I’ve been playing with GNU Autotools tonight; the stuff that makes it easy to compile software by allowing you to follow the./configure, make, make install routine.

Playing is perhaps not the right word. Struggling would be a better one. The tools are not exactly what one would call intuitive. They do some very clever stuff, however, so the difficulty in using them can be forgiven. I have a feeling that once you’ve done a couple of programs, whilst you won’t understand what is going on, you at least know how to get the thing working without too much trouble.

No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

— Bill Gates via C|Net.

Communists?! Since when have communists had anything to do with IP? Does Bill really have much idea what he is saying here?

I tracked down the bug that was stopping Bluefunk downloading covers from Amazon. So downloading covers now seems to work like a charm. Nice!

It turned out to be a silly linking bug whereby the wrong code was getting linked into the Bluefunk executable. Some hardcore reading of auto-generated Muine makefile code managed to tease out the right way to link things in.

Another milestone towards 0.1 release.

Having found revision too stressful after a mere day working on it, I have decided to pause in order to give you a view of my New Years celebrations. As I am still a student, of course these did not involve sitting at home with a nice glass of vintage port (it is still on the side). In a nod to my hubris I did, however, have a (few) nice glass(es) of Beaujolais and Leffe.

Use Displaying an IE Information bar reminding your users that IE isn’t very useful.

That reminds me, I have to burn a Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org CD or two to take home for Christmas…