Well, we moved yesterday, all went very smoothly, and we now have a house full of boxes. No DSL for a week or so probably, which means no photos of the move or the wedding yet (my galleries are hosted on my home server), but they will come.

So now, back to the course...

Packages updated today:

• gstreamer-plugins[-*]
  Updated to version 0.8.6, various plugins now enabled
• totem[-mozilla]
  Updated to version 0.99.22

Planet SuSE updated to fix link to Michael's blog.

Liverpool are a goal up against Arsenal!

We completed on Friday! Jo has picked up the keys for us, cos I came down to Watford Friday afternoon for Clare and Jeremy's wedding. A fantastic affair, took a bunch of photos, but I left my USB cable for my cam in Nottingham, so can't upload them till I get back up there tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, that's when we move. The removal company were here yesterday morning doing the lion's share of the boxing up, and so now our entire life appears to be in boxes around the house - very strange.

Will be seriously attacking my CTW101 essay this week (it's due a week tomorrow), and then start looking at my BS102 one. Might leave the CTW102 essay until the beginning of the Christmas vacation - Amanda will be at work, so I'll need something to occupy me besides meeting up with people for coffee...

Wow! Those Ukrainians sure know how to grow a beard!

We exchanged contracts today!

We complete on Friday!

We move into the house on Monday!

Details are of course that we then have to find homes for all our stuff, get used to being there, and oh yes, I still have to be bothered about college and all that stuff. Also, still need a buyer for our house in Watford, so best praying trousers on!

DSL will be provided by NSHC who also provide my web & mail hosting.

Gave up on trying to install Ubuntu on Bochs, so sacrificed Crappy Old Laptop to the cause. And it was a sacrfice, because having repartitioned it's drive, the installer then proceeded not to install the base system! For some reason it also couldn't get an IP from the DHCP server here at college (so I manually set one that I knew to be free). SuSE 9.1 is currently reinstalling on it, although I'm also downloading the ISO for Hoary, so I may just try that. Yes, I'll just kill the SuSE install now.

My installation of Ubuntu (Warty) on Bochs failed, first off, when it started, this is what I saw:

So far so good, and I proceeded with the installation, which seemed to be going well, and eventually started installing the base system, but then, it fails with this. Switching, as it says to console three reveals this.

Of course, this is down to the fact that I don't have a NIC setup on Bochs, so it can't get the packages it wants.

Time to learn about TUN/TAP...

Currently uploading:

• AbiWord 2.2.0
• XChat 2.4.1

More on Ubuntu later...

I see a bandwagon, I jump on it.

Thing is, I couldn't quite bring myself to nuke my lovely [working] SuSE 9.1 install, even 9.2 hasn't tempted me to do that (what? rebuild all my GNOME 2.8 packages? you're having a larf!), but I really want to get into Ubuntu. Don't have the patience to install it on Crappy Old Laptop, so I opted for Bochs. First time I've ever used it, and it's going well. Created a 2G disk image to install into [ref], set the memory size to 256M [ref] and upped the IPS to emulate a 500MHz CPU [ref] (the ips value I used is 500000000).

They're the only changes I've had to make to default settings from the SuSE package (and I know I hadn't made changes previously cos I only installed it today), and Ubuntu is now installing very nicely. I'll enable an NE2000 NIC at some point, and USB is enabled by default. I only wish I'd been taking screenshots as I went, never mind, I'll do one of the installed system running when it's ready.

Seriously thinking about trying Ubuntu, and who knows, maybe switching from SuSE/ULB and joining the mighty Jeff's desktop team (if you'll have me, dude )...

If the ISO ever downloads of course...

Currently playing: Blur - Parklife

Who needs a heater when you have a desktop CPU in your notebook, and SETI@home? I started using SETI again yesterday after about a year off, and I noticed that it had this effect:

And the heat extraction on my beast of a notebook was such that when I leave my door shut, and draw the curtains, the room heats up quite nicely.

Oh yes, updated gimp to 2.2pre2 (rpm version is 2.1.99.2).

Discovered Ross' Contact Lookup Applet today, very nice piece of software, screenshots of it in action below. Sent Ross an en_GB translation too while I was looking at it.

Fun night, Liz, Jo, Andy M and myself got a chinese takeout (sooooo much crispy duck!), and watched Breakfast at Tiffany's, another of my all time favorite movies (Jo had also brought When Harry Met Sally just in case I wanted to watch it again.

Before that, had had four straight hours of lectures and seminars in the morning and then lunch and early afternoon with my fellowship group, which was okay.

Interesting...

Cool, seems it's snowed across the continent [Ref: Jimmac in the Czech Republic]

Wonder what caused that sudden, and brief fall. It got as far south as Luton here, but apparently not to Watford.

380 tons!

New package: gossip the Jabber client for GNOME by Imendio.

Holy snow Batman!

Okay, I know you'd think I'd never seen snow before, but it was so unexpected... If it lasts till morning, I'll try to get some better photos in the light.

Thanks Pete. You know what for.

Great news!

As a life long psoriasis sufferer (although it has spent some time in remission), this is fantastic news. I suffer from moderate psoriasis (Ref - find "How serious is psoriasis?" in that page), specifically plaque psoriasis on the scalp and legs (which is why I'm never seen in shorts in the summer).

I know these things take time, and a breakthrough now may be a usable treatment in a decade or so, if ever, but any news is good news.

Tonight, I have been raising a glass to Jen and Dan.

AND I've got a book from the library for my CTW101 essay!

Currently playing: Blur - For Tomorrow

So, this morning, my Palm m105 decided it was going to crash hard on sync this morning. Useless pile of junk! First couple of times it happened, popping one of the batteries, and then replacing it got it working again, although only until I tried to sync again. Then, it decided to just zero itself. Couldn't restore from backups, it just locked up hard everytime, so in the end I had to zero my gnome-pilot directories so it didn't try to restore, and do a one-time copy of my Evolution addressbook & contacts, and reinstall all the software I use.

Old Testament Prophets course started today, into the second set of modules for the term, and Rachel K, neé S has joined the Tuesday partnership course, very cool to have her in the lectures. Will do a newsletter mailing soon, I promise.

Currently playing: Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go

Saw Amanda off back to Watford today

"Charismatic Evening" at college chapel tonight, was doing sound and CTP, both seemed to go quite well. After that, wine at Liz's flat. Think my friends at college might be realising what a sad bastard I am. We were talking about bad courier experiences, and I took control of Liz's PC to refer them all to my various blog entries from September - a bit of a giveaway...

I then made the mistake of showing them Planet SuSE, and realised how badly it renders in Internet Exploiter. Really should redo that CSS at some point...

Someone mentioned on SLE that the orphaned PWC driver had been adopted and updated. The functionality from pwcx.ko has now been incorporated into pwc.ko. The new versions can get obtained here, and my webcam is now using the new version.

Updates today:

• abiword[-plugins-*|-clipart]
• gaim
• gDesklets
• rhythmbox[-xine]

Some Diebold-related links

• Diebold official site
• Diebold Election Systems
• Black Box Voting
• Diebold CEO committed to give votes to Bush in 2004
• The Diebold Variations (LOL!)
• Verified Voting
• Online Policy Group v. Diebold Inc.

Diebold...

...making machines that vote - so you don't have to.

Interesting...

The Ohio recount, if it happens, won't tip the election to Kerry of course, that would be wishful thinking (I was feeling wishful yesterday). What it may do of course is show how corrupt (if at all) the Diebold voting machines are.

If you're American, and you believe in your constitutional right to scrutinize and monitor what your government does on your behalf (such as y'know, run your elections and contract companies to assist in that), you can donate to the Libertarian/Green recount effort here.

Amanda's on her way up - yay!

There may still be hope.

What's up with Slashdot stories and Firefox?

I hate waking up in the morning more tired than when I went to bed the previous night.

R.I.P. Yasser Arafat.

Spent an interesting night in the pub with a medic from the British Army who has resigned her commision largely over the war in Iraq. Very interesting to hear the truth about what it's like over there, that Basra isn't quite the walk in the park that we've been led in part to believe, but that the British genuinely are received better by the Iraqis than the US soldiers.

Summed up by "we've got rid of the dictator, there were no WMD, it's time for us to get out and leave it to them". This isn't heartless leaving them to it, but out of respect for their ability as a nation and sovereignty as a nation. It's an afront for even us who they dislike less than the US to still be there.

Bring the troops home.

Currently playing: The White Stripes - Hypnotize

It's been a busy, busy day - lectures all morning (for those who are interested in my course's schedule, I had Ancient Greek followed by three hours of Church & Ministry), then lunch, then we watched a video produced by Forward in Faith (or a similar group) opposing the ordination of women, followed by the Yes, Prime Minister episode, The Bishop's Gambit, about the Crown Appointment Committee.

Had an hour or so free, and then I've got a practise in about 10 mins with the band that are playing in chapel tomorrow night, who I'm filling in with on percussion.

Have added Live Bookmarks links to Planet SuSE for the RSS 1.0 and 2.0 versions of the site, as well as for the Planet SuSE News feed.

WTF!

Currently playing: Manic Street Preachers - Archives of Pain

For the first time in ages (and ages and ages) I managed to change the batteries in my Palm m105 without losing all my data and having to restore from a backup. Now, I don't know if this is because also for the first time in quite a while I've opted for a reputable brand of battery rather than buying a supermarket own brand, but I'm a happy bunny (ahem!).

Watched When Harry Met Sally again yesterday. Simply my favorite movie of all time, and yet it always makes me cry (no big feat admittedly).

Currently playing: The Stone Roses - Daybreak

Remember, Christmas is coming...

Pete: Should have asked for one you could smoke

Seems there have been some emails not reaching me - sorry about this, I have sent a support request to my mail hoster, but please bear in mind that if I don't reply to your emails, it may mean I haven't got them.

• Friday was the college community day, I was on the prayer team, which afforded me the opportunity to do what I did for the Noise in Watford earlier in the year - to take photos of the various projects. These are now up in the Photo Gallery.
• Have added live bookmarks to my site, so people using Firefox can now subscribe to my blog if they want to.
  
• Have changed my hackergotchi on Planet SuSE to the same image from the top left of my website.
• Had a big meal at college last night, full on roast pork jobbie, was good to all get together at the weekend, cos otherwise it can be like the Marie Celeste at weekends sometimes.

So, been a bit of a few days. Tragedy in the US, but you've got to respect the dignity of Kerry to concede rather than drag it through the courts. Stayed up till about 4.30am Tuesday night, and then got up about 6.30am Wednesday morning, and I didn't even sleep for the whole of those two hours. Suffice to say, I was seriously tired, and basically out of it on Wednesday. Went to bed at about 6.30 Wednesday evening, slept through to 6.15 this morning, felt a lot more normal today.

GNOME bug #157110 has resulted in me switching to Firefox instead of Galeon. Tried gDesklets for the first time today (and in fact built a package, which I've not uploaded) and I have to say that I like it, and I've (for the time being) replaced GKrellM with it.

I don't like these numbers. Let's assume that Kerry takes Ohio (by no means certain of course), that's 20 more votes. Add Michigan's 17, which he seems likely to get. Wisconsin's too close to call thus far, Iowa looks like it's just going to go for Bush. So, to the South. New Mexico's going to go for Bush, and Nevada's too close to call. Hawaii looks possible for Kerry, but the count has barely started.

So, let's add them up. Kerry has 221 so far, plus 37 for Ohio and Michigan, only makes 258, so even if he takes Ohio, he still really needs Iowa and Nevada.

It's a big ask.

Fifty polls today [Ref] and it's looking damn good for Kerry (and so for the world) tomorrow. American citzens, get out and vote tomorrow. Yes, it matters who for (Vote Kerry!) but it matters more that you participate in the process. Use your vote, use your voice, or you can't complain when you aren't heard.

So, back to those polls. Based on the latest crop, Kerry would have 298 votes in the Electoral College, with a projected final total of 306. That doesn't look as close as we were being led to believe, and so I'm very confident that failing a major electoral fraud, y'know, like was perpetrated in Florida four years ago, so I'm not really holding my breath, Kerry's gonna win tomorrow.

States to watch: CO, FL, MO, NH, NM, NV, OH, PA, VA.

Oh, and who would have guessed that the votemaster is Mr Tanenbaum, whose book I never bought, never mind read when I was reading Computer Science at University.