xvidcap 1.1.7 is finally out. The problems I know about are all either related to libxcb (see “xvidcap hangs on starting a capture session. What can I do about it?” here for some advice) or alsa/alsa-oss problems, so nothing I can mend at this point in time. Apart from that, things should work well.

Find out more at the usual URL.

Man, can’t Bush just retire somewhat early?

It’s really bad to my blood pressure, when during the G8 meeting that jerk and his staff smugly hint how Germany’s decision to withdraw from nuclear energy harms the climate. How can that guy who has probably just learned how to spell “carbon dioxide” (if at all), who represents one of the worst polluting countries in the world, which is at the same time among the richtest with a large population and could have played a decisive role in global nature protection for years but has completely failed to rise to that challenge, act so self-righteous?

What’s more, we don’t have an emission problem that forces us to resort to nuclear energy. As the project I introduced in a previous post shows, we only have a problem with our leaders being unwilling to sit together and do what it takes to solve our energy and climate problems. Instead they are all conservative blockheads who protect their own little claims, cling to the seemingly easy way out, and still haven’t understood the difference between protecting their own petty national economies and a global ecology. That’s probably because greenpeace activists play golf so much worse than the average lobbyist for nuclear energy.

And now that Mrs. Merkel, who normally lends an open ear to whatever lobbyist might come along, is finally in a situation that forces her to tackle the real, underlying problem, up comes Georgie and suggests building a few more nuclear power plants. But hey, not if you’re Iran, of course.

How can I explain it to somebody who’s rumored to name “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” as his favourite book? We’re not looking for a solution where after having eradicated all apple trees by eating all apples with seeds, we move over to pears. Esp. not if by eating those pears we’d risk contaminating the world we live in. Let’s try to solve a problem for good for once.

So we’re back from our vacation and I’ve even managed to organize the pictures taken on Mallorca. The program I picked for doing that (on my ubuntu Linux system) is f-spot. It has some oddities, but the general approach for categorizing loads of photos seems quite promising. Then I wanted to share the photos with a number of friends and took a look at the export modules for f-spot and between flickr and picasaweb, I picked picasaweb because I couldn’t reactivate my old yahoo account (nor did I get any reaction to my support request) and flickr has restrictions on the maximum upload amount per month which wouldn’t even have let me upload the pictures from this trip on one go. Picasaweb has restrictions on the maximum picture storage, but the current 1 GB seems to be a good start for me.

The upload went quite smooth, except for some odd server errors now and then which didn’t let me upload 400 pictures in one go. The upload would just bail out sometimes and a retry wouldn’t mend it. Restarting a new upload to the same album from the first picture not yet uploaded successfully, however, worked around that for me. Eventually, I uploaded the album in around 6 chunks.

The downside seems to be, the picasaweb slideshows do not work with wordpress.com, though there seem to be plugins for wordpress.org. But then, you can always do this:

Watch the pics here!