stonetable.org

I like having a new mail notification icon, so I did some searching and found a Thunderbird extension, moztraybiff. It’s simple and works, using the Free Desktop system tray standard.

Some quick stuff I’ve been meaning to cover:

• After years of being constantly sick, tired, and irritable, I recently discovered I’m lactose-intolerant. I cut the dairy and within 36 hours I feel like a new man.
• I’m bouncing between working on EMP and libipod in my free time. EMP takes the priority, but I’d like to have full iPod support ready when EMP 1.0 is done.
• I’m currently addicted to Battlestar Galactica. I never thought I would get used to a female Starbuck, but she rules.
• Now that I’m feeling better, I’ve started writing again. Not much, but it’s a start.
• It’s January and we’re under a thunderstorm warning. What the hell is up with that?

I’m still adjusting to life after discovering my lactose-intolerance. It takes getting used to. I am taking lactaid at meals as-needed and that seems to be working. It’s been so long since I felt healthy. For the first time in recent memory, I’m sleeping straight through the night without tossing and turning. It’s a wonderful feeling.

EMP 0.1.2 is ready for testing. Grab the fresh tarball here.

Aside from some bug fixes, I rewrote the entire GStreamer backend code, borrowing heavily from Rhythmbox’s player/rb-player-gst.c. It’s my first time using GObjects. I highly recommend this tutorial. It made me realize why using GObjects are important.

If you have any problems building EMP, try this before you file a bug (assuming you’re using Debian):

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-gconf0.8-dev gstreamer-gconf gstreamer0.8-plugins

For those of you running Fedora Core 3 (thanks to Soko):

yum install gstreamer
yum install gstreamer-plugins
yum install GConf
yum install GConf-devel
yum install gstreamer-devel
yum install gstreamer-plugins-devel

I’m working on creating Debian packages for EMP, possibly for the 0.2 release.

On Wednesday, Dena, Annie and I went downtown to see Monty Python’s Spamalot, the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Starring Hank Azaria, David Hyde Pierce, and Tim Curry, this piece of “musical theatre” is absolutely brilliant. The theatre was packed. The play was funnier than I expected. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much or so hard. I even bit the inside of my cheek somehow in the process. The show bills itself as playing “Broadway in Chicago” and indeed their quest is to reach, wait for it, Broadway! But they can’t get to Broadway if they don’t have any Jews. What a dilema!

If you get the chance, go see this show. I suspect it’s going to be one of the hot shows to see when it hits Broadway.

Someone sent me a link to this site offering free ipods. What’s the catch, you ask? Simply complete one of their “offers”, which include things like requesting an AOL CD in the mail or opening a trial membership on some websites (like Ancestry.com). Then send the link to five of your friends. Once your five friends have completed their offers, they will ship you the iPod of your choice. Interesting deal. Sounds like a scam at first, but this same place has been around for a while, giving away various other products to get you to sign up with an advertiser.

With the pay for placement market what it is, it doesn’t surprise me to see an advertiser pay top dollar to this company in order to get a sign-up. Let’s do the math:

If an advertiser pays $50 for a sign-up, and in order to get a free iPod, you and 5 friends must sign-up, that’s $300. What’s a mini-iPod go for these days? About $250. That’s a net profit of $50 per person that they make, and I get a free iPod out of it. Interesting business model. Now let’s see if I can get the last two completions I need to get my silver mini-iPod.

Update:
I’m happy to say that I’ve completed my five offers (but click on the links above to help my wonderful wife Dena get hers. Other people are reporting receiving their iPods and are quite happy with the results.

Update #2:
I found a little package on my front porch after work today.

This packing slip sure looks interesting….

Behold!

My free iPod has arrived, proof to the naysayers that claimed the FreeIpods.com was a scam.

After a fair amount of work, I’m happy to announce the release of EMP 0.1.0, aka “Ring of Fire”. The code is stable to the point that I can use it on a daily basis, though it’s far from perfect.

There are plenty of bugs to be found. If you think you’ve found one, pop over to Zarro Boogs and file a bug report. It would be helpful (especially if the bug involves your music library) to include ~/.config/emp/library.xml. I expect to release new builds every couple of days, as i fix bugs and add features.

[Update]
I realized that I’m using a glib function that’s only available in 2.6.x. I’m going to change that call for 0.1.1, so if you get a linker like this: /home/ken/src/emp-0.1.0/src/library.c:28: undefined reference to `g_get_user_config_dir’, you’ll need to wait for 0.1.1