I received a Nokia E51, an iPod Touch 16GB, and the shotgun mic for my HV20 today. Still waiting for the ZR800 though. Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow.

I like the E51. Really nice phone. Only real problem it’s got is its pathetic video recording performance (9 fps, what the hell?).

The iPod Touch is soooo thin… Interchanging between the iPhone and the iPod Touch in your hand, the difference in thickness brings a weird feeling. Thank God you can manually sync with the iPod Touch btw.

Haven’t tested the DM-50 mic yet. I need to finish up my Adobe Photoshop+Premiere Elements review first. Adobe sent me a review package last week.

Update: Stupid Apple. They have no special keyword to recognize the user agent of the iPod web browser. The word “iPhone” is unique enough so it can be used relatively safely as a keyword matcher, but the iPod Touch just has words like “AppleWebKit”. “Mobile” and “iPod” (not close to each other), which I am sorry to say they are not that unique so it’s difficult to decide if it’s a genuine iPod or not. Anyways, I just added special support for it on OSNews and Gnomefiles, but most other sites don’t support it (e.g. mobile.live.com does not let me use the actual mobile site while it does let me do so when using the iPhone).

Murray Cumming, maintainer of the GTKmm C++ bindings of GTK+, lambasted Jeff Waugh today. Both are prominent members of the Gnome developer community and also high profile. I always felt that Jeff was always very polemic on his replies to me for pretty much anything. Be it I was a real bitch on the d-d-l mailing list, or truly very helpful, his reactions were always one and the same towards me.

I never really understood what Jeff was really doing for Gnome, especially after he stopped maintaining his Python apps. Jeff blames his depression for all that, but if depression is the cause of the problem, maybe he should give Gnome a rest for a while. I know how hard it is to work full time on something when you are depressed — I’ve been there, and I am there.

Murray is not very friendly nut either, and we have a major disagreement about how GTKmm should be maintained (he keeps breaking the API every few months and so GTKmm apps stop compiling and it’s required that either the apps must be updated, or have many parallel versions of GTKmm installed). However, I always had the feeling that he’s a bit more connectable than Jeff.

Now, I know that Jeff passes by my blog every now and then and there’s a good chance that he will read this, but I must be truthful, so I am. Besides, I am pretty sure he feels the same for me anyway, so I guess we are square.

Now, regarding Gnome. It has fallen apart. Nothing gets done in a serious note anymore. Since Havoc Pennington took his team away from full-time core Gnome work a few years ago, and since Novell failed to make their Mono-based utils accepted, Gnome is one big sterile place. It’s sad, because it IS my favorite DE. I like Gnome. But maintaining a DE is not the same as developing for it and innovating every now and then. Oh, well, whatever. I use Windows XP when sitting my ass in my office, and Mac OS X when traveling or in front of the TV. I don’t really need Linux anyway. Not without a usable video editor.

Update: Thom blogged about it too.

We spent Thanksgiving at the Village of Squaw, home of the Winter Olympics of 1960. We booked an apartment there for 4 days and we had a great time — minus the fact that there was not much snow so my JBQ could not ski. I love these small apartments as they are fully equipped, so I can cook there. We didn’t hike as the weather was very cold (-12C to -4C), so we stayed in for the most part and… watched lots of TV.

Nonetheless, I did find the time to shoot 40 minutes of video, which translated to the following 3’22” clip. HD version here.