Flux player no longer open source?

Back when I last experimented with Flux Player and Flux Studio, I seem to recall their website still contained references to the player being open source. The source code in CVS at the sourceforge project was however three to four years out of date but there was an archived snapshot of a more recent release (fluxsrc-2006-07-09.zip) which is still available here and other places.

Now unless I am mistaken, all such references to it being open source are gone from the main Media Machines web pages. There are references in various other places to a later source code release from this year but all the files have been deleted from the sourceforge project.

It is still possible to find the deleted files if you google for the file names and substitute them into the standard sourceforge download paths:

• fluxserver0-1.zip
• fluxsrc-build634-2007-05-06.zip

This isn't the first time I have seen the wind down of the open source release of a commercial product on sourceforge. It is nice to know that with a minimal amount of effort you can track down the released files.

Given the four year old age of the files checked into CVS I wonder whether it was released based on an initial open source faith which waned in the face of reality or from buying into the false promise of there being volunteers who would pop up and help out.

Giles Coren's restaurant reviews

Food blogs are a large part of the subscriptions I have in Google Reader. What makes a good food blog for me are good photos mostly, along with a description which adds colour to whatever is pictured. I find food blogs which lack photos mostly disinteresting.

I find it surprising that I enjoy Giles Coren's restaurant reviews on The Times Online website. But I do and I make a point of reading the new one each week when it is published.

A good piece of fluff that leads into the latest review about some Gary Rhodes restaurant:

What the phrase “hotel dining” mostly brings to mind is arriving in a strange city too late, or too tired, to check in your bags and then to scour unfamiliar streets in search of food, and so retiring to your room and dithering between room service and raiding the minibar.

The advantage of room service is that if you’re lucky they might do a cheeseburger, generally the only hot food worth risking from a hotel kitchen at 11.30pm; the downside is having to then wait until 1.30am for it to turn up. The advantage of the minibar is that it’s available immediately. The disadvantage? It’s that its contents have been chosen by someone who believes that (a) what you want when staying in a hotel is to eat macadamia nuts, a snack which no person has ever been known to crave at any time of year, and that (b) you are happy to pay for this jar of macadamia nuts a sum only slightly less than what you pay to get your car serviced. There is a third hotel dining option, available at 11.30pm, of strolling the hotel corridors helping yourself to other guests’ leftovers that they have parked outside their doors on room-service trays ready for collection: think of it as a floor-level buffet table. But few hotel guests are bold enough.