Gosh, what a week. I've written an essay, about six weeks ahead of it's due date (!), been to my cell group in Watford, had Caz and Cat round for dinner, survived a killer cold and kicked (I hope) my new mortgage lender into submission^*. I've also met up with Hils and Caz for coffee, and got some packages built.

Of course, the best, and most important thing is that I've spent a fairly normal week with Amanda, which has just been bliss. Had fondue tonight - yum!

Back to Nottingham tomorrow, and college life begins again.

Roger notes that Novell's plan is not to liberate SuSE Pro to the community. That's sad, but I can understand their perspective. But know, Novell insiders, that if you ever do, you have a GNOME maintainer ready and waiting.

2.9.1 is due on Monday. Yes, I'm excited, but do I start building that, or stick with 2.8.x? The agony of choice...

America goes to the polls on Tuesday, and it's too close to call. I've been monitoring Electoral-Vote.com, and it's simply too close to call. Thankfully, Florida, with it's important 27 electoral college votes seems to be edging towards Kerry, and the 37 (combined) votes of Ohio and Michigan while currently being called for Bush are essentially a statistical tie (they're well well well within the margin), so this is really all to play for. Yes, I know Florida's well within the margin too, but it's trend has been towards Kerry over time. I also don't buy the latest polling data from Michigan, it suggests a sudden and dramatic collapse in the Kerry vote there, and that doesn't seem likely. All of a sudden, New Jersey looks key, until you consider that the latest poll there calling it not just as a statistical tie, but a very actual tie also suggests a sudden collapse in the Kerry vote. It's also worth considering that the latest poll in NJ is from Strategic Vision, not known for being very left-friendly.

Let's just say I feel confident about Kerry's chances Tuesday.

[Ref]
Obviously, if I was under the control of North Korea, was a Specially Designated Terrorist^* and was planning to use Oracle 10g for the development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, I'd hold my hands up right there, and say "sorry, I'd better not download this, it would be wrong."

^*Presumably plain old regular average Joe type terrorists are fine, they can use Oracle 10g freely.

Have built hal, dbus and gnome-volume-manager (used SuSE-supplied udev to play safe), but can't get hald to start. Google was amazingly unhelpful on this occasion. Leaving it for now, working on an essay about St Paul's teaching on the Holy Spirit, but will post some errors in the hope that someone will be able to help...

Hard at work!

Okay, I am on fire tonight! Python packages from GNOME Bindings now available. Your install mambo goes a little like this:

apt install ulb-gnome-bindings-python

Taking a break from building those bindings. Having usable Python packages means I can press on with HAL/D-Bus/udev. It also means I can think about building gDesklets.

Okay, the C++ packages from GNOME Bindings 2.8.0 are built, and uploading as I type. Once they're in the APT repository, you can install them with apt install ulb-gnome-bindings-c++.

Python next...

So, apparently, Novell are planning to make the current SuSE Pro Edition a community distribution, in a Fedora style. A Linux Today editorial today says this is a mistake.

I disagree. My feelings on this can be summed up in three words.

Bring. It. On

Bring it on, the SuSE community is strong and committed, on top of the quite simply astounding employees at SuSE subsidiaries around the world and at Ximian, there's the PackMan team doing great work across a huge range of packages, up to date GNOME packages from me, Richard doing great work with APT, which could become the official package management method in a community release of SuSE (and not before time. This community is strong, and we're ready to do what the Fedora community have done, and who knows? Maybe do it better!

Bring. It. On.

Yes, the WLAN adaptor works!

Of course, now I just have my battery life to contend with...

Or, I could just locate the power socket

So, today I finally set up the built in WLAN adapter in my new lappie, using the ndiswrapper module. By setting up ndiswrapper, I was then able to use YaST as normal to set up the adapter, specifying the module. No wireless network here for me to use, but then college seems generally to be a radio dead spot. Anyway, I might find one to test it with at the services on my way home tomorrow.

This leads me to a couple of new packages built and uploaded today, the first is gnome-netstatus, which is part of GNOME 2.8.x, and I'd forgotten to build it till today. The second is the very cool netapplet, as seen in Nat's blog. This hasn't actually had a release yet, so the package is versioned 0.0.0 and is today's CVS.

Planet SuSE has hackergotchis again! Many thanks to Justin for sorting my account out. It's also been updated to the latest Planet code.

Recent updates (yesterday and today):

• Gaim
• Nautilus CD Burner
• File Roller
• gThumb
• gLabels

Hackfest, hackfest, hackfest! Rodrigo's done his first EPlugin (ref) a handy feature, and just look at that code! EPlugin makes it so easy, even I might have a go!

I popped into the Hackfest earlier today, and it seems to be going well, US based hackers are in bed at the moment now though.

Also looking into why AbiCommand seems not to build. Sure it used to, so it's either my new build box, or something's changed since a couple of 2.1.x versions ago.

Preparing Morning Prayer for tomorrow.

Been a week of parties, mostly birthday related. Friday night, had a nice meal on campus, and then a few of us hung out. Saturday we had pizza en masse which rocked. Monday was Jen's birthday, today is Rachel's, Friday is Adam's. So, Monday night, me and Liz took Jen to the pub, and last night we had a big party in honour of the three birthday people.

Going to be a fairly busy rest-of-the-week too, I'm playing at the main college service tomorrow night, and leading morning prayer on Friday, before going home on Friday for reading week. Yay!

Time for another TODO list...

• GNOME Bindings 2.8.0
• HAL/D-Bus/udev
• gnome-volume-manager
• gnome-system-tools
• vino

Uploading AbiWord 2.1.91

Wha-hey! Cat's a hardware hacker!

Wetherspoons curry night at the Last Post in Beeston last night - four of us went, and it was a jolly good time.

So, I've been here nearly three weeks now, so I figured I ought to blog about my life here. First off, here's a photo of where I live. This room is my home at the moment

There's also a lounge and a kitchen down the coridoor, so it that respect it's a bit more like a normal home. The lounge has a TV in too.

There are two pubs in "local" distance - the White Lion (or Lecture Room 7 as it's known at college), which is literally just round the corner. A small local pub which does good real ale. The other is the Cadland, part of the Ember Inns chain, so good real ale again, but different atmosphere, and a twice weekly quiz.

Today, as well as collee stuff, been focused on Totem bug #155362, as well as a crasher in Papaya.

Good morning of Church History lectures. Child Protection orientation stuff in the afternoon. Chilled evening.

We did the Cadland's pub quiz last night, 55/60 - second place, but I claim it as a moral victory for reasons to complex to go into here.

Today's updates:

• abiword (now at 2.1.90 - obsoletes abiword-beta)
• gconf-editor
• gnome-applets
• gtksourceview
• totem

• eog
• evolution
• evolution-data-server
• evolution-webcal
• file-roller
• gal2
• gconf2
• gnome-applets
• gnome-desktop
• gnome-panel
• gnome-session
• gnome-system-monitor
• gnome-themes
• gnome-utils
• gtkhtml2
• libgtop
• libwnck
• ximian-connector
• yelp

• eel
• epiphany
• epiphany-extensions
• gedit
• gimp-beta
• glib2
• gnome-games
• gnome-vfs2
• gnumeric
• libgda
• libgnomedb
• libsoup
• metacity
• nautilus
• nautilus-cd-burner
• sound-juicer
• totem

Yay! Will be moving house very soon!

Not sold our house yet, but that's another story...

I'd noticed an issue in Nautilus with GNOME 2.8 where when you double-clicked an icon for a file (a .png for example), it opped up an error dialog saying "There was an error launching the application". Am just uploading a new ULB GNOME package that fixes this. It adds a SuSEconfig component to ensure that update-desktop-database is run whenever SuSEconfig is (which, let's face it is pretty often).

Time to start adding those MIME types to the .desktop files included in ULB GNOME I guess...

Went to Nottingham LUG last night, interesting talk on OO Perl, followed by drinks, and some oohing and ahing at my beast of a laptop.

• gnome-pilot[-conduits] 2.0.12
• gcalctool 5.5.5
• libgda/libgnomedb 1.1.6

Updated builds yesterday and today:

• Gnumeric 1.3.90 (and libgsf 1.10.1)
• Epiphany 1.4.1 (and matching extensions package)

Will be rebuilding gnome-themes to remove the Spheres and Crystals theme, as it crashes badly with GTK+ 2.4 (and has been obsoleted).

Hoping to make it to Nottingham LUG on Wednesday.

I love how Roger is paranoid enough for all of us.

Rog, hat's off to ya!

Ever have pone of those "DOH!" moments?

Just had one...

Had forgotten to --addsign all my packages since I created the keypair to sign them with. Boy, do I feel dumb...

Amanda made it up okay, we went to Nandos in Nottingham last night, and today's she's at the spouses' induction at college, which gives her a chance to at least have some contact with the college community.

Also, the webcam is now back online in my college room - you won't see me sleep, and you certainly won't see me getting changed, but you will see me work.

Have built, and am uploading ULB GNOME 2.8.0.1. It's a brown paper bag release that I'm not bothering to code name (call it the "Release With No Name" if you like). Changes from 2.8.0 are:

• Tidy up ULB supplied Panel menu entries
• Updated gnome-panel to 2.8.0.1
• Updated GDM to 2.6.0.5, and made it use the same GTK+ theme by default as ULB GNOME. Also, include the SuSE theme that is removed by installing ULB GNOME - allowing people to use that if they so desire.

Have also updated control-center2 to include a menu entry for the control centre itself, in the Preferences submenu. But, it doesn't seem to work. Trying to figure out why. Watch this space.

Amanda's on her way up for the weekend - yay!

Update: Control Center menu entry issue resolved - rebuilding and will upload shortly.

Wow, seems that Kerry kicked Bush's behind in the debate. I didn't manage to see it, but judging from comments posted on the BBC site, even Republicans in the south found Kerry to be a better choice as President based on the debate. My favorite comment was this:

"Anyone who watched the debate and thinks the Bush-Kerry debate was a draw or that Kerry didn't win hands-down probably still believes there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had a part in 9/11, and that Santa Claus really does exist. Kerry was by far the winner. Coherent, clear, convincing, next to Bush's boring repetition of cliché, after cliché, after cliché."