I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets. I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party. ...

So apparently the route I took round Central Park is 9.7km, which explains a lot. This morning I checked out Morningside Park, but it's really too small for running - there's a loop of about 400m at one end, and you can go down the long bit to 123rd St, but it gets boring very quickly. Most of the park is taken up with a big hill and stairs. I'll try Riverside Park on Thursday, or find a shorter loop at this end of Central Park. ...

Yesterday my brother and I checked out of the youth hostel - it was a nice place, but I think it would have been better if we'd had the time to focus on the youth hostelling experience. As it was, I felt like we were just interlopers peeking into a world where we didn't belong. We headed across Central Park and visited the Met, which is huge - and noted with some satisfaction all the things that came from England. When we left, it was raining, and we walked down Fifth Avenue in the downpour. After so much heat, it was a great relief - but it'll probably be straight sunshine for a few days now. ...

Well, I made it to New York, along with my brother. Yesterday we walked down most of Manhatten Island - we've been staying in the youth hostel on 103rd street, and made our way on foot as far as Battery Park. Along the way, we visited McDonalds (twice) and Starbucks (was that two or three times?), both featuring free wifi and air conditioning. We went up the Rockefeller Tower as well, and got a few photos out of that. ...

One thing I noticed having started to use gnash is that the BBC's iPlayer website (UK-only, I believe) gives a message like "You do not have Flash player installed" - not merely complaining about the version, but actually not recognising gnash as a Flash player at all. Cue some digging. The BBC's pages use glow, an in-house JavaScript library (available under the Apache 2.0 License) to detect whether Flash is installed. The documentation was really easy to follow - I had a test page going quicker than you can say "Hello, World!" ...

Adobe aren't supporting their flash player on amd64 right now. The cognitive dissonance gets a little draining, anyway, and I've seen the hoops I'd have to jump through to get the 32-bit version running. So I'm going to try tracking gnash trunk for a while. First impressions: gnash seems easier to build than it used to be (or maybe I just read the instructions this time). I chose the AGG graphics backend, with gstreamer and gtk. I also chose to install the browser plugins system-wide. The bzr repository ships copies of the necessary Mozilla libraries, which I'd usually frown upon as a packager, but it did mean I didn't have to worry about them. ...

The daemon feature of Emacs is great. But when should the daemon be started? At one time I used an '@reboot' line in my crontab. But when you want to use things like Tramp mode (for editing files on remote servers transparently), you very quickly wish that emacs could talk to your ssh-agent. So if you accept that you will be running a desktop environment (not always true), you can add the daemon to your equivalent of "System >> Preferences >> Startup Programs". ...

Today I improved the function I was using to toggle full screen in GNU Emacs. (defun toggle-fullscreen (&optional f) (interactive) (let ((current-value (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen))) (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen (if (equal 'fullboth current-value) (if (boundp 'old-fullscreen) old-fullscreen nil) (progn (setq old-fullscreen current-value) 'fullboth))))) (global-set-key [f11] 'toggle-fullscreen) The previous function would always restore the frame to "normal" state, even if Emacs was previously maximized. This one makes it behave more like, say, Epiphany or Totem. ...

Thank you to everyone who came to see me sing in the Southampton Philharmonic Choir this evening, and to those supporting from afar. My favourite parts, naturally, were the phrases in Villa-Lobos's Choros 10 that include fortissimo low F notes. There's a low E at one point in Daphnis et Chloe, but it's pianissimo.  

Today I wore a tie to work, and told everyone it was "dress up Friday". Of course, this has been done before. At lunch most of the office was together at the pub, celebrating a software release. I had an entertaining discussion with the Technical Director about how our next major version should be developed - we disagree. But it seems I've convinced several key people of the merits of basing our work on a third-party distribution, so that looks promising. ...