[Ref]
Will the real Roger Whittaker please stand up?

It's a two bedroom terraced house, in Watford, in great "decorative order" as estate agents say, on the market for £179,950. You can see photos in the gallery. Some of them haven't come out very well (I wasn't looking down the viewfinder for all of them, so wasn't able to see the "flash ready" light.

See the full details here

Survived the early start yesterday, and it all went fairly swimmingly, might be having lunch with Justin tomorrow. Had Caz round for lasagne tonight.

Soul in the City seems to be going well, based on the fact that my cellphone has yet to ring so far...

Offer on the house in Nottingham was provisionally accepted. Pinnacle have yet to advertise my job!

Well, after a fashion, all tent cities were set up, and the first meetings happened last night. Took some photos, will upload when I have time.

In other news, I'm starting work tomorrow at 6am, and it's been suggested I get a GNOME CVS account to facilitate committing translations.

Found a house we really like in Nottingham, it's about 5-10 minutes walk from college, comfortably within our price range, and will need no work doing to it at all. Plus, there's no upper chain. We've put an offer in, at the asking price, waiting to hear back if it's been accepted. All we have to do now is sell ours, someone's viewing it tomorrow while we're at Church. The house isn't even on the estate agent's website, or in the local paper yet!

Soul in the City starts Sunday, we added all the new songs from the worship leaders for the various Tent Cities tonight (well over fifty!). The songs will be taken to the sites for us and Presenter will be installed for us too. Then, on Sunday we'll go round the TCs, configure Presenter, and train the teams. We'll stick around at one site for the opening celebration Sunday night, and then we're hands off until the Trafalgar Square celebration at the end, on August 7th, which yes, is my birthday. We'll be going to the pub afterwards.

So, with that, on top of looking at houses in Nottingham, we're having quite a busy weekend ot say the least.

• Been really touched by all the tributes that have been paid to me both on and off-list, thank you all.
• Truly hellish week at work, why won't they just put me on gardening leave?
• Submitted en_GB translations for atk, eog, nautilus-cd-burner and gnome-nettool.
• We've booked to see five houses in Nottingham this weekend - four on Saturday morning, all on the same street!

Have decided to retire usr-local-bin as a website & service this summer. Come the autumn when I go to college, I'm not going to be able to afford either the hosting for the site (on average it generates 2G of traffic per day, and will require pushing 1G of disk space once I've got a full GNOME install, plus all the apps built - and that will also increase the traffic), or the time it takes up to maintain the packages. Depending on how things progress, I'll release a couple of GNOME 2.7 package sets (2.7.2, 2.7.4, and maybe one of the release candidates), and then retire it.

It's been a fantastic 2 ^1/2 years running the site, I've loved having such a visible input into the community, and providing a service like this. I'll stil lbe as active as my training allows, I'll bre reading lists, and hopefully finding time to contribute patches, but in the words of my favorite MUD,
Riggwelter has been slain by Real Life (Kills 1)

Thanks to everyone who's supported the site over the years, hope you enjoy this last hurrah over the summer.

• Haircut this morning.
• Spending the day cleaning, and tidying - getting ready to put the house on the market.
• Out at Caz & Hils' tonight, Mexican, good wine (bottle we laid down 3.5 years ago to toast getting the ordination nod with) and Lost in Translation.
• House is looking tons better than it was before, and it didn't look bad in the first place.
• Gaim 0.80 is out, building it, with evolution-data-server support.
• ggv, file-roller, gconf-editor built.

• Dunno how I managed to type Monday, definitely meant Wednesday
• Submitted en_GB translation for gnome-keyring-manager
• eog, gob2 built.

• Didn't mention that Monday was my youngest brother David's birthday, hope you had a great day mate.
• Submitted en_GB translations for evolution-brainread, jumpnbumpmenu andgtk+.
• 2.7.3 is up on f.g.o, a bit behind schedule, but 2.7.4 should be along soon, so I'm going to finish off ULBG for 2.7.2 and then go for 2.7.4.

Been out of the office ill today. Went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and had to leave mid-way through to run to the toilet to throw up. Not because of the portrayal of the Iraq war I hasten to add. Was ill again after midnight and felt like I was going to be again this morning. Indeed, had the "5 second warning" at one point, but headed it off. F9/11 is an excellent documentary incidentally, and I strongly recommend it.

In other news, #144012 seems fixed, and camE and giblib packages for SuSE 9.0 and 9.1 are now in my all new non-GNOME RPM repository.

Building ULB GNOME 2.7.2 continues slowly as and when I'm in the house, no longer have SSH access from work to do it in my lunchhour. Oddly enough, didn't feel up to spending today on it

• Handed in my notice today, my lsat day at Pinnacle will be September 10th. Two months to sort out web hosting...
• Submitted an en_GB translation for Criawips
• Seems some people were not happy with my comment about John Kerry being "The Right Thing" for the USA, and indeed the world, this November. Now, I agree he's not perfect, but my opinion is that Bush has scared me to death these last three years, and to some extent anyone's better. Now, would Kerry have been my first choice? No, I was a Dean man. Is Kerry as liberal as I would like? Not by a long measure, but he's way to the left of Bush. Bottom line: I don't have a say in what happens in the USA presidential election in November, but I do have the right to express my view on it. A right that if the reports are to be believed, Bush wants to deny the American public at all costs.
• Building libxml2, libxslt and yelp before bed

Roger: Yes, the future does look bleak, but if Americans do the Right Thing^TM this autumn, it could be brighter.

One day I've going to replace the batteries in my Palm M105 without losing all my data...

Is very nice indeed. Using version 1.5.90 at home now, and, well, it's just good. It works, it's quite nippy, even with debugging enabled. I do miss the shortcuts bar, but I dare say I'll get used to the new way of working. Looking forward to uploading it, along with the rest of ULB GNOME 2.7.2 later this week. Will also be getting ximian-connector2 and evolution-ogo packages built. Built the latest gnome-games and gnome-utils last night.

Looking good, I now have a fully working desktop install, and all the multimedia stuff is built. All that really remains is to build the various small apps that are patr of the official desktop release (GEdit, eog, fileroller, etc...), sort out the default theming, and create the ulb-gnome package to depend on all the appropriate things.

Oh yes, and produce a fixed gdm package, include the SuSE GDM theme in it, and set it's GTK+ theme to match the default ULB GNOME theme.

First of all that good news I mentioned in my earlier entry about GNOME 2.7. I got a letter this morning informing me that I've been selected for training for ordination within the Church of England. Come September, I'll be starting a full time BA (Hons) course in Ministry at St Joh's College, Nottingham, which should lead to ordination in three years time. I'll be informing my current employers on Monday. Don't know what will happen with usr local bin as yet, but I've a couple of months to figure that out.

Currently rebuilding Evolution 1.4, having rebuilt gal2, gtkhtml2 and libsoup. Also building control-center2. Hoping to get Nautilus, and possibly GStreamer built by the end of the day. Uploading tomorrow may be ambitious, but at least it seems to be working.

Update:
Evolution build completed, but turns out my problem is Ximian bug #54888. Have uninstalled evolution-data-server-devel, and will try again.

Somewhere along the line something's gone screwy. Rebuilt gnome-applets to remove a Conflicts: line in the .spec that APT didn't like. When I tried to install the rebuilt version:

weasel:/usr/src/packages/SPECS # rpm -Uvh
/usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/gnome-applets-2.6.1-100.SuSE.ulb.2.i586.rpm
/usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/gnome-applets-devel-2.6.1-100.SuSE.ulb.2.i586.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
control-center2 is needed by (installed) gnome-media-2.4.1.1-40
control-center2 is needed by (installed) nautilus-2.4.2-47
control-center2 is needed by (installed) xscreensaver-gnome-4.16-2.3
control-center2 is needed by (installed) gnome-panel-2.7.1-100.SuSE.ulb.1
control-center2 is needed by (installed) gnome-session-2.7.1-100.SuSE.ulb.1
control-center2 is needed by (installed) control-center2-devel-2.6.1-100.SuSE.ulb.1

Compare with:

weasel:/usr/src/packages/SPECS # rpm -q control-center2
control-center2-2.6.1-100.SuSE.ulb.1

Doing rpm --rebuilddb at the moment, hopefully that will help.

Update 2:
Argh, just realised why, control-center2 "Provides" gswitchit, gnome-applets now Obsoletes it, so it was trying to remove control-center2.

Gonna keep this blog entry updating as I go, dates and times are BST (GMT +0100)

• 9 Jul 20:34 Started building ORBit2 2.10.2
• 20:52 libbonobo 2.6.2
• 21:02 GConf 2.7.1
• 21:15 gnome-mime-data 2.4.1
• 21:25 gnome-vfs 2.7.1
• 10 Jul 07:52 libgnome 2.7.1
• 08:06 libgnomecanvas 2.7.1
• 08:09 libbonoboui 2.6.1
• 08:23 libgnomeprint 2.7.0 (Pango 1.5.0, ATK 1.7.1)
• 08:49 libgnomeprintui 2.7.0 (Just got some good news - info later...)
• 08:52 gnome-keyring 0.3.1
• 08:54 libgnomeui 2.7.1
• 09:11 startup-notification 0.6, gnome-themes 2.7.1
• 09:19 gnome-desktop 2.7.1
• 09:21 libwnck 2.6.1
• 09:25 libsoup 2.1.11
• 09:27 evolution-data-server 0.0.95
• 10:07 gnome-panel 2.7.1
• 10:20 gnome-session 2.7.1
• 10:30 gnome-terminal 2.7.2
• 10:38 gnome-applets 2.6.1 (libxklavier 1.02)
• 11:34 Metacity 2.8.1
• 11:40 Galeon 1.3.16
• 11:55 First login attempt to GNOME 2.7.2
• 11:57 Succesful, but Evolution is broken (having rebuilt it against 2.7 libraries:
  

  evolution: error while loading shared libraries:
  /opt/gnome/lib/evolution/1.4/components/libevolution-addressbook.so:
  undefined symbol: e_book_get_config_database
  

  Seems I need to rebuild all it's deps too, will do so later

Okay, I'm gonna go for it. Amanda's working Saturday, so I'm gonna do the GNOME 2.7 mambo. My plan is to have 2.7.2 built by the end of Saturday, and then upload on Sunday (or 2.7.3 if it's ready by then). I have a wedding to go to Saturday afternoon, but hopefully I can happily leave something building while I go. So this is it, usr local bin goes truely bleeding-edge. Why? Well, it helps SuSE people jump in with GNOME development by using what's going to become the next STABLE release (2.8 as it will be), secondly, it means I can upgrade Galeon, and thirdly, there's a lot of cool stuff that I want to start building and providing. (Things like Dashboard/Beagle, Project Utopia, etc...) and I just wouldn't feel right doing that without having first opened up this area of GNOME coolness to the SuSE community.

Of course, it might not quite happen, time might be too tight, or something else might come up, but that's the plan anyway. This way SuSE users will have a real choice of GNOME versions. 2.4 as shipped with 9.1, 2.6 (with the issues I've discussed before), from ftp.suse.com, or 2.7/2.8 from me, and isn't that what Free Software's meant to be about?

Remember, if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room

Had an email asking how to set up camE on SuSE. This is a brief guide to building it, and it's requirements from source, although at some point I'll do packages of it, and it's deps.

Okay, the first thing you want to do is make sure you've got all the packages that you need from the SuSE distribution installed, the key things here are the imlib2-loaders and imlib2-devel packages. Install these using YaST or APT (whichever you happen to use), and the main imlib2 package will also be installed if it's not already.

Next, install giblib from the camE site, this is a standard ./configure && make && make install jobbie, and now you're onto the real thing. Building camE is even easier, you don't even need a ./configure stage - make && make install and you're almost good to go.

Most people will be running camE in a situation where they save the cam image to their local filesystem in a location where Apache can find it (~/public_html probably). So, you need to copy example.camErc to ~/.camErc, and edit it as you require. Create a ~/.caminfo to contain your caption, and you're set, simply run camE. It backgrounds automatically, so you can log out of that session, and it'll run until you kill it.

If you want your webcam to update automatically like mine does, feel free to copy the JavaScript from my cam page.

Managed to watch Something's Gotta Give last night. Sweet movie, sad at times. Enjoyed it, but wouldn't describe it as great. Could stand to lose the final scene too.

Booked tickets for Fahrenheit 9/11, going a week today (it opens in the UK on Friday). Really looking forward to it. Not expecting a totally objective view, but then, it's not like what's been coming out of the Bush White House since day one has been remotely trustworthy. My view of Moore has always been that agree with him or not, democracy needs people like him who are prepared to stand up and criticise the leadership. Bush plays a dangerous game when his regime and supporters try to tar anyone who opposes them as unpatriotic, or un-American.

You know what to do about it this autumn/fall.

Okay, so now I have to make a decision. Galeon 1.3.16 came out, and it introduced a GNOME 2.6 dependency. (libgnomeui-2.5.3, which depends on gnome-vfs-2.5.3, which depends on...) So, I'm left in a position where to update my prefered browser, and indeed the default browser in ULB GNOME, I have to build a full updated set of GNOME packages. If I'm going to do that, I'd probably do 2.7, not 2.6, and up the version number of ULB GNOME to match the Desktop release number it represents. I just don't know if I have the time. Gonna think about it, so watch this space...

The webcam's back after my time in Ely (forgot to bring the cam to the office yesterday).

The world's coming apart at the seams. I had an appointment Saturday morning, 10:30, for a financial review at my bank. Now, because we live in the Computer Age ^TM, accounts are no longer transfered to your local branch when you move house, so mine is still held at the Lancaster branch, and it was they who made the appointment for me at Watford. Of course, when I got to the Watford branch, they had no record of my appointment. Insanity. Also, it seems that there's some sort of localised magic field over Eisenegger in Watford that causes my legs to be two inches shorter than anywhere else.

Other than that quite a relaxing weekend, watched some West Wing, failed to watch Something's Gotta Give with Caz Saturday night. Amanda was at a Soul in the City training day all Saturday, and Sunday was pretty good.

Congrats to Maria Sharapova, Roger Federer and the Greek national football team.

Uploaded pictures of Ely, it may be a dull place, but it sure is pretty.

Well, I've been in Ely the last three days, without internet access, but I survived. Ely is possibly the dullest city in th UK, it seems to only consist of the cathedral and an enormous public school, as well as a few nice pubs. (For non-UK residents, in the UK a "public school" is what would be called a "private school" elsewhere, what others would call a "public school" we call a "state school". Don't ask me why, we're a quirky lot us Brits.)

So, anyway, I came back to about 750 emails, and that's just at home, I dread to think what my Inbox at work is going to look like Monday morning. Going to be rebuilding AbiWord 2.1.x packages to be less fussy about the GTK+ version installed, and to include the AbiCommand plugin (which I can't believe it doesn't - whoops). Seems someone in Novell wants to base something or other on my 2.1.x packages (such details as there are are in the AbiWord development list archives), and it needs the AbiCommand plugin. Probably will look into doing packages of the SDK as well at some point.

Mono 1.0 was released while I was away, this is great news, an incredible work of hackage by an amazing team of hackers. You guys rock hard, and I'm proud to be associated by even tenuous means with you.

Oh yes, and on Ximian bug #60661, not really the result I was hoping for, will have another punt when the next pre-release version comes out, in the meantime, if anyone knows the gcc flag to not set immediate symbol resolution, please let me know.