amaroK-1.3.5 available

I've just updated amaroK to 1.3.5 in the FreeBSD portstree. This fixes the bugs, I mentioned earlier on this blog.

I've also written a patch for the "auto scan music collection" issue, when using postgres as your db backend.

All your base are belong to us.

All dressed up, but nobody to play with..

So Friday night, the big night - the b-i-g night..
My better half has arranged a soiree between friends, in which I'd hate to impose on - and my own plans kinda fell dead due to various reasons, to I'm left with two options:

1. Go back to the office, and catch up on some of my work.
2. Get some super-funky drinks with some cool people..

As I'm having a cold, neither seems to attractive - but I guess I'll have to opt for door number 2. Now if only it could stop raining...

Too bad, there's not any all-night-open driving-ranges, I could *so* deal with hitting the living crap out of some balls now.. oh well, I will definitely go play some golf one of these days, it's gonna feel good !!

On the subject of spam

A couple of months ago, I setup David Schweikert mailgraph scripts for all our incoming/outgoing mailservers. Since end of August, we've received 534278 mails, in addition we tagged 135893 as spam. That's like 1/5 of our incoming mails, are spam !!
Imagine the resources we waste on fighting spam.. Bandwidth, a dedicated server to scan, tag and store messages.

Over the same period of time, we've caught 1046 messages containing vira of some sort, and I've (through postfix header checks) REJECTED roughly 33000 messages.

It's a sad state of affairs.

amaroK 1.3.3

I committed the amaroK 1.3.3 update to the FreeBSD portstree a couple of days ago, go get it !

The amaroK dev team really worked a lot on the stability, and it should be (according to them) the most stable release..ever..

I've already managed to find a couple of bugs.. The amarok port installs two main binaries (amarok and amarokapp), the first one being a wrapper for the latter. If you've compiled the port with libvisual support, you'll have to run amarokapp in order to visualize any plugin, the wrapper will not work.

Another thing is user-defined "smart playlists", they do not work with PostgreSQL support enabled.

I've created bug reports for both issues.

Google Reader Vs Bloglines

Thomas wrote a post about the Google Reader, so I thought I'd give it a try. As usual with Google services I was positively surprised, and have more or less switched to it now.

On the down side (as Thomas mentioned), I cannot easily see how many posts are unread, and to which category they belong - I have a couple of different categories, such as "Read now", "Read later" and "Read whenever".. I hope they'll add this RSN.

The big plus, is that it actually keeps the posts marked as unread until I click on it. In Bloglines I'd usually click on one of my categories, and all unread posts in that category would be displayed - it could be up to 40-50 posts all displayed at the same time - if I'd accidently close this page, or if firefox would crash (yes, it does happen once in a while) - all the posts would be marked as read, and it'd be a pain to read them.

Also, the Reader interface is sexy ;)

Rugby Extravaganza

Hello amigos!

Last week (Saturday morning), I had a little mishap at rugby - head-on collision with some dipshit - and my left eyebrow exploded.. Of course I took pictures, and mich has been begging me to put them up, so here we are.

This is just after the collision, at the 'Urgences' (read ER) of the Ambroise Paré hospital. I like the little drop of blood on my cheek, I think it really 'makes' the picture:


This is after the stitches. Still doesn't look too good:


Needless to say, everyone left me alone for a week, people in the subway would take different subway lines to avoid me.

The stitches are coming out tomorrow, so I don't look like Tyson anymore (well that's my opinion):


Full details: 5 internal stitches, to stitch up the torn muscles. 15 external stitches, to close up the 10 cm gap in my head.

Ciao!

dimbo

EuroBSDCon 2005

Just registered for EuroBSDCon 2005. Yay !
I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of old (and new) faces, especially as I did not go to the BSDCan (Canada) earlier this year.
This time is takes place in Basel, Switzerland - and there are a lot of interesting talks.

Trying to find a hotel for a reasonable price, got some good offers through the venue and the Swiss tourist office - as the conference itself will take place at a university campus, they've been able to really keep fees to a minimum.

Probably going to drive over there.. it's only 550km or so. Last year, I drove to EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany - I believe the distance is about the same.

New FreeBSD.org website imminent

The cool and slick re-design of the www.FreeBSD.org website, should come online sometime within the next 12 hours.

It has been created by Emily Boyd as her Google Summer of Code project.

Update: ... and it's been launched. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it.

Tennis

Managed to play a little bit of tennis this weekend.. it's been a while, so as suspected a was pretty trashed afterwards.. It felt good though.

Also, we went to visit some family in the north of France (near Amiens) - I enjoy coming a bit away from Paris, enjoying the peace and quiet (I'm becoming an old fart... ). We had some good food up there, they certainly know how to feed a Dane ;)

Came in to the office this morning, with the ever growing backlog awaiting.. it's getting increasingly tiresome trying to keep up with everything. Have a bunch of FreeBSD stuff I need to do as well, apparently there's still problems getting amaroK and libtunepimp-0.4 to get along. I hope I'll have a few moments tomorrow to play around with it.
Got a mail from Andreas Klemm with a bug-report on sysutils/hackbot. Basically, the path to the datafiles required by hackbot was wrong, so hackbot would bail out with an error... Last time I made a commit to the hackbot port was in March 2004.. Amazingly nobody else pointed out the error..

In other news, I can report that Dimitri looks more or less like a roadkill. He had a rugby playing "accident" and ended up with about 15 stitches in the eyebrow.. It's a sorry sight.