Pinging stuff I care about.
Futzmonkey commands me to try Songbird, now that version 0.6 is officially out.
Spiffy thing: It will import your iTunes songs “in-place” so that you can play anything you’ve got in iTunes (well, not DRMed stuff I guess) through Songbird. So — instant library ready to use!
Videos as well as audio. Podcasts too. It’s all imported in there.
I’ll give it a spin.
UPDATE: cool, but I have iTunes. Oh well.
Despite Leopard being new and shiny and wonderful, I’m terribly discontent with it. The biggest reason seems to be the huge amount of Macports breakage. I can’t build Haskell to play with it, but that’s fairly trivial. It’s not like that’s anything but an intellectual curiosity thing. But I also can’t build the GIMP, which is actually something I use with some frequency. It’s because MacPorts had finally, during the extra year and a half that the delayed release of Leopard had given them, gotten everything just singing together. Everything built right and correctly and worked together.
Then Leopard arrives and the breakage begins.
It’s like there’s this wave of “works-right-ness” that ebbs and flows. When a new version of OS X comes out, then much of the cool open source software I love gets broken on it, hopelessly, certainly beyond my ability to fix. At this point, (Ubuntu) Linux looks better because a ton of things work there that don’t on OS X. As time goes on, things get fixed and fixed and fixed on OS X until it’s on an equal footing with regards to open source stuff building correctly, and at this point OS X looks better than Linux because of its general professionalism and ease of use and smoothness.
There’s a second wave in there related to Ubuntu releases but because they happen every 6 months instead of every one to two-and-a-half years, it’s a smaller, less disruptive wave.
UPDATE: They fixed Gimp. (Well, they fixed glib2, which was the source of the problems.) Good-o. :)
I’m tired of emitting bits of political outrage stolen from the loathsome and infuriating Reddit.com to a WordPress blog with an irrelevant list of categories I never use and a blogroll two years out of date. I want to change something.
I want to set up some new and different kind of blog, doing something new and different with it.
What, where, how?
I don’t know yet.
Apparently there’s some super slick desktop thingy you can do in Ubuntu, called Beryl. Â There are various howtos for how to enable it. Â They suggest that someone with my video driver can do it. Â They are wrong. Â This thread pretty much sums up my experience.
Well played, Futzmonkey. Â Well played.