Evolution accepts whitespace in the hostname field. When sending email, it fails due to invalid hostname. This has now been fixed, thanks to input from Alan Matsuoka. Reference: GNOME Bug 533465 – Evolution account editor accepts white space in host name as valid

The Tower of KFC Originally uploaded by sankarshan. My Desk.

Upon quitting Totem, I heard a ping. This came from xchat-gnome (via the sound-notification plugin). It turns out gnome_sound_play was being used to play the sound, which defaults to the ESD backend: gnome_sound_play("../../data/message.wav"); ESD has been superseded by PulseAudio in most major distributions. I would prefer moving to a GStreamer-based backend, so I rewrote the code to use GStreamer. However, the ping still didn’t work while I was playing music through Totem. ...

Ticking “Away” worked like a charm on xchat-gnome, but unticking it didn’t do any magic. This turned out to be a bug fixed upstream (GNOME #462031). Grepping the code revealed a rather trivial fix, which on further lookup was part of the Fedora 9 build. I ended up filing a bug report (Fedora #430883). A package was released with the stated fix, which crashed xchat-gnome whenever one tried to set or unset away: ...

The Three Laws of Robotics The movie faithfully quotes Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Read more on the Isaac Asimov Home Page.