FIFA U20 World Cup - Spain vs. Czech Republic
As you football fans may know the FIFA U20 World Cup is currently taking place in various venues across Canada. I have never really been a huge football fan. As a Canadian it's generally all about the hockey. However, I did start watching some matches when the World Cup took place in Germany a few years back (I found myself cheering for France, not sure why, as I am not French). Since a few matches are taking place in Edmonton where I am currently holed up, I had to take the opporatunity to see a world class match.
I bought a couple of tickets for the quarter final match for me and my son before I left for Penticton on vacation. At the time I had no idea who we would be seeing, as the group stage of the tournament had not yet been played out. It ended up being Spain vs. Czech Republic, not a bad result. I enjoyed watching Spain upset Brazil on the tele with their 4-2 come from behind victory.
The atmosphere at Commonwealth Stadium was fantastic. The pictures seem to imply there was not much of a crowd, but to be fair, Commonwealth is a huge facility (seats 69000) and the large majority of the crowd was on the shady side of the stadium with us. The official attendance was 26801, which is quite respectable for this sort of event, in a city the size of Edmonton (850000 people). The crowd was lively, and seemed to me to be supporting Spain predominantly, at least the section we were seated in. Having no particular allegiance to either side, I simply cheered for a good match, and I would not be dissapointed.
Full time ended without a score, to the chagrin of Dylan ("Why can't somebody score a goal already?"). What can I say, a six year old wants instant gratification. Thirteen minutes into extra time the deadlock was finally broken by a strike from Luboš Kalouda. Not willing to bow out, Juan Manuel Mata answered back for Spain a mere seven minutes later. Deadlocked once again, we were off to Penalty kicks, which the Czechs won out by a margin of 4-3.
We even had some genuine 'Scottish Soccer Hooligans' complete with thick accents seated in front of us (see picture 3). Thankfully, they were quite well-behaved despite their copious beer consumption, and they added a lot of flavour to the match, rather than simply being an annoyance. All in all, I had such a great time that I am going to go see the Czech Republic vs Austria semifinal on Wednesday. This time I will leave the boy, so I can get into some trouble with beer myself ;)
So congratulations to FIFA for converting another fan! When I finally get my ass over to Europe I am certainly going to put "Attend a professional football match" near the top of my todo list.
Updates to sneetchalizer and FlacInfo
Well, this is rather old news now, but here it is. On June 26 I released version 0.6.0 of sneetchalizerwhich now includes support for ape (Monkey's Audio) tags, and includes encode/decode support for both Wavpack and Musepack formats. There are also many smaller fixes which are enumerated in the changelog.
I have also recently released new versions of FlacInfo. Version 0.2 includes support for parsing and extracting embedded images from METADATA_PICTURE blocks (introduced in Flac 1.1.4). Version 0.3 which I released about a week later includes write support for Vorbis metadata (ie: tags). This should be treated as expirimental until more testing is done. I am currently working on support for writing/resizing PADDING blocks. Look for a new release in the next week or so.
Chasm between Gentoo Devs and Users widens
I am saddened and dismayed by the current plans to moderate user contributions on the dev list. Ostensibly this is to clean up the off-topic garbage and flames that seem to clog the list these days. Why single out the users though? Seems to be this is a solution to a problem that is precipitated, if not started, by certain devs more than any users.
Lets call a spade a spade: all this is is more pointless beureaucratic bullshit that further alienates users, and makes it harder and less enticing for users to contribute. It's also a nice big middle-finger pointed square at the userbase and potential developer pool. Attitudes from devs seem to be getting progressivly hostile. This complete rubbish was posted to -dev today from a developer who shall remain nameless:
Gentoo's always been exclusively for the developers. Nobody's paying us to do this. It just so happens that the things we want to do also benefit other people, and so they use them.
That's a really great attitude. If I spot a bug with one of this developer's packages in the future I'll be sure to post "Your package is broken, get off you ass and fix it" rather than a proper, well-written, and useful bug report. After all, I'm not getting paid for my time, so I should focus on myself first right?
