Amarok, the best music player there is for Linux or indeed any platform, has been redesigned from the ground up. The old version 1.4, while feature-rich, was apparently up to the standards and visions of the app’s makers, and now, there is a 2.2 out.

Amarok 2.2 is completely different in terms of appearance (and probably even more internally), but right now I’m having lots of trouble getting it to work the way 1.4 did. Here’s what’s bugging me the most:

• I can’t seem to get the playlists to sort my music according to albums without every album on the list being listed once for every song that album contains. VERY frustrating.
• Version 2.2 reintroduced the capability to play audio CDs. However, this feature doesn’t seem to work on my laptop–the CD is listed but just won’t play (even Kscd plays on the laptop and that’s to say a lot). On my desktop, the CDs will play, though.
• CD title lengths are always 0:00. Annoying.

I’m sure these will be sorted out in time, but right now, when KDE 4 is still buggy and unreliable, and Pulseaudio still mutes sound on every boot, there is enough on my plate already to keep me annoyed.

This blog is about blame. Specifically, it’s about Windows XP. If you’re into the Microsoft-friendly thing, quit reading.

I held my presentation at XML Prague today. It seemed to go reasonably well until I was about to switch to a demo. I was in Powerpoint and meant to show a little something on the actual application, so I switched to Internet Explorer, or so I thought.

NOTHING happened. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nothing whatsoever.

Nothing. Can you imagine the terror? WTF?

I kept on speaking, realising that my presentation wasn’t up to par. Another demo opportunity came up, with similar results.

Nothing.

And that is what happened. Nothing. You explain this, because I can’t.

Well, a bit more than that, actually. See you at XML Prague.

…but I miss SGML. I miss the time when any project worth its salt was up to a year or more but would still have to be redone from scratch to create something that actually works.

These days, companies expect these things to work right out of the box. Just install it, give it a week’s training and another week of adjustments, and you’re all set. I have competitors that market their product in this way, claiming that it’s all it takes. Funny, that, because what they are actually saying is that the handling of a customer’s most vital asset, their information, should require no more than a couple of weeks to be up and running but the product itself could take years to develop. Is it just me or is there something wrong with this concept?

In the olden times, things were never that easy. There was no DOM and there was no XSLT, and certainly no native, built-in SGML APIs to ease a developer’s plight. No fast track, no overnight results. Outputting structured documents on paper was not an easy task so things were allowed to take time. There was time to do a proper analysis, and time to perfect it while others were writing code.

Imagine having that time now, imagine having a year to do things properly. Oh, yes, I miss SGML.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5683671.ece

Looks like Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who claimed MMR vaccines were to blame for the so-called “autism epidemy” manipulated his research data in order to get the results he wanted.

Not that I believe for one second that the MMR scare is now history, with nutters like watsername married to Jim Carrey running around crying wolf, but it still feels like a victory to me.

I will present my whitepaper, Practical Reuse in XML, at XML Prague on March 21 (in Prague, Czech Republic, in case you didn’t guess that). XML Prague is a small conference but the speaker list is very impressive: Norman Walsh, Ken Holman, and Jeni Tennison will attend, among many others. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Read CNN’s web page, just now, and found the following, re the US presidential election:

McCain, meanwhile, continues to hammer his opponent for exuding confidence in the final days of the campaign. He has been repeating a standard campaign line recently, saying Obama is “measuring the drapes” for the White House.

My immediate reaction was: What’s wrong with confidence? I don’t understand. If you think you’ll win or, God forbid, if you think you’re right, what’s so terrible about it?

8.

Still makes me giggle. For those of you not in the IT business, move on to the next blog.

I’ve decided to start blogging again. I’m sure you’re all thrilled.