Jokosher

Over the past few months, some of you (especially LugRadio listeners) may have been aware of the project called Jokosher. It is a collaborative effort to create an easy to use, audio editor for the masses. It uses the GStreamer for a back-end and GNOME for the front end. It has just made its first release and I thought I’d mention it here because watching it being developed blew me away in terms of the power and skill of the FLOSS community. Unfortunately thats all I could do, just sit back and watch and describe what I saw in the Wikipedia article (yes, OK, I’m a fucking Wikipediholic, I know).

For more information on Jokosher, check out the site, and see the Wikipedia article for a description of it.

Truly incredible.

A bit late but

Yep I did go to the LUGRadio live event. You might not have seen me, but I frequented the area around the pool table, MAME cabinet, and Clan.lugradio table. Drinky, Adam Sweet, if you come across this page, I’m the one who kicked your ass with mines .

Overall the event pretty much rocked. Some of the talks were boring (I won’t name names), but overall I throughly enjoyed it and learnt a lot about Linux, open source, and how badly the community surrounding it can dance. I’ll see everyone who attended next year, for sure.

Firefox 2.0b1

I actually did try this. But I got bored within the first few days and upgraded again to the nightly 2.0b1 branch. What can I say? It looks brilliant. Another Microsoft killer for sure. Some say it might even pass the Acid 2.0 test, but that is yet to be seen in action. To the right is a screenshot that I took of the M/S killer when it was still installed as the official download, that can now be seen in the Mozilla Firefox wikipedia article (well, at the time of writing – here is a link to a revision with it on).

The application is great. It’s been reworked and un-quirked to make it enjoyable for all users, not just ones who take the time to learn the application. The RSS reading system has been upgraded and now it is just fantastic. Right now, I’m editing in a box with fucking spell checking. I kid you not. You can undo closed tabs, restore all tabs after a crash or hang and you can reorder and change your search plugins. All of these additions will probably be feature regressions for the slow catch up game of IE7. And I think that with IE7 introducing tabbed browsing to the masses will encourage users to switch over, if merely to see what the fuss is about. I can’t wait to see the future of Firefox, and I hope and wish it every success. With any luck, Microsoft will drop their browser and install Firefox as default. It won’t cost them anything, especially not in licensing, and it would free up developers for them. Think forward to open source possibilities Gatesy! You know it’s right.

Spain? Me?

That is correct. I haven’t been to Spain and I most definitely have not been neglecting this blog. Okay? All clear? Right.

I succumbed to the Internet whilst in Spain, and all the computers I had to work on were riddled with Internet Explorer spyware/adware. You’d think that Internet cafe would at least be secure enough to avoid downloading that type of crap. But not, it seems.

Other than that, in the world of technology, nothing seems new. I am currently trying out Firefox 2.0b I shall report back to you as soon as possible.

Television Commercials

Some make you laugh, some make you happy, some make you cringe. Others make you want to stab the person sat next to you in the heart. The new Shell advert, however is fantastic. There is only a certain type of advert that make me stop and watch, Honda of course being up there near the top. But the new Shell advert is one of the most well constructed adverts I have ever seen, it just makes me want to watch it again and again. Okay, enough blabbering on about adverts. I have some Axis to destroy.

A well deserved sending home

Anyone that held any hope leading into the quarter-finals last night needs to be shut in a box for a few years. Those that truly believed that we were going to win the World Cup this year has been slapped in the face and put to bed. We just never looked like a side that was worth it. The American press described our team as boring, and I’m certain to tell you I wasn’t leaping and bounding at that game. It was utter drab. I felt like going out for a walk since the country had gone quiet for once. If England are ever to even get into the semi-finals in the World Cup, they need to up their game a huge amount. Sven just didn’t seem to understand there that 4-1-4-1 doesn’t work as on his own, Rooney does as much work as a bloody goalkeeper; and the team – where is the spark of genius that Cup winning teams have? It’s non-existent. The second seed team comes home today, and they played like a 10th seed team. Appalling.

eon8

What is eon8? If you had asked me that 24 hours ago you would have sent a shudder down my very spine. eon8.com was a social experiment. A bloke from Florida, named Mike decided 6 months ago that he would create a suspicious looking site to gauge the publics reaction. The web page he set up consisted of a timer counting down, a world map with dots on high population areas (“deployment”), several undecipherable codes and parts of the site completely restricted from the outside world. I don’t know what other people thought, but it sure did shit me up some.

What is really interesting is the kind of reaction a human mind has to this type of thing instantly you panic. There is something here that you don’t have a fucking clue about, and there’s the slight possibility that it could do harm. So what does the human mind instantly want to do. Destroy it. Several people were so scared by this site, that they attempted to take it down by any means necessary, in the hope that whatever would happen would be stopped. It is funny to think that anything we don’t and can’t know about, we feel we must destroy it.

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Peace