MaW’s Blog

However, that doesn’t mean their sense of humour was completely destroyed in the process. From the mouse of Trioptimum

I just upgraded to the latest WPBlacklist for comment spam filtering. I’ve set fairly aggressive deletion options because I’m sick of having to do the deletions manually. It’s possible that you may end up having comments deleted if your IP appears on a real-time blacklist server for whatever reason. If that happens, sorry, but I really don’t get enough comments to make the spam worth the effort of deleting.

If this doesn’t work as well as I’m hoping it will, comments will be switched off until Wordpress 1.3 with its better plugin hooks comes along and spam filtering plugins can get fancier.

‘Nuff said?

NaNoWriMo continues. My novel is now flagging slightly behind the 60,000 word pace. It’s difficult to keep up the momentum once work starts to take over, and my sudden urge to restart hacking on Towel doesn’t help very much. For the uninitiated, Towel is a fairly simple audio player for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It started off as little more than a pretty GTK+ frontend to GStreamer, but now it’s a little more complicated than that, as the playlist system is rapidly becoming more and more complex. I think it may have reached its natural limit now, and is gradually getting filled out with missing functionality.

Recently I’ve been working on getting it to compile on my native 64bit Linux system, which wasn’t too hard because it was fairly intelligently coded the first time around (actually the most serious problem was with printf format strings generating warnings about variable sizes). The nastiest work was porting to GStreamer 0.8, which should have been done a long time ago but is done now and works quite nicely.

Currently I’m implementing properties dialogs for groups and tracks, which will help people figure out what the checkboxes in the groups and tracks views are for as they can be set from the properties dialogs as well — this is until GtkTreeView gains proper tooltip support, but I suspect that might take a while and may even be a GTK+ 3.0 feature. Also on the list are metadata caching, so Towel doesn’t have to probe every file in the library for its title/artist/length data every time it starts up, better handling of file read errors (there are going to be some holes exposed by the metadata caching system, as previously we relied heavily on all the files being read at startup), and general UI love for the library window.

Moving onward, there’ll be a release, then I’ll port to gtkmm 2.5 to take advantage of some useful new features, such as ellipsizing labels and stock icons for play, pause, stop and so forth. For now I intend to keep the project at SourceForge, but it’s going to have to move into a Subversion repository somewhere at some point; I just can’t be doing with CVS anymore.

And many thanks to Bryan Forbes, who says he’ll do some testing and offer assistance with the UI design.

Now I just need to get hold of Jonathan again…

So I’m back from the Show of Hands concert organissed by Cambridge Folk Club to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Good on the folk club I say. The venue was Comberton Leisure, which is attached to the village college (Comberton is a mediumish village a few miles west of Cambridge). I have to say I was skeptical about it, but the seating was no worse than at the Cambridge Corn Exchange (where the seating is awful). Actually, I take that back - the seating was better than at the Corn Exchange. The acoustics were also amazing. Although the hall is clearly used as a sports hall, it was also clearly designed for performance as well, and apparently fulfils both functions most suitably. There are slits and baffles and all kinds of things in the walls to stop it echoing overmuch, retractable tiered seating, blackout curtains, spotlight mounts… excellent indeed.

And as for the concert itself… Show of Hands won the Best Live Act award at the 2004 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and they deserve several of them. Absolutely stunning. Lots of jokes about lots of things - why the Romans didn’t bother invading Cornwall (cholesterol - the Cornish threw pasties and clotted cream at them, and then the Devonians drove them out with custard, parking tickets and extortionately priced guest houses); the time Phil Beer’s land rover got towed away after a concert, with an orange sofa in the back; how many ways local newspapers can find to misspell the name of the band or their albums or their songs or their members… endless fun. And then the music, which was top notch. Phil and Steve had with them this evening a talented young double bassist by the name of Miranda Sykes, who also did some vocals. I was so impressed I bought her CD (along with a Show of Hands disk from 1995) and got them both autographed. Miranda thought she’d seen me earlier in a petrol station, which is unlikely as I haven’t been to one for weeks. Steve Knightley thought my name was Nat, so that’s what it says on my copy of ‘Lie of the Land’. Ho hum.

Got a T-shirt too. Woot.

In other news: back’s playing up again, need to do more exercises to keep it happy I think, if only I could figure out what they actually are. NaNoWriMo novel is up to 34,500 words and counting. Some people who’ve read it even say they like it. I haven’t figured out why yet. Survived my trip to Germany, photos may go up if I decide I like any of them enough. Didn’t get the landscape shots I wanted to do some new visuals for the blog, maybe another time, another place. Going to Nottingham on Monday to visit CSiT and talk to potential PhD supervisors. Will be there Sunday evening if anyone fancies Wagamama, or indeed Monday evening, depending on how long the CSiT thing takes and how much I decide I want to go home (which will probably depend on how well it goes). Back to work on Tuesday, final push to get things done before Christmas.

And bed time now, as if my back’s happier in the morning I’ll be going to archery, and for that one needs to be in that state known as ‘awake’. Somehow I don’t think it’s likely though… there’s just something stopping me doing it during this indoor season. Must figure out what it is, and why, and then jump on it until it stops.