techy stuff

I upgraded the site to PHP 5 this morning. This should be visible in precisely no way at all, I just thought I'd mention it :). Have been playing with f-spot today; it's a fantastic photo management application in early development. I really like the way it works. It's a little sluggish and memory happy at the moment, like many mono apps, but it works _really_ well, and makes organising pictures pretty much effortless. Which is good for me, as I'm terrible at sorting my pictures out. GNOME has had gthumb for a while, and that is obviously more mature and stable, but it's not half as nicely designed as f-spot. Thumbs up. I'm once more trying to set up MythTV as a front-end for my HTPC. It always ends up going wrong somehow. This time, it compiles and installs fine, the front end works perfectly when I run it over ssh from my desktop, but when I attempt to launch it actually sitting at the HTPC itself, it goes to a grey screen and freezes, in a really strange way. The system is still alive and happy but doesn't respond to input. If I ssh in from another machine I can kill mythfrontend and kill X - and the grey screen doesn't go away. If I use sysrq sequences from the HTPC itself I can kill everything and get back to a console login screen - into which I can't type anything any more. All together now: huh?! Oh well. I'll stick to launching everything from GNOME with big icons, for now. Called Sony Ericsson to see about getting my dead T610 fixed this morning. I bought it second-hand on eBay a few months ago and have been happy with it ever since, until the Ash concert last month. I took the phone to the show; when I got home, I took it out of my pocket, and it was dead. It hasn't come back to life since. Sammy's works OK, and I can swap the batteries and his _still_ works OK and mine's _still_ dead, so I know it's not just a stuffed battery. It doesn't start when plugged in to the mains, and I can't even get anything out of it with my terminator cable. It's utterly dead. So the very nice guy at SE told me I can send it in for them to fix, but it'll cost $150. I took a pass on that...I'll see what the local dodgy Chinese mall can do, and if there's no dice there, I'll sell it for parts on eBay. I already ordered its replacement off eBay, a Treo 600 - they're going nice and cheap now as the new version has come out and all the rich executives are dumping their old models.