Below are the five most recent posts in my weblog. You can also see a list of all posts.
Wed Jul 1 11:10:51 2009
I am now a Debian Developer. Yay! Thank you to everyone who helped and supported me through this process, which (depending on exactly how you count) took between 3, 4 and 8 years. I would have given up long ago without the encouragement and well-wishing I have received along the way.
Mon Jun 29 22:14:16 2009
For the last two years, I have been quietly working on a computer game influenced heavily by the classic UFO: Enemy Unknown.
The game is nowhere near complete and probably of little interest to most people. However, I have recently had the urge to write about things which have come up during development of the game. I've held of doing so since I hadn't actually announced the game.
Consider this an announcement of sorts. The super-early, basically not interesting source and binaries for win32 together with some documentation are available at http://ufo.alcopop.org/. This post serves to get the introduction out of the way so that in future, I can write about interesting things that have come up in the course of development.
Wed Jun 24 11:59:40 2009
Amazon "kindly" suffixes ' [Explicit]' onto the track names of mp3s it sells where the album qualifies for parental advisory (as well as the album title itself).
I corrected this by adjusting the ID3v1 tag for each track. So far so simple, but the files have an ID3v2 tag too. I don't need both, so I thought I'd remove the ID3v2 tags:
ls -1 | xargs -n1 -d '\n' -P0 id3v2 -d
Unfortunately id3v2 seems to have an undocumented feature: when you
strip the v2 tag, it copies the values across into corresponding v1 tags,
thereby undoing my corrections.
Aside: I learnt about the -P argument for xargs from a thread regarding an ITP on debian-devel a month or two back. It's particularly useful for jobs like audio encoding.
Fri Jun 19 15:41:28 2009
handbrake (or specifically, the ghb front end) does
not honour the GNOME network proxy settings, nor the http_proxy environment
variable. In addition, it runs in one thread and dials home on startup, using
synchronous calls, so in an environment where outbound port 80 packets are
dropped, it freezes up:
ghb 19841 jon 10u IPv4 95315 0t0 TCP 10.64.64.42:59082->91.121.74.28:www (SYN_SENT)
It seems to be trying to talk to handbrake.fr, and based on a glance at the
source code, is either checking for updates, or fetching '/appcast.xml' which
seems to be a blog about the app.
