Occasional Thoughts

I have a new toy. Last week I bought an iPod touch. My primary use case is remote controlling media in my home. I already have a HTPC in my living room with access to satellite TV, videos, photos and music. However, I always found it stupid to switch on my TV in order to choose music. I checked choices like Squeezebox Duet or the TEAC WAP-4500. Pretty nice toys starting around 250 EURO. But if you already have a PC, the iPod is about 200+ EURO extra. And it's a nice gadget too. So I ordered one and tried to run the free Remote app from Apple.

Congratulations Microsoft for finally introducing some features KDE users already enjoy.

Just saw some Windows 7 screenshots on Heise Online that once again reveals some Microsoft "innovations" that KDE users already enjoy.

Taskbar shows related documents

OK, the first screenshot shows something really new. It associates an entry on the taskbar with documents recently opened with that application. Could be a nice feature. However in general I think the list of recent documents is more useful. Why shall I first start an application to see it in the taskbar and then open a document related to that? But OK... let's give Microsoft one point for that.

No closures for Java 7!

This was just due to the fact that the folks are not able to agree on a solution, while Closures are a very very old concept already used in Smalltalk (Blocks) and are an essential concept for modern dynamic languages like Groovy or Ruby.

To me this is prove that either the JSR process needs a major overhaul urgently to become more flexible or the end of Java is near.

After a long painful time I finally got my Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 running for streaming on my Ubuntu Intrepid server. As streaming software I used Motion, an intelligent streaming server that is able to detect motion and only stores images if something happens that is worth imaging.

I myself had a hard time to get it running. I first tried to run it on SuSE Linux 10. But failed because of a series of problems. Then I tried running it on Ubuntu Linux 8.10. Ubuntu has a precompiled package for Motion. The tool is V4L2 aware and is known to work with the uvc-video driver, which is needed for the Quickcam.