Evolution Account Editor Accepts Whitespace in Hostname as Valid

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

May 22, 2008 · 1 min

The Tower of KFC

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

March 19, 2008 · 1 min

xchat-gnome: Sound Notification

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used to play the sound, which defaults to the ESD backend: gnome_sound_play("../../data/message.wav"); ESD has been superseded by PulseAudio in most major distributions.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. ...

February 4, 2008 · 1 min

xchat-gnome: Unchecking "Mark as Away" Does Not Work

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: ...

February 4, 2008 · 1 min

Isaac Asimov Home Page

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.

January 2, 2006 · 1 min