Halloween Costumes: Get Inspiration From Celebrities

Don't know what to be this Halloween? Get some inspiration from these sassy stars dressed to the nines on previous Halloweens ...

See the full slideshow on Glam.com.

Glee Stars on the Cover of Entertainment Weekly

Check out the new cover of Entertainment Weekly featuring the stars of the hit Fox musical-comedy Glee!

Panucci - Portrait mode Media Player for the N900

You probably know Panucci from your N8x0 where it allows you to playback, resume and bookmark audiobooks and podcasts. Some users seem to use it as a normal audio media player, too, although the primary design goal is to support resuming for long audio tracks.

Just today I asked on maemo-developers how to get GStreamer's playbin to work on Maemo 5 when several people (thanks, guys!) pointed out that playbin2 should be used.

After that, a new package was only some UI fixing and merging of the rotation code from gPodder away. While you are eagerly waiting for the autobuilder to put Panucci into Extras-Devel, here's a short video of it in action:

Please test Panucci when it finally appears in Extras-Testing and give some feedback! And thank you to all of you who were kind enough to take the time to review the new gPodder version - it has made its way into Extras today! :) Guess the next version should allow Panucci to be selected as audio player in the preferences dialog, then.. ;)

Important: Due to the way optification works, upgrading from older versions of might break the package (application does not load). To fix this, simply uninstall and re-install the package. Both Panucci and gPodder are affected by this if you have installed an older version.

The Box-Office Beat

See what movies made the big bucks this weekend at the box office ...

1 - Where the Wild Things Are: $32.5 M
2 - Law Abiding Citizen: $21.3 M
3 - Paranormal Activity: $20.2 M
4 - Couples Retreat: $17.9 M
5 - The Stepfather: $12.3 M
6 - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: $8.1 M
7 - Zombieland: $7.8 M
8 - Toy Story: $3.0 M
9 - Surrogates: $1.9 M
10 - The Invention of Lying: $1.9 M

New gPodder version with automatic downloading

Thanks for all your comments on talk.m.o, Flickr and bugs.m.o and directly at the Summit. The result is a shiny new release with improved UX and automatic feed updating/downloading.

The new version is currently in Extras-Devel (promoted to -Testing, waiting for someone to confirm the promotion). Please take the time to review the new release and rate/comment it on gPodder's maemo.org/packages page.

One thing that did not make it into this release: Direct play/download/delete buttons in the episode shownotes window. I'm thinking of just popping up a list of actions when a episode is clicked and make "display shownotes" one of these actions. What do you think?

Please report bugs, discuss and rate the package. See the complete set of screenshots on Flickr.

James Franco to Guest-Star on General Hospital

So, okay forgive me … Things have been super-busy lately, so I’ve ignored the whole Letterman scandal, and let you read it elsewhere (even though I've been following it myself like a fiend.) And I haven't dissected all the new Fall TV shows yet ... And I've neglected to chitchat about silly little gossip ... like the fact that Katie Holmes lets Suri Cruise wear heels.

But I can't let this one go... And maybe I’m a couple days late in my response here ... but, WHAT?!?!? James Franco is joining the cast of General Hospital?!?!? Yep, Franco has signed on for a two-month guest role on the highly dramatic ABC soap opera. Am I the only one here who is seriously confused? Last time I checked big stars don’t do soaps. (Small stars are supposed to hope to become big stars by doing gigs on silly soaps!) And Franco is sort of a big star. He’s gotten a lot of acclaim over the last few years for roles in Milk, Pineapple Express ... and a little movie called Spiderman! He’s also set to star in the upcoming movie sure-to-be-huge Eat, Pray, Love. So, yeah ... What?!?!

This is not the first time Franco has done things backwards. In 2008, he enrolled in classes at NYU and Columbia ... which kind of made sense. He wanted to write, act, and hone his craft. But this career choice is just weird.

So what do we think of his new gig? Is it going to ultimately help or hurt his career? As they probably asked in his University acting classes, "James, what's your motivation?"

*Getty Images

The Box-Office Beat

Blood, guts, and flesh ruled at the box office this weekend. The comedic flick Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, took the top spot. Spaghetti tornadoes, burger blizzards, and 3D meatballs from the sky fell into second place. See what other big-budget flicks made the big bucks on the big screen ...

1 - Zombieland: $25.0 M
2 - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: $16.7 M
3 - Toy Story/ Toy Story 2 (3D): $12.5 M
4 - The Invention of Lying: $7.4 M
5 - Surrogates: $7.3 M
6 - Capitalism: A Love Story: $4.9 M
7 - Whip It: $4.9 M
8 - Fame: $4.8 M
9 - The Informant!: $3.8 M
10 - Love Hapens: $2.8 M

Peter and Vandy

As anyone who’s ever been in love can tell you, it’s a slippery slope from “We’re head over heels in love!” to “We’re fine.” Peter and Vandy takes us through the relationship of a young New York couple – just not in chronological order. Most movie romances end when the relationship is beginning. Peter and Vandy’s love story goes much further than that. The story shifts back and forth in time, whipping between their romantic beginnings and the inevitable struggles that follow. With star-making performances by Jason Ritter and Jess Weixler, Peter and Vandy is a unique take on the exhilaration and frustrations love can bring – a love story in disorder.

Peter and Vandy opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 9, 2009.

RSS Feed Handler 2.0

We have been talking about browser integration for all RSS-based apps before, and the initial standalone adaption of Canola's feedhandler (in canola-tuning) was nice, but it was written in Python and therefore startup time was not as fast as it could get (startup time is important for the feed handler, which usually only runs for some seconds, and to the user does not look as if it is a separate application, but rather a "feature" of the browser).

If you need the performance of applications written in C combined with the comfort of higher-level languages, use Vala :) That's what I have done, and feedparser 2.0 is the feedparser re-implemented in Vala.

Done so far: Reported a Vala D-Bus bug (thanks to Jürg Billeter for fixing this very quickly), registered a garage project, committed some source code, created a package (in Extras-Devel) and created a product page on Maemo.org Downloads.

As you can see, the UI still needs much love, but at least the infrastructure and feed handling is there for Diablo and Fremantle already, and some initial links to applications are there, too (shameless plug for gPodder, which has arrived in Fremantle Extras this week - yay!).

Plans for the next release:

• Add a mechanism to register and display other RSS-based apps (the current list is hardcoded)
• Contact authors of RSS readers and ask them to add feedhandler support to their apps
• Add more web-based services (tell me the ones you would like to see)
• Wait for Fremantle Widgets support in Vala (Philipp Zabel is working on this)
• Fremantleize and Diabloize the UI
• Integration with other browsers (Tear?)

Feel free to try out the "Feed Handler" from Extras-Devel and send some feedback.