5 little ducks went out one day...
Recapping from last time...

iPod
So the iPod works, and I have been using it quite happily. I had to transcode my Ogg Vorbis files to MP3, which took a while. Thankfully, gstreamer makes this incredibly easy, and gives me a method to do this from the command line:

find . | grep ".ogg$" > to-convert
while read i ;\
 do gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location="$i" ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert !\
 lame ! filesink location="`echo $i|sed -re 's/^(.*).ogg$/\1.mp3/'`" ;\
done < to-convert

It even preserves the metadata, although doesn't quite deal with unicode characters as well as I would like. I am assuming it's the fault of the id3 spec, rather then gstreamer. I considered using MP4 (AAC) rather then MP3 to reencode my music, however there appears to be no Debian packages for gstreamer-faac. I've noticed that while you can get a lot of the non-free libraries, there doesn't seem to be a repository for non-free gstreamer plugins, perhaps someone can point me to one.
Another irritating thing is that you now have to add a gstreamer profile for MP3 so that you can encode to MP3 in sound-juicer. The application to do this appears to be not quite working, which made it a major pain in the arse. I had to fall back to gconftool-2.

Finally, gnome-volume-manager automagically mounts the iPod, which is cool. However it doesn't actually mount it with the user flag, so it doesn't appear in Nautilus (it would be cool to see a picture of an iPod in computer://, or even just the firewire disk logo), doesn't appear in drivemount and would appear to not be user unmountable. I should probably file a bug against this.

I guess the final test will be using the iTrip on the way to Bunbury early Tuesday morning. Then I'll have to decide if I'm buying it.

Four little ducks went out one day...
Today (which is incidently St. Valentine's Day) is the last day I get to spend properly with Stephanie for the next week (she's going to Melbourne for a week). Not being majorly influenced by the day, we have nothing special planned (I was explicitly informed to not plan anything special). Some people also went to the other extreme.

(all these people getting married and engaged reminds me that Stephanie and I still haven't actually picked a date, or maybe even a season in a year, and we've been engaged for a long while now...)

Non the less, she claimed the other day, she is going to Melbourne for a holiday. THIS IS NOT THE CASE, she is going there to study! So if you're in Melbourne, and you see this girl, and she is not studying, then please email me, she has a thesis to write, and no time for fun!

(ok, so I'm actually kidding. Yes, she should study, but I don't expect her to sit in that library the entire time. I know I wouldn't...)

Back in Time
Stephanie had never seen the first two Back to the Future movies, so we watched them. Apparently she doesn't like movies involving time travel. It would seem that thinking about causality gives her a headache. Apparently we will never be watching them again, this makes me sad because I really enjoy them. I have decided that it's the theme of reoccurring history that makes them really cool.

Deutschstunde
Another German lesson tomorrow, for which I have not yet done my homework. It seems to me that the class I am in is really just a rehash of the third year of highschool (year 10) German, which I've actually done. As a result, I know all the grammar they are teaching me. I am also probably the strongest reader and speaker in the class (now that the girl who was too good for that class has left). My vocabulary is still rusty, and I am still trying to get all my cases (subjective, accusative, dative, genitive) sorted out again. I have gone to my brother's notes from year 11 and 12 German in an attempt to learn more grammar, and have actually learnt some stuff I was getting wrong, and a new tense or two, giving me more things I can express. I also know why some certain sentences are the way they are (reflexive verbs and an indirect object). Finally I have been sent some German children's picture books (thanks Frank), which I shall have to sit down and read (an amazing number of words I don't know).

Software Suspend
The swsusp2 developers now have a very scary way of displaying the status of a software suspend in userspace, while suspending in kernel space. This allows them to display images, text, rendered blender files, or whatever they like, as long as they follow certain rules. Things like X have to be frozen, but today we discussed making it look like GNOME was suspending your computer, you capture the desktop and then composite a grey alpha transparent mask on it. You then blat that into video memory (they already can blat PNGs into video memory). Originally I had wanted to realise suspend and resume dialogs in offscreen memory, find out the coordinates of the progress bar, and just fill it by hand, but that would rely on the progress bar being a solid colour, and look like shit, depending on your GTK theme. Instead, perhaps some nasty incantation of gtkfb to draw the dialog on top of a "background".

<bernard_> davyd: could you persuade gtkfb to do the right thing?
ewwww.... get gtkfb to actually do the progress dialog, with a "background image"
<davyd> bernard_: that's what I was thinking...
<davyd> sounds evil doesn't it
<bernard_> disgusting. i like it.

Blender Abuse
Bernard (above) has been looking at Blender to render a short animation of Tux being rotated in an ice cube. So far it seems that noone with actual cool Blender skills has stepped forward, so he's been looking for models he can use. Today we came across this:

from a "mature users only" file... we just had to look
Now you too can spank the dancing, sleazy nurse!

I don't think I had anything else to write about, my apologies for the length of these last couple of posts. Also, hello to Planet Linux Australia, the organisation of which I think I'm a member, just never remember signing up.