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. ...

For future reference, here is the gstreamer pipeline I'm currently using to record videos (with audio) for YouTube: gst-launch-0.10 \ v4l2src ! 'video/x-raw-yuv,width=800,height=600,framerate=20/1' \ ! tee name=t_vid ! queue ! xvimagesink sync=false t_vid. ! queue \ ! videorate ! 'video/x-raw-yuv,framerate=20/1' ! queue \ ! mux. pulsesrc ! audio/x-raw-int,rate=48000,channels=2,depth=16 ! queue \ ! audioconvert ! queue \ ! mux. avimux name=mux ! filesink location=test6.avi For some reason cheese becomes slow for me when I start recording. Probably the theora encoding? I need to investigate further. ...

This weekend I've been messing about with gstreamer pipelines so that I can spam the world with YouTube videos. Go me! Let's see if it shows up on Planet Debian. Next weekend I'll be teaching my brother how to triage Debian GNOME bugs. :)

So Facebook Chat now uses XMPP. And the Empathy development version has some nice integration. This could mean that I can finally chat to non-Jabber using friends on a regular basis. It's been nearly four years since I switched from MSN to Jabber, and I think I lost contact with a lot of people. Facebook chat via AJAX is unreliable, and my visits to the site are quite irregular, so hopefully this will work around both problems. ...

On Tuesday, I released version 0.02 of Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards to CPAN. So far, no one has complained. This module is probably of interest only to people in the UK; it looks up which trains are next to arrive/depart from a particular station. This release was prompted by a patch sent to me by Ian Dash, implementing a filtering feature I was too lazy to write myself. If someone wants to put a fancy GNOME applet around it, I'd be grateful. ;) I think the next step is to add a nicer OO interface. ...

I wrote a plugin for Hudson today, which integrates Devel::Cover (Perl's test coverage tool) into the build reports. Actually, that's currently an exaggeration. All it does is add a checkbox in the configure page, and a link to Devel::Cover's reports on the build page when it's enabled. I spent the day remembering how to program in Java. Tomorrow I might be in a position to extend it into something more attractive - I'll publish it very soon, but I need to run it past my employer. Watch this space. ...