Basically it allows you to develop apps in standard C/C++, build then using whichever compiler you like and run the resulting binary on all mobile phone platform (well.. all platforms that allow third party native apps).

Check it out!

Since I never really liked the screen on the X300 I decided to go back to Sony and get a new Z series. Much more powerful (300Gb disk, 4Gb RAM, 2.66Ghz) and still way way lighter than even the 13" MacBook pro.

Now we're about to head back to live in San Francisco for a big. I'm half excited and half amazing that we're actually going to get on a place in a bout 1/2 an hour.

It was super great to see everyone last night for our goodbye drinks. Hopefully I'll be back in London from time to time to see people and lots of folks will be coming out of the burn this year.

Go to the supermarket with your fancy Osprey rucksack and feel smug as you pack all you shopping into it without using any plastic bags. Try a bit to hard and cause a carton of mango juice to split but don't notice this until half way home you find the you back getting wet. Get home to find a litre of mango juice swimming around the bottom of your rucksack.

Thanks to matt for finding this machine super cheap on eBay and for Simon for hosting my box for the last 5 years.

Currently the machine is in the server room at my office so I'm currently looking for cheap colo in london.

I took the opportunity to reinstall etch as I moved to the new box and also finally ditched me bespoke iptables scripts in favour of shorewall.

Apart from a slightly strange dynamic linker and libc everything pretty much behaves like standard linux. There are couple of missing libc and libpthread functions that are easy enough to stub/implement and then away you go. I even got SDL up and running with very little trouble.

Also, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks Android bares more than a passing resemblance to the software stack we build at Transvirtual back in 2000. Jim Pick also mentioned it on his blog.

Its a shame I missed other pieces they have been doing over the last week. I think I am becoming a true Forced Entertainment fan. They are also doing something in the Festival Hall for meltdown festival in not to long. Hurrah! Anyone who has not yet seem these guys needs to go!

It was really great to see all my old friends who I love so much and to see what has changed in the city. The main difference seem to be that even more people have been forced to move over the bridge to Oakland due to city prices. Apart from that everything seems pretty much as I left it. We even got glorious sunshine for the weekend of the 10th and 11th.

GDC was also super fun and I got to meet up with a lot of old colleagues from MathEngine who are now scattered all over the industry. Was especially good to see James Golding again, who is now at Epic writing large parts of their engine product. And, of course, I got to consume unlimited amounts of food and drink at the various industry events.

I've uploaded the few photos I took on the trip. Most of them are of the weekend in Lake Tahoe. Unfortunately. I didn't get many pictures of my time in the city.

The new version 0.6.0 is available in source form from here.

http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html

I was able to simple unzip the ironpython source, change CSC=csc to CSC=gmcs, type make, and run ipy.exe on my sid machine. Hurray. Soon we can say goodbye to the miriade of different interpreter engines we have and bow down the one true byte-code. For once MS have given something less that harmful.

Hey you SF people, I know you probably don't read this stuff ever, but if you do then let me know if you're around the weekend of the 10th and 11th. I've probably already mailed you anyway.

I wonder how many super burritos I can eat in one weekend. Maybe I can carry them back in my hand luggage and freeze them for consuming here in London. Tessa brought one back for me last time she went and we ate it cold the next day on the train to Bath!

mp3tool can be downloaded via http, ftp or subversion.

On one day I came back from the slopes to find over a foot of snow built up against the front door.

Apart from snow we had an incredible place to stay with such luxuries as our own sauna and hot hub! And a fully stocked liqueur cabinet. Lots of nights playing racing demon and snapscat, including the last night on which I actually managed to win (thanks mostly to Jo going home early).

We stayed on the far side of the Les Gets mountain where we shared a chair lift with a few other chalets. This meant the on powder days (which were every day!) we always got first tracks down the runs that lead to our house. On most days we have first tracks on two different black runs and tree runs for a good hour before most others arrived to destroy our virgin powder. There was also a nice snow park just over the peak towards Les Gets but due to the amount of powder that fell it was only open on one day. This meant I was stuck on small kickers. I'm starting to really nail bigger backside 180s (about time!) but still not consistent 360. Something for Les 2 Alpes in the summer.

Also, the reason this post update is a little late is that superduper.net moved location while I was away and for various reasons was down for almost a week :( Enough for the my mail to start bouncing, so sorry to anyone who got a bounce. Time to re-subscribe to all those debian lists that don't tolerate bounces.

This year I'm hoping to organise a similar trip. Hopefully book an apartment for the month of July. I wish I should remember the emails of some of the people I met back then in 2002. Tim and Tom, if you read this then get in touch!

Am I crazy to do this? Couldn't I think of a more imaginative thing to permanently scare myself with? Well, I figure this would represent many things that I believe in: freedom, privacy and free software, all in one little hex string. Actually, maybe I am crazy.

Now that its working I need to find a way to easily trigger it. Perhaps in the lid closed event in /etc/acpid? For some reason gnome power manager still doesn't think that suspend is an option so I'm having to do it from the command line.

How many times have I said the phone number outloud from memory. Certainly many hundreds. When I did track down the number in written form I read it out and it sounded alien. Certainly not the number I should be very used to.

Is this just me working too hard? Or maybe getting old? Or is it something more sinister. Perhaps its a clue in the phildickian sense, like the guy who goes to pull the light cored in his bathroom and the realises its a switch, and that he's never lived in a house with a light cord?

That's my first personal entry in my new blog. Hope you like it.

Next I'm planning a serious plugin to display photo galleries, based on my existing gallery but in the style of pyblosxom. I'm going to make it very simple for users to add entire tree's of images to their gallery just by putting them in the gallery folder. The same way pyblosxom works for blog entries. Comments and hitcounts will be maintained in a separate but parallel tree do the users images need to be apache-writable.

Pyblosxom is written in python, which doesn't guarantee its greatness, but it helps. It also has tons of plugins, some of which are installed here already. Notably the booklist plugin allows people to see what I'm reading, what I've read, and what I thought of each book. It also pulls cover images direct from amazon. Very cool.

So, the upshot is that there should be a lot more postings to this blog coming up. Since the last port was well over a year ago I can't really get any worse at updating it. I'm going to try and blog more about what I'm doing with GNU/linux as well as stuff going on in my life. I'm also planning to turn my hand rolled photo gallery into a pyblosxom plugin.

At last I've got the insurance money from CityLink after waiting more then 5 months! Just ordered a sexy new Sony Z1. Should be here on Teusday. Hurray!

Well lots has been happening here in London. The last couple of weeks have been packed with some great concerts. And best of all I've managed to wangle free tickets for all them them!

• The Pixies

  Unbelievable. The living legends themselves. We got to see the Pixies in concert at Brixton Academy. Quite an honour. Lots of absolutely passionate fans. Thanks Manish for sorting Tessa and I would free VIP tickets.

  Frank Black was incredible. Didn't stop for one minute out of 90 to catch his breath. Definitely a night to remember. I have some photos that will be in the gallery section RSN.

• Peter Gabriel

  Despite being involved with Real World for many year, I'd never actually seen Peter perform at a large gig. I got to see him do his large performance of a two year tour at Wembely arena. The stage show was quite amazing. All kinds of crazy tricks from walking upside-down to a blinding coat of purer light, to two Segways (look it up if you don't know what it is) on stage dancing to the music.

  Much more than I expected. I now understand the meaning of "stadium concert".

• Orbital

  On their way to Glastonbury to play they final gigs Orbital did two nights at Brixton Academy. Manish, again, sorting out a couple of tickets at the last minute, thanks dude. Tessa, unfortunately, was ill so I had to find someone to go with last minute on the night of an England match. Paul Makepiece eventually showed up on his way back from NYC.

  I think I must has seen these guys play at least 10 times in the last 10 years, starting back in Glastonbury 1994. For me they are the definition of nineties electronic music. This gig was nothing special, however. England having lost, the crowd, despite growing considerably after the match, wasn't too up for it. However, it was great to see them one last time and say good by. Pictures on their way.

Last week i finally got hear Richard Stallman speaking in person. I saw him give his "Dangers of Software Patents" talk at UCL and then was in bristol the next day to hear him speak about copyright. Both very educational and enoyable. What a character. We even get to watch him eat his lunch on stage before and during the talk :)

I took a few photos which will be online in a day or so...

Today I finally finished reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Took me three months of central line journeys to complete but definitely worth it.

I'm thinking of adding a "book" catagory to the blog that I can use to list the books I read, with cover images and links.

Its been 9 weeks now since my laptop was "lost" by the couriers. I really can't believe how shite CityLink have been at sorting it out. You'd have thought a big company like that would be able to hadle claims like mine in a matter of days... but ohh no.

This means that I havn't had any CPU cycles at to devote to my site or any of the software projects I have been planning. For those who are interested I'm working on three new projects:

• Litter - my linux port of clutter, that can arrange album art on the desktop. It will integrate tightly with...
• PyTunes - you guessed it. A simple iTunes-like thing written in python/gnome2. It is focused on music organisation and will itegrate with Rhythmbox and litter. It will also work with the ipod and feature a 2-way sync so you can pull music off your ipod. It will feature automatic album art retrieval using amazon and fingerprinting using musicbrainz.
• PyPhoto - you guessed it again! A simple photo orgaizer. I use the command line and gqview at the moment but want something that will integrate with metainformation I currently store on the web site.

Although, I don't normally use my blog in the traditional way and reference others, this one is kinda special to me. My dearest Tessa is really and truly writing HTML and actually understanded it as she does so. Wow. All this from the girl who.... I'll leave that stuff off the public formum acutally :)

Anyway her blog is much more active than mine and far, far more creative.

Here is a snippet from Bruce Schneier's Latest Cryptogram:

Last month the Supreme Court let stand the Justice Department's right to secretly arrest non-citizen residents. Combined with the government's power to designate foreign prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" in order to ignore international treaties regulating their incarceration, and their power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or access to an attorney, the United States is looking more and more like a police state.

Just in case anyone hadn't noticed this already.

I have had my IPod for several months now. Its a G3 30Gb model and I use it with Linux and gtkpod. I've been using the new HFS+ driver and the 2.6 test series of kernel and had no problems at all. This means I can mount both Windows (FAT32) and Mac (HFS+) formatted IPods. gtkpod already has lots of great features that are missing from iTunes such as duplicate track detection using MD5 sums. I am working on a feature that will allow a 2 ways sync between the ipod and linux. This will allow to detection of exectly which tracks on the ipod are not present on the PC and to copy those tracks back accross. This feature is very usefull if you carry your IPod with you and use it collect tracks from other peoples iTunes.

Secondly, I have noticed that it is perfectly possible to use a FAT32 IPod with OS X and iTunes. It seems like Apple could have saved themselves some hassle and formatted all the IPods for Windows. That said, I sure there are serveral technial benifits to HFS+ especially on large IPods. However, the key point here is that if you want to use your IPod on Windows and OS X (and Linux or course :) then format it FAT32.

For some reason I haven't been writing in this blog for a very long time now. Since my last entries I have now completed my MSc. My thesis, along with some of my other school work can be downloaded from here.

I've also been in Brussels for about a month and am now looking for work in London. If you're reading this and you know of a programming postions in London that involves Linux and is with an innovative, lively, young company please get in touch.

I spent a bit more time looking at CSS this week and gave the site a little revamp. You may notice some tricks from Paul Sowden, Nicholas Theodorakis and Eric Meyer. The site now uses a little bit of javascript to change CSS styles and store the selection in a cookie. If you have cookies disabled you will always get the default style, sorry.

The photo section has also been improved with lots of whiz-bang stuff. Images will appear to load faster thanks to some javascript preloading. Next feature is to make a javascript slideshow that doesn't need a page reload simply to change the current image.