MaW’s Blog

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Oooh, it draws fast again

Filed under: Linux — MaW @ 6:21

Since Foresight’s X server started using EXA for acceleration by default with the intel driver, various bits of rendering on the desktop have been horribly slow. Fortunately it’s still possible to switch back to XAA, which at least on my i915 is faster. Just stick

Option “AccelMethod” “xaa”

In the driver section of xorg.conf. Hopefully EXA will get faster in the future.

Saturday, 22nd March 2008

Jonathan Coulton at Dingwalls, London

Filed under: Music — MaW @ 7:51

Yes, Jonathan Coulton in London! His first time performing ‘over here’ and yes, he did sing Over There — he sang it first, after saying he thought he should get it out of the way and then not being able to start because he was trying not to laugh.

The atmosphere prior to the start of the concert was absolutely incredible. I’m going to keep comparing it to Loreena McKennitt at the Barbican, because there was the same sense of being part of a group of really dedicated fans, and of extreme anticipation. In her case it was because she’d not toured at all for nine years. In JoCo’s case, it’s because he’s never been here at all.

With a group of people from JoCo’s forum, I was right near the front of the queue. The doors didn’t even open until the advertised start time, which is not how I usually understand these things to work — the time on the ticket is usually the show’s intended start time. Therefore the concert started later than expected, and the whole transport situation became rather more stressful than it should have been.

However, the show itself was worth waiting for. After Over There — complete with derisory boos during the ’saved their asses in World War Two’ line — we were treated to a good cross-section of JoCo’s music, although unfortunately not including the new Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu. Particular highlights included Skullcrusher Mountain with virtually everyone singing every single word and the last chorus as an audience solo; Re: Your Brains as a concert-ender with audience participation (as if we hadn’t been participating already, as he acknowledged) where we had to learn to sing it like a mob of zombies, not like a Viennese children’s choir which has been turned into zombies. ‘Perhaps your mouths don’t work properly since you became zombies’.

I can’t recount all the wonderful moments as I’ll be here all day and I need to go shopping and do some cooking, but we did get the world premiere of Code Monkey sung with the accompaniment of JoCo’s new Tenori-On.

What do you mean, you don’t know what a Tenori-On is? Get thee to Google! Away, away!

Sunday, 24th February 2008

New house!

Filed under: Life — MaW @ 22:13

I’ve moved. If you need updated contact details (address and landline have changed, everything else remains the same), get in touch and I’ll give them to you.

Also, if you’re around and at a loose end, come over for dinner. I’ve got a dining table and four chairs, but you might have to bring a plate.

Tuesday, 1st January 2008

Ginger Cordial

Filed under: Food — MaW @ 19:59

Some people might think this is a post about being nice to redheads. It isn’t, although I suppose I could write something about the ridiculousness of that particular much-perpetuated image.

No, this is about drink!

Non-alcoholic, before you get too excited. It’s quite simple really. It goes like this:

  1. take a decently-sized piece of fresh ginger
  2. peel it
  3. slice it thinly
  4. tip it into a small saucepan with some water and a generous amount of sugar
  5. heat it gently, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar to form a syrup
  6. continue to cook gently until it tastes quite strongly gingery
  7. add more sugar if it doesn’t seem syrupy enough
  8. strain
  9. allow to cool a bit, then place into a jar, bottle or other suitable lidded storage vessel

When you want to drink it, dilute some down with water. For strength, you’re aiming for something like commercial ‘high juice’ squashes. You could make it weaker, but then you just need a bigger helping in each glassful.

I have no idea how long this keeps, but if you make the syrup really sugary it should keep until you drink it, because it’ll get drunk fast, sugar’s a preservative and ginger’s antibacterial.

Saturday, 15th December 2007

Three steps back…

Filed under: Dasher, Maemo — MaW @ 21:20

Okay so maybe not three steps. I got Dasher linking - hurrah! It turns out there was all sorts of fudging in the configure script to get it to work on the original Maemo for the Nokia 770, which is now unnecessary on OS2008. Hurrah for SDK improvements, but boo for not spotting that earlier.

The problem now is that libglade isn’t finding half the widgets in the glade file, and returns null pointers for them instead of the widget pointers. Every single one of the ones it’s failing to find is definitely in the XML, and the file’s definitely in the right place. I’ve checked - lots of times.

This might just be what makes me start to go bald.

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