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Built, and uploaded Blam packages, they depend upon the Mono packages from the ximian APT component, make sure you have it in your sources.list (Screenshot below).

Will build Tomboy as soon as Alex's website is available, and I can get a proper tarball, rather than building HEAD.

(That's Happy New Year in Welsh)

2005 will be here in seven hours, it's already in Australia. BS102 essay (or, bs102.abw as it's also known) is complete, and on my USB key for safe keeping - just in case of course.

Dave and Catherine popped in this afternoon, they're at a wedding in Yorkshire tomorrow, so they were in the area, was good to see them.

About to start on Blam package building.

Novell have finally, about nine months after I requested it, and was told that it was being worked upon, started producing news feeds in RSS 2.0 that I can add to Planet SuSE.

Handily all the feeds that they've done thus far are SuSE relevant, so I've added them all. Nice one Novell, can we have the rest soon please?

Anyone who regularly does an APT upgrade will have noticed that gtkhtml2 had a rebuild yesterday for no apparent reason. This was to allow it to play nice with the Mono packages from the ximian APT component. Having done that, I've been playing around with a couple of Mono apps, specifically Blam and Tomboy. For those who don't know, Blam is an RSS aggregator, and I've been using it to read, amongst other things, Planet SuSE, Planet GNOME and BBC News. Tomboy is nifty little note taking app, it's basically a serverless Wiki. Expect packages of both very soon, as soon as I have time to do them. Here's a screenshot of them sitting in my notifcation area:

My BS102 is just shy of 1000 words, which was my target for today, so I'm quite pleased with my progress, will probably walk up to college tomorrow to grab an extra book that I want to refer to, hopefully get it finished (save for some tweaking of course) tomorrow. Then we're off to Chris & Bernie's for a New Year's Eve bash.

Rodrigo released 1.2.0 of libgda and libgnomedb. I filed bug #162471. It's pretty much a team effort

Switched to X.Org 6.8.1, wow, talk about seamless, the keyboard driver reference was succesfully changed to kbd, and all I had to do was rebuild my NVidia driver. (apt install xorg*).

Christmas was good, New Year will soon be upon us, unfortunately, Caz wasn't well, so couldn't join us as planned on Boxing Day.

Uploaded new ULB GNOME - a minor revision, 2.8.0.2. This update now requires netapplet cos it's hella cool, and an updated libgnome and gnome-vfs2 which change the default browser from Galeon to Firefox (they depend upon the SuSE package MozillaFirefox)

Posted by me on SLE yesterday.

My gift to you all: Updated evolution, gal2, gtkhtml2 and evolution-data-server packages.

Ho ho ho...

Great night last night, fantastic curry as always, and good company, who could ask for anything more?

Have built Coaster, the kick-ass CD burning app for GNOME by Bryan. Also (of course) it's dependencies Bakery and libxml++ as well the required update to nautilus-cd-burner.

apt-get install coaster will sort you out.

Updated netapplet package to 1.0.0, and patched it to use gnomesu rather than kdesu when launching YaST to configure the network settings, this speeds things up incredibly, even on my P4 3.4GHz, the delay in starting kdesu is considerable, it's hardly noticable when starting gnomesu. Might well update that patch to provide a message that's specific to netapplet then send Rob the patch. Have already sent him an en_GB translation.

Next ULB GNOME release will depend upon netapplet, and oh yes, have done a patch to patch the .desktop file to vanilla GNOME categories.

Amazing how having an essay to do really motivates me to get into some code

Was playing with Gnome Blog earlier. Thing is, my blog is hosted by my ISP, and I upload using SCP, so I can't use it for my "real" blog.

Wish I had the time to write a simple client, based upon Gnome Blog that would do the following (all toggleable):

• Save the blog entry in a Blosxom compatible format to a local directory, using either a user-specified filename, or UNIX date format filename, followed by user-specified extension.
• Upload to a remote server by FTP, with password either saved (ouch) or prompted for.
• Upload to a remote server by SCP, using gnome-ssh-askpass2 to provide the passphrase (have built updated openssh packages for SuSE 9.1 to add gnome-ssh-askpass2 to openssh-askpass - might split it out into a seperate openssh-gnome package.

I guess ideally, these would be included in Gnome Blog, might drop Seth a line to ask about it, another of those moments when I consider learning Python.

New openssh uploaded, along with updated gstreamer packages (0.8.8 - released today)

Just got a GMail invite this morning, have to say, it's very nice, why can't other webmail services be like this? It actually feels like a real application. Well done Google.

We're out for a Wetherspoon curry tonight with Liz & Jo from college. Planning to get some work done on my BS102 essay before walking down.

[Ref]

Congratulations Roger. Dunno about certified, maybe committed

Updated GIMP packages to restore Python plugin.

R.I.P. Crappy Old Laptop - it finally gave up the ghost today.

The GIMP and Gnumeric have both hit their next stable version, 2.2.0 and 1.4.1 respectively. Gnumeric is built, GIMP is building, and I'll upload them both, along with updated libgsf and librsvg later on.

Update: Note to self, log Python plugin build bug

Update 2: Blimey! Just noticed that my GIMP builds are linked from the official GIMP download page, and my Gnumeric builds are linked from it's downloads page.

Two weddings in a week! Fiona and Richard's today at college, and we were in the 'choir' for the signing of the register and during the eucharist. Another lovely day, and it's the first wedding I've ever been to that included a celebration of the eucharist.

We've finally put our tree up, only a week before the big day, feeling festive, although that may be the wine and bubbly from the wedding breakfast...

Last night went very well, a lot of fun was had by all. We ended up projecting Goom into the raftered ceiling of the chapel (where the disco part of the night was taking place. After the party had finished, we somehow managed to put the chapel, one of the lecture rooms where we'd "borrowed" a whole bunch of tables from and the dining room back how they're supposed to be.

Low impact today, which was just as well, as we were all incredibly tired. There was mulled wine in the common room at the 11am break (what a result) and our last lecture session was cancelled by John Kelly. After lunch we had our end of term eucharist, which was beautiful, and I rather hit my funky groove as we played out with Joy to the World.

Tonight is the college Christmas Bash, and I've been charged with looking after the music. Various people have given me CDs to rip, and tonight it's going to be a royalty free, Free Software delivered disco.

That's right folks, a randomised selection from 452 tracks, ripped to OGG using Sound Juicer will be played with Totem running on SuSE 9.1. The Goom visualisation plugin will be projected onto the walls, here's it in action on Welcome to the Jungle:

Screw installing Gallery - chmod 0777? No thanks!

Finally uploaded galleries of the two weddings and our house move.

Uploading updated AbiWord packages (version 2.2.2) and new packages of vino the integrated VNC server for GNOME, this is at version 2.8.1.

DSL is now up and running, and at 1M downstream, which is just lovely. It dropped a couple of times last night, which was a bit weird, but I'd specified the internet facing IP in the router's config, seems to not be dropping since I set it to obtain it by DHCP.

Now to setup Gallery on it...

DSL has been activated on the line (router synchronised this morning), should get authentication details today, and be up and running by the end of the day.

Oh yes, my DSL is provided by NSH Consultancy, a.k.a. my mate Neil - cheers pal!

Very good weekend. Cabled the house up with Cat 5 on Saturday, so now have ethernet connectivity in the living/dining room and the study. Don't need it anywhere else, unless at some point I decide to use the (huge) built-in cupboard in the guest room as a server room. We then finished off unpacking the living/dining room, so that's now ready to receive guests. Will be putting the tree up real soon, as soon as I sort out some power in that room. One thing we didn't really consider about the house is that power sockets are few and far between, so I'm going to have to liberate the two extension leads I have in my college room (since I really no longer need to have quite so much kit in here any more) and use one to provide power to the DSL router/switch and the other, for now, for the tree lights.

Yesterday was Carole and Andrew's wedding, and it was just a fantastic day. Everything about it was wonderful, and Carole's never looked so lovely. My sermon seemed to go quite well, although I was shaking like a leaf behind the lectern. Apparently one of the guests commented to Carole "If he's not a vicar, he should be". Encouraging

The reception was at Fawsley Hall, where Queen Elizabeth I was once entertained in the 16th Century. The food was wonderful, good wine, and the speeches came in at 32 minutes. Harsh, as I had 34 minutes in the sweepstake that JS had organised.

The happy couple are off the Sri Lanka today, looking forward to seeing them when they get back to Blighty. In the meantime, I have an essay on Hosea to attack, starting today.

We now have an activation date - December 15th, which gives me five days to get the Cat 5 cabling in from the main phone point to the study and the living room. Unless someone wants to donate a Wireless Access Point

Courses at St John's are either validated by Nottingham Uni, or the Open University. The course I'm on (BA (Hons), Ministry) is validated by Nottingham, but at the moment, the Open Uni are doing their inspection of the facilities here. As part of that, a couple of them just paid an inpromptu visit to my room accompanied by my course convener, John Darch.

Of course, this means that they had the extreme pleasure to see ULB GNOME on SuSE 9.1, with Firefox running, and wget grabbing the sources for GNOME 2.8.2 in one terminal window, and GARNOME building GNOME Office in another.

In other news, decided this morning in my Old Testament Prophets seminar that Ezekiel was a geek too. Came out of us reading Ezekiel 4: 1-3, and Doug commenting that it sounded like he was playing Warhammer - it doesn't get much more geeky that that, does it?

My current TODO list looks a little like this:

• BS102 & CTW102 essays.
• GNOME 2.8.2 (and any more recent stable versions of individual modules such as Evolution 2.0.3 - just out) on SuSE 9.1.
• Update hotplug for SuSE 9.1, and then finally get g-v-m etc. built and working.
• Upgrade notebook to SuSE 9.2
• Repeat all GNOME steps on SuSE 9.2

rm -fr control-center
!make

...and so it continues, have switched to downloading using FTP from ftp.mirrorservice.org to speed the process up a bit.

(Reported bug #160755)

DSL: Waiting for BT to give a date for them to fix the problems on the line that would hinder a 1M DSL rather than a 512k one. Apparently they tend to give one day's notice when they manage to come up with one.

Question for Pavel and Michael:

On a [mainly thinking about Windoze I'm afraid] machine with a dual output, will OpenOffice.org Impress support displaying a slideshow on display 2 in the same way that PowerPoint does? This would make life a lot easier for people who use dual output machines for displaying, as it's output 2 that tends to be connected to projectors. Mostly thinking about version 2.0 (and next time I have to boot into Windows, I'll download a beta and try it for myself)

cd garnome-2.9.2
make paranoid-install

I may live to regret this

Update: Build still progressing, have disabled building of gnome-volume-manager for safety (although if and when I build an updated hotplug for 9.1, I may redo it with g-v-m in place), and had to remove the PATCHFILES entry from the gnome-vfs Makefile, as the patch file didn't apply. It's now building libgnomeui.

(Can't report the patch problem on the list, still waiting for the DSL, and so the reappearance online of swamprat)

Update 2: Encountered GNOME bug #160693, lucky I found the existing bug entry before submitting it. I'll just be uploading a patch to fix it.

Update 3: After hitting, and patching against bug #160698, build has failed with control-center requiring libnautilus.pc which is no longer included in the nautilus 2.9 branch. Looks like we need a 2.9.x release of control-center.

[Full Story]

"According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, [Florida Republican Representative] Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations."

Essays handed in - several hours ahead of the deadline, I'm breaking all kinds of [personal] records here! In all seriousness, it's so good to actually have got off to what I hope is a good start.

Last week before Carole's wedding, and my sermon is pretty well formed in my mind. I'm not the kind of person to really write out a sermon, but I plan to maybe do myself some cue cards with my main points and scripture references on. Now, that's organised. No mention will be made on content until after the wedding in case Carole or Andrew happen to read this.

AbiWord 2.2.1 and Enchant 1.1.5 will be built and uploaded today.

Just finished my CTW101 essay, it and the BS101 one are due in tomorrow, so I have enough time to get it printed and do a college cover sheet for it.

Uploaded new gaim builds - version 1.1.0.

Just in case anyone's emailed me over the last week or so, because of the move, I'm not receiving mail at the moment, because all my mail goes through swamprat, my home server (because Amanda also had addresses at my various domains, so I can't just POP3 them from my hoster's server to my laptop), as soon as the DSL is active in our new house, I'll be catching up.

• Essay: 999 words.
• Me: Ill - full of cold, drinking lemsip.
• Morning: 2 hours reflection on previous occupation (how exciting!) followed by two hours on mission.

At least it's the weekend tomorrow.

I have now started actually producing words for my CTW101 essay.

I have also printed out my BS101 essay ready to hand it in.

Currently playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Around The World.

Right, DSL has been ordered for the Nottingham house, 1M downstream, 256k upstream, on a static IP. Why do they still not offer anything better than 256k upstream irrespective of your downstream speed?