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title: Some musings
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<div>Firstly: Music is a good thing. Power Metal has the ability to brighten any situation (even funerals). Being alone in a house means I can sing along as much as I want, headbang on my own all I want, etc. It is good.<br /><br /><br /><br />Second: Music players crashing is a bad thing. So far Rhythmbox, Exaile, Sonata (a GTK frontend to the Music Playing Daemon), Amarok 1 and Amarok 2 keep dying on me. This saddens me.<br /><br /><br /><br />Third: I dislike Amarok 2's interface quite strongly. Having nice extras is good, but a music player should focus on playing music. Essentially <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=hkI4P6GlLgk">this</a> is Amarok 1's interface, whilst <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0105643/">this</a> is Amarok 2's.<br /><br /><br /><br />Fourth: Easter break. Yay! Responsibilities have gone down considerably, which means I can bring up the responsibilities I have to non-course stuff. This means programming, drawing, reading Discworld, organising my life a bit more, and of course staying in bed, hopefully not alone. The beauty of this system is that I can get all of the secondary objectives accomplished whilst still satisfying the main one of staying in bed :) (OK, I'm actually trying not to be lazy. I'm writing this at my desk since staying in bed makes me feel generally bad as it seems like I haven't got anything done.)<br /><br /><br /><br />Fifth: Web based applications suck. They really, really do. If you are reading this at http://seriously-this-is-not-worth-reading.blogspot.com or http://seriously-this-is-not-worth-reading.blogspot.com/2008/03/some-musings.html then shame on you. If, however, you are reading this from http://seriously-this-is-not-worth-reading.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default or http://seriously-this-is-not-worth-reading.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss then nice one. I'm writing this in Kblogger because Epiphany died and sent the original text of this post with it (which I had spent over 3 hours writing). Web based applications fail. Full stop. I've said it before and I'll say it again. With WebKit coming to GTK and QT we should hopefully start to see a slew of applications for online services which replace their current crappy web frontends<br /><br />In other news I've upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 and things are running much faster, there's nice bootscreen stuff been happening (I can press Escape to skip routine filesystem checks, there's a huge load of new packages which I want to try out, etc.<br /><br />Problems so far include: Wifi firmware (I'm on a very long ethernet tether at the moment), any kind of Flash plugin (Adobe, Gnash or Swfdec) and media player instability (although Rhythmbox's is related to a bug I've had since upgrading to 7.04 where my optical drive gets 'confused'). Meh, I've got the holidays to sort it out.<br /><br />I've spent about 8 hours writing this thing now, so I'd better wrap up.<br /><br />I plan to see what kind of desktop applications I can make to replace web-based stuff that I am dissatisfied with. There, now I'm committed to it. Ah well :P<br /><br />Have fun with whatever you're up to at the moment, goodnight!<br /><br /></div>