Friday: first impressions
We left from Eindhoven and went to Dublin with the famous budget-airline RyanAir. For 1.5 hours I've been observing the play in the airplane performed by the stewards and stewardesses. They looked tired and grumpy, still they tried to sell food, drinks, cigarettes and lots for some lottery to 200 people. After the play the doors opened, we stretched our legs and an unknown city and country are within reach now.
Friday morning, July 31st 2009: time to go to Berlin. After a smooth trip we arrived at the Kronprinz Hotel near the Kürfürstendamm. Because we left early there was plenty of time left to visit the city already. With our hotel reservation came a ticket for all public transport in Berlin, valid for 72 hours. Very convenient, so with this card would get us going.
For a student assignment we had to analyze code duplication between releases of an application. It gives insight in how much code remained the same with relation to other versions.
Together with Remco Blewanus, I chose to analyze the best audio player out there: Amarok. This has a couple of reasons, besides being familiar with Amarok already.
About 1 year ago, I switched to identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service. Most of the open source folks moved from Twitter to identi.ca, it had (and still has) a quite some advantages over Twitter. See this article for a comparison among these two services. There was not much to lose, I could still forward my tweets to Twitter. But after one year I've pretty much had it with this service. There are quite some nice people out there, but the service was getting on my nerves. What follows here is a rant, you've been warned.
Since two months I'm using Google Calendar, and I've been looking around for a nice way to synchronize my online calendar with my mobile phone. This is a fairly simple device, a Sony Ericsson C902. It's just a Java enabled phone with a simple built-in calendar tool, nothing special. I have tried different solutions, but it was a bit tough to get it right.
These were the solutions I have tried, the last one is the most satisfactory solution which I'm using at this moment.
Everybody knows Russia from television and history books: a cold country full with rockets, bears and chess players. You see grey flats everywhere with sad people inside who drink their home-brewn vodka. Their writing looks like it can only be stamped or set in stone. No one has seen sunshine inside the Russian borders. Lenin is to be seen on every street corner, and the hammer and sickle is slammed into children from their early ages. In short, why would anyone want to go there?
To show the contrary.
In the past few weeks Twitter has hit the news quite often, but I notice people still don't really understand its value. For those dinosaurs who haven't heard of Twitter, it's a micro-blogging site to write in short notices what you're doing. You can follow others and others can follow you.
But most people take the words "What are you doing?" too literally, making a caricature of it.
Flickr On Plasma 0.5 has been released.
Visit the Flickr On Plasma page here.
Changelog
- Ability to switch off the background.
- Rounded corners (optional).
- Soft borders (optional).
- Cache all paint operations, for example when moving the applet.
- Converted all configuration pages to Qt Designer pages.
I did a little comparison between Twitter and identi.ca, two micro-blogging sites available today. The list is pretty random and may contain errors, or may miss some items. And both sites are introducing and ditching features which could invalidate the list below. But feel free to let me know if something needs to be changed (I'm @bram85 on identi.ca and Twitter), or use the comment section below.
| identi.ca | ||
|---|---|---|
| Open source |  |
|
| Groups | |
|
| Tags | |
|
| OpenID | |
|
| Jabber (XMPP)* | |
|
| Notices to SMS** | |
|
| Autosubscribe followers | |
|
| @Replies filtering | |
|
| Update protection | |
|
| Theming | |
|
| Mobile interface | |
|
| Non-english interface*** | |
|
| RSS feeds | |
|
| ATOM feeds | |
|
| FOAF feeds | |
* Regarding Jabber support, Twitter used to have this, but silently ditched it.
** Differs from country to country. It appears that the range of Twitter is more limited than identi.ca's.
*** Twitter offers only one additional language besides English, Japanese. Identi.ca offers a wide range of languages.
A little while ago I wrote about the temptations of using Arch Linux instead of Gentoo. About 5 months after writing it I only have Arch Linux machines around me. On my laptop, Gentoo is replaced with Arch. On my dad's PC, Debian is replaced with Arch. And on my workstation I have installed Arch Linux too.