The design may intermittently seem incomplete and certain content may appear broken until I get everything ironed out.

Stay tuned…

Since then I have bounced back and forth between using Rhythmbox and the Listen music player.  In preparing music and playlists for our upcoming wedding (no way in hell I was going to rent a crappy DJ) I have been putting these players through their paces.  I have been listening to song snippets, creating large playlists, smart playlists, transferring files etc.

With this work I have brought both Rhythmbox and Listen music players to their knees, causing crashes left and right.  Frankly they have both pissed me off to the point of no return.  Rhythmbox crashed and somehow lost/wiped all my playlists which I spent hours creating.

Rhythmbox (0.12.3), besides being very boring, works very well except for one thing: if you start double-clicking quickly from song to song, it will momentarily hang for 30 seconds at a time.  Sometimes it comes back and works for a bit, other times it comes back and will no longer play at all (I have to restart it).  This one bug, which I found to be filed in launchpad months ago (still has no fix) kills this app for me, unusable in my mind.

The Listen player is my favorite (v0.6+).  I’ve come to love its “dynamic” mode and the queue centric behavior, unique layout.  However, as much as I really really want to love this player, it crashes all the time.

What about Amarok?  Screw it, I’ve tried, just do not like its layout, never figured out how to get devices to work right.  If I can’t get something working quickly I dump it.

Bashee.. no.

So… I have been avoiding, but recently decided to download and try Songbird.  It is a cross-platform music app, built on Mozilla technology, open source blah blah.

Long story short, it does what I want.  Actually, I love the mash-up pane for instant artist info.  I got it running quickly, added a few add-ons so I have a now-playing queue playlist similar in function to the Listen player, yet can browse my music similar to iTunes and Rhythmbox.  Best of both worlds.  I tend to prefer simple “lightweight” apps, and Songbird is “heavyweight” in my mind because of the integrated web browsing that I don’t see myself using.  Yet, so far… its solid.  Me likey.  At least I can make some progress now…

Anyway, now happily running 9.04 32-bit, installed VMWare Server 1.0.9 to run a Windows XP Pro client on my Ubuntu host.  I found that something in the newer X server is mucking up keyboard mappings to VMWare such that the arrow keys, page up/down, home, delete etc. and number keys do weird things like opening menus and programs.

After some time, I found that I could at least workaround the problem by hard coding broken keymaps like so:

In ~/.vmware/config (create it if it doesn’t exist), put the following:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0×138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0×135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0×148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0×150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0×152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0×153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0×147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0×149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0×151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0×46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0×100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

yay google.

So far, I think its pretty dumb.  Mostly a waste of time since the few times I’ve tried to log in and “surf” a bit, twitter’s server response seems so slow and choked up I end up just closing the window.

At work, I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird to talk to exchange (lack of calendaring yes, that’s another topic). The new division I’m working in generates TONS of email.  I average about 150/day. With the old standard non-threaded viewing of your inbox I find myself constantly scrolling around, re-grouping, re-sorting email to sift through email strings as not to miss any information – a total pain!

I finally spent some time to search for a solution… and found the Threadbubble add-on.  This simply enables threaded viewing in Thunderbird very similar to Gmail.  Awesome!

Upon further reading, I stumbled across the silly fact that this add-on is absolutely NOT necessary as Thunderbird already has threaded viewing capability, its just turned off by default.  The dumb thing is that its not exposed as an option – at least not easy to find.

The solution: Use Threadbubble.  Or, open up Thunderbird preferences(linux)/options(windoz), go to Advanced –> Config Editor.  Scroll down and look for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” and change its default value to TRUE.  Restart Thunderbird, and bam!  However, the one thing you get out of Threadbubble add-on, is that it will “bubble” up threads to the top if sorted by Date.

I also read that threaded viewing will be the default behavior (or at least an option) whenever Thunderbird 3.x comes out.

The only quirky thing, is that sorting via the column headers can muck up the odering with threads… in my case I like having the newest thread always at the top… if I get the view mucked up, I use the View –> Sort by –> Date, then turn on threading again to get it how I like it.

Cheers, -e