Present Perfect

This morning Carl (who just turned father for the second time) called me to ask me if I was interested in going to see Leonard Cohen tonight. It took me all of 10 seconds to decide. Leonard Cohen is someone I don't have much music by, but I've always wanted to see him live, and never tried to get tickets because it's the kind of four hour queue nightmare that has stopped me from seeing, say, U2 or Bruce Springsteen.

I was a bit worried that only knowing a few of the songs would detract from my enjoyment, but the contrary was true. He played all the songs I was hoping to hear, and the other songs ranged from pretty good to stellar as well. So I need to dive more into his catalogue.

It probably helped the atmosphere that today was his 75th birthday, and it also didn't hurt that his Spanish guitar player was playing a home match. He put on a 3hour+ show, with stellar renditions of personal favourites like "Take This Waltz" (with a perfect female voice too), "I'm Your Man", "Cure For Love", "Dance me to the End of Love", and "First we take Manhattan". Awesome show, and well worth the 60 euros impulse decision.

In sharp contrast to last Saturday's Archive show in Belgium. It was planned well in advance, started on the wrong foot because I had forgotten I bought a ticket for my sister but she wouldn't be able to make it, and not finding anyone to replace her. I ended up driving around for an hour just trying to find a parking space (should have taken my bike, would have been faster), and then didn't manage to sell the extra ticket.

As for the show, it seems Archive are reconnecting with their original hip-hop-influenced roots, even welcoming again into the collective the MC they had originally. I personally prefer their more progressive/rock side. I didn't know the new album very well yet, and my personal favouite 'You all look the same to me' didn't bring many songs to the set list - except for the awesome encore of 'Again', the opener from that album, lasting the full 15 minutes. They didn't play 'Fuck You', puzzling since it's a fan favourite. I thought the show was good, but it really hurt that I didn't know most of the songs.

In the end I paid the same price for Leonard Cohen, he played double the time, and I enjoyed it a lot more. Hope he comes around again!

This morning Carl (who just turned father for the second time) called me to ask me if I was interested in going to see Leonard Cohen tonight. It took me...

Usually when I run out of space on my laptop I do a du --max-depth=1 to a file in my home dir, wait, look at it, then drill down to the biggest dir and repeat. I find some stuff, delete some stuff, free up some space, then continue.

Each time I think 'there's got to be a better way to do this', and today I remembered the name 'baobab'. I was surprised to find out that a) this was already included by default in GNOME and b) already installed on my system. I didn't find it where the online docs said I would (on my F-11 system it's under System Tools instead of Accessories - I'm guessing that's a Fedora decision).

It took a while to run on my home directory (about 10 minutes I think), but I just used to drill down to a few levels, and freed up 2.5 GB of space in under 5 minutes. With my manual system I'm lucky if I delete half a gig in 15 minutes!

Excellent, excellent tool, and flawlessly executed. Apart from launching it I didn't need to learn anything, it just worked as expected, and it told me what I needed to know in less time than before. Fabio Marzocca, you're my hero of the week!

Usually when I run out of space on my laptop I do a du --max-depth=1 to a file in my home dir, wait, look at it, then drill down to...

After a visit from the unicode police I'm gearing up for a first morituri release.

If you're on F-11, you can just install my repository and then install the latest snapshot with
yum -y install morituri

After that, pop in a relatively well-known CD, then type:

rip offset find

Hopefully, it will be able to tell you the read offset of your CD drive.

Then do

rip cd rip --offset (the number from above)

and it should proceed to look up the CD on MusicBrainz, rip and verify the tracks to flac, and then do an AccurateRip verification.

Let me know if that works out for you. And if you're not on Fedora 11, you can always check out the source code directly, it's not much harder to get running.

After a visit from the unicode police I'm gearing up for a first morituri release. If you're on F-11, you can just install my repository and then install the latest...

On this week's plane trip I finally took some time to port two of my trac plugins to 0.11 because work's migration to 0.11 seems blocked on them. I did so because I started needing more and more 0.11 features, and the migration didn't seem to be moving.

Funnily or sadly (pick your poison) after landing I checked our trac and it seems that while I was doing this port one of our developers had just done the same. Oh well.

In any case, I took the opportunity to clean up my Trac 0.11 hacking notes a little. These instructions completely remove the mental friction I always have to getting started doing any trac hacking.

I also updated the trac-hacks presence for these plug-ins: TracDupPlugin and TracKeywordsPlugin.

On this week's plane trip I finally took some time to port two of my trac plugins to 0.11 because work's migration to 0.11 seems blocked on them. I did...

Taking further notes as I try and work through the various questions and problems that plague my setup with PulseAudio.

If you can shed any light on the following, please do!

• Whenever pulseaudio crashes, sound in Firefox doesn't work, even after restarting pulseaudio. (pavucontrol seems to suggest I'm using the ALSA plug-in for firefox). I assume we can agree that this is a bug. Can Firefox use pulseaudio natively, without the alsa emulation ? Is there any other way to make Firefox sound work as long as pulse is running ?
• I'm trying to figure out why my F-11 desktop/client cannot see the devices from my F-9 media machine/server anymore - yesterday I had it working. avahi-browse -a -t on the server shows the sound cards exported; on the client, the same command lists all the other services on that server, except for the soundcard. paprefs on the server tells me that the devices should be fully network-reachable and exported. What else could be causing this problem ?
• If pulse is for some reason not running on the server, should it be possible for an audio app on the client to trigger the server's pulse to start, similar to how it works on the local machine ?

Taking further notes as I try and work through the various questions and problems that plague my setup with PulseAudio. If you can shed any light on the following, please...