Michael Wood

Here is a brief report on gnome-uk at LinuxWorld expo 2006

The GnomeUK stand had a good location this year, on the stand we had the 2 TFT panels, 1 desktop (these from the Gnome event box) and some of our own laptops.

We also had prepared leaflets on “why chose gnome”, “what is gnome” and importantly the GUADEC leaflets. Thos and I had made up a few posters on some of the popular gnome applications which had snippets of information
about them.

This year we also had a special “wall of hate/love” which we invited current gnome users to put their comments, hates and loves about Gnome.
This went down pretty well and helped us to actually get down the feedback without spending a lot of time writing it down ourselves etc.

The desktop from the gnome event box had been pre installed with the latest version Mandrieva and was running XGL and compiz. We also had a laptop linked to one of the TFT monitors which were running AIGLX and beryl/emerald on ubuntu edgy. Having the fun graphics and showing some of the actual practicalities of the new abilities that XGL* introduces brought a lot of attention to our
stand. At peak times we had quite a crowd, dealt excellently by the tireless by the UK Gnome team on the stand.

A lot of the discussion between the members of the public were a lot to do with explaining that gnome was the desktop environment. IE a lot of them had used distributions that used gnome but had not realised that gnome was a separate entity from the distribution it’s self, We also demoed what people will be able to expect from Gnome 2.16 and future desktops (via XGL). Concentrating on the ease of use that has now come upon us via the gnome desktop, such as Gnome VFS, USB memory sticks auto mounting and so on. There were a few technical queries about how to do certain things which we were either able to solve or we put them up on our “wall of
hate/love” .
One of the common questions was what makes gnome different from KDE, more specifically what makes it better, these are quite difficult to answer I find because it is a lot down to personal taste. Possibly in future we ought to generate a sheet that mentions things that makes GNOME different from other desktop environments in a direct comparison.

We collected quite a lot of email addresses and business cards for keeping people in touch, especially in terms of information regarding
GUADEC, which quite a few people had heard about but didn’t know it was going to be in the UK (Birmingham 2007).

Well done to everyone involved, another successful LinuxWorld expo..
Bring on GUADEC 2007 !

My mp3 player (which has just survived a trip round the washing machine) doesn’t support m4a files so I needed a way to mass convert the audio files. Also the plugin bmp-m4a (beep media player m4a plugin) doesn’t seem to be that stable for me.
Here is the shell script that I wrote to do this. It requires the two programs “faad” and “lame“. For ubuntu users these can be found in the repsitories/synaptics/apt
faad is an ACC decoder/player and lame is an MP3 encoder.

#!/bin/bash
#aac convert mp3
#Michael G D Wood (X3N)
for m4afile in *.m4a
do
echo —- Convert to wav —
echo faad “$m4afile” -o “$m4afile.wav”
faad “$m4afile” -o “$m4afile.wav”
echo — Encode to mp3 —
newfile=`echo $m4afile | sed -e ’s/.m4a//g’`
lame -h “$m4afile.wav” “$newfile.mp3″
echo — Removing wav files —
rm “$m4afile.wav” -f
done

Download: m4atomp3.sh  Simply run this script in the directory of m4a files. e.g. sh /downloaded/to/m4atomp3.sh
Two modifications that you might consider to make life easier:
1) Add “rm $m4afile” -f after the line “rm  “m4afile.wav” -f” [line 13] . This would remove the m4a version of the file, not having this results in you having 2 versions of your files one in mp3 format and one in m4a (the original)
2) Add a outer for loop, ie nest the original for loop. You could do this to make the script go into a set of directories and preform the convertor. e.g. for targetdirectory in $directorylist do cd $targetdirectory .. then the original for loop.
If you need any help/customisations/what ever with this leave me a comment.

Currently a spammer is using one of my domains; x3n.me.uk as a spoofing address. I can assure you that these emails are completly unassociated to me, anyone I know and anyone who has legitimate use of x3n.me.uk. Please dissregard them or better still report the source address to the isp of the address.

You can do this by running an whois on the ip address which they came from, there is usually an abuse email address with this whois information.

In other news… The bbc have recently setup this site: http://www.thetimewhen.co.uk/ for recording events, an interesting idea, if it survives then i would imagine it would be future historians dream.