Last Friday I completed the migration of GNOME Blogs (nicknamed ‘blogo’) to WordPress MU with an announcement to the GNOME community and a thank you to the WordPress community a couple of days later. The first post details some of the features we launched with.

But the best feature…?

Now anyone with a gnome.org, gtk.org or gimp.org email address can set up a delicious, prêt-à-porter, WordPress-powered blog for personal or project use in 30 seconds flat.

Thus far, all the feedback from GNOME bloggers has been positive, and there are a bunch of folks in the process of migrating from old pyblosxom installs, Advogato, self-hosted blogs, and abominations hacked up in emacs.

Oh, okay, I was lying about the last bit… none of those folks are going to kick their emacs habit any time soon.

WordPress folks have been very supportive, too:

Ryan Boren, a WordPress core developer, said: “I used to contribute bits and pieces to GNOME before being consumed by WordPress full time. I found out about WordPress through some GNOME developers. I took some of the GNOME philosophy with me to WordPress and found that Matt shared much of it. So I’m glad to see GNOME using WP and hope they will be as happy with it as I have been with GNOME.”

Lloyd Budd, WordPress hacker, and apparently a big fan (!), said: “This is awesome! I extensively and passionately use Ubuntu GNOME! […] Is there a higher compliment than experience-oriented, open-source-for-everyone participants using the software that you care about?”

I’ll quit with the quoting, because this is starting to sound like a press release.

To cap it off, we’ve already managed to complete the virtuous circle: WordPress MU bug #352 was filed, fixed and shipped with WordPress MU 1.2.2 as a result of work on GNOME Blogs.

Tastes like freedom — and there’s more on the way!

• Ignore what the check-in agent tells you -- your aerosol deodorant is still on the "banned liquids" list. Thanks, you numpty. I would have checked it if I'd known.
• They should possibly filter what goes onto the TV screens in the departures lounge. I can imagine that a song whose only lyrics are "destination unknown" might not fill some travellers with joyous anticipation.
• Your seat assignment is usually decided long before you check in. If you want a good seat, it's best to ask for it explicitly when you book. Failing that, you can ask at the check-in counter and again at the gate. It worked for me, but only because whoever got assigned that seat originally didn't make his earlier connection and hence wasn't going to be on that flight without teleportation.
• There's free wifi in some strange places -- even international departure lounges. I suspect that The Authorities weren't really aware of the one I was using -- the SSID and public IP address don't feel particularly "official".
• There's a Qantas 767, "City of Rockhampton", which has CASA registration VH-OGG. I find that particularly humourous, although I suspect that my entertainment is largely a function of boredom.
• The Internet kiosk machines in the International departure lounge at Sydney airport run Ubuntu -- not sure of the version (GNOME post-login splash screen was quite rounded, but I don't memorise what different Ubuntu versions' splash screens look like). They then run Opera on top of that. Anyone know anything about this?
• A lounge music version of the LJ Hooker theme song is a true abomination to mankind.

Some of you have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet lately — for about a month now — and it deserves some explanation. May as well just be blunt: I’ve been very heavily depressed, not socialising, shying away from much of life. It is difficult to write here, but there it is.

This is the main reason I’m not at LFCS/DAM4 this week. Travel and high-intensity people stuff is just not going to happen right now. So, I’m sorry to those of you I’m missing in SFO, and to others who have wanted or needed my attention in recent weeks. As always, Pia gets the worst of it, but is wonderful regardless. Thank you.

The infuriating thing about depression is that it’s a despair without definition. If I could put my finger on it, I could solve it. Sure, I can point you to a confluence of things that were likely to set it off, but when it hits, it doesn’t really work that way.

Most people I’ve met who have depression use a physical or anthropomorphic metaphor as a way to understand or express it — a great example is Winston Churchill’s Black Dog. I tend towards the physical, seeing it in much the same way as my arthritis: Every now and then, my body stops working properly, and I can’t walk; every now and then, my brain stops working properly, and I can’t… do or feel much of anything at all.

People often ask whether I’d turn it off, if a relevant switch were provided. I don’t think so. Down here, my drive and motivation might be dangerously close to zero, but on balance, I could never trade the ferocity or infectiousness of up there. It’s too central to the culture of my creativity, as odd as that may sound.

The only way I’ve found to drag myself up is to choose something to do and kick the crap out of it until a sense of achievement sets in. I found a great therapy task a few days ago… but I’ll leave that story to a happier post!

If you don’t get it, but want to grok more, Beyond Blue has some good stuff to read.

Finally: Despite everything, I’m OK. I’ve been here before, and made it out fine. Back soon.

Worms farms are pretty simple pieces of equipment. You have a few layers of trays where you put your veggie scraps and worms, separated by a perforated mesh that the worms can move through. The top and bottom are sealed to keep the worms in and insects out, while collecting (very fertile) liquid at the very bottom. You fill the bottom tray with scraps, then move on to the next tray up. When the worms are done with the bottom tray, you empty it into your garden as wonderful compost and soil improver, move that tray to the top and continue.

Most worm farms are made out of molded plastic. The structures are very simple. The material is cheap. The Chinese manufacturing miracle should be able to churn these things almost for free.

Thing is, the cheapest I've been able to find is $65 from The Watershed, run by Marrickville and Sydney councils. At Bunnings the cheapest is about $80, yet you can buy a Mitre Saw, full of complex machinery and electronics, for $30. Someone, somewhere is making a lot of profit on these worm farms.

If anyone out there has any expertise in plastics moulding and mass manufacturing, there's a lot of money to be made undercutting these price gougers.

One option is to make your own, but it shouldn't be so hard!

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Last night we rolled out some new code onto the Vquence site. We are now fairly happy with the process that we have put in place for creating vquences. That is, us geeks at Vquence are - so we are now allowing friends and family to help us kick it into shape in a closed beta trial. We expect the public beta is not far off now.

Last week, YouTube brought out a new flash video player. The player had thumbnails of related videos from YouTube content included directly into the embedded video as you moused over it. This provides access to other YouTube videos through any embedded video.

People who have seen what we do over at Vquence noticed the similarity in the user interfaces. They also assumed that therefore the functionality must be the same. However, quite the opposite is true.

YouTube is a video hosting site. People upload videos there to publish them and most probably to re-embed them into their own websites. When you use video hosting, you don’t want your video hosting provider to suddenly display other videos on top of the one you have embedded, since that changes the perception of the page that you have created around the video.

Indeed, YouTube had to take back the mouse-over functionality one day after they introduced it because their users gave them negative feedback.

In contrast, Vquence is a video aggregator. The Vquence video player is for “playlists” (rather: slicecasts or vquences) of videos collected from multiple hosting sites. So, when you embed the Vquence player, you expect display of and easy access to all the videos in the slicecast. It is a very different concept: the aim is not the embedding of a video, but rather the recommendation of multiple videos to your readers. Vquences enable you to share your bookmarked videos in a viewer-friendly fashion. It’s not about embedding videos in your page - it’s about providing hyperlinks to videos by using videos.

• Meet new people (?),
• Catch up with fellow Aussies I haven’t seen in years (?),
• Go to parties (?),
• Behave appropriately at said parties (?),
• Use the phrase “Inconceivable!” inappropriately (?),
• Work on inspiring new code (?),
• Keep up with Interblag news (?),
• Keep up with RSS feeds (?),
• Keep up with personal email (?),
• Keep up with work email (?),
• Installed Leopard beta (?),
• Port code to work on Leopard (?),
• Successfully avoid Apple Store, Virgin, Banana Republic et al in downtown San Francisco (?),
• Keep family and friends at home updated (?),
• Mention the words “Erlang”, “Haskell” and “higher-order messaging” to puny humansfellow Objective-C programmers (?),
• Write up HoPL III report (?),
• Find and beat whoever wrote NSTokenField with a large dildo (?),
• Get food poisoning again (?),
• Sleep (?),
• Actually attend sessions at the conference (? ?).

• Friends who I've seen in the past few days
  
• I really like what I'm studying
  
• My house-mate is easy-going and understands the notion of comfort on cold days

• There's a lot to review before next week
  
• Tired and head-achey

For the record I am no longer coordinator of LinuxChix. What am I going to do now? Well, probably not much for a while, but eventually I'll have a think about my goals related to women and Free Software, separately and together and figure out which of them are achievable and then how to achieve them.

Now that I can do GPRS at only mildly extortionate rates ($0.0058 per kb from Exetel, thanks to Graeme's tip) I've been playing with Jabber clients on my mobile. It can be kinda handy, and it's kinda cool. Problem is, all the clients I've found are either seriously crap or lilwannabebillgatesware.

So does anyone know of a Jabber client for J2ME (or native Symbian) that is free/libre and doesn't suck?

I also wonder if you can get one that gzip compresses the Jabber stream. The Jabber protocol is _incredibly_ verbose XML, which means it could cost quite a bit uncompressed but would be easily compressed.

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Today Apple announced the release of Safari for Windows. Clearly this will not have any major impact on browser usage statistics. If Apple did not release it to gain market share then why did they? There’s a saying:

If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.

Apple didn’t released a Windows version of Safari for the average web user, they’ve done it for the average web developer. By releasing Safari for Windows they have significantly reduced the barrier that has, until now, prevented many web developers from checking that their websites work correctly with Safari.

But why now? Why not two years ago? Two years ago Apple wasn’t about to release the iPhone. To make the iPhone work commercially they need to sell it as more than just a phone that can play music. They need to sell it as a device that can keep you connected via email and the web. Most web developers are willing to check their web site with multiple browsers but didn’t have a way to check it with Safari. Apple has now provided this just weeks before the iPhone goes on sale giving developers enough time to download Safari and fix their websites so they work on the iPhone the day it is release.

Sadly, as a Linux based web developer I’m still left out in the cold.

It would appear VMware Fusion is available for pre-order.

This is great news, as I’ve been very curious when the final will be available, so it looks like it might be just around the corner.

More details here.

I just downloaded Safari, Apple's web browser, and installed it on the Windows machine here at work. It didn't stay on my hard drive long.

First problem is it doesn't support proxy servers. Presumably this is a beta "feature" which will be fixed soon. Second thing is it refuses to act in a Windows-ish way, instead having all the sizzle and CPU-burning features of OSX. Bollocks to that! If I wanted all that crap, I'd run OSX.

This is a pretty common thing for Apple to do. It's also the reason I don't have Quicktime installed. I can't stand applications that unilaterally decide to ignore all the UI standards of the host OS. Imagine how rabid the Apple fanbois would be if a Windows application didn't do things in an OSX-ish way?

Regardless, all I wanted to do is be able to test sites in Safari. It'll have to wait until proxies work.

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