Forgot to mention my sith review here.  I think it might just be the worst film review there has ever been.  I talk about the cinema more than the actual film. haha

Woah, the scariest thing about this is the colour scheme.  Ouch.

Now I can do it too with Kandoo!

But not with ubuntu. Haha, hell am i talking about?  Oh yeah, i thought i’d see how smoothly ubuntu imports from a camera/mass storage type doo dar.  Started off well, i connected the camera via USB, at first it appeared as though nothing was going to happen, there weren’t any visual cues and there wasn’t the choking HD activity you tend to get when windows is looking for device drivers.  But after around 10 or so seconds a dialog popped up asking if i would like to import the photo’s.  Neat, that’s a good sign.  I click Import and it automatically loaded some app i haven’t seen before called gThumb.  Looked a bit like a photo management app but with very few features.  One thing i wasn’t very impressed with was that even though there were only about 15 photo’s on the camera it took about a minute to gather thumbnails and whilst it was doing this the app was not frozen but extremely unresponsive, worryingly so.  After it had finished i was pretty much left to guess at what I was supposed to do next, it hadn’t actually imported them at that point, it was just showing me by thumbnails what was on the camera.  So i selected all the photo’s, went to File->Import and a hopeless thing happened, a dialog popped up in which to select a folder destination, but also an error dialog cropped up telling me that it did not recognise the camera… So Bloody What??? Thats no reason not to allow me to copy the files, which it didn’t BTW.  It has obviously got access to the photo’s otherwise it couldn’t have made the thumbnails. Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid.  So i tried a different thing, I checked that you could drag the photo’s, you could but i hadn’t opened a folder window yet so i let go on top of the gThumb app thinking that as seen as the source and destination was the same that it wouldn’t do anything.  But oh god, it did, it kept popping up a dialog asking if i wanted to overwrite the existing photo WTF?!?!?!?  A couple of these (i had all photos selected) and it got so confused that it crashed.  Nice.

So i invoked the app to appear again by turning the camera off and on and tried again.  Opened a folder window and dragged the photos from gThumb to the nautilus window,  it started ok, copying the files as normal but it stalled on the 11th photo. I couldn’t do anything and had to kill the app again.  Sigh.

I give up.  These kinds of problems just aren’t cricket.

Watching the Liverpool victory parade at the moment, such lovely scene’s i wish i was there.  Would have been an absolute impossibility to have gotten into the city today though.  I’ve been to Anfield a few times and its magical seeing it on TV right now with what looks like millions around it,  and its a cramped victorian terrace type area so it must feel like such a huge street party.

Ever wondered what the scarf is that i’m wearing on the cover page of my website?  You know, the pic HERE.

Well it’s this…

And because of yesterday it is now horribly out of date.  Whatever shall I do?  Damn you Gerrard and Dudek!

I don’t think this is much of a solution…

Last nights excitement was too much to bare.
Annnnyway.

Played around in ubuntu some more yesterday and discovered a wonderful app i hadn’t noticed before called Inkscape.  Vector based drawing apps can be great fun but most have such stupid boneheaded interfaces which get in the way and cause a hell of a lot of frustration (i’m talking to you illustrator). Its also one of the last software categories to have a decent opensource alternative, i think only music production is left. After playing around with Inkscape i’m really impressed, it may be missing a lot of advanced features but it gets all the basics so right.  The interface is clean and obvious, for instance all the pathfinding and boolean operation stuff is in the Path pull down, are clearly labelled, quick to do and have symbols. You don’t have to mess around with a million fold-up floating window thingies.  Its also extremely fast, did i mention that?  Oh and something useful is that it has a built in xml crawler.  The file format the app uses (a modified verison of SVG) is xml based, and you can make tiny adjustments in the apps xml editor and the app will immediately reflect the change.  This allows them you give you precise control over positions and sizes etc without them having to make specific tools for the job.

Here’s a screenshot from the app in ubuntu, with clearlooks and dropshadows every app looks delicious somehow.  The screenshots on the Inkscape site don’t look this good.  And yeah, about the think i made, i was just trying the app out OK?  I think i’ve been visiting blogography too much.

I discovered that i didn’t have the gnome interface extension to openoffice 2 beta installed.  It now looks like the original with gnome, only with them msoffice rip off toolbar thingies.

I’m seriously considering repartitioning my drive to give linux the lions share, and windows just enough for games and music production (the only 2 things i can’t do in linux).

Oh and in other news, one of the wright stuff debates this morning was should crazy frog and the makers be murdered for causing so much misery, or something to that effect.  I’m kinda changing my mind about it all now because come next Sunday crazy frog will direct more misery chris martin’s way than anyone else, and anything that can wripe that smug grin of chris martin’s pusher of intense blandness face is alright in my book.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!

I’m currently playing through Super Mario World on an emulator.  Should have done this years ago, it isn’t just in my Top 5 best games ever created, its in my Top 5 best THINGS ever created.  It really is a work of beauty.  Anyway, the point of this is I’m Gonna be a Record Breaker!

Thats a joke BTW, and not everyone will get it.

Sometimes it can be frustrating living in the UK, and by that i mean somewhere that isn’t the US.  For instance, whilst Americans enjoyed legal music downloads it was over a year because we had even a taste of it over here.  When new services launched and i was to visit the site and try to sign up I would be told that the service is only open to US residents and quite often they would leave this crucial point right at the end of the subscription process.  Nice of them eh?  Of course that is only an example and there would be a lot more.  But all of that pails into insignificance when compared to the experiences of someone who is deemed an enemy of the free world.

This Fucking Border Linesome, an entry by some Iranian is fascinating.  Just check out the error given by the Java installer, the wording is hilarious and makes me think of pirates for some reason.  Thats pirates with parrots, not pirates with CD-R’s.

Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security Notification

Real-time Scan
Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security has detected a virus, spyware application, or other Internet threat, and performed the action specified.

Infected file: C:\WINDOWS\wt\wtupdates\webd\4.1.1\files\wtvh.dll
Virus name: SPYW_WTANGENT.A
User name: Mark Gilbert
Scan action result: Denied Access.
Note: If Search for and clean Trojans is enabled and is executed after scanning, you can click Next to view final scan result information.

Any Ideas?

Google have some interesting things going down in their lab at the moment.  A newey is personalising the main page, you can have bbc news headlines underneath the search box.  It manages to be both neat and a load of crap at the same time.

But looking through the other stuff google have in their lab section i discovered another feature that is news to me.  My Search History.  Now this is pretty cool, just use your gmail login and it remembers your searches organised into days.  This could turn out to be really great, sometimes i’ll find a useful site, but be at a different comp or booted into a different OS and i can’t quite get the search that got me there quite the same.  Log in and the search will be there regardless of which comp you’re using.  Makes me wonder how long it will be until google offer a .mac type service to sync your bookmarks and stuff.  Now that would be cool!

Also, the lab stuff reminded me of Google Suggest.  I’d completely forgotten about this beauty. It populates a drop down with the most popular searches that start with what you are typing.  And updates as you type iTunes style.  Problem is, i aways use the search box in firefox rather than the google page.  hmm, i wonder if anyones writen an extension to get this functionality into firefox… They have!!  Only it doesn’t work so well

I suppose it was a long shot.  As you can see the results drop down appears in the wrong place (for me anyone).  Also, you can’t hit the down arrow to scroll the results, you have to grab the mouse and click on it.. Too much hassle.