The 2.30 version of gnome-icon-theme is really one of the worst icon themes I’ve ever seen in the last years. First of all, it does not fit into the system due to the colors chosen. I was always satisfied with the GNOME icon theme, but with the 2.30 release I can’t use it anymore since it makes my system look like a piece of sh**. Secondly, it just does not fit with the tango icon theme. I’m currently using the tango icon theme on my laptop, and after installing g-i-t 2.30, some logos suddenly started to turn black and they just did not fit anymore. ... Read more 》

Last year, in July, I reported an issue to Python’s issue tracker. This issue can be seen at http://bugs.python.org/issue6483. Since then, there has been no action on this bug from the developers. The bug describes that every object stored in a module will not be deallocated if the module is deallocated and it’s m_size = -1 (which it should be if the module has no state). The problem seems to be that Python copies the dictionary of the module but forgets to decrease the reference count of the copy when the module is deallocated. This bug may have serious impact if objects are stored in the module which write status to a file when they are deallocated, because the deallocation functions are never called.

I wonder why the federal minister for consumer protection (hopefully a good enough translation for “Verbraucherschutzministerin”) Ilse Aigner has concerns about Street View, because those concerns are completely unrelated to protecting the consumer, because the consumer is the one viewing the images in the browser, and not the person being photographed. I have no reason to believe that Google Street View is illegal, I see no difference between a photo taken by a company and a photo taken by a single person. If Google Street View were illegal, distribution of every picture taken in the public would have to be considered illegal as well. ... Read more 》

Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900. And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn’t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers. ... Read more 》

It seems that the N900 is able to run for > 3 days in standby, I unplugged it Friday on 7:00, and it lasted until Sunday 23:50. I used it for browsing the web a bit and to listen to music via FM transmitter.

I have just uninstalled hal from my laptop running unstable, and everything still seems to work, including suspend & resume.

I just uploaded python-apt 0.7.93 to unstable with support for Python 2.6 and Python 3.1, meaning that there is now a single development branch again. This uploads brings developers the new API with real classes in apt_pkg (you can now use pydoc to view documentation), C++ bindings for making apt-pkg applications scriptable (although they should be considered experimental), a test suite (although aptsources fails in one test for now) and many new context managers for enhanced Python 3 coding fun. And objects are now freed when their reference count reaches 0. A more complete list of news can be found in the What’s New In python-apt 0.7.100 part of the documentation. ... Read more 》

My brother and I just replaced the keyboard of my HP Compaq 6720s with a new HP replacement part (a christmas present). The old one had no characters on some keys anymore and it did not look very well. Replacing the keyboard was a matter of removing two screws, and then just ‘clicking’ the keyboard out. The old keyboard lost a few keys during the process, but this is not really important anymore. Typing now feels a bit different and I have to get used to it during the next days. ... Read more 》

Yesterday, an N900 I bought from Amazon Warehouse Deals arrived. The device is great, but I discovered today that the AV output only outputs sound on the right speaker and nothing on the left one. So it seems that I have to send it back and will thus not have a N900 during Christmas. Appart from that problem, the device works almost perfectly. The internet browsing experience is faboulus, the camera is good, and the device is fast; the screen is great and the speakers are great as well. The keyboard is easy to type with and you can type fast after a short time. The video player does not seem to like my H.264 files (the OpenMAX decoder fails whereas on my PC ffmpeg is able to play it). ... Read more 》

Well, it seems that several news sites (golem.de, pro-linux.de, linux-magazin.de, linux-magazine.com, ubuntu-user.de [the last ones all from the same publishing house]), especially German ones have picked up the last blog post with same false impressions. First, they stated that I am planning an APT2 release for Christmas. They took the statement as a proof for this. But in the context of this paragraph, ‘publish’ was not meant in the term of publishing a release, but in the term of publishing the code (of the internal branch) in the public repository. The code is public now and lives in a ’temp’ branch and will be reworked there for inclusion in the master branch. ... Read more 》