I want a music player that will play nicely with Linux and from a company that will not try to sabotage me at their will. When I buy music from the Apple Music Store, I can not play it on Linux.

I know about FairKeys, but this is not a product that could be shipped by Linux distributions that are afraid of getting into a lawsuit. So it effectively can not enter the mass market of free software users.

I have always been annoyed at this, and today I found this on BoingBoing: iTunes upgrade used to remove more features (disguissed as an "upgrade") and a follow up (through Dave Winer).

Luckly Slashdot has pointers to a bunch of new iPod Killers: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Certainly Apple has a couple of years of advantage in terms of improving their product compared to their competition, but am going to spend my money into funding products and companies that are not out to screw me or limit what I can do with the device I purchased.

If people have good experiences on a good portable player, let me know. Am looking for something with 20 gigs of space and possibly ogg support. FM and recording are pluses, but not very important.

New song from Eminem is out. lyrics, plus video in Real and Windows Media are available.

Loved the video.

Commentary and lyrics at common dreams

Florida Elections

Greg Palast on Harper magazine this month on the new touch-screen computers in Florida's election or how Florida is learning one or two tricks from Mexico's IFE.

Nat on Inspiration and Software

A great read from Nat's blog: Getting nothing wrong is for the uninspired

Walking to Work

Today my laptop was left on while I walked to work, and this is what happens when you walk by MIT:

The anonymous method support has been checked into CVS in the HEAD branch.

Another cool Mono App: Panoramic Photos

Autopano-sift is an application to assist in the creation of panoramic images from a series of pictures.

Sam Ruby Slides

From DevCon are available.

Last week we had a Mono Summit in Cambridge, notes from the various discussions and developments are available here: http://www.go-mono.com/summit-notes.html

John Pilger documents the Story of Diego Garcia and the cleaning of the native population in the 60's.

The story has a happy ending, those expelled from Diego Garcia received 3,000 pounds (each).

There is more information on Pilger's site.

Duncan's NodeStore/NodeView

Duncan has done some work to bring the NodeStore/NodeView to life, simplifying the life of those using the TreeView, here is a screenshot from his blog entry:

Interesting article: 100 facts, 1 opinion.

Btw, you can not use `Fox News' as your fact check source ;-)

Cleaning up the Record

Yahoo picked up on the removal of transcripts of the from the White House web site. The removals include some priceless gems.

For those running to the wayback machine to look for the originals the Whitehouse web site has been updated with a robots.txt file to avoid it.

Gnome Notifier

Thanks for all the e-mail on the Gnome Notifier. Am not interested in turning this prototype into a working product, there are better efforts underway. The point I was trying to make on my last post was that early on I realized that we needed the notification system to do more than just show a message: it is important to be able to have a list of actions associated with it that I can click on.

My toy Gnome Notifier was written a few years ago as a sample program that I wanted the Gnome people to productize. It was not meant to be a real or completed program.

Linux and Windows

Nicholas Petreley has a Security Report on Windows vs Linux.

Jamin, you might want to read the news articles posted from Enjoy the Draft's FAQ. I was particularly interested in question (5).

Rico Mariani has a blog on .NET performance. An interesting read is his Performance TidBits post.

A good companion is: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability.

Notifications

Calum writes his feelings about notifications: they should not have options. And here lies a problems with the view on notifications: am personally not interested in the equivalent to `tail -f some_log'. I want my notifications to be interactive, and hence those options seems awesome.

I am personally interested in a notification framework to the desktop to avoid things like GAIM popping up a dialog box in the middle of writing an email that asks me if I want to accept a buddy or not. In this particular case having a default button makes things worse, because I do not know which people I have accepted or not accidentally. I literally have this problem every day.

In fact, I want to have a log not only of notifications but of actions to follow up to. So some notifications should not go away, they should stick around, and when I have the time I can go and click the appropriate buttons `accept', `accept', `reject', `reject'.

Some other notifications can just go away: if I have not responded to the CD insertion action, it can likely go away from my screen.

Longhorn keeps track of notifications that the user has not seen.

My old gnome-notifier does exactly this, and supports a special kind of url `run:' that you could use to run programs in response to actions.

Elijah Gaim is one of the applications that have this behavior. But even if you do not steal focus, I do not want a window popping up in the middle of the screen for GAIM. I want these kind of notifications to go elsewhere (Windows uses a baloon and the proposals so far are along the same lines: notifications are out of your current work area).

Enjoy the Draft

An educational website: Enjoy the Draft Dot Com.

The FAQ is a must-read.

A lighter, more positive side of the draft.

I am the last one to notice monoForge a site that allows you to test your Web-based Mono application on Linux. During the beta period the service is free.

Gnome Notify

An implementation of the Desktop Notification. Fredrik is working to get a notification that looks like Tuomas mockups.

Another version is MonkeyPop which uses Mozilla. MonkeyPop uses a set of tools for developing desktop applications called the Chicken Framework. One nice thing about the Chicken Framework is that its distributed with documentation.

It would be nice for the authors to work together.

Tomorrow the 21st I will be participating on the Evolution E-Plugin hackfest. The hackfest will take place in the #evolution IRC channel on irc.gnome.org.

We will be learning the E-Plugin interface that Michael Zucchi designed for Evolution. Now Evolution 2.x can be extended with user code to implement your favorite missing feature or your favorite aberration.

Plugins are typically built with C but there is a Mono interface so any Mono supported language can be used to extend evolution.

This blog entry has some demos of the E-Plugin from August, it will give you a few ideas of what can be done.

Mark Crichton's Mozilla# for Windows

Mark has Gecko-sharp running on Windows (this is the Gecko binding for Gtk# running on Windows).

Gecko# on Windows.