Laney's blog

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager --version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

Ever since I switched to Banshee I've been a bit annoyed that I didn't know how to annoy others by advertising my currently playing song. I always knew the trick for Amarok which Theory posted a long while ago, but had no idea how to adapt this for dbus which Banshee uses. Now, thanks to kees, this has all changed.

In order to get at your currently playing song on Banshee from a SSH connection into your box, just run the following script:

#!/bin/bash

PID=$(pidof mono /usr/lib/banshee-1/Banshee.exe)

if [ -z $PID ]; then
    echo "Banshee doesn't appear to be running"
else
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\\
        \$(cat /proc/\$PID/environ | xargs -0 -n1 \\
            | grep ^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS= | cut -d= -f2-)
    banshee-1 --query-artist --query-title | cut -d ' ' -f 1 --complement | \\
        sed -n '1h;2,$H;${g;s/\n/ - /g;p}'
fi

It will produce output like so:

laney@chicken:~$ banshee-np.sh
Rancid – Corazon de Oro

Now to get it working remotely, just follow Theory's instructions, replacing

command="dcop --user `whoami` amarok player nowPlaying"

with

command="/path/to/banshee-np.sh"

and you should be good to go!

This post brought to you by my burnt hand, which I have to return to the ice pack every 20 seconds or so. Ouch.