I got my XMMS2 tshirts!

I have got my XMMS2 t-shirts! Looks good, feels good! I have attached some pics! Go fetch!

Ok, I am a QZealot

After I have been playing around with Hildon / Maemo a couple of days, trying to make a PyMaemo client for XMMS2 I have a really bad headache. GTK feels soo different from Qt and frankly I couldn't loath the API any more. I have decided to scrap that effort, right now I want to see what it would take to be able to use Qt properly under Maemo. I searched the internet for good advice but it seems like all the efforts to make Qt work well under Maemo has been very scattered and disorganized. I have created a wiki page and try to collect information about how to "port" Qt4 to Maemo. If you have any information I lack please head over to the wiki and help me out!

On another note I am thinking about going to the Trolltech Dev Days in Germany the 16-17th of October. Come buy me a beer ;-)

First step towards a xmms2/maemo client

Since I got a Nokia N800 device, I just HAD to port xmmsclient to it. It was a lot easier than I had suspected. Once I had scratchbox up and running (this was actually the hard part), it was very straight forward to just do ./waf configure ; ./waf build. I had to tweak waf to find the correct python binary but nothing more than this. I now have xmmsclient + python bindings running on my n800 :) Expect a small client soon!

Post from n800!

I now got my new toy, the nokia n800! I am posting this using the built-in browser and it seems to work just fine, but why did they put the spacebar at the leftend corner? I will write a longer review later when I have had a chance to use it more!

Back in Madrid.

I am back in Europe again, even though my physical body is here my soul is a bit behind (Daimens law of jetlag). The last days in Santiago was pretty good, work-wise it was a much more relaxed trip than it usually is, which of course just means that usually it's insane.

Friday I felt like celebrating, so I went to "Happening" and had a great Argentinan steak. The service and food was as usual excellent and it was sooo cheap. The rest of the night was spent with the movie Equilibrium. I do like the movie a lot, it's a great dystopian universe and Christian Bale does a great role.

For the whole week I tried to figure out what I should do on my Saturday, I ended up just taking an extra trip around the city and not going outside Santiago. So I started to walk from the Hotel over to Domino's (the Santiago hotdog company) and had a Completo. A completo is a Chilean hotdog with avocado, mayo, tomatoes and onion.


After that I took a stroll up the San Cristobal as I have done so many times when I lived in Santiago. The smog was pretty bad that day (as you can see in the pictures) so the city was pretty clouded. It's a pretty intense walk upwards the "Hill" (In a country where the Andes is always visible, a 800m high mountain is considered a hill).


That evening I went out with Sergio and Jenny (old colleague + wife) to a old favorite restaurant "Como Agua para Chocolate", as water to chocolate. The place is mexican type of place with beautiful decor, great food and great presentation of the food.


The trip home was uneventful, I got upgraded to first class because of space problems in economy, I didn't complain much about that. Since I got the "sapphire" status in oneworld the "random" upgrades seems so much more frequent. Not a coincident if you ask me. I couldn't sleep on the plane though, so now I am in for a world of jetlag changes that I hate.

And oh, I am getting my N800 in a couple of hours. :)

Two days ago, I woke up ... under water ...

With "Crossroads" by mind.in.a.box we return to their intense electro-world. With cool vocal effects, multilayered soundscapes and addictive melodies this is nothing but a masterpiece. If you never heard a mind.in.a.box album before you'll need to know that they are thematic records with the protagonist "Mr. Black". At the start of this record (chapter three in the story) Mr. Black wakes up in the water and cannot remember who he is. The first songs deal with his memory loss (amnesia, into to the night) and then mr. black manages to figure out who he is (the song identity), but things spiral out of hand and our "hero" realizes that he is not alone (songs fear and stalkers). I won't spoil the rest of the story for you, you should listen to it yourself! The CD comes with a booklet that contains a small story written by the Austrian sci/fi author Andreas Gruber that takes place in the "crossroads universe".

I must say that I love the idea of not just writing cool songs, but also add to a wholeness, like NIN did with Year Zero. This gives you something more than just music.

I recommend everyone that like electronic music to get this record, listen to the stories and read the booklet, you won't be sorry!

Absolution Gap

Last night, while eating excellent mexican food at Taqueria El Rancho, I finished "Absolution Gap" by Alastair Reynolds. It was my second (or third, if you count that I just finished half of "Revelation Space" before it was destroyed by rain) Reynolds book. The whole book was very captive and the pace was incredible. From the start you follow three different settings in different parts of the universe, after half the book it merges into just two stories you follow. And in the last three high paced chapters all the loose ends tie up and you get eject into a reading frenzy that is unavoidable!

In Reynolds universe every book add to the details and it feels richer and richer all the time.

But this book is not for everyone, it's "hard" science fiction with a lot of reference to physics and space science. Reynolds has worked at ESA so he probably know more about physics than most people. His books are very careful to not break any rules of natures, even though they bend them pretty far in some cases (see the Hypometric weapons for example). The books also challenge the reader to follow at least three different story-lines.

I am looking forward to my next Reynolds book (I need to surf amazon I guess :)), in the meanwhile I will finish Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".