Slept in, took my cello to be repaired, by a mate from Church, so got a Mate's Rate, which is nice. Was a simple fix, done while I was there. Met Amanda for lunch, and did some clothes shopping. The selection of shirts at the moment is appalling if you don't like wearing short sleeves. Anyway, I found one shirt (one! I went to every clothes shop in Watford!).

After Yahoo!'s dumb decision yesterday, Gaim 0.79 came out today, and Yahoo! works again, built and uploaded that and Gnumeric 1.2.13 this afternoon. Relaxing in the front room with the notebook and the tennis, how did we ever cope without fully networked houses?

Today's my last day in the office till the 5th July, and for three days or so next week, I'll also be away from home, and don't know what the internet connection's going to be like where I'm going (I suspect non-existant, but will be taking my SuSE notebook in case so I can SSH to home to check mail).

Plan to build and upload Gnumeric 1.2.13 tomorrow. Watching the match tonight at Church - it's this month's Soul Man evening.

Also on the schedule to be built tomorrow is Gaim 0.79. Yahoo!'s decision to once again try to prevent people actually using their network is not only immensly annoying, but also strikes me as monumentally dumb. It does nothing to engender goodwill towards what used to be a flagship of coolness on the web (back in, like, 1995), but is now to a lot of people a byword for selling out and corporatism, all the worst things on the web.

Well, rebuilt ORBit2, and then rebuilt everything else against it, but still no joy, so my releasing the packages now blocks on Ximian bug #60661.

Evolution 1.5 all built (including the 1.5 version of Ximian Connector), but it don't work properly. Think it's cos I had to install ORBit2 2.10.x into a different prefix to 2.8, because the library filenames are the same, but slightly concerned about ABI compatability. Will rebuild as a straight upgrade to the orbit2 package tonight (and have the 2.8 version ready to roll back if it just breaks everything).

Update: Also built the OpenGroupware.org connector for Evo 1.5

Started building Evolution 1.5 on 9.1. ORBit2 2.10.2, libsoup 2.1.11, and evolution-data-server 0.0.94.1 built so far (where appropriate, each package is parallel installable with the version for Evolution 1.4).

Six days to go...

Rooney, Scholes, Lampard - we love you, you are giants amongst men. Big it up for Stevey Gerrard too, the rock in England's midfield.

We can win this, I'm not saying we will, but we can...

Uploaded new GIMP and GTK+ packages, as well as an updated APT installation guide.

So, about that pesky TODO list...

• gtk2-2.4.3 DONE, and ready to be uploaded
• gimp-2.0.2 DONE, and ready to be uploaded
• Debug builds of gtk2 and galeon for #144012 installed, ready for Amanda to test later

Poked around in ooo-build, if I had a spare 20G or more of disk, I'd jump in tonight, and look at getting some SuSE 9.1 packages built (hooray for pre-prepared SuSE-oriented .spec files, nice one Michael, get well soon).

England v Croatia tonight, a draw will put us through, a win, and the French failing to win would put us top of the group! (Unlikely)

Seven days to go...

Nothing knocked off my TODO list. Building OOo filled my 10G /usr/src/packages partition. Gave up. Switched to the Ximian built packages from ftp.ximian.com : xd-unstable, had to download the following packages:

• gnome-cups-manager
• libgnomecups
• ooo
• ooo-dictionaries
• ooo-fonts

Works brilliantly, and the GNOME integration rocks hard. When I have some time, and perhaps a bit more disk space to throw at it, I must jump into ooo-build.

Watched The Parole Officer Saturday night. Enjoyable film, although by no means great. Was fun playing "spot the cameo" though. (One line from Simon Pegg!)

Justin: Slight delay in so far as OOo on my machine doesn't start due to a problem with the GTK+ libraries (presumably as a result of having upgraded to 2.4), and currently rebuilding OOo, but oh my goodness it takes a long time.

Watched Grosse Pointe Blank, another of my favorite movies last night. I wonder how you get into the assassin business...

Who is the Mystery Man?

Good result against the Swiss, especially after a fairly poor performance. Just need a draw (likely) against Croatia to make it past the group stage. Fantastic night with Carole and Andrew, and the curry was just superb, once it actually got delivered. I think the whole of Watford must have ordered a ruby after the game.

Another day without building any packages, busy weekend on the horizon, but going to try to lop off the items I mentioned yesterday.

Happy Zero Day.

Not had much to blog about recently, work's been pretty busy, and most of my personal time has been redoing my website, finally switched the blog to fully be CSS shaped, so it's now only the photo gallery that still use tables.

I have the following things outstanding at the moment:

• gtk2-2.4.3
• gimp-2.0.2
• Investigating #144012 (having a wife who knows how to take backtraces rules)

Got Carole and Andrew coming round for curry tonight. Thursday night really is curry night - oh yes! Also, crunch game for England today against the Swiss, it's a must-win. Can't see them not doing so in all honesty.

• Someone broke the Internet.
• Uploaded the new valid HTML 4.01 Transitional/CSS version of my website, if you're reading my blog directly, you're already seeing the new look. The CSS, as I said, is valid, so naturally, IE barfs on it. Hence the firefox button's appearance.

Plenty of positives from the football, even if we were beaten by Les Bleus

• England demonstrated that they can beat France, which will be encouraging if both sides reach the final.
• Can't see either Croatia or Switzerland beating us, so we should go through.
• All sides in Group A (one of whom we'd meet in the next stage) looked very beatable on Saturday. Glad the Russians got beat, they shouldn't be there in the first place. Spain looked very good, but their finishing was woeful. Portugal and Greece also both seem very beatable.

In any case, had a good evening, french bread pizza & popcorn with a jolly good red wine. Myself and Caz danced up and down the street at half-time (when we were in front), sort of feel a bit silly about that now.

Have redesigned my website, using CSS at last. Will switch to the new design when I change my blosxom flavour to match the new look.

Justin: Can you post the actual output from rpmbuild, cos it has two different ways it can barf on the file check. One is that it can't find files you're referencing ing %files, the other is that there are files in $RPM_BUILD_ROOT that are then not packaged, and I suspect it might be the latter. ALso, feel free to email me the .spec, and I'll give it a once-over. Nice one on packaging logcheck incidentally, I love it, use it on all my servers, but have never got around to doing an RPM.

Euro 2004 kicks off today, and England tomorrow. Even the badgers are behind the boys.

Dinner with Nick and Rosie tonight.

Amanda's out at a hen night tonight, so I'm home, left to my own devices (mmmm, chinese food...). Have downloaded GNOME System Tools CVS so I can test all of our (big shout to the GNOME Bangalore crew) work on SuSE 9.1 tomorrow morning when I drag myself out of bed.

Also, regular readers of my blog will remember the old Acer notebook I was given by a friend from church having a clear out. Finally got around to buying a cheapish CardBus NIC for it (NetGear FA511) which works well enough in SuSE 9.1. Connected to my router at 100M, which is faster than on my desktop machine, because I only have a 10M hub at the moment. One weird thing is that if I unplug it, it locks up the machine, although I can plug it once the machine is booted, and it gets detected correctly, and talks to my DHCP server quite nicely. Ah well, I can cope with that.

The upshot of all this is that I can now sit in my living room, and be online, which is just fatal. I'm currently on Asylum MUD, and I'm watching the World Series of Poker on Challenge TV. I think I need help.

Incidentally, because of the specs of the laptop, I'm using XFce. SuSE APT users might be interested to know that the xfce4 packages from tp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.0-i386/RPMS.suser-ollakka/ work great on 9.1 - you'll just need to copy /etc/X11/dm/Sessions/xfce.desktop to /opt/gnome/share/xsessions. Hint: call it xfce4.desktop in that directory so it doesn't overwrite the xfce.desktop provided by gdm. That's if you use GDM of course

Fixed a typo on the deps page in the links to the libglade2 packages.

Removed the gimp-beta packages, apparently the developers didn't want binary packages being distributed at this time. Pity the announcement on FootNotes didn't mention that.

Oh well...

Argh! I only just built GTK+ 2.4.2!

My patch to Totem was applied which was nice, and my melon-farmer of a patch for GST::Users also got committed. I'll be testing the SuSE work that myself, Carlos and the guys at GNOME Bangalore have been doing on 9.1 Saturday morning, and it should then hopefully make it into the next release.

Local & European elections yesterday, Lib Dems held Watford Council, with an increased share of the seats. reckon there's a strong chance they'll take the parliamentary seat from Labour next time around. We can only hope.

Built Totem yesterday, including the new Mozilla plugin (which will be a seperate package - totem-mozilla). Found one problem whereby, the binary that the plugin calls is installed into LIBDIR/totem, and the plugin looks for it in LIBDIR, submitted a small patch. Other problem was that even with all the Xine plugins from PackMan (including the Win32 codecs), Xine (and therefore Totem) doesn't recognise the format of the trailers at Apple, which I'd planned to use to test it. All this meant that I didn't get around to uploading the packages before going to bed last night.

In the end, I installed the MPlayer Plugin, so I could watch the trailer for Fahrenheit 9/11. Watch it, then go see the movie when it comes out.

Last night, uploaded new gtk2, glib2, abiword-beta and gaim packages. Today is Totem Day, new release, with the beginnings of a Mozilla plugin, now that's tasty.

Bastien: (Have no idea if you read Planet SuSE, but just in case...) Of the IMDb's Bottom 100, I've seen Superman IV, Highlander II, and Police Academy 4. Now, I've not seen Plan 9 from Outer Space, but my understanding was that it fell very much in the so bad it's good camp.

• Uploaded gimp-beta packages Saturday afternoon.
• Stag night was good fun, had a great curry, and plenty of laughs.
• What better way is there to spend a Sunday afternoon in the summertime that sat outside drinking Pimms?
• While I've been focused on getting ULB ready for SuSE 9.1, Carlos has made excellent progress on the GST port, which is great news.

Well, of course nothing stands still, so after yesterday's big big switch, today I built and uploaded the latest gFTP, which I'd managed to build the previous version of when I switched the site over.

Also made a start on the language bindings for GTK+ and GNOME. So far, I've updated libsigc++2 and glibmm2, the rest will follow, and then I'll upload them.

Also, looking into a package of the new GIMP development tree.

Going to a stag night tonight, should be a quality time.

Changed usr-local-bin.org over to the SuSE 9.1 packages of everything today, finally. Also released ULB GNOME 0.8.0 (screenshot) to the masses.

Update: Announcement on FootNotes.

Before bed last night, and before leaving for work this morning, I got gnome-panel built with the default setup right, and rebuilt gnome-session to fix an issue in the SuSE GNOME script that mashed icon themes. That means that ULB GNOME 0.8.0 is now built and ready to go, currently copying it to my work machine ready to update the site. It's about a CD worth of data being transferred over a 512k DSL, and currently unstructured, so it's probably going to be tomorrow that I switch the site.

If there's one thing I really can't stand it's people who apparently have nothing better to do than port scan IPs. Actually, it's the people who do it without really knowing what they're doing who wind me up. No, that doesn't cover it either, it's the people who do it to me without really knowing what they're doing that get my goat.

I get automated mails from my server at home produced by logsentry, and this morning's was full of output from sshd where some idiot had scanned it for about 90 seconds between midnight and 1am UK time using Nessus. Of course, I reported it, with full log extracts to the ISP who own the IP it originated from.

The thing is what sort of idiot uses a tool that, precisely because it's intended to be used for legitimate security auditing identifies itself very clearly to the SSH server like that if they're trying to compromise a remote host? The person responsible for the scan last night should be taken out and shot, not for doing the scan, but for sucking so badly at it.

Well, tonight I've built Galeon 1.3.15 on SuSE 9.1 at home, and after the disaster that was the attempt I made on 9.0, it was incredibly smooth. The only dependency I had to update was libglade2 (does anyone know why SuSE were still packaging the geriatric 2.0.1 - almost two years old?).

So, when I'm done beating the panel into submission I can release ULB GNOME 0.8.0 with a kick-ass GTK+ 2.4 based browser (mmmm, that new file selector is gorgeous!).

Can't believe it's June already. Ah well...

• Uploaded pics of Cambridge
• Uploaded updated Gaim packages for 9.0.
• Totally hosed my GNOME install by building dependencies for the new release of Galeon. I'm so totally fed up of GNOME 2.2, I can't put it into words. Can't wait till I get the final few creases ironed out of ULB GNOME on 9.1, and I can switch to it at work as well as home.
• SuSE released GNOME 2.6 packages for 9.1 and 9.0 at the end of last week, which is great, except that it seems that they've made the Evolution 1.5 packages that are included not parallel installable with the 1.4 packages, so anyone just using those packages to upgrade using either YaST or APT is going to overwrite the stable version of Evolution with the beta version.