Hmmm, well I have to say I wasn't that impressed with the programme. Some of the illusions weren't particularly impressive (especially when you're married to a former magician's assistant), and they only used the clips of us reading the passages to camera, didn't use any of the descriptions or unpacking of the passages that took the best part of a day to shoot (a waste of money on their part apart from anything else). But on the whole it was quite entertaining, and as they said at the beginning they were tricks inspired by the miracles, not attempts to replicate them. The second part, Tricks from the Bible is on at Easter, I'm in that as well.

That's right folks, tonight's the night. Channel 4, 21.00-22.00. The Magic of Jesus featuring yours truly.

Finished and printed out BS203. Had to edit about 150 words out to be within the word range.

Time to start looking at CTW201, as well as revising for the BS203 exam on the first day of term...

It's pretty well snowing here!

Have applied Mauricio's patch to add YaST2 support to the Smart package manager. Have added SUSE 10.0 Oss/Java/Extra repositories, and updated the channel information. Screenshot below shows Smart displaying the repository contents.

Selected a package to install, it was successfully downloaded and installed. Nice one Mauricio! Does it also support YOU repositories?

Merry Christmas to all who may read this.

In what I hope will become a nice family tradition, we are watching a couple of West Wing episodes. Specifically (and here's the point), we're watching the Pilot, and the Christmas episode of Season Six, Impact Winter. Ho ho ho...

• BS203: 1120 words
• Whoops, missed one change required in beagle.spec to allow it to build on x86_64. Not worth me issuing another update to fix it, so if you want to build it on that architecture, change line 154 from --libexecdir=/opt/gnome/lib/nautilus \ to --libexecdir=/opt/gnome/%_lib/nautilus \
• With Smart 0.41 being out, I made the switch to it, and I have to say I like it a lot. At some point, I'll be adding it to the list of ways to install my packages, along with a downloadable channel information file for usr-local-bin. Roll on YaST repository support

Uploaded updated beagle packages (0.1.4-0.1). Reasons:

• Make beagle-python a separate package
• The .src.rpm should now rebuild on x86_64 correctly now

Beagle 0.1.4 is out, and packages for 10.0 (i586 and i686) are being uploaded to the usr-local-bin repository for your installing pleasure. Feature-wise these packages are maxed out and include the Python bindings, which I may in future strip out as a separate beagle-python package.

Expect a rant soon about my CPU overheating when trying to build the GIMP, causing the build to fail. The OpenSUSE build server can't come quick enough...

Going to be starting my BS203 text study shortly...

After some discussion on the packaging list, Pascal has produced packages of Gaim 2.0.0beta1. I'm very glad for him to maintain packages rather than me, given the little time I have to dedicate to it these days, and they seem pretty stable. If you try them out, remember to send him feedback on them.

Sao Paulo v Liverpool
Today; Yokohama Stadium, Japan; 10.20 GMT.

Now that, rather inconveniently, clashes with Church this morning. So, the VCR is set, and the whole match will be recorded. My mobile phone is off, and we'll be playing a CD in the car to avoid hearing the result on the radio. If anyone tells me the score before I watch the match when I get home I will quite simply have to kill them!

Update: Okay, now I'm miserable. Sao Paulo 1-0 Liverpool.

Mauricio: bought myself a christma's gift ...

Now, let's ignore the fact that Christmas is spelt with an upper-case C, and go straight for the stray apostrophe. The way you've spelt it means a gift belonging to christma, whoever that may be. The correct usage would be Christmas gift.

May I recommend Eats, Shoots & Leaves (sic) by Lynne Truss?

We took Tia to the vet today because she'd been suffering a bit recently due to old age (she was about two years, three months old), and the result was that she was put to sleep - she basically had no quality of life and not long to go.

This is how we'll remember her - in her youth as a proud mum.

Was tonight (in fact, it's still going on...)

Forgot to take my camera, but it was a fantastic night. House band, The Apostles, absolutely rocked, and the guest/resident DJ (from Radio 1, Jo T's brother) is playing a storming set as I type.

Liverpool 3-0 Deportivo Saprissa.
The lads simply outclassed the Costa Rican side to make it to the final of the World Club Championship, as well as achieving a club record of eleven successive competitive clean sheets. Bring on Sao Paulo - with Crouch in this form I really fancy their chances. Was listening in our lecture with Ian and was found out later today - whoops!

Wow, Justin may not blog all that often, but when he does, he really goes to town...

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Mauricio. Mauricio's going to be working on adding YaST repository support to Smart, along with Pascal and Christoph. Also welcome to Larry. Larry's blog is packed with handy hints and tips on SUSE, as well as bits of news from the Novell world that he's picked up.

There was a power outage here at 05:39 GMT this morning. Annoyingly, home.rubberturnip.org.uk (web/mail server) came up okay when power was restored, but capybara.internal.rubberturnip.org.uk (DNS server, among other things) did not - its power supply (being about ten years old) does not respond to power being available (and its BIOS won't let it boot without a keyboard attached).

Normal service should now be resumed...

So, less than two weeks until Christmas. I actually found myself this afternoon referring to it as Incarnation-tide because I wanted to keep it in my consciousness that this is the time of year when we remember, but not necessarily when it happened, that 2,000 years ago God became a human being. That he was born in humility and became a refugee before growing up and living in a region that made him an outcast among his own people. He became a political prisoner who was tortured and ultimately brutally executed by an oppressive state before coming back from the dead three days later.

That's why, for me, at this time of year concern for the poor, the disenfranchised, victims of torture, the oppressed are brought into sharper focus.

Ahem, sermon over. (Buy Nothing Christmas)

The weekend's network issues totally killed my plans to spend some of yesterday building SUSE packages of GNOME Art (and the required Ruby bindings etc...).

Will do it as soon as I get a chance.

Last week of term starts tomorrow, College Christmas Bash on Thursday. Vacation here I come!

Some network upgrades were done overnight that affected the line that home.rubberturnip.org.uk is on. This screwed somethings up for me (in terms of outbound HTTP/1.1 being scuppered) and for anyone emailing me (in terms of SMTP routing being b0rked) so anyone who emailed me since around 23.00 GMT yesterday may have to resend.

W00t Christian! Expect a SUSE package to be available this afternoon (it's built, just need to upload it and the servers to sync up).

College service this evening, think everything I need to do is basically done. You never know though...

30^th December, 21:00, Channel 4: The Magic of Jesus, featuring yours truly.

Chelsea 0-0 Liverpool

Liverpool go through as group winners to the knock-out stage of the Champions' League after a match where really I think a draw was the fair result, and 0-0 the scoreline I predicted beforehand.

Getting ready to lead the college service Thursday night, I think it's fair to say that it'll have a bit of a Soul Survivor flavour to it

• Shoot went well, a lot of fun, journey home was hellish due to multiple signal failures in the Loughborough area
• Preached at 9.15 this morning on Gentleness, went okay but could have been a lot better
• Need to add 482 words to my PT202a reflection by 16:00 GMT tomorrow
• I want, want, want one of these!

In London tomorrow for a TV shoot for a programme to be aired on Channel 4 (I think sometime over Christmas). Very exciting - the first media work of this kind I've done. Will try to sport a SUSE pin on my shirt collar.