gnegg: April 2003

Philips Streamium

I got my hands on a Philips Streamium. Not because I wanted one, but because I’m going to write a review for our broadband portal. I really wondered whether it was possible to use the device without the stupid musicmatch jukebox, so I went behind the scene using a network sniffer.

I will post a deeper review of what I’ve found (its just plain old XML over HTTP) later this day, because now I have to do some real work. Till then, you can have a look at the exchange between my musicmatch and the streamium here (and before you ask: I really have bought all the CD’s from which I have ripped the MP3’s you will see in the log. I rarely ever download music from P2P Networks).

Mario…

It just came to my mind: I am through with Super Mario Advance 2 on my GameBoy Advance SP – at least, I’ve finished all 96 goals. No I’ve only to get all Yoshi-coins, but when I think of the dammed special world, I come to the conclusion that I’ll possibly never manage to get those coins.

Two more bugs… gone!

No. This is not about the new iPods, Apple announced today (of course I’ve ordered myself a 30GB one, but this really is another history).

I’m just very pleased that two Bugs in jEdit’s current CVS-Version that have been fixed by Slava the same day, I’ve reported them. This is just great!

If you are in need of a good editor, go and get jEdit!

That’s nice…

You may know CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers: It’s a commercial Wine-Distribution specificially targeted at supporting MS Office and a couple of other often used Windows applications under Linux.

As you can imagine, the CodeWeavers people are implementing featrues for their product independent of the Wine community but feed them back to the OpenSource project once a new release of CrossOver Office is released. This practice makes sense as it allows them to get media coverage by announcing lots of not-there-before features, but still work together with the community.

Just now that CrossOver Office 2.0 got released, there was a thread on the Wine-mailinglist because someone tried to implement tablet support for the Open Source Version only to learn, that it is already there in CrossOver Office. The changes got commited to the Wine-Code, but there was soem discussion why it did not get announced to the community so sensless duplicated work could have been prevented.

I was really happy to see the response of the guy at CodeWeaver. I just hope, every company would react to and work with the community in that way…

Read a conclusion of the thread here

A name is a name… or not?

I really saw this mess coming when I read the announcement that Mozilla’s Phoenix will be called Firebird for now: Firebird is a spin off of the once open-sourced Interbase-Database Server by Borland existing for three years now and using the name “Firebird” since then.

As you can imagine, the Firebird (DB)-People were not too happy about this – Phoenix had to be renamed because of a naming conflict and the new solution still creates one – but this time it’s not a commercional product it’s conflicting with – its another Open Source project.

I can understand both sides:

Mozilla
The name Firebird has been checked by Netscapes/AOLs legal departement (why have they not noticed this? or is it maybe that they thought it would not matter?) and another name-change would again involve the legal departement which won’t please neither the BIOS vendor Phoenix not the Mozilla-Team as they will not release another milestone called phoenix.

Firebird
Firebrid already suffers from not really be known in the public. The RDBMS it spun off is known mainly by delphi-developers and neither Interbase nor Firebird were often in the press these days. A more known product with the same name will further divert attention. And the psycological reason: The name Firebird was chosen based on the real political mess around open-sourcing Interbase and is, in my oppinion, a very well chosen name.

Why I can understand the arguments on both sides, I can neither offer a solution pleasing for both projects (besides the question why Phoenix is not to be called simply “Mozilla” – after all, the Browser-Component in the Mozilla Suite is to be replaced by Firebird (the browser) anyway) nor can I understand the way the folks around Firebird (the DB) react to the problem (and here – an entry in Dave Hyatts blog). War is never a solution – never!

Long time no see

I really should have more discipline concerning this little weblog ;-)

Just some notes for now:

P800 and the calendar
About a week ago, after I’ve updated the SonyEricsson P800 Sync-Software to 1.3.1, it stopped synchronizing my calendar entries. There was no error message, but it did not work either – it id not touch the calendar entries at all. Then I performed a full synchronisation, overwriting the phone with the effect of having no entries at all on the phone.

Reinstalling the Sync-Software did not help. What finally had effect was reinstalling both Office (with outlook), cleaning the Registry from Office-Settings and the Sync-Software (first removing everything and then reinstalling it). This process took about 3 hours (and many of them figuring out how to fix it without having to reinstall everything). Stupid Software.

iPod and Linux
I am running Gentoo Linux using Kernel 2.4.20-gentoo-r2. Although I had HFS and IEE1394-Support int the kernel, one of the modules (sbp2 I think) oopsed when I plugged my Mac-Formated iPod and modprobe‘d ohci1394. Reformating the iPod with the FAT32-Filesystem (use the Windows-iPod-Updater from apple.com, but remove MacDrive if it’s installed – else your iPod will not be detected) did help me with this so I finally have a device to quickly exchange large amounts of data between home and office.

Browsers (1)
Apple recently released Beta 2 of Safari. Looks great – especially the Tabbed Brwosing-Feature. Too bad I still don’t have my own Mac.

Mario
I’m in World 6 of Super Mario Advance 2 and the game really is great. If only the Special World would not be so difficult to master…

Browsers (2)
I recently tried out the latest build of Phoenix which will replace the browser-Part in the Mozilla-Suite someday. It really looks great and is a pleasure to use. I am thinking of dropping Mozilla entirely and use Phoenix for the web an Becky! for email.

So. That’s half a month of notable internet expirience. I promise to report more often in the future!