Rumours abounding about a new Gnome Media release

[iain <iain ximian com>]

Right, so here's the skinny. the deal, the lowdown, the <insert some
number that means something to someone who's used a US telephone
exchange here>. There's a few rumours going round, that a) I've actually
made a deadline, and that b) I've picked a sensible version number.
Well, guess what. It's all lies! Lies I tell you... what? I mean, no,
it's TRUE. TRUE I tell you.

Gnome Media - Two Point Oh Point Oh cunningly subtitled "Murder history;
on your cue, a thousand musicians can jam on 2 turntables & a mixer."[1]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents:
Gnome-CD: 
A cd player. Changes from the last officially released version[2]
include: Translation changes, and Michael Meeks did loads of weird stuff
"refactoring" cos he gets kicks out of stuff like that. He closed loads
of bugs too, and Bala as always helped out immensely, while, to be
honest, I just changed a few lines here and there.

CDDBSlave Two: 
A FreeDB[3] server accessor that tells you neato things about the CD
thats in the drive. Like the names of tracks and where you could have
got a much better CD for the same price[4]. The usual suspects (tm) of
bugs were fixed, and I worked out why when you changed track names, the
CD player didn't find out about it (The short version for the
nontechnical among us: I'm a dumbass). And according to the ChangeLog in
August 2002 I'm fixing a memory leak. Maybe I should just start using
ChangeLogs as a diary...

Gnome Volume Control[5]:
A ... wait for it... volume control! No way, bet you'd never guessed.
No, but seriously folks, Bala made it so that Solaris users still get a
menu item even if they're not really using GVC (as we in "the buisness"
like to call it). John Fleck apparently fixed up the documentation for
it as well.

Gnome Sound Recorder[6]:
It records sounds. Neat! I forewardported[7] a patch someone called
"Godless" submitted that was for 1.2 so that you can have spaces and
other fancy characters like that in filenames. Which is a nice addition.
I also fixed some annoyingly silly buggy bits. And Kjartan made it
compile quicker.

VU Meter:
Well, it makes flashy bars flash when you're playing or recording music
and from the ChangeLog it doesn't look like it's been changed in about 2
months. Lovely. I guess it must be perfect (or no-ones using it).

Screenshots are at the usual place:
http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/gnome-media

And you can download it from the usual http://ftp.gnome.org directory.

Many thanks to the myriad of translators who have translated gnome-media
in 40 different languages and to Jeff who uploaded the tarball for me.

Well Kiddyducklings, I think thats it, I'll just bow out with a small
joke my mother told me[8].

At the recent jubilee celebrations for Liz Windsor, Condoleezza Rice
wandered up to her and said "Yo, Lizzy doll, how come you have such
great people in your government on this quaint little isle?" And Liz,
true to form replied, "Oh, it's easy, Chuck[9], I just ask them a
question, and if they get it right, then I let them in. Watch", and she
called the Presid^w Prime Minister (Tony Bliar[10]) over and said "Tony
dear, if your parents have a child, and it's not your brother or your
sister, who is it?". Tony, being an Oxbridge[11] educated man replied
instantly, "It's me". The Queen congratulated him on being so clever,
and said "See, thats how you do it".
So, Condoleezza returned to the White House and said to Georgey,
"George, if your parents have a child and it's not your brother or your
sister, who is it?". George scratched his head and said "Hmmm, I don't
know...Hmmm.". So he decided to cheat and ask his cleverest friend Colin
Powell. "Colin," he said, "If your parents have a child, and it's not
your brother or your sister, who is it?". Colin thought about it for a
minute, and said "Oh, George, it's me".
George, feeling all clever, went back to see Condoleezza and said "Thats
easy Condoleezza, it's Colin Powell."
"No," said Condoleezza, laughing at the most powerful man in the world's
stupididty. "It's Tony Blair".[12]

Thanks, I'll be performing at the Middle East, Cambridge[14], Thursday
through Saturday.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...
iain [17]

[1] Yes, I copied this off of my slipmats.
[2] There was a "release" called 1.999999999.0 last week, and to tell
you the truth, the only thing thats changed is the version number in the
configure.in file.
[3] Or any other server that does that sort of stuff. Don't let the name
fool you.
[4] AKA The "Your favourite band sucks" principle.
[5] The mixer formally known as GMix.
[6] Don't you love the non-cryptic idiot proof names we now have. Thanks
Seth.
[7] I don't think this is a word, but I had backported here, but thats
not right, so I made up one that is just as good. Perfect Davish[15]
[8] I think our minister told it to her...it's a bit long to be one of
the jokes my mum makes up.
[9] Queen Lizzy was doing her Cilla Black[16] impressions that night.
[10] (sic)
[11] Same place the Batgirl was educated at in Batman 3 or 4. 4 I think.
The one that sucked most.
[12] Interesting site I found while researching this joke (My mum had
just used "his advisors" in place of real names):
http://www.opensecrets.org/bush/cabinet.asp
[13] This footnote intentionally left blank
[14] It's around here somwhere
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=464+Mass+Ave&city=Cambridge&state=MA&zipcode=&homesubmit.x=35&homesubmit.y=8
[15] "If you know what its supposed to mean, it's a valid word"
[16] http://www.cillablack.com/
[17] I wasn't in the mood to do one of these, but then I read the GDM
one and knew deep down in my heart, I had to make a more pointless
release announcement than it. Just think how long the LinuxToday GNOME
apps page is going to be...bet they cut it.
-- 
"Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself"
	- Leo Tolstoy.