Squeezer 0.6 released

I've just released a new version of Squeezer -- an Android application for controlling Logitech Squeezebox servers and their attached players.



Originally developed by Brian Brad Fitzpatrick up to version 0.5, this release features a wealth of new features, many of which are due to significant contributions by Kurt Aaholst. These include:

• Browse your music library by album, artist, song, genre, and year.
• Search across the library.
• Internet radio support (browse staff picks, search)
• Scrobble tracks if Last.fm is installed on your Android device.
• A revamped UI.

You can install Squeezer from the Android Market. It's free, and open source. If you'd like to contribute the main project pages are on Google Code Hosting at http://code.google.com/p/android-squeezer/, and the code is on GitHub, https://github.com/nikclayton/android-squeezer.

EuroBSDCon 2009

A couple of weekends ago I attended the 2009 European BSD Conference, in Cambridge.

My trip report has just been posted on the official Google Open Source Blog, and includes a few of my photos from the event.

Google Photography Prize

I extended my recent UK visit by a couple of days to attend a private viewing at the Saatchi Gallery, in aid of the Google Photography Prize, a

global competition for students to create themes for iGoogle, run in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery London. We received over 3500 entries from 82 countries. The public voted to select the 6 finalists from a shortlist of 36 entries, and an expert jury of photographers and art critics has selected the overall winner.

Entries from the shortlisted photographer's were being projected on the walls, as various friends, family members, photography luminaries, and hangers on (I count myself in that last category of course) inspected and admired their work. And imbibed the occasional lychee mojito as necessary.

Of the finalists I was most impressed by Amelia Ortúzar, in particular this shot:

The warmth of the colours do it for me, and I think the break in composition towards the middle of the picture works very well.

The technical excellence displayed by Fahad AlDaajani's macro work was very good, and the overall composition on this photo caught my eye.

Matjaz Tancic demonstrated a very strong use of colour and form in his work, such as in this photo.

The winner, however, was Daniel Halasz, studying at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here's a representative shot.

I have to confess, that doesn't do it for me; although perhaps technically well executed the subject matter, composition, and lighting don't excite me. Perhaps just as well I wasn't one of the judges.

To view these, or any of the other shortlisted entries go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/photographyprize/vote.html, and if you use iGoogle you can then select one of them to use as your theme.

PAYG SIMs from Three

I've popped back to the UK for the weekend to catch up with friends and family.

Over the last few months I've become very used to having an HTC Dream phone running Android in my pocket in Switzerland, with an effectively unlimited data plan. Internet access while out and about has proven to be fantastically useful -- being able to look up maps online, get restaurant recommendations, and check travel planning websites are things are now take for granted. To say nothing of being able to pass the time on a bus by keeping up to date with my RSS feeds.

I wasn't looking forward to losing this for the duration of my stay, international data roaming charges being what they are.

So I was quite pleased to discover Three's SIM-only Pay As You Go (PAYG) offer. Hand them GBP 10 and in return receive a SIM for the phone, credit for 300 SMS messages, a 150MB download allowance, and calls to other UK numbers (landline or mobile) at 20p a minute.

Once the SIM was in the phone calling 444 to activate it, waiting 10 minutes, and then calling 444 again to activate the GBP 10 credit was sufficient to allow the phone to send and receive calls. To take advantage of the 3G connectivity I had to follow these instructions to add the Three APNs to the phone. I reproduce them here, mostly so it's easy for me to find them again...

From Settings -> Wireless controls -> Mobile networks -> Access Point names, add a new APN with the following settings:

Name	Three
APN	three.co.uk
MCC	234
MNC	20

Leave the other settings empty. That should be enough for the data connection to start working, and you can keep track of how much of the credit you've used by going to http://mobile.three.co.uk/my3 from the phone.

Googleserve

I spent last Friday wandering the streets of Zurich as part of "Googleserve".

Every year the Google offices participate in "Googleserve". At the risk of over-simplifying slightly, we talk to non-profit organisations that work with the local community and ask what they'd do with a few hundred extra volunteers for the week.

This year the Zurich office took part in a number of different projects; cleaning up graffiti, teaching people to use the internet, painting murals at the Kinderspital, ...

I was involved in raising the awareness of two AOZ projects among Zurich's immigrant population (of which, of course, I'm a member). The AOZ is a state-funded organisation with the remit to make it easier for newcomers to Zurich to find their feet and integrate socially and professionally.

The two programmes we were promoting (in teams of 2-4 throughout the city) were:

MAPS Agenda -- this is a monthly free publication that lists (in 13 different languages) events that are happening throughout the Zurich area; focussing particularly on events that are likely to be of interest to immigrants, or that will help them integrate in to Swiss society. For example, one of the events is a weekly free 90 minute German course at Letzipark.

The Konfliktophon -- a telephone helpline for foreigners in Switzerland who think they are being discriminated against, or are having some sort of trouble or misunderstanding with a Swiss person; perhaps a neighbour, or someone in the workplace. They help to try and defuse the situation, and try and see that everyone's viewpoint is represented.

All told everyone who volunteered distributed several thousand of these leaflets around Zurich, and have hopefully played a small part in making things a little easier for people moving to Switzerland.

Holy crap, I’m moving to Switzerland!

It's been a bit quiet around here for the last couple of months. A quick brain dump.

In February I left my job helping to run the mail systems at Citigroup, having sorted myself out with a contracting role doing software development in Perl (with some Autosys and Murex mangling on the side) for the nice people at Brevan Howard. Quite definitely some of the nicest people I've had the pleasure of working with in the financial industry. If you're a London-based Perl developer looking for work and the opportunity for a contract with them comes up, jump at it.

Along the way I finally got around to sorting myself out with a Flickr account, and you can see my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikclayton/. Not something I've written much about, but that may change in the future.

Anyway, that proved to be temporary. No, they didn't fire me. Instead, in two days time I jump on a plane bound for Zurich, to start working as a site reliability engineer for Google Switzerland.

I was over there a couple of weeks ago as part of a preview-cum-orientation trip, which coincided with the once-every-three-years Züri Fäscht (Zurich Festival), so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots of fireworks.







Anyway, I hope to write more next week about the process, useful sites for people undergoing a similar move, and so on. That, and getting back to contributing to projects like Subversion -- my free time has been practically non-existent for the past 4 months or so, and that's something that I've let slip.