Aaron Bockover has a couple of interesting posts on the Banshee music player:

• Scripting Banshee. Aaron embedded the Boo language into Banshee to help prototype, test and extend it.
• Audio Profile Configuration for the Masses: in which he presents his work to provide a user friendly interface to configuring your underlying media platform.
  Screencast and screenshots included.
• Radio Support in Banshee. Check his description of the implementation, but most importantly of his use of the Rhapsody Web Services to match the radio music with cover art, artist information and more.

Aaron has shown his craftsmanship in building Banshee, which is a labor of love.

Paco posted a few screenshots of Gtk SQL# a tool to interact with SQL databases using the System.Data API.

The Mono.Xna developers continue to make progress. Alan blogs about the progress here.

Jonathan Pobst will be joining the Managed Windows.Forms team at Novell on Monday. Jonathan has been a Windows.Forms 2.0 contributor and also developed the Mono Migration Assistant tool (Moma).

We have upgraded our VMWare Mono Image from SLED to OpenSUSE 10.2. In the process we fixed most of the problems that were reported by our Windows users doing their .NET migration from Windows to Linux. Please keep sending us your feedback!

I have also migrated my desktop computer at home to OpenSUSE 10.2 (my laptop remains in SLED-land for now), and here are some personal experiences.

Duncan improved my computing experience ten times by suggesting that I install the Smart package management system for OpenSUSE (Smart home page is here).

Smart is fantastic, and I like it a bit better than apt-get so far (still got apt-get installed, but I have switched to smart for my package management now).

The second piece of advise from Duncan was to configure the Additional Package Repositories. Which is a fantastic universe of packages for OpenSUSE, pretty much anything under the sun is packaged there. I accidentally ran into the "GuitarScaleAssistant" while trying out the smart search features. GuitarScaleAssistant: lovely piece of software.

Jonathan Pryor has also a blog entry on caring and feeding your new OpenSUSE 10.2 installation, which should be very useful to Windows guys migrating to Linux.

The new Content, Restriction, Annulment and Protection (CRAP) subsystem built into Vista is another reason to stay away from it.

Leaving aside the political issues of CRAP, this is what users of Vista will be treated to:

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

...

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's content protection. [...] However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible.

Read the whole piece, its hilarious.

The "remote shutdown" capability for device drivers, if true is a reason enough to not buy Vista in any form or shape.

Microsoft: Shooting itself in the foot. One toe at a time.

Cocotron is a cross-platform, MIT X11-licensed implementation of the Cocoa APIs.

The Foundation works on Windows, Linux and Solaris. The GUI side (AppKit) currently only has a Win32 backend.

The TODO list is here.

It might be useful to hack on Cocoa# and Dumbarton on non-Apple platforms.

The quality of the writing over at Billmon never ceased to amaze me. I wish I had the anything remotely as good in the way of writing, constructing and researching that Billmon had.

The blog started in April 10th of 2003. A time when the anti-war movement had been served a slap in the face, jingoism in the US reached new levels and war peddlers were at the top of their game.

Today Billmon has a retrospective on the blog posts from those days:

By my rough guess, at least two thirds, if not more, of the almost three thousand posts I've written since that day have concerned the Iraq War, directly or indirectly. Over the past three-and-a-half years the war has come to define my thinking just as thoroughly as it has come to define Shrub's presidency -- not to mention the world we now live in.

What I also realized, ploughing through hundreds of forgotten or half-remembered posts, is that much of what I wrote back then proved not only true but also extremely prescient -- especially in the first few months after "mission accomplished," when the corporate media by and large was still drinking the White House Kool-Aid and the conservative movement was proclaiming the deification of Emperor George.

It's not that the story wasn't being told. Then as now, most of what I understood to be true about Iraq came from reading between the lines of the semi-official media (New York Times, Washington Post) from the samzidat journalists at Knight-Ridder, from the foreign press (the Guardian and the Independent in particular) and from the Juan Cole's crucial work translating and analyzing Iraqi and other Arabic-language sources. The downward trends could even be seen in the bare factual bones of wire service reports with obscure datelines like Fallujah and Haditha and Tikrit.

But to piece together the truth in those days you had to scrounge for it, ignore the ignorance and lies pouring out of Donald Rumfeld's mouth and defy the prevailing political tide of arrogant triumphalism. Very few journalists, and even fewer politicians, were willing to do that. Some in Left Blogistan were (Kos, Needlenose and Steve Gilliard, among others, also come readily to mind). As a result we presented a far more accurate picture of the war to our readers than the corporate media -- with a few honorable exceptions -- did to its own. I'm proud enough of that to want to remind the world, and the moronic media blog bashers in particular, of it.

The retrospective is here.

Compiz has a new web site and they now also have forums.

Logo contest is here and you can vote here.

SunUO is a free Ultima Online server based on "RunUO".

SunUO has released a new version of their server that runs on Mono.

Mono adoption in SecondLife was discussed in the Technical Town Hall with Cory Linden:

There are some technical changes we still need to make in particular, we’ll need to compile Mono on the server side which requires a distributed compilation service to be running on the grid (yay, backbone!) but I expect that we will begin testing Mono on the main grid in Q1/Q2 2007.

The process there will be to have places on the grid where you can bring scripts and recompile them into Mono for testing. That will let you report broken scripts to us.

Since Mono tends to execute LSL about 600 times faster, I expect that there will be some interesting borkage around carefully timed scripts. Babbage has talked about the implications of Mono extensively, but it’s important to remember that the sequence will be:

• Start allowing compilation of LSL to Mono/CLI. Test existing scripts like crazy. (Q1/Q2)
• Think about ways to include other languages (Q more than 2)

A small article explaining the dangers that the dollar faces ahead here.

My Friend Taylor Hayward has launched a site that tracks hundreds of widgets that people can use to develop web applications, the ThePeoplesToolbox.

Check it out, and if you like it, digg it.