09:33 < jspears> is there an equivalent to 'awesome -k' for awesome3?

09:33 < jspears> I tried just using lua but it seems to error on valid syntax

09:34 < farhaven> I just start another X server

09:34 < farhaven> like this: startx -- :1

09:34 < farhaven> and if awesome works fine inside that one, the syntax is okay

09:51 < CIA-5> awesome: Julien Danjou  * rda52a7b197bd / (awesomerc.lua.in lib/awful/util.lua.in): awful:

               add helper to check configuration file syntax

09:51 < CIA-5> awesome: Julien Danjou  * r116de391421a / (luaa.c structs.h): lua: add awesome.conffile()

09:55 -!- sm217 [~sm@92.112.172.241] has joined #awesome

09:56 -!- GGLucas [~GGLucas@5357FFDA.cable.casema.nl] has quit [Ping timeout: 480 seconds]

09:56 < MadCoder> farhaven: your answer seems to be obsolete :P

09:57 < farhaven> damn :D

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,norock /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

For reasons I’m not too interested in, the norock option is mandatory if you don’t want to see an empty directory.

One of the devs points out in his blog that there’s a current hot issue over how the client provides information about which IM service you’re currently chatting over, or which service you would use if you were to message someone in your buddy list. After reading the discussion in the bug report and the comments on his blog post, I can only conclude that the Pidgin developers are only coding for themselves. They are presenting the stereotypical, snide, elitist attitude that many critics attribute to open source developers.

They have made it clear that no matter what anyone says, the logical “use cases” don’t justify reinstating a recently disappeared feature – one which I and other users took for granted as a part of how the app behaves, and have found very useful. To my way of thinking, if you create an app that users love and then hack pieces away without regard for user feedback, you’re shooting yourself in the foot (stabbing yourself in the eye, what have you.) You won’t be trusted as a good steward of open source going forward, and people will begin to abandon use of your product as soon as they can find a reasonably usable alternative. This is bad for everyone involved.

Listen to your users, and stop pretending you live in a perfect vacuum.

I especially like Scale (think Mac’s Expose) and translucency with blur for helping find or keep track of open windows. Here’s one of the better videos demonstrating some real world uses of the effects available.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/dJO6CLln-B0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I tried mplayer with aalib1 built in last night. Somewhat less than really useful, but cool.

People familiar with PVR applications for the PC are probably aware of Myth TV, and are wondering why the free homebrew project isn’t included. The answer is simple: It requires Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Linux at all, but our roundup focuses on competing Windows applications. Besides, if you want to turn your PC into a PVR with Linux, Myth TV is pretty much your only good option.

In not doing the truly interesting work of investigating free, open products like mythtv, they’re just being mainstream, and hey, who can blame them? But if you’re not going to include the gamut of available options, then it’s beyond the scope of your article to make statements like “Myth TV is pretty much your only good option”; there’s a big difference between “best option” and “only good option” but they don’t even make the effort to get that far.

Their testbed setup includes a P4 3.2Ghz and 1G of RAM, but they say “We’re going more for quiet and reliable than for blistering speed.” Uh huh. Of course you’ll need the RAM simply because you’re running under XP, but I don’t see why (if you’ve chosen a tuner card with any hardware encoding / decoding capability at all) you need to run one of the hottest CPUs ever made just to watch and record TV. I’m doing it under linux with an old Athlon 1400 with plenty of CPU cycles to spare.

It boggles the mind that people think building their own PVR using Windows is going to throw off the yoke of the TiVo’s and other DRM-rich services. They’re really just trading one master for another. Meet the new boss, indeed.

urss doesn’t have an “uninstall feature,” that being listed as something that’s in development. That’s cool, because Firefox has an extension manager; no problem, right? Wrong. urss installs itself in ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile name]/chrome/urss where it has no need to be. After thoroughly munging my existing profile trying to be rid of this thing and get Firefox to start properly, I finally started over with a new profile.

All this is well and good, it’s a version 0.x product and all. Except that there are no bugs filed against it. Hm. I went to try and file a bug. Interesting, there’s no bug tracker for this obviously broken extension! Stay away from urss unless you’re interested in testing and fixing it yourself. You have been warned.