ninth level down

I sold a PC on eBay then other week and when it came to shipping Parcelforce 48 seemed like a good deal. They would pick up a 9KG parcel from my house and deliver it, all for £14. So I jumped on their website and started to book a shipment. All went well until I hit the following page:

Basically, everything was present and correct: scriping was enabled, Firefox was compatible, a PDF plugin was available… the only thing wrong was the OS – Linux wasn’t in their list of Microsoft operating systems.
Nor was OS X for that matter.

I guess the reason this shocked me so much was that this kind of thing has been pretty much confined to the past. Gone are the days where Linux users were seconds class citizens on the web. I guess that we have Firefox to thank for that, and the Windows users of Firefox specifically. This is probably the single most important factor in the recent rise of the Linux desktop and Ubuntu in particular. If there were more sites lounging in the Dark Ages like Parcelforce then I simply wouldn’t be able to use Linux half as much as I do.

Thanks, Parcelforce, for reminding me how crap things used to be.

I know I haven’t been posting much here recently… I tend not to blog when I’m very busy, which is ironically when I’ve usually got the most stuff to talk about. The thing that’s been taking up most of my time, apart from my lovely daughters of course, is my new screensaver project, Eternity Screensaver. I came up with the idea when thinking of a screensaver for Ubuntu SE. I’d already created a few raytraced wallpapers with POVRay and experimented with animating them. I thought it would be really cool if I could display them as screensavers. To my surprise, there wasn’t really anything out there which would play movie clips as a screensaver for Linux and loop them efficiently. Even mplayer and xine wouldn’t output properly to the virtual root window (used by screensavers) or quickly play a loop without interruption. The only thing close was electricsheep, which generates fractal images and saves them in MPEG2 format. It had a player called mpeg2dec_onroot which did pretty much what I wanted. I forked this player and hacked it so that it would read a list of clips from a config file and seamlessly loop them. I packaged it up with some animations and Eternity Screensaver was born.

Once the packages were ready, I added them to my APT repository. To be honest, maintaining my own packages and APT repo is becoming a bit of a pain. The new packages are very large and it take ages to shift them around and compile for different architectures, etc. So, my ears pricked when I saw the announcement for the new Personal Package Archive (PPA) functionality on Ubuntu’s open source collaboration site, launchpad. I’d been meaning to start using lauchpad properly for a while, so I took the opportunity to register all of my projects and upload the code to their Bazzar version control system.

Launchpad is a dream to use. It’s a great example of a modern web-based user interface and has a good community feel. It’s taken me a while to get to grips with Bazaar, as I’m used to using heavyweight Clearcase source control at work, but it’s a refreshingly simple and pwerful tool.

Launchpad PPA should be out of beta soon, so hopefully I should be able to move my repositories onto there soon.