Totem is Gnome’s built-in media player, and it really annoyed me in previous versions, and had me switching to VLC. However, the version included in the Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate has two features which are very important, in my opinion. The first feature is smooth graphical integration with compositing managers (such as compiz). In previous versions, as well as VLC, once you fullscreen the window, moving the mouse (which causes the cursor and the partial interface to appear) causes a very annoying flicker. This has been fixed (at least on my box, using an NVidia card).

I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot’s VOD service (and happily pay to watch the shows I enjoy), but my true favorite for getting my entertainment is everyone’s favorite not-a-dumptruck, the internet. In this post, I will describe how I do it.

Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:

At my workplace, I’ve recently been using git for code review purposes. I work on code in my own git clone, and ask a peer to review it. It works somewhat like this:

1. master branch is same code as currently in upstream.
2. Working to resolve issue #1234 pertaining to “Performance for gizmo”, I work on a branch 1234-gizmo-performance.
3. I mail a peer, John, with this information, as well as my repository location.
4. John adds my repository as a remote, lutzky. Then he branches review1 (or review2 if that is taken, and so on) at lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance.
5. John adds comments with nice big FIXME tags, which are highlighted in any decent editor. He commits this, the commit-message stating that it was code review.
6. John tags his final review commit (or, if he had no comments - lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance) with a reviewed1 (or reviewed2, etc.) annotated tag. Since the annotated tag includes all the necessary information (who tagged, when, and what), the number doesn’t really matter.
7. I merge john/review1, incorporate the changes (or reject them) and remove the comments. If no further review is necessary, I submit this - and once submitted, I merge this back into master.

It’s a nice system. I wonder what other methods there are of doing this.

I had a Game Boy once. I could play it just about anywhere, and battery life - for the time - was great. I lost it at one point, and replaced it with a Game Gear, which sucked the life out of 6 AA batteries rather quickly. The Game Boy Color was actually decent on battery life, but since it didn’t have a backlight, you had to play it at very specific angles.