Gustavo Panizzo's Hexen 2 Package which is in pretty good shape and should be ready for upload fairly soon. A prerequisite for that is support for Hexen 2 in game-data-packager: I've hacked in preliminary support and pushed a package to experimental (version 31), it should be available not long after you read this.

P8M CD and stickers

What if you have a mis-behaving electronic device, which might corrupt files you store on it? I'm interested in tools to inspect incremental backups, look at file changes and alert me if they are suspicious. For example, if an MP3 changes, did the MPEG data change, or the ID3 tag, or something else? An ID3 change is likely to be on purpose, MPEG data less so. Similar for JPEGs and EXIF metadata. I decided to poke around in my backups of my music player. I discovered some pretty weird stuff.

If you have an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 PCI sound card or anything else using the "Envy24" chip, be aware: at present neither the GNOME3 "sound" control panel applet nor the pulseaudio tool "pavucontrol" expose enough of the card's controls to play any audio. You need to have alsa-utils or alsa-utils-gui installed and use envy24control to put the relevant sliders in the right places.

Very little done last night. Advocated a maintainer. My desktop computer is completely hosed as part of a wheezy update: many issues at once but one is GDM going into an infinite loop, spawning millions of X servers; another is something in the boot processes seemingly prodding /dev/sdc and failing. I'm not sure if I have time to get to the bottom of it, I might just reinstall from a d-i daily. Priority going forward should be to finish off the musicbrainz stuff.

And we've frozen!

Once again Debian day was somewhat compromised: this time by more DIY. I still managed a few bits and pieces, amortized over the rest of the week. I benefited from some train time this weekend.

One interesting side-effect of setting aside a regular slot of time for a task is that you are guaranteed to spend some time, perhaps not much, thinking about that task, every week. As a consequence, even one evening a week is enough for me to think about my Debian work at other times. This means I am in a better position to use any unplanned free time more effectively.

After a relatively long period of flux, I've managed to settle into a routine where I've got all the time I can dedicate to open source stuff bunched together: every Tuesday night. I've started calling it "Debian Day", although Debian won't get all that time exclusively.

One evening a week doesn't sound like much, but that's unfortunately a realistic amount given my other commitments. Still, having a firm idea of how much resource I have makes planning what I can and can't do much easier. It also means I need to be quite selective about what I spend my time on.

In (roughly) 2008 I read "Blood Music" — my first Greg Bear novel — and devoured it in a weekend, in only two or three reading sessions. That happens very rarely, and when it does I often wonder whether it's the quality of the writing or some combination of that and your personal moods and tastes at the time that is responsible. My next Bear was "Darwin's Radio" in mid-2010 which, whilst good, did not provoke the same feverish read. I might write short reviews for both at some point in the future, but right now I can't remember either well enough to do so.