Archive for January, 2006

Amarok’s ‘Global shortcuts’ are the cause of my keyboard woes. Amarok divides its shortcuts into ‘Amarok shortcuts’ and ‘Global shortcuts’, the global variety take over those keys while the program remains running. Of course functions like play, pause, next track, etc. are global, so if I want something simpler than ‘Ctrl-Windows Key-P’, say hitting the space bar, I can’t use it for anything else.

I’m guessing the author’s of this feature had grander plans that what I’m using it for. Maybe a nice feature request for local versions of play. stop, etc. is the way to go…

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one who wants this feature, and thankfully the ticket has already gone through the ‘don’t be so stupid that’s not a bug I’m closing this, oh wait I see your point I’ll open it’ phase. But that was the middle of last year and nothing has happened since. Maybe I should try to add them myself, the patch on this ticket makes it look easy enough.

The spacebar on my desktop decided to behave again, so all is good, or so I thought. Then like clockwork the spacebar on my notebook started exhibiting the same behaviour, i.e. shift-space = space. But then I noticed that the left and right arrow keys didn’t work either, at that point something clicked. Earlier in the evening I setup some new shortcuts for Amarok, space to pause and left and right to go back and forth in the track. Sure enough after I shut down Amarok all the keys returned to normal.

So something is either from with Amarok’s shortcut handling or KDE’s. Something to look into, but not tonight because it’s getting late.

My SpamAssassin setup on DreamHost has decided to stop working, joy. In my procmail logs:

Can't locate Mail/SpamAssassin/Util/Progress.pm in @INC (@INC contains: 
    /home/***/usr/share/perl/5.8.4 /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.4 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.4 
    /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl) 
at /mnt/***/vol/boot/***/sales/***/usr/bin/spamassassin line 82.

Of course the file is there because I haven’t changed the setup in months:

find usr -name Progress.pm
usr/share/perl/5.8.4/Mail/SpamAssassin/Util/Progress.pm

I guess it might be because when it’s executed it uses the full path (with /mnt) rather than just the /home alias. But @INC includes the path where the file it. I’ll have to wait until I get home to sort this out.

Update: It started working again, no idea why and nothing interesting in the logs. I guess it was some DreamHost home directory mounting issue. It did let me see how much work SpamAssassin does and made me really grateful that it exists.

For some reason the space bar on my desktop keyboard has stopped working in X. It’s definitely not broken because if I switch to a virtual console it works fine. I wonder how long it’s been like that…I guess since the last time I upgraded that box, but that was some time ago. I never realised how little I actually sit at my desk when I’m at home.

Update: Shift-Space produces a space, now I’m really confused.

I just saw this post on O’Reilly Radar, which refers to an article in the Guardian. Basically Tesco is going to start selling VOIP phones, and some people wonder if this is the start of the end of BT. Being in an office with VOIP phones, and using the Asterisk server that O’Reilly is pimping a book for, I can safely safe BT is safe for now. Mobiles on the other hand, they have a good chance at ending BT, especially if you could get a phone that routes calls seemlessly over Skype if it finds a WLAN connection. But everyone gets their ADSL connection off BT one way or another, so I guess they aren’t going anywhere.

I saw an advert recently that Vodafone has started a flat rate plan for their 3G datacards. The ad said £45 a month but the price plan says £52.88. And it works in Linux. At the moment I use my computers either at home or at work so £52.88 is a bit steep for the odd occasion when I take my laptop somewhere but if you’re a contractor, it becomes a lot more attractive, especially if you have it instead of broadband at home. But then again 384kb/s vs. 8mb/s, would you really want to? Now where are those 4G cards…

Update: Just saw the ad again, which still says it’s only £45 a month, and the small print says ‘1GB fair use limit’. So it’s not unlimited at all, it’s a 1GB plan. Dodgy advertising if you ask me.

That’s the current estimated jackpot in this week’s EuroMillions lottery. That’s a hell of a lot of money, definitely enough to put the rational part of my brain on hold whilst I buy a ticket. In fact the past few weeks, back when the jackpot was only £50 million I started paying what is affectionally known as the ’stupid person tax’. I know I won’t win, but there’s still that feeling that I could.

To drive the point home I came across a site that checks all lotto results since it started back in 1994. It works on the assumption that you play the same numbers every week. At first I didn’t want to stick in some numbers (family members’ birthdays) in the irrational fear that I should be a millionaire. The results were:

And that’s for a lottery whose odds are 14 million to one, so how come I’ve just bought another ticket for a lottery whose odds are 76 million to one? Stupid tax indeed.

Up to now I’ve converted all my CD’s to mp3 with iTunes on Windows. Actually that’s not strictly true, they were ripped to what ever is Apple’s default format, I keep meaning to rerip them as 192k mp3s. I’ve started using Amarok to organise my music in Linux. It’s a nice program and looks good, but there are a few things missing before it can become my main music client. One is full iPod integration, i.e. ratings and playlists, and the other major thing was CD ripping. I thought it was odd that it didn’t have it built in. So I started hunting for a program to do it in KDE. After a bit of searching I found it’s built right into KDE!

If you open up Konqueror and bring up the navigation panel (F9) there should be something in the tree called ‘Audio CD Browser’. If you have an audio CD in your drive and click on it you see a bunch of different files and folders depending on what ripping software you have installed. In my case it showed the tracks of the CD as CDA (CD audio), mp3 and ogg. It also has the whole CD as one track in all the different formats. You can configure the quality of the ripping through the control panel, I went for variable bit rate with an average bit rate of 192kb/s. Then it’s just a matter of copying the files from audio CD browser like any other file and it rips it on the fly. Truly simple software.

The next step is to integrate it into Amarok so I can pop in a CD, click the CD browser tab, select the tracks I want and click ‘Add to my collection’. That would be really slick.

One of the things I always like about the Amazon was that if you searched for something on the main amazon.com site, you could replace com with co.uk and tada you’re looking at the same item on the UK site. This no longer works and you get some new 404 page saying that URL doesn’t exist on the site. I don’t know if this is a transition period and they haven’t rolled out the new software to the UK site yet, but I’m not sure I want them too. I’ve noticed the US site’s pages now contain a lot more crap than before and I like the existing design on the UK site. Apparently I’m not the only one, have a look at Jacob Nielsen’s ‘Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design‘.

I’m sure I made a booking through ba.com with Konqueror in the past, but now it just hangs on the payment authorization screen. It’s one of those annoying waiting pages where you’re not sure if the booking has been made or not. After checking my email I was convinced that it hadn’t gone through and successfully made the booking with Firefox. ba.com is a pretty good site but it bugs me when sites don’t work with Konqueror, but it’s not as bad as Lufthansa’s website, which just fails completely in Konqueror and Firefox. It works with Opera, or I should say it loads, but it wouldn’t let me select the flight time combination I wanted and kept deselecting the other leg of the flight. It could be a bug or it might just be I couldn’t do the combination with the ticket class I selected, but surely if they want to go all automated (and hence not work in other browsers) they could at least have told me so.

I wish Sabre and/or Amadeus would offer some nice little web API so I could throw together a script to books my flights for me.