After what seems like ages, the new version of Growl has come out (0.6). Growl is basically a helper application which manages notifications from various applications. For example, if you are running Adium, you can have a little notification pop up whenever someone makes their presence felt online. A neat little perversion of this type of functionality is found at this page. Basically when the tune changes in iTunes, it sends a notification to Growl, which then hooks back into Adium to change my MSN/ICQ/Yahoo buddy icon. The new release of Growl has a new notification style which works really well with the iTunes integration. It's called Musicvideo, and looks a little like this:

It's a pretty cool little MTV effect going on there. The next challenge I face is getting Skype working with this. It's got support for the little profile pictures, but the AppleScript support is kind of lacking at the moment. Since Skype was released for the Mac, I've been making many phonecalls to distant friends and relatives (some in exotic places such as Chatswood) for close to nothing. Once it matures into a proper Mac application (with neat integration to the Address book for example) I'll be a very happy chappy.

Another geeky development that's been happening in the background is work on mt-daapd. There is some work to develop an XML-RPC / CGI interface for manipulating playlists - so hopefully things like requesting specific artwork, or adding rating capability to shared libraries will be just (i.e. a few months) around the corner.

Update: I've found some screen-grabs from the station idents from Channel 4, you can find the rest of them here. It looks much better as a video.

During my brief flirtation with being a Londoner again, I kept on seeing advertisements for a new phone in some of the tube stations. The phone looked pretty awful, but I accepted that as another of the latest and greatest trends that the industrial design monkeys were churning out (He is immune). The phone is in fact a joke (Here's the link again for those whose brains are more closely related to Carassius Auratus) from the Channel 4 television show Nathan Barley. I don't think it is being shown in Australia yet, but apparently you can download TV shows off the Internet. I wish I knew how to do that.

I'm trying out ecto as a blog posting tool at the moment. Right now any posts I make usually go through the web interface at Blogger, but the lack of both an built in spellchecker and photo uploading tool make it pretty time-consuming to do updates. Enter ecto - basically a text editor that has hooks into the various RPC apis available. As usual, I'm trying to make things as brain-dead simple as possible using AppleScript. Right now I've got a script going to look up various words in the tomes of information (such as Google, UrbanDictionary and Wikipedia). So I can write a word like "absure" and within a few clicks, have a working definition linked up for it.

After about 6 years in the IT/Computing industry, I've finally ended up in a cube. This is what I get for going on holiday for 10 weeks. I thought it was bad when someone took my chair after taking a day off, but now I've been moved to the reception desk. It's like my own little office. A really cold office, frequented by stupid couriers insisting that you are a receptionist.

In order to get away from my desk for the maximum amount of time, I developed a clever ruse (illustrated above). Now, as long as no-one stops to talk to Decoy, I can safely wander warmer parts of the building in search of couriers and coffee.

After travelling around a few different cities in the world, I've come to the conclusion that Sydney sucks. It's not really the fault of Sydney as a whole that it sucks. It is more to do with the fact that to do anything in Sydney that involves travelling is a bit of a nightmare.

For example, last night I tried getting into Newtown, and every step of the way there, the public transport was late. I don't know if the trains and buses are running on some kind of Bizarro-world timetable, where they all conspire to be equally late, so you never miss your connecting train/bus. That way your journey is smooth, at the expense of taking an extra hour to get where you wanted to.

I can understand if public transport is bad, because it's a public infrastructure, and if it's not funded well enough to scale to demand, of course it's going to fall over. That doesn't quite explain why the indicator boards have stopped working on the train stations, but I'll let that pass. The thing that really got to me was that at ten to twelve - on a TUESDAY night - there was slow moving, almost stopped traffic going across the Harbour bridge. That's just not cool. I expected better from the hard man of the NSW state govt. At least the new guy is local so he's readily available to whinge to.

I've begun work on the DVD covering my trip using the underpowered but good enough iDVD, part of the iLife suite. For some reason, I get some kind of strange satisfaction from using the iLife tools - maybe it has to do with me pretending to be cooler and more interesting than I actually am. Regardless, they're a great set of programs for someone who has no skills at all, and can result in professional looking results. If you see enough iDVD projects however, they all start to look strangely similar, because of the reliance on templates.

To avoid this generic looking DVD, I've been figuring out ways to customise the DVD as much as possible. One way I'm customising the DVD is to put my own backgrounds for each of the menus, which can just be dragged and dropped into iDVD straight from Photoshop. What you see to the right is a menu from the Berlin section that I photoshopped up. Those little East german crossing guys are cool.

The actual main content for this DVD will basically be a slideshow with a music track playing in the background. Now I'm back amongst my music, it's a lot easier to pick good (and appropriate) music to have as background noise while the slideshow is playing. You can choose from a whole bunch of canned transistion effects, but I always end up looking for the one that is least likely to cause nausea after watching it 100 times. As with all good DVDs I am planning to add a directors commentary track to the DVD, where I sit down and make fun of all the photos. The most interesting commentaries though are when you have a few people together and the commentary veers off into a random tangent. With any luck I will be able to sort out some celebrity commentators for sections of the DVD.

I've actually got to go to work tomorrow morning. First time in 3 months. I can see myself not doing very much at all.

I had a few minutes spare today, so I've done a bit of maintenance on the site. Comments are now enabled for new posts, and the music badges are now working again - sort of. Instead of retrieving the music badges from a third party server, the music badges are now actually retrieved directly from the ICQ server. Have a look at the URL for the image to see how I got it working.

Well, as you might have noticed on Cublog, my trip is over - or at least, I'm back in Australia. I'm just catching up on three months of - well basically normal life - before I jump back into the routine. I'm going to be really busy for the next few months, but I'll be doing lots of (relatively) interesting things, so its not a bad thing.