Went to Prague last weekend on a company trip. Fabulous city, cheap and decent beer. Culinary side of things wasn't that impressive, although it was better than Lisbon where we were last year. Main point of excitement on the trip was four people of our group getting their luggage stolen two hours or so after our plane landed, when they left them in our minibus and the driver wasn't guarding it.

We went to see Faust in a black light theatre. It's apparently a local speciality. As a co-worker put it, it was slightly worse than a piece of shit. We were all in agreement. Never, never again.

Also went to see the Czech - Germany world cup hockey match, which wasn't anything to write home about (not that it prevents me from blogging about it.) The result was clear from the start, even though the Czech team played a lazy game. They did win 8-2 or something like that, going on pure routine. It was the second time in my life I've been to a hockey game, and the commercialism was something painful, with multiple ad breaks in the middle of the periods. The tackiest moment of all was someone proposing (and apparently getting yes for an answer) to his girlfriend in the middle of the game, with the whole arena watching it on the screen. I thought that happened only on Friends.

Oh, and: If you are still experiencing character set troubles (like seeing ** (straw:14064): WARNING **: Invalid UTF8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text()) with Straw 0.24, you should probably try to remove the feed a subscribe to it again. There might be old data in your DB the new version can't do much about.

Some pretty cool shit here.

Subscribe categories to OPML feeds: make Jeff work for you! Create a category, make it subscribed to Planet GNOME's OPML feed, and you'll have an always up-to-date set of GNOME blogs in your aggregator. No support for FOAF blogrolls yet, though. Maybe in the next release.

Notification area thingy! If you have unread articles, there's a Straw icon in your notification area that tells you how many unread items you have. And click on it to bring Straw to front and to read those articles.

(Mostly) asynchronous subscription process! No longer will the subscribe dialog freeze Straw on you while it's working. Well, not very much at least. And there's less clicking involved, too.

No more feed information display in the main window screwing up the layout! Feed link is available in the article header, rest of the stuff in the feed properties dialog.

Prettier article view!

Overall less brokenness! Hopefully including a lot fewer locale/encoding problems.

Get it while it's hot from the download area.