It really has been, I've been stuck using Windows at work for a whole week while waiting for my new machine to arrive, it finally did Friday afternoon, and I set about installing SuSE 9.0 on it. I have to say that even installing and restoring my data on SuSE was more pleasureable than using Windows. But the point is that I really can't fathom how anyone actually works with Windows! I have also developed a deep, passionate loathing for Cisco IOS. I mean it's horrible!

Made it into work for a couple of hours on Thursday, the roads were seriously scary, and Amanda got home Thursday afternoon, which was brilliant, I'd really missed her. We went out for a lovely meal last night. Tonight we're going to a fondue party at Caz's, it's a seriously long time since we had fondue.

So, on Monday, I should be back in a position to be getting updated packages done, and looking at porting GST to SuSE 9.0 - finally!

Well, despite the much-publicized closing down of Britain due to snow, I've made it into the office today, only to find that the heating has broken down! The coldest day in three years or something (or so I heard, dunno about the veracity of that claim), and that's the day it goes for a burton. Seriously considering going home if it's not fixed before long.

Had a brilliant night last night, did horrifically badly in the quiz, drank some very nice wine and had a good meal (salmon in peppercorn sauce) and had a seriously good chat. Amanda phoned while we were in the pub, and we saw Alex & Bev, had a really good time. I'd also had flowers delivered to Amanda's hotel room for when she arrived, so that made it slightly better her being so far away, as did the phone call. Got to bed at about 2.30am in the end, and up again at 6.30, so I'm a bit tired.

Still no hard drive, still no packages.

Gah, the heating just came back on, but apparently blizzard-type snow is heading south fast, it's hit Leicester already...

I'm the guy who posted the anonymous comment on Slashdot that is rapidly becoming famous, in response to the news that MyDoom will attack SCO's website, I commented "Quick, disable your AV software, and get some Windows boxes on the internet!" The message quickly got modded up to +5 (Funny) and then back down to zero through a combination of Troll and Flamebait mods.

This comment has subsequently been quoted in a story on eWeek, where it has been utterly taken out of context, as apparently honestly cheering on the writers of the MyDoom worm, and seriously suggesting that people that the action I mention. So, I'm forced to say this:

IT WAS A JOKE!

Now, I'm sorry if some people have had sense-of-humour bypasses, but it was not, ever meant to be taken seriously. I'm a responsible mail admin myself, we've been blocking tons of MyDoom, and I wouldn't for a moment consider disabling our virus scanning on mails, or of letting MyDoom through, and neither should you. This worm has the potential to do more serious damage to the reputation of the Free Software community than it does to SCO's website if ill-informed tech writers continue to try to draw connections between it and the community.

Blimey, what a few days! Still without my work machine, meaning that I've not done any package updates since Friday morning. I've been using a spare machine at work, which has Win2k on it. I can't see how anyone can work with Windows on a regular basis, it's totally unusable. Anyone who views Windows as a usability goal frankly is delusional. Apart from anything else, I hate having to click in a window to give it focus. Now yes, I know I can download and install a third party piece of software to allow me to do that, but there are two very good reasons why I won't:

• I shouldn't have to, it should be an option in the Mouse settings bit of Control Panel. It just should.
• I have no idea that the software I'm installing isn't spyware, or worse, I'm not stupid...

Anyway, after the hard drive death at work on Friday, it happened at home last night. The partition on this server, swamprat.homeunix.org, with /home on it died, gave up the ghost, I had to do muchos drive swapping to restore it, and the machine was down for several hours last night as a result. I really need to replace the machine actually, it's about six or seven years old.

Amanda's in Leicester with work on a course until Thursday, so I'm fending for myself, tonight I'm going to the pub quiz with Caz, and tomorrow is cell group, thankfully, Amanda gets home on Thursday afternoon, so I'll see her then.

I has just readning an article on the BBC, an interview with Brice Perens about what 2004 holds for Linux, and the Open Source movement generally. As I got towards the bottom, in fact, Bruce's response to the final question, there it was, a reference to Novell/SuSE. You can't read a serious item on Linux, except perhaps very specialised and targetted ones, without there being at least a reference to Novell/SuSE at the moment. It's amazing! When I think of all the time we spent when I was at SuSE trying to increase "mind-share" and all that nonsense, when apparently all we needed to do was get bought by a lumbering dinosaur recreating itself as a lean, fast cheetah.

Boy, was I glad to have got the new Galeon built this morning, because while I was having lunch my PC at work died.
Just died!
I was booted into a "less Free" OS for one of those rare work occasions that demands it, and when I came back after lunch, it had just stopped. It wouldn't boot, in the end we worked out that for some reason, /dev/hda had died. Thankfully, my Linux install is on hdb, with the exception of /boot. That's an "erk" moment right there! Anyway, waiting on a replacement drive, could well be a nice large one, which will mean I can go for having everything on the single drive, the secondary drive at the moment being my own personal drive, and it would be nice to take it home in all honesty.

Had a great night last night, opted for the Balti in the end, and had a reasonable bottle of Shiraz Cab Sauv.

Got the information from Novell about their RSS feeds today, unfortunately, they're straight version 0.91, which means no pubDate fields. I could be really cheeky and ask if they could upgrdae to version 2.0. I think I might. I mean, what do I have to lose?

Had a good night last night, Caz round for dinner, pork & leek sausages with mash and onion gravy, with some very nice red wine. Also last night found out I have a provisional (but probable I guess) date for Selection Conference, the 28th - 31st June, which I've just requested time off work for. I have to be honest that my first reaction was horror that it's so far away. Five months of people asking me if I'd been yet, five months of waiting, five months of worrying about it. But now, I guess it's probably good, five months to prepare, five months to sort out a college place (hopefully), five months to pray. It will mean that if I get through, the summer will be rather busy, but I'm used to busy summers. I just need to trust God that what's in His will will come out, one way or the other. Speaking of college places, I've also found out that the dates I'd requested for my interview at Ridley Hall are already full, so I'll be going sometime after Easter, which will wtill be plenty of time ahead of conference.

Finally managed to rebuild Mozilla 1.6 with a typo-free spec file, so those packages are up on ULB, along with Gnumeric 1.2.5, which was released last night. That's meant that looking at GST has been delayed yet again, still, there's always next week.

The Planetarium continues to grow, Planeta Hispalinux, for the main Spanish LUG has been launched, and I'll be adding it to p.SuSE's Planetarium for the next build. I need to look at the new Planet code at some point, and convert p.SuSE to it. I also need to move it off my NFS filesystem, onto a regular filesystem, cos it keeps getting corrupted. More to the point, I need to figure out why that happens on this filesystem. I used to think it was ReiserFS's fault, but it's ext3 now, and it still happens. it;s not even as if the planet code is ever accessed on any of the machines that access the filesystem, only ever on the host server. Hmmmm...

Out for a Soul Man Ruby Night tonight, I'm seriously (well, ok, not seriously, jokingly is more like the truth) considering getting a phaal...
Ohhh, baby....

I've been asked if I can sort out a screenshot from the Pirates of the Caribbean Making Of... showing them using GNOME for the Spanish GNOME News site, gonna try to get around to doing that by the end of the week. Also, there seems to be interest in getting SuSE 9.0 support into the GNOME System Tools, which is good, cos otherwise it would seem rather futile. Hoping now to get around to doing that next week. Mozilla 1.6 packages still broken on Enigmail. Had planned to rebuild without Enigmail (as Wolfgang at SuSE has done with his packages) today, and after it spent four hours building, rpmbuild exitted due to a typo in my spec file's %install section. Couldn't believe it! Moments like that I wish --short-circuit allowed you to specify a section of the spec file to skip to. Something like rpmbuild -ba --target=i586 --short-circuit=install mozilla.spec, to ignore everything before the install section. As it stands, when it failed, it wouldn't have had time to build again before I go home at the end of today.

Now pretty convinced that my DSL problem is down to my router. Borrowed one from work to verify it, and it's been up for nearly 48 hours without a drop so far, which is unheard of for me the last month or so. Will swap back to my own and then watch as it (no doubt) proceeds to drop the connection within an hour. The problem is I couldn't find any of the paperwork relating to my router, no receipt, no warranty, nothing. Only got it in July, gah! To the max!

Oh, and I may very well be a genius...
Watch this space...

A quality time, it has to be said. Saturday was quite busy, we did some shopping in Watford, and then some housework. Then we had Caz round for the evening to watch Pirates of the Caribbean again. Played Triv too. I won, naturally

Was doing Word projection at Church, Sunday morning, which went rather well, then spent the afternoon relaxing a bit and drinking coffee.

Back to reality today though, work is work of course, and gosh, how dull! Mozilla, Galeon, Epiphany updates as well as new Planet code which barfs for me, will try to figure out what's up. Also, Jeff's added p.SuSE to p.GNOME's Planetarium.

I decided to provide my own feeds of the SuSE News and SuSE Security channels for Planet SuSE so that they actually appear. It kind of makes the site seem a lot more useful to me, even if it does mean a tiny bit more work for me in terms of updating those feeds when there are security announcements (not loads) or Press Releases (potentially one a day I guess at the moment, Novell and all that...

I also got the gtkmm.libsigc++ packages done for LenZ at last, once I'd found out that it was 2.2.x of gtkmm he needed, not 1.2.x . However, haven't had a chance to look at GST as yet, that'll have to wait till next week, as will me seeing if getting involved with GNOME-MUD is feasible.

Had a great time last night, our best ever result in the quiz, we got 31/40, which was only two points less than the winning team, and most importantly, Amanda seemed to have a good time. Slightly more relaxing night at home tonight, which will be nice.

Gah! Seems my DSL issue was not resolved by the BT engineer's visit, I've had several drops today, which makes me think now that it could well be my router. Why it would go bad after six months of faithful service is quite beyond me, but hey-ho. I shall be digging out it's warranty in the morning to try to figure out how I get my money back.

In better news, I had an email from one of the Novell web team saying they'd find out if there's an RSS feed of Novell news items for Planet SuSE. That would be neat!

Yes, it finally happened, I've announced the launch of Planet SuSE.

In other news, I think the DSL issue might be resolved. Had a BT engineer at the house this morning, he determined that he was pretty sure that the problem existed somewhere between the exchange and the house, and so I think he replaced a bit of kit either in the cabinet at the end of thr road or on the telegraph pole outside the house. I hope it's sorted anyway.

Amanda's birthday today, we're going to the pub later for a meal and then being joined by various people for drinks & the quiz.

Made some cosmetic changes to p.SuSE today, but more significantly, I was informed of the location of feeds for SuSE press releases and security advisories. They need the pubDate adding to items, and alas, that's not likely to happen. Still not had a chance to look properly at GST, or do the packages for LenZ.

First evening (hopefully not last as well) at a new cell group tonight after leaving the old one last year. We've prayed about it with Caz as well, and we think this is the right one. It does have the advantage that we already are very good friends with a number of the members. Having Caz for dinner before we go. Well, actually, we're having a pasta bolognese thing, but you know what I meant.

BT engineer tomorrow, really hoping the sync problem will be resolved, cos it's a real pain in the backside...

Well, strike two items off my TODO list already. p.SuSE is now using the new Planet code, and I've redone the template and CSS. Okay, so, if I'm honest, I've done about 1.75 items off the list, cos the CSS needs a lot of internal tidying, and fixing to work with b0rked browsers (IE), but on the whole, I'm pleased with it, and I have a look that I'll go with when I launch later this week.

So, I lop two off, and I'm adding another item to the list. Seems to me that Papaya development is stalled, while Gnome MUD is still alive and well, so I might have a look at the G-MUD code and try to contribute some connection keep-alive code, and support for HTTP proxies. Haven't had time to have a serious look at GST as yet, but it looks relatively simple to add the support for SuSE 9.0, and at some point I will do those gtkmm packages (I promise LenZ, I will...)

Got a BT engineer going to the exchange, and possibly to my house Thursday morning to try to diagnose/solve the problem on my line that's causing my router to keep losing it's sync. Hopefully this will result in the link to swamprat being a lot more stable.

My TODO list for the week

• Convert Planet SuSE to new Planet Code
• p.SuSE design improvement, and new template
• GNOME System Tools SuSE support (9.0, possibly older versions)
• gtkmm/libsigc++ 1.2 packages for LenZ

Watched Sweet Home Alabama yesterday, really enjoyed it, even though it seemed to lose it's way a bit in the middle.

I see Nermal has new drinking rules he's going to try to stick to, mate I'd recommend water over lemonade as your non-alcoholic stop-gap beverage. Lemonade in that situation and those quantities will do you in something rotten!

New Gaim and gnome-themes-extras today, they should both be on ULB by the end of the day.

Watched Pirates of the Caribbean today, cracking film, only wish I'd seen it at the cinema. Especially loved all the references, Star Wars, Matrix, Terminator... But the best one was in one of the deleted scenes, I could hardly believe it...

A Fast Show reference!

Of course, Mr Depp had that guest appearance in the final ever Fast Show, but who would have thought he'd get an "I'll get my coat" reference in? Genius! Also watched the Making Of... on DVD2, and lo and behold, the animators were using GNOME! Quality.

New release of Gaim, which fixes the Yahoo! authentication, I'll be doing packages when I get into the office on Monday. Also, at some point I'm going to be looking at the new Planet code that Scott and Jeff put together over the last 24 hours or so, and also planning to give Planet SuSE some design love.

Had an email this morning asking me to do packages of GNOME System Tools, a quality set of tools, without a doubt, but sadly lacking in SuSE-related goodness. So, I guess it's time to put my hacking pants on before my packaging trousers on this occasion.

This is getting silly, another day, another shout for Jeff in my blog He's blogged a reference to my call for SuSE bloggers so that it gets picked up on Planet GNOME. Hopefully it help swell our numbers. Jeff, you rock!

Updated Rhythmbox packages today, damn that app's nice, I think it's one of the proposed modules for GNOME 2.6, I think it's more suited to 5th Toe myself. 'Course, I really think that GNOME D&D and GNOME Office could be supplemented well by a GNOME Media platform including Rhythmbox, Totem, Sound Juicer etc, but hey, what do I know?

Thanks to Jeff for a fix to a bug in the planet code. We don't have any MT blogs on p.SuSE as yet, but it could only be a matter of time...

Set up Planet SuSE today, with a little help from Jeff in the form of some code updates to provide hackergotchi head support. If you're reading this in p.SuSE, that's the funky little pic of me to the right. Got a few demo RSS feeds on it at the mo, but hopefully soon I'll have some real one from community members to make it worthwhile. Also, hopefully SuSE might provide an RSS feed of their press releases and news items so I can include them. Still need to create a nice CSS for it, but that's not massively important.

In other news, GIMP 2.0pre1 is out, it's currently building, and should be uploaded by the time I go home.

School of Prophecy tonight at church, preceded by a dinner meeting at our local all-you-can-eat Chinese place, really looking forward to putting back on some of the 3lb I lost yesterday

Jeff mentions he has a fully working planet ready to go for the Apache guys. He really does - it'll just plug 'n' go :)

Well, it would seem that I'm going to be going to a Selection Conference, the Bishop said he'd be recommending me, which is absolutely fantastic!

Anyway, now I have to make sure everyone who should know does so, don't want anyone to feel that I'm neglecting them. My first application form for a theological college arrived today, from Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Waiting on forms/prospectuses from St John's College, Nottingham and Ridley Hall, Cambridge now. Would be nice to go to selection conference knowing that if I get accepted to train, I'll have a place on a course already lined up.

Chelsea 0 - 1 Liverpool - almost makes up for the first game of the season. Almost.

Today's the day, we're off to see the Bishop tonight. Was feeling a bit nervous this morning, but chilled about it again now. Actually, looking forward to it I think.

Also, started using a new blogging engine now, does most of what I wanted, and saves me the time of writing my own, which is nice. I've also converted all my old blog entries to the new engine (it's blosxom if anyone cares).

Have built packages of the new version of Sound Juicer, just about to upload them. Leaving early today so I can shower and stuff ahead of tonight.

Man, deciding on a title for a Blog entry is as tricky as choosing a Subject: header for an email sometimes! Actually, having said that, "Blah!" kind of sums today up rather well so far, it's been a pretty "Blah!" day...

I've wrestled with parted, to no avail, done some housekeeping, a lot of Googling, built a few packages, drank a lot of caffeine, and noticed how fat I look on my cam! I've also requested prospectuses and application forms from three theological colleges, and last night I posted that letter, probably caught the last post.

This evening we're heading down to church, some friends who are going to be moving away to plant a church later in the year (that could actually describe about half of our friends at church at the moment) are having a vision-sharing evening, should be good, then tomorrow it's Bishop Time!

At this stage, I'm pretty chilled about seeing El Bish, I might feel differently this time tomorrow.

Me apparently! Over the weekend, someone posted a review of SuSE's own GNOME 2.4 packages, Ximian Desktop 2 and ULB GNOME on SuSE 9.0. He decided that of the three GNOME offerings for SuSE 9.0, my ULB packages were the best. I'm just amazed, a lot of people have said to me that they use ULB rather than XD2, and some have even switched from KDE to it, but this was such an in depth comparison, it really blew me away.

I looked at the YaST theming over the weekend, was considering doing a YaST theme to compliment ULB GNOME, but I couldn't figure out how you tell YaST which theme to use - I don't want to have to write a wrapper script to symlink current to ULB and then back again afterwards, that would just be dumb!

Used my lunch hour today to write a letter to an old friend, I don't even have their current address, so I'm hoping their parents haven't moved, and so are able to forward it on.

our social diary for this month is starting to fill up nicely, and the good thing is that unlike usual, a lot of the slots are being taken by "voluntary" things as opposed to Church stuff that we kind of have to do.

Been listening to some of the CDs I got for Christmas from Amanda and Philip/David (my brothers). There was some really good music made last year, notably The Strokes, Turin Brakes, The Coral, Placebo and, of course, The White Stripes. All that said, my fave album of 2003 is still So Much for the City by The Thrills.

Been a jolly fun weekend, took the tree and decorations down yesterday, and then did some pre-spring cleaning around the house. I had my first clothes clear-out in about ten years, I can't believe some of the things I used to wear. Threw a lot out, and a lot is ready to go to a local charity shop.

Had Caz round for dinner tonight, always gorgeous to see her, and we did the photo thing. Showed her some photos that noone since we lived in Lancaster has seen, I think that says something.

I was back at work on Friday, but I guess it really kicks in for real tomorrow, that's when everyone's back in the office, and the year really begins. What joy. Seeing the Bishop on Wednesday, at least there's a light...

Happy New Year!!!