Finally got the CSS for Planet SuSE sorted so it now works in Konqueror/Safari and IE as well as in Mozilla. This makes me happy. Only outstanding thing is that IE appears not to support background: url("planetsuse.png") no-repeat; for some reason, if anyone knows how to blag this, please let me know.

Continued lopping off issues from our security audit, halved the size of the report so far, and a lot of things in it are false-positives or simply information. This also makes me happy.

Watching Fight Club tonight, can't believe I've not seen it before. Three working days running with an empty INBOX at the close of play now.

Starting tomorrow, it's The Noise. Every year, the first Bank Holiday weekend in May, we do, as a Church a variety of projects on one of the estates in Watford to reach out to our community and demonstrate the love of God in practical ways. There'll be gardening projects, house decorating, free car washes, litter picking... This is an annual high-profile event to help people get envisioned for Noise projects throughout the year, we do a smaller, one-day thing every month, and people who are doing Soul Time are involved with serving that community on a day-in, day-out basis as part of the 'Stepping Out' part of the course.

Kill Bill Vol 2 rocked out, it was quite simply superb. Some people have said the ending was schmaltzy, but I didn't think it was so bad, and it certainly didn't ruin the movie.

Infosecurity was quite interesting, met up with some people we've been working with, and got some useful information.

Found out this morning that my car is being considered a total loss by my insurance company, waiting to find out what their estimated value of the car prior to the accident is, and how close that will be to the outstanding balance of the finance deal on it.

Another total loss is the Memo Pad on my Palm. Lost the whole contents of the Palm's memory while changing batteries the other day. Thought I'd more or less manages to restore everything using gnome-pilot, but discovered that I'd lost the whole of the memo pad. Luckily I still had what I thought was the MemoDB.pdb file, tried installing it - no joy, tried making the only file in a directory, and using that as the source directory for a restore - no joy. I dumped the output of strings to a text file and took a look, it was about two years old! I had assumed that when I sync my Palm, it actually took a backup of the Memo Pad - largely because it pretended it did! So, that's really great. All the memos from the last two years or so gone, no more, finito.

Sorted out a couple of oustanding issues on our Astaro firewalls today, my fault of course, I'd made a couple of small typoes in the network object definitions. Whoops. Anyway, at least they're now resolved, and my work INBOX is currently empty, two days in the office running I have an empty INBOX.

Pretty bland, sys admin oriented day, as well as we've been formalizing a bunch of our procedures here ahead of a general inspection by our parent company. Had lunch with Jen though, which was nice, good to see her.

It's Kill Bill Vol 2 tonight, at last! Off to Infosecurity Expo tomorrow, and hoping to spend a bit of time sorting out the structure of the various DIVs in Planet SuSE, so that I can redo the CSS to not be broken in Konqueror/Safari, and some less Free browsers.

Really must get around to ordering a copy of 9.1. Except that since all the ordering is now done through a single site, based in Germany, it has no idea what a Switch card is, so I'm going to have to get it from somewhere other than direct from SuSE.

So, should Italians protest against the war in Iraq? If it saves the lives of those hostages, then of course they should, it actually benefits the hostage takers nothing in material or political gain really, and three men can be saved from murder. Of course, after the men are released, Italians opposed to the war should protest again to demonstrate that they were not simply cajoled into it by the kidnappers.

Uploaded new Gaim packages this morning, but found out this afternoon that there are some issues (not with my package, but with the vanilla code - would link to my mail on the devel list, but it's not made it into SF's archives yet).

Anyway, in addition to that, had to drive to Watford and back (and, in fact to the other side of Watford) to drop the keys for my car off at the service centre.

Been having a major security blitz at work today, feels very satisfying to get a lot of small niggly things that have bugged me for a while ticked off my list in the space of a few short hours.

Watched Being John Malkovich, and Insomnia. Malkovich is one seriously odd movie, solid performance by John Cusack, surprisingly good job by Cameron Diaz. Insomnia didn't grab me as I thought it would, it built well, but frankly it could have been a lot more engaging.

Interesting discussion this evening on whether the recent pictures of American coffins returning from Iraq is turning US public opinion against Bush. My thoughts...

Anything that turns the American public against Bush is a good thing. The American public need to be reminded that in 2000 when the election was held, they were against him, he and his brother in Florida conspired to steal the election, and defraud the American public of the president they wanted.

They need to be reminded that his administration took their nation into an illegal war in Iraq and lied about the reasons behind that war. That almost three million jobs have been lost in the USA under Bush, that under his administration, the USA has not ratified Kyoto, and I could go on...

That public opinion in the USA is turning back away from Bush in the run up to their next presidential election is reassuring, it reminds us that there is still a conscience in the world's sole remaining super-power.

Survived my review, which I kind of expected I would, gonna be looking a lot at User Mode Linux over the next few months, as well as some other things. Could be quite a cool few months to come...

• g-t-e symlink hackage
• SNMP & Cisco stuff
• Prep for my annual review this afternoon

[Ref: Roger, Justin]
I didn't go to the Linux Expo (or LUDEX as it was also called - this one being the Linux User & Developer EXpo), I totally forgot it was on. Understandable after Monday night you might say, except that the reason I forgot was that my admission badge didn't arrive at the office until Wednesday (the last day of the expo), and I had a day off that day to await the BT guy.

Pity really, cos it sounds like it was really good. The SuSE presence was strong I understand, and Red Hat turned up - miracle! AbiWord were in the .org area, along with a bunch of other non-commercial guys, and there was a great poster of Abi the Ant. Maybe I'll manage to go to the next one.

Did some work on gnome-themes-extras today, just adding symlinks to cover where some icons are named differently on SuSE, so the correct version from the current theme is picked up, will be sending a patch to Uraeus later on.

Uploaded updated AbiWord Beta and g-t-e packages this morning, and exchanged a couple of emails with Pipex to confirm that my error ticket could now be closed.

Added new hamster photos, some curry-eating photos, and the before & after shots of my haircut to the gallery.

The jukebox at work has managed to randomly select a lot of tracks by Placebo today, which is superb, and in a moment of extreme self-absorbedness (is that even a word?), I changed the icon for my home directory in Nautilus:

People who read my blog directly, rather than on Planet SuSE should read my Advogato blog for the last few days to catch up on what I've blogged while my DSL has been down.

The DSL is of course now back up, it seems that our line was switched to a different pair of wires in the cabinet at the end of our road, and the BT routing department weren't told. When the line was checked at the exchange, the fuse wasn't replaced which is why the phone service died as well. This is now all sorted.

Didn't see Kill Bill - silly me didn't notice that it opens this Friday, not last Friday, so we actually have tickets for next Tuesday. Saw Shaun of the Dead instead, and it was fantastic - really laugh out loud funny, with really good nods towards the horror genre too. I recommend it.

Anyone who reads my blog directly should check out my Adovgato blog for the last few days as with the unreliability of my DSL lately, I've been blogging there.

Anyway, it seems to be a little bit more stable now, it's up more than down at the moment, which makes a change. It's clearly not resolved though, so I'm waiting on BT still...

[Ref: My Advogato Blog from today]
The DSL is now working again - the phone in the living room had died, and was causing havoc with the phone circuit.

Been a a pleasant Easter Weekend, Friday morning we had the Good Friday service organised by Churches Together in North Watford (or whatever it's called), in Asda. Was cool to be Church in the community, and although at the time I felt it was a bit naff, at least we were there I guess, and it was better than nothing. Spent the rest of Friday preparing for the evening. We had a small dinner party planned (Caz, Hils and Matt in attendance), so it was an afternoon of baking, cleaning, tidying, food preparation and candle arrangement. It was well worth it, the evening was great, had a really good time, and Hils declared that she will be back after tasting my cake (Caz of course is a regular eater Chez Ogley, and it's not just our sparkling conversation that brings her back).

Saturday we didn't get up till mid-afternoon, and we didn't leave the house, watched TV, drank soft drinks & water, and ordered pizza. Sunday was great. I love Easter Day, what a day of celebration! Clive from cell group spoke, an appropriate Easter sermon, in his own style, with a presentation based upon Where is the love by the Black Eyed Peas. He kept the message simple about why we all need what Jesus did at the cross and through the resurrection, and because it was simple, it was effective. Concluded by looking at whether we really live our whole lives for Him. Prayed with the party attendees after the service, and then had a lovely lunch at the Southern Cross. Spent the rest of Sunday chilling out and watching TV.

Shopping today. On a Bank Holiday. We must be insane

(Ref: Rog's comments)
What is more frightening, the thought of a terrorist threat, or a "democratic" government so devoid of morals or ethics that they will hype up the perception of such a threat in order to be able soften the populus up to draconian measures such as compulsory ID cards, the removal of the right to a trial by jury, lowering the burden of proof in court cases, and the introduction of secret trials?

I know which one scares me more. The one that oppresses under the cloak of respectability and the protection of citizens. Terrorism has no such cloak, it is seen to be what it is.

Had quite an interesting phone conference this morning with a New Yorker who really by any sensible measure should still have been in bed. He was a lot more with it than I was at the same time in the +0100 timezone I currently occupy along with the rest of the UK.

Started SuSEfying GST::Network, I've put the Users tool on the back-burner, think it was getting to the stage where I couldn't see the wood for the trees with it, and Carlos said a while ago that Network would be a good/useful one to tackle, so it's currently work in progress. Hopefully I might have a semi-working local version ready by the long weekend, and get a patch done next week.

Going out with the Employment Tribunal people tonight, I've only met a couple of them before, but Amanda says they're all nice enough people, so I should be okay. Think I might stop off at home and change out of my work clothes first though.

Rob: Whenever I read about Project Utopia, my heart thumps a little bit faster. This is possibly one of the coolest things in Free Software at the moment, I just wish I had a spare box to try it out on.

Nat: That would be a killer feature, I've lost track of the number of times people have had to reply to mails from me saying "Ummm, you forgot the file..."

Another useful feature would be the option to specify a size in megabytes, which if your mail and attachments exceed, you get a warning when you send it suggesting that you either send fewer attachments, or try compression (but obviously with the option to "Send Anyway").

I bank with the HSBC. A bank that admittedly has had it's fair share of ethical problems in the past, but now by all accounts seems to be making an effort to work ethically (Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3, Ref 4, Ref 5, Ref 6) which is a real result.

Now, I was in my nearest branch on Saturday, because I needed to request a replacement debit card as my current one is damaged. As the lady who served me was pootling away on her computer, I observed that the whole thing was web-driven. I then noticed a tell-tale lizard icon at the top-left of the window. It was the blue version from pre-1.0 Mozilla. HSBC's branches are using Mozilla. That's 1,670 branches in the UK. Not only that, but their UK online banking service works just dreamily in the ol' Lizard we all know and love. I'm very impressed with HSBC right now on so many levels, I hope they keep up the good work.

Finally downloaded the beta4 ISOs yesterday, I'd waited this long because I'd ran out of CDs to burn. Anyway, it's installing on my low-spec notebook (hint: drop to text console and activate swap partition ASAP, and YaST is a lot happier), and I'm thinking I might put an extra HDD (I have a 20G one lieing around) in weasel so I can really give it a decent test (AthlonXP 1700+, 768M, GeForce4, and most interestingly, a CD-RW - want to test it without ide-scsi).

Meeting Clare's Jeremy for the first time today, for lunch. Looking forward to it, as apparently is he. Then we're catching up with Alex and Bev after this evening's service. Haven't seen them in ages, which is just wrong, so it'll be great to catch up.

We did woefully badly in the quiz, Cat came along and joined us, but we still barely scraped what would be a 2:ii at university. Other than that, was a good night, always good to spend time with friends, and we had some very good wine.

Oh yes, I don't normally go in for April Fools, but this year, I just felt compelled. I selotaped a bit of paper over my colleague's mouse's optical sensor, which was a right laugh as he sat there thinking his mouse had died. Then, I fooled the SuSE community good with the announcement that I've been hired by Novell to work in their Desktop Team.

Tonight should be good, Caz just got a new job, so we're going out for a meal with her to celebrate, but before that, she's opening a bottle of 2000 Wolf Blass President Selection Cabernet Sauvignon.