More work on GNOME:UNSTABLE this morning, resulting in fewer packages now failing to build. This, my friends, is a good thing.

Lunch at our functional local, the Cadland which was lovely.

Wrangling with the iPod and Banshee this afternoon. This is truly weird - it works fine on my laptop but on Amanda's desktop, it fails to transcode from Ogg to MP3. We have (apparently) matching GStreamer installs and yet, no joy. Oh, lazy web: before I report this as an apparent bug, if you can help me solve it, please get in touch.

Related to the iPod issue is a new LifeDrive issue. A while ago, I formatted the drive in it using the LD's own facility for doing so. Since then, hald won't mount it automatically when it's in Drive Mode. It detects that it is a drive and creates a device node (normally /dev/sdb1) but then doesn't actually mount it. This seems to be because the LD now misreports details of the drive. Specifically, the hal value fsusage is empty, when it should be filesystem. Because the device is created, I can then format it from within Linux and when I then enter Drive Mode again, it's detected and mounted. Hooray! But no! The problem is that if I do that, I then can't see it on the LD. Again, any help would be gratefully received (and yes, I've done a Factory reset).

Man, Banshee rocks my socks in a box by the docks.

Amanda bought herself an iPod today (Nano, 4G) and to configure it in the Less Free OS^TM is a right pain - plug it in, wait for ages while it gets detected and some software installed then ...

...

... yes, you guessed it - reboot! Even in XP! Then you've got to install iTunes etc etc etc ...

So, openSUSE 10.2. Plug it in. Banshee gets started with it there, ready to go. Drag tracks to it and synchronise. In terms of time, by this point I hadn't even rebooted in Windoze. All our music's encoded in Ogg Vorbis. This isn't a problem for Banshee though, oh no! It merrily converts them all before copying.

Expect to see the iTunes Music Store plugin for Banshee in my home repo and then in GNOME:Community soon.

Stanislav and I have been blitzing GNOME:UNSTABLE today and we're getting closer to having a full package set building with /usr as prefix and /etc as sysconfdir.

One source of annoyance to me is that the Qt4 bindings for poppler currently won't build on x86_64 because of hard-coded paths in configure. Reckon I'm going to have to patch it to use pkg-config correctly.

Found in a drawer today while looking for something completely different ...

Left: Red Hat Linux 4.0; Right: SuSE Linux 6.3

Red Hat 4.0 is, I think, the oldest version of Linux for which I own media. SuSE 6.3 (correct capitalisation for that version) was the first version of [open]SUSE I used. I was given that set of media when I went for my interview there around Christmas 1999.

Now, to see if I can find some really old Slackware media to trump them, I know I have a floppy disk box somewhere...

Well, this is a screencast of me using Beryl on openSUSE Factory with some effects enabled. Let me talk you through them ...

This is creating and closing a window with the Fire/Burn effect.

This is minimising and unminimising a window using the Magic Lamp effect.

This is fading and unfading a window using an effect, the name of which escapes me.

Here's the instructions on how to get and use Beryl. I'm using it with the NVIDIA drivers and starting automatically. You don't need to add beryl to the startup programs - beryl-manager takes care of that for you.

Stopping the screencast recording now so I can save it and reference it below before submitting.

See the movie here (Ogg Theora, 1280x800, 1.8M)

Well, like Justin, I'm going to try to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly. I've got really bad at keeping this up to date, so a new leaf needs to be turned over. The ironic thing is that quite often something will be in the news and I'll plan to post something about it (rare for me not to have an opinion after all) and then not get around to it.

Well, no more! This is a promise to vent my spleen and voice my opinion on the issues of the day. Should I fail to do so, well, you can have your money back(!)

A day spent mostly watching Christmas present DVDs. Watched Groundhog Day this afternoon. Incredibly, I'd never seen it before. For that reason, Amanda bought it for me - loved it! Bill Murray was just sublime, as always. Andie MacDowell gave what I consider to be her best performance (don't even mention that British movie) in spite of having more accent changes than costume changes. Five stars.

This evening, we watched season one and some of season two of Seinfeld. What more needs to be said - the sharpest sitcom ever to grace the small screen. The beautiful thing about this program is that, being a fan from the UK, and, having been a fan from the outset, one is able to quote or paraphrase the programme in every-day life and the vast majority of people will simply assume you're being very witty indeed.

In between, we watched some of the 2006 World Series of Poker on Bravo 2 - the $10,000 pot-limit Omaha championship won by Lee Watkinson.

Well it may be Christmas Day (and indeed, it is) but I've done a bit of openSUSE work anyway:

• Updated the laptop to the latest Factory, all went smoothly.
• I've not mentioned it here, but my home repo contains a testing package called gaim-unstable - you can probably guess what it is. Well, today I added a patch to allow GNOME Keyring support which was the one piece of functionality missing from the 1.5.0 packages. If you're brave, please give it a test.

From the currently growing Ogley clan, to all readers of my blog, a very happy Incarnation-tide.

R.I.P. James Brown.

Rowan seeks to keep Israel-Palestine high on the agenda.

Well, my openSUSE 10.2 box arrived, and I've installed it on Amanda's machine. Have to say it's a very easy install. The one annoyance I had was that, because I was doing a DVD install, I was unable to add network based add-on products (such as Build Service repos). This was basically down to the network interface not being brought up because of it not being a network install. I'll be mentioning this on the Factory list of course. It does mean that you have to finish the install and then log in before being able to add the NVIDIA drivers. That said, the %post scriptlet in them might have broken when installing without the xorg.conf in place.

Anyway, once I'd finished installing, adding the extra repos was a breeze. I installed Pascal's Smart packages. These already include a bunch of repos which I wanted, including PackMan. Having done that, I added the NVIDIA repo along with GNOME:Community and my home repo (Hint: just add the .repo file as a URL in Smart).

I also created a new user on the machine to see the default GNOME look and it's really smart and professional. openSUSE 10.2's a fantastic distro, the small annoyance allowed, if you've been waiting to take the plunge, now's the time to go for it.

Why do some people seem to think that in quite serious fog (obviously not a pea-soup situation, but still fairly thick) that side lights are all they need to turn on on their cars?

You have fog lights for a reason! Idiots!

Oh, and don't even get me started on the pillocks who didn't even have side lights on...

A successful night saw me win the 4-way tournament tonight. Commiserations to Chris, Mark and Amanda, but kudos for four games very well played, especially from the absolute beginner.

Tonight the unofficial college champion, tomorrow the world?!

• Sounds like Amanda's baby shower last night was a lot of fun - lots of useful (and cute) stuff for the baby too. Ante-natal class this morning was okay although the midwife was rather annoying. Her grammar was appalling (for example, writing What causes mothers to stop on the flip-chart as a question - note the lack of query mark!)
• Poker tonight.
• Tomboy in GNOME:Community has been updated to version 0.5.2 and there's a package of the latest Beagle in my home repo.

Well, it's going to be a busy week leading up to Christmas... Tomorrow my mother and auntie are visiting us during the day and then it's Amanda's baby shower c/o Focus in the evening. Tuesday we have an ante-natal class in the morning, then in the evening it's poker (£5 no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament). Thursday we're looking at a possible curacy (although I'm not disclosing where).

Going to be knackered by the time it's the weekend again.

So said Jo Moore, special adviser to Stephen Byers, then Transport Secretary, of 11 September 2001.

So, it would seem, thought the government of 14 December 2006. Lord Stevens had made it known well in advance that that would be the date he would publish his report into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It was therefore known what would be the focus of interest of much of the tabloid press^[1] (and, since the Express seems to still have a Diana story on its front page every other day, that didn't take a lot of working out).

So, with all that in mind is it a coincidence that also on that day, Tony Blair was interviewed by Scotland Yard over the loans-for-honours scandal and the Serious Fraud Office dropped an inquiry into BAe Systems and the alleged corruption involved in their dealings with Saudi Arabia^[2]? It is hard to attribute these things to mere coincidence. It is doubly hard to do so with a government as duplicitous as the current Labour one. The spirit of Jo Moore still walks the corridors of power, even if she herself does not.

^[1]In The Independent, it only made page eight, mercifully.
^[2] Apparently, this country is more interested in supplying arms to a repressive government such as that of Saudi Arabia than it is in fighting corruption in its own largest companies. Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?

Tonight is the college Christmas Bash (photos in the gallery soon after). It's a black tie affair and, when the photos are up, you can see my interpretation of black tie.

Had the final Hebrew session of term this afternoon and I think most of us left feeling pretty good about the progress we've made over the last ten weeks (of which we've only had sessions in eight due to other modules). Picked up the timetable for next term.

Amanda's having a baby shower next week, organised by some of Focus (the college spouses' group). Not sure which night it will be yet but hoping to organise a poker game for whichever night it may be.

• Shopping.
• Some trivial work on GNOME:STABLE - gnome-commander should build on 10.1 now. Another step towards a complete build on 10.1, but there are large hurdles to get over for some of the remaining packages.
• Chris and Bernie initiated a catch-up of our year at college (most of whom finished in the summer), so sent them all an update of where we are.

Because the name of the distribution has changed, starting with 10.2, to openSUSE (instead of SUSE), the path to the GNOME:Community repo for Factory is changing (as soon as the packages are built). Please update any references to http://software.opensuse.org/download/GNOME:/Community/SUSE_Factory or http://repos.opensuse.org/GNOME:/Community/SUSE_Factory to be http://repos.opensuse.org/GNOME:/Community/openSUSE_Factory

Miguel: You say that the guy from MIT had a date and then go on to say he reminded you of Comic Book Guy - surely the two are completely incompatible or, as he might put it, unrealistic!

• Very full day at college - five hours on Developing Preaching followed by placement group.
• Watched Liverpool lose 3-2 to Galatasary.
• Did some work on GNOME:STABLE
• GNOME:Community and my home repository now include openSUSE 10.2 repositories as well as 9.3/10.0/10.1 and Factory

• Friday was Amanda's last day at work - yay!
• Have added irrepressible.info to my site - this posts information that is censored somewhere in the world on the site which has a two-fold effect:
  1. It helps (in a small way) circumvent the censorship of countries that crack down on freedom of speech on the internet such as China, Vietnam, Iran, etc, etc
  2. It draws other people's attention to the fight for freedom of the speech on the internet, and provides a handy link to irrepressible.info, which is an Amnesty International initiative.
• GNOME:STABLE is coming together for 10.1 nicely, the gimp-unstable package in GNOME:Community has been updated to the latest version. Coming soon: a new abiword-unstable tree - haven't had one since SUSE 9.3.

Today is World Aids Day. This is why my site is red today.

Over 25 million people have already died from Aids. A further 40 million men, women and children are living with HIV^[1].

You can help stop Aids

^[1] Source: The Independent

Was all set to post a short HOWTO on getting a Realtek 8168 NIC working on openSUSE after Realtek released version 1.05 of their Linux driver which both builds and works. Was then trumped when I plugged in my ethernet cable and the card sprang to life using the r8169 module. Seems the openSUSE kernel packages were updated on November 15th and this included this update. See my message on the openSUSE list.

If you're using a version that's older than Factory/10.2, you may still need to compile the driver. In that case follow the link above and download the tarball. Unpack it and make sure you have the following packages installed:

• make
• kernel-source
• kernel-syms
• gcc

Make sure you're root and in the directory created by unpacking the tarball do the following:

• make - This will build and install the module, which is why you need to be root already.
• depmod -a - This sets up all the module dependencies correctly.
• modprobe r1000 - This loads the module.

Once all that's done, you can set up the card as normal in YaST.

The problem is that, because it's not provided by openSUSE as part of the kernel package, you'll need to rebuild it (make clean && make && depmod -a) whenever the kernel is upgraded.

This is a test

Poker night tonight. A six-person £5 no-limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament with some guys from college. Hopefully it'll be a good night, especially since quite a few people have expressed interest in being in future games.

The glib2 issue is now in bugzilla.

The server that hosts my mail at home.rubberturnip.org.uk and my photo gallery will be offline for essential maintenance. All mail for all of our domains will be queued by our ISP.

If you need to get in touch, and you know the address, please use my GMail address in the meantime.

Update: It's back online again.

Rock on! Aaron's joined the GNOME:Community crowd, so the latest Banshee packages are in there now.

Testing Tomboy 0.5.0 packages in my home repo before updating the version in G:C.

Update: The Tomboy packages are now in G:C

So far have moved the following packages from my home repo to GNOME:Community:

• gnome-themes-extras
• mail-notification
• sensors-applet
• tomboy

None of us can figure out why glib2 isn't building in GNOME:[UN]STABLE - and suffice to say it's blocking lots of other things as a result.

This week, I'm doing a week-long module (which means it's pretty well full-time) on Chaplaincy with John Coyne - very interesting so far.

A morning spent wearing my openSUSE team hat. Been working on #216352. Also finally logged the gnome-blog.desktop bug (#219794).

The various GNOME projects on the Build Service are now in existence, so I'll be moving some packages to GNOME:Community real soon.

Well, there's been some discussion on the Build Service list about GNOME stuff and, since that's a matter of public record through the archives, I'm going to mention a few things that are happening/will happen.

Firstly, there will be two 'official' Build Service repos. These will be called GNOME:STABLE and GNOME:UNSTABLE. You can probably work out what will be contained within them. The core GNOME packages that are included in numbered distro releases go in here. STABLE contains the versions that are in the current stable GNOME release and UNSTABLE those which are in the current unstable release. We, the GNOME team, will maintain these

In addition to these there will be GNOME:Community. This will, finally, replace the old usr-local-bin repository that I run, hosted elsewhere. It will contain packages that are not, currently, part of the core distro package set. I'm guessing we're going to be open to other community packagers being added to this.

Since I keep getting hassled to produce my holiday write up, here it is at last:

We went to Italy.

It was good.

I liked it.

Wanted from the community: Suggestions of where the menu entry for the non-applet version of GNOME Blog should go.

Currently it resides in System/Desktop Applet, but this just seems plain wrong. It's not a system tool and it's not an applet (at least in the GNOME sense, I suppose if you take applet to mean small application then yes, it is one). So, where should it go?

My suggestions are: Utilities/Editor or Internet/Insert Category Here. Your choice, or a write-in nomination on a postcard (well, email) to the usual address please.

Fred: you will make sure you file these in bugzilla, won't you?

At the same time, this is a note to myself, when I have time I must file my niggly gnome-blog.desktop issue along with a patch.

America goes to the polls on Tuesday (well, most of it does anyway) and, unlike previous US elections, I've not really said much about it. Anyone who reads my blog knows what my key issues are. As a Christian, I believe the Iraq war not to be just. I believe in the easing of poverty (and that it is government's job to facilitate this). I believe that we are stewards of the earth and that we should do all we can to combat climate change. I believe that it is not the government's job to enforce the perceived morals of a vocal minority.

In short, I believe that the Democratic party is the right choice both for the American people and the world at large. It's looking positive, people of America: you can make it happen. Get out and vote on Tuesday. Vote Democrat!

This is the text of an email I received today:

Subject: Regarding your blog entry: Novell, M$ and the openSUSE project
Dear James,

I take the opportunity from this specific entry at your blog to say that despite being out of the Suse community a couple of years now I keep on reading your blog because I really appreciate the job you do for OSS all these years and it is always good to see some clear thinking at moments like this one.

Keep on the like this.

Ignore the slightly ropey English (the sender's English being waaay better than my attempts at his native tongue) please, this was a great email to get. Thank you.

It turns out this is possible, but it requires some GConf-Fu!

1. Make sure you have the gconf-editor package installed
2. Open the following option from the Applications menu - System: Configuration: GNOME Configuration Editor
3. Navigate to /desktop/gnome/applications/main-menu/file-area
4. Edit the user_specified_apps key by double clicking on it. For example, if you want Evolution instead of F-Spot (WHY F-SPOT?!?!?!?), change the f-spot.desktop entry to evolution-2.8.desktop.

Update: Seems you can right-click on applications in the Application Browser (you get that by clicking "More Applications"

These are more musings on this subject, prompted by a short (so far) email discussion with a friend of mine at Novell (I'll not name the person in question, just to be on the safe side).

My biggest concern is that it implicitly says that there are patent issues that people need to be protected from. Once that is conceded then other Linux/FLOSS users are vulnerable to litigation and royalties now, and Novell customers are vulnerable once this agreement passes. The reason I say this is that courts, should it come to that, wouldn't care about in intricacies, they'll listen to the company with the most lawyers - guess who that would be.

The other thing is that these things don't happen overnight, negotiations toward this agreement must have been happening for months at least and that seems duplicitous to say the least.

At the moment I'm inclined to give the openSUSE project the benefit of the doubt, if not Novell. I will probably be calling for greater independence from Novell for the project this coming week such as its own Bugzilla etc (even if these things are hosted by Novell).

The bottom line in terms of the community is that, in all likelihood, Novell have blown whatever goodwill they have had in the space of a day. That's really sad for the community. They may also have signed their own death warrant - no-one has ever got into bed with Microsoft and come out in good shape - which is sad for most people connected with Novell, with the possible exception of their major share holders should it be a buy-out that sees their demise.

This makes me more than a little bit nervous. I just saw the news this morning - didn't get any tech news yesterday - so I've not looked deeply into it but phrases like "patent coverage" make me twitchy. If this agreement is in place until 2012, what happens in 2013? Remember software patents are bad, so any agreement that is based on them is tainted too.

Miguel has a list of links relating to the story.

Discussion on opensuse-factory regarding the removal of tiny-nvidia-installer from the distro. Ends up discussing the legal implications of shipping NVIDIA drivers. Incidentally, the current method of installing them is a RIGHT PAIN! Now, I'm able to use them, and that's fine, it's just an annoying delay when the kernel package is updated to have to reboot (have to do that anyway for the new kernel) and select runlevel 3. Then rebuild the drivers and enter runlevel 5. For a non-technical user, they're better off not having hardware acceleration and sticking to the nv driver.

If NVIDIA GPLed the drivers, they could either be integrated into the main kernel tree or legally patched in by distros.

Alternatively, if some intrepid kernel hackers (Greg?) were to attempt to write pukka GPL kernel drivers for NVIDIA cards, this could allow the nv driver to be extended. This would probably a seriously popular piece of code because NVIDIA chipsets are so prevalent in the market.

Have made some changes to various packages in my repo today. This means that a bunch of expansion errors have been fixed. Abiword, Beagle and GIMP Unstable now all build on FACTORY. This makes me very happy indeed.

I installed 10.2 Beta1 yesterday and I have to say I think this is going to be a really good distro when it's finished. In the meantime, I've filed seven bugs so far today:

• 216129
• 216313
• 216317
• 216319
• 216328
• 216352
• 216353

One gripe I have, and I'll raise this on a list because it's not a bug, is that the traditional three part menu (Applications/Places/System) was replaced automatically by the new SLED style GNOME Main Menu (recently proposed for GNOME 2.18) without me asking. Now, I like the new menu up to a point but I don't want it to be forced upon users. I knew about it, but seeing it there where the old one had been confused me at first. Imagine the reaction of a user who doesn't know about it, upgrades and it's all different.

My other gripe about it is 'Favourite Applications'. It's not immediately clear (or indeed even a day later) how I change this list. My question, therefore, is whose favourites are these? They should be mine, I suspect they're Novell's.

Finally, the Application Browser accessed by clicking More Applications on it is rubbish! What would be much better would be if clicking that button spawned the Applications menu.

The new menu looks like this:

Finally got around to installing the Flash 9 Beta and sure enough, YouTube is now usable, video and audio in sync.

This means that you can now enjoy this video of Lex leading worship at Week A this year. The reason I chose this video is that at 00:30 or so in it, you can also see the work done by our team on the big screen.

Yes, I know it's entirely unscientific but among those people who read the technology section of BBC News Online and could be bothered to vote, Firefox is the more popular browser. What surprised me was the number of people who said they use both.

Update to my earlier post...

It's not just SSH I can't do, it seems the only open ports here are 80 and 443.

Current repository status: mostly good. Things that require PyGTK on Factory are blocking on bug #214046 at the moment - that's beagle and gimp-unstable.

Spent the evening with Carole and Andrew last night. Was just lovely to see them and the food was excellent.

I'm posting this from Presence on Watford High Street, a cracking shop and coffee house where a lot of my friends work and which provides free wi-fi. Only thing is I don't seem to be able to SSH home for some reason which means I can't check my email.

openSUSE 10.2 Beta1 is out, and feel the goodness: Firefox 2.0, GNOME 2.16.1, KDE 3.5.5, X.Org 7.2RC etc etc etc. Think it's time I moved to this branch rather than 10.1...

So, what did I do yesterday?

Well, I had a couple of hours of Acts and Mission at college and finished the day with a research induction session looking toward dissertations and all that malarky. In the evening, we watched some telly and I 'cashed' in a play money Hold'em tourney on PokerStars.

Think by the end of the day I'd come down with Amanda's cold and this morning confirmed that. Pah!

[Ref]

This evening, I shall post an entry which will discuss what I've done today and then I'll add it to the blog of Britain. If you're in Britain, I suggest you do the same. Who knows what future generations will make of it, but I bet they won't really care all that much.

[Ref]

Justin: What model of Palm and what method are you using to blog from it? I occasionally SSH from my LifeDrive to my web server and vi myself a blog entry.

A while ago there was some discussion on the Factory list about the compositing manager in Metacity. I've built packages that enable this (and the required package libcm), which intrepid testers can grab from the Factory section of my repository. When I next deal with mail at home, I'll post the same message on the list.

Have removed the multisync-gui package from my repository, it's been moved into the main OpenSync repo and at some point may well replace the current FACTORY package. The result of this is that my repo no longer depends on the OpenSync package.

Thanks to The Independent for this quote:

It is so much cheaper to alleviate poverty, put kids in school, fight disease, build government and economic capacity in a poor country, than it is to fight a war
Bill Clinton to the Labour Party Conference

Well said, Mr President.

On my way between Nottingham and Beeston his afternoon, I decided to use my LifeDrive to see how many open and unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots I could find. There were quite a few. For people who live in the area, this was along the 36 bus route, down Derby Road and then wiggling into Beeston town centre. This is an unscientific and totally non-exhaustive survey. Nevertheless, my results are below. They're not in order, simply the order I remember them and this is in no way intended to encourage people to use these hotspots, which I imagine are on people's domestic DSL connections, but to encourage the owners to tighten them.

• default
• GEORGE
• henry
• chester home
• Several called belkin54g
• ineedbroadband
• At least a couple called linksys
• NETGEAR
• ProximusPrime

Of the above, the bus lingered long enough in the coverage area of a couple for me to get an IP. There may well be others just along that one bus route that the bus passed before I could pick them up.

People of Nottingham, secure your Wi-Fi!

Glad Roger pointed this out. The government continues to use and abuse the media (who, in some cases, are all to willing to help) to keep the ambient fear level in society high. Why, you may ask, would a government want to do that? Well, the more afraid of whoever the current boogeyman is (it's Muslims^[1] at the moment, twenty years ago it was the Irish^[2]) the population are, the more willing they are to accept the increasing erosion of their civil liberties. Detention orders, identity cards, biometric passports, increased surveillance, the list goes on and they're just issues that occur to me off the top of my head.

This is what lies behind the many operations against alleged terrorist suspects. This is why Jean Charles de Menezes was shot, why the house in Forest Gate was stormed, why the tanks rolled into Heathrow and why there are still restrictions on hand-luggage on transatlantic flights. The thought process they want to instill in you is "okay, so de Menezes was innocent but he could have been a terrorist, the people arrested at Forest Gate were normal, law-abiding citizens but they could have been terrorists".

The government is very happy, even eager, to make sure we all know how many people have been arrested under anti-terrorism legislation because they know that, if that is all they say to us, the assumption will be that they must be the real thing, right? Well, wrong. Of the 1000+ Muslims arrested as alleged terror suspects only just over 2% have ultimately been convicted and most of them not of terrorism charges but other, minor, offences discovered in the process^[3].

What Abu Izzadeen said (well, shouted) to Dr Reid was absolutely right. He, and the government he represents are enemies of Islam, however much they protest to the contrary. Unfortunately, it will also send exactly the message Reid wanted to the country.

Update: Forgot to mention, it seems that 'torture may be worse now in Iraq than under Saddam Hussein'. More for us to be proud of.

^[1]I do believe that the US and UK governments want to paint a picture of all Muslims being involved in terrorism
^[2]In the same way as they did with the Irish
^[3]Note, this is not due process, but why let a small thing like the law get in the way of a conviction?

Apologies to Fred and Narayan for the delay in switching to their new blog locations on Planet SUSE, it's now done.

Anyone got a spare 5,000 Euro?

Well, it's about time I said this here for anyone reading this to see. Amanda's pregnant and the baby is due at the end of January. We're both very excited about this new stage in our life together and as a family and look forward to the, hopefully healthy, arrival of our son or daughter.

Wrote some code yesterday! Wrote a Perl script to produce the necessary copyright information for the summer events by parsing the Presenter song lists and song files. To say the code is ugly would be quite accurate, but it did the job. Might produce a generic one that would produce the information churches need to provide to CCLI.

Pimp my bug: Novell bug #206659.

ISO images are downloaded and ready to go:

ogley@riggwelter:/home/install/ISO/openSUSE/10.2/Alpha4> md5sum *
1adbb29f42572edc67ff7dd25848be6b  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-Addon-BiArch.iso
1ce1d5963a18ec0cb2c8bfb450077e70  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-i386-CD1.iso
4e9781a8e1f4af9cb67857e5c3d81761  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-i386-CD2.iso
a60613037c2a7b38b67c0014adee0f7d  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-i386-CD3.iso
54e9d9d2ef0286e57457a690b7db3a12  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-i386-CD4.iso
bb24d4c25126c43d9b499f88050f360f  openSUSE-10.2-Alpha4-i386-CD5.iso

So, either over the weekend or, more likely, next week I'll be installing it.

Alex released Tomboy 0.4.1 less than 24 hours after I built 0.4.0 . The packages are currently building.

I forgot about the non-OSS ISO that forms part of each Alpha/Beta release, I may grab the images later on.

Updated some packages yesterday. tomboy's now at 0.4.0 which is the version in GNOME 2.16. gimp-unstable got a rebuild because of a small mistake I'd made in the script that launches it correctly when parallel installed with the stable gimp package. The mistake meant that double-clicking an image didn't open it in the GIMP, it merely ran the GIMP with no arguments. mail-notification had an error in the .spec file that meant it wouldn't build on FACTORY, this is now fixed.

openSUSE 10.2 Alpha 4 is out and, like FACTORY, includes a GNOME 2.16 beta. Expect 2.16 in 10.2 final. Starting to think about moving to the Factory tree or the alphas. Big thing to check before I do is whether wlan-kmp is included, as well as the other gubbins needed to run my ipw3945, I suspect not.

Added a hackergotchi-style head of my large Geeko to entries on Planet SUSE from anyone who doesn't have their own. I give you Geekogotchi:

That's right folks, I found a new reason to hate them! You see, they think I'm a spammer (I'm not, of course). Or, at least, their dumb-ass filter does. Basically it seems to be any mail sent from my home server. It can't be (I hope) that it's on a blacklist because it's not an open relay or anything dumb like that. Far as I can make out, it must be because the mail headers reveal that the server runs Linux or that I use a non-Microsoft MUA.

It's an issue for me because I know a number of people who use Hotmail and they won't have been receiving mail from me. Suffice to say I've mailed their support department about it. I'll post any reply here of course...

Update: With the help of Nick, I've run a couple of tests. Nick's employers use an off-site spam filtering service that uses SpamAssassin. I sent a mail to Nick using Evolution, and one using mutt. Each mail basically scored zero in SA's tests. Furthermore, I checked the SpamHaus blacklists and neither my machine, nor my ISP are listed.

This really is beginning to look like Microsoft abusing its position, I await their response.

In light of my new found love for Realtek, here's a list of the hardware that's still an issue for me in my new laptop:

• ipw3945 WiFi adaptor
  Mostly working, provided I don't try to make my WAP support 802.11b as well as g. See Novell bug #202619.
• Integrated SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro reader
  This is a Ricoh R5C822/R5C592 host adapter. The module to support this was merged with the main kernel tree starting with 2.6.17-rc1 and versions from 2.6.18-rc1 onwards contain a rewrite the followed a major audit of the code following the release of the specification of the interface. This means it should work with Factory/10.2.
• Internal modem
  Who cares?
• The various 'special' buttons around the keyboard
  See the modem comment

Mad About You just started on LivingTV - happy happy joy joy...

This morning, I emailed Realtek's NIC support line to ask about the Linux driver they offer for download for the 8168 NIC in my laptop. It's a source-code download (nice one) but it has never compiled on SUSE (not so nice one).

Having sent the email, I went out, had some lunch and did some shopping. I returned to a reply from one of Realtek's Tech Support guys. It wasn't the standard "thank you for your email, we're looking into it" email either, it had a tarball of the latest beta version of the driver attached. This update had clearly (based on the changelog) been produced as a result of my email. Best of all, it worked. I built the module and installed it. Then I fired up YaST and was able to configure it.

Now, to try and determine the license, line 98 of r1000_n.c reads

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");

However, no copy of the GPL is included. If it turns out that it is GPL (or at least OSI approved), I'd love to see this included in openSUSE for 10.2.

...oh I believe in Yesterday! I do - I was there, it really happened.

Morning was 'fun'. There was a coffee morning at college, part of the welcome assault for new students. I was planning to go but also hoping to not get rained upon. When the rain stopped I seized upon my chance but had barely got to the end of the road when the heavens opened again. Still, it was nice to meet some of the new arrivals.

Popped in to see Steve and Ali on the way home and to meet Grace who was three weeks old yesterday - she's tiny!

Did some housework in the afternoon, I'm doing what I'm calling an Autumn Clean (since it's not Spring right now) and then started looking into my wlan issue. In addition to the mailing list thread I linked to the other day, I posted one of my own. Turns out that the wlan-kmp-* packages contain quite an old version of the ipw3945 module (even in Factory) and the way that the packages are built meant that I wasn't able to simply rebuild the IEEE802.11 subsystem and module and slot them into place (the ieee80211* modules are also quite old).

Need to find out if we can get that package and the kernel package updated. Time to post a bug...

Update: It's now bug #202619.

Congratulations to Michael and J. on the arrival on Mirriam Julia Mercy. One question: What channel had back-to-back All Creatures... at that time of night?

Well, having sorted out my Ogg Vorbis playback issues on the Life Drive yesterday, I decided to address the issue of it not talking to my Wireless Access Point. Initially I thought it might be a problem with it authenticating via WPA-PSK. It then occurred to me that it might be that it doesn't talk 802.11g. Checked the specs and sure enough, it only supports .b.

So, logged into the router/WAP and changed its settings to support .g and .b. The LifeDrive went right ahead and connected once I provided the authentication key. Problem solved.

Well, not quite because with the WAP accepting .b and .g, my laptop (which frankly it's more important to be able to use Wi-Fi with) only communicates at 1Mb/s rather than the 54 I'd expect. I confirmed that this wasn't just nm-applet getting confused in reporting the speed by pinging a machine on my LAN, the response times with .b and .g enabled were about twice those with just .g enabled.

The wireless adaptor is an Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG which uses the ipw3945 module and I've confirmed that it's not the adaptor itself that uses the slower speed when both are available by booting in to the Less Free OS^TM and it connects at 54Mb/s then.

I've looked at the README and checked the mode, normally it is mode 7 (802.11abg) but even if I set it to mode 4 (802.11g only) it still only connects at 1Mb/s with both types enabled on the WAP. One interesting thing is that when I enable both types on the WAP, nm-applet reports the connection strength as being 60% or so whereas normally it is 90%+ in this room.

I've searched a lot and come up with no more help, so I ask the Planet SUSE/Planet GNOME UK communities if they are able to help. If so, please get in touch.

Oh yes, if it helps, it's roughly the same as this problem but the suggested solution - iwprive - is what I've tried to no avail.

Users of Mad Penguin who are syndicated on Planet SUSE (Fred, Narayan) should drop me an email as soon as they know what arrangements they're going to make for their blogs once MP apparently goes the way of the (mad) dodo.

Had a lovely day yesterday. We had lunch together at the Cadland before heading over to Derby. We spent the afternoon with Liz and it was just wonderful to see her. When it got to the evening we popped round the corner to Simon and Jo's and, once they'd put the boys to bed, we had a glass of wine and ordered chinese food.

Today addressed the issue of Ogg Vorbis playback on my LifeDrive. Discovered that the bundled version of Pocket Tunes that comes with it doesn't support plugins (you have to buy the Basic or better version from them) and so can't play Ogg files¹. A quick hunt around revealed two real possibilities. The first, which would be my preference if it supported background play, is the Open Source Core Pocket Media Player. Since it doesn't support background play, I've gone for the free version of AeroPlayer. I don't have any MP3s, so I don't need to pay for it. When I plugged the LifeDrive in in Drive Mode to copy music to it I discovered something odd. In spite of the fact that it reports 2.3G of free space on the drive, the OS reports the external drive that it is mounted as as having only 50.8M free! No idea why...

¹How bizarre - the free version supports MP3 which should require a royalty payment whereas to play the royalty-free Ogg Vorbis, one must pay!

Many thanks to Bjørn Lie who gave me the information I'd requested. The yast2-gtk packages have now been updated and build on x86_64 too. If you install it, remember to read the contents of /usr/share/doc/packages/yast2-gtk before trying to use it.

We're home and our house now has a drive - yay!

Pack-down last night went well with just a minor hiccup when the crew dealing with the kids work venue pulled the power on the CTP machine in there while I was taking an image of the Presenter install so that we can ensure that all righteousness is fulfilled regarding copyrights.

Popped in to Bristol on the way home to see Caz, lovely to see her although then getting out of Bristol was a pig. Still, we made it.

yast2-gtk packages are now in my Build Service repo, they don't build on 10.0 because they require the new libzypp based package manager. They're available for 10.1 and FACTORY on i586, but they fail on x86_64 with the following:

rm: cannot remove `/var/tmp/yast2-gtk-0.1_r284-build/usr/lib64/YaST2/plugin/libpy2gtk.la': No such file or directory

That file has been installed into /usr/lib/.... Now, I don't have an x86_64 box to check this on so can someone tell me if that's correct or if lib64 is correct for where YaST sticks its plugins. One way or the other, once I know which it right I'll fix either the %build or %install section of the .spec accordingly.

Rather than try to use a text editor and FTP client, an SSH client with a half-decent soft QWERTY keyboad will do the job.

Christoph has very kindly sen me he spec and tarball that will form the yast2-gtk package du to land in FACTORY soon. In a day or so it'll be in my Build Service repo for 10.1 an 10.0, assuming it builds on them both of course.

Yes, that's right folks, tomorrow I get to go home. I'm currently sat in the lounge on site, trusting that at some point the power's going to come back on and bring the wi-fi back with it.

Had some fun yesterday repatching composite cables in the big top yesterday. Someone had managed to lose the video feed on the DVD channel to the mixer/switch. We still had the audio feed to the sound desk^[1] but no pictures.^[2] Anyway, it was a right old mess down the back of our desk, but after much cable tracing, the connections were made and we had life.

Had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Kitto, who it turns out knows Mordecai Vanunu, someone for whom I have nothing but total respect. Carolyn and her husband Fuzz have been here doing some seminars. Fuzz also occasionally pops in to MCYM to do a bit of teaching. MCYM is based at St. John's.

^[1]Ooh, the power came back then. But only briefly.
^[2]Back again!

Summer of Code is over and Ricardo's announced YaST-GTK. I'll package it up when I get home. Don't think I'll have time today. This is great news though and fantastic to see a project I proposed come to fruition. Next step: A usable YaST-GTK for installation.

Just uploaded the first batch of photos from Soul Survivor to the gallery. Haven't added any comments to them yet, but I will - I promise.

YouTube/Stakes on a Plain goodies:

• Foxes on a Kayak
• Aardvarks on a Tank
• All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us

We're now into Momentum, which is the conference for students and young adults. Yesterday was the first day and we had the worst rain I've seen in a number of years. It was actually cascading through the roof of the big tent and a number of venues (as well as people's tents) were flooded out.

An interesting thing, that I have a couple of photos to prove, is that in the speakers/team leaders' lounge, there is a much larger number of laptops running UNIX based OSs than Windoze. Mostly Macs, but at least one Linux

Jakub blogged about a relatively unknown feature of the GIF standard that allows the use of local palettes. You can add the 'Blazer' browser on PalmOS to the list of browsers that have a funky ZX Spectrum style loading effect for that sort of GIF.

With reference to Joe, how long until SoaP is confused with SOAP?

(This was originally prepared on my Palm yesterday, but it turns out life's just too short to try blogging on a PDA...)

I'm blogging this backstage at the last night of Soul Survivor B and I just had a very weird experience. A guy from SS New Zealand told me that one of the team down there wanted to know if I blog my backstage experiences... Could it be that I have joined the ranks of the Minor Christian Celebrities (MCCs)?

Look forward to my photos of the events, coming soon...

Final day of Soul Survivor B, Momentum starts tomorrow.

Beagle 0.2.8 is out and I've added it to my Build Service repo. At some point I'm sure it'll start to build and I can start to figure out which patches have been folded into the main tree.

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Martin and Will.

Oh yes, the new Beagle packages also include a new sub-package, beagle-thunderbird, which contains the new ThunderBird backend.

Cool thing for today: Using your Palm to SSH to your home server because your laptop is otherwise engaged. Next step is to install an FTP client on it so I can blog from it too

That's where I am, where I've been since Wednesday. We went down to Amanda's parents' on Tuesday and then up to site the following day. The event's going well - about 10,000 people at Week A and even more booked in for Week B (which starts tomorrow) apparently. CTP started hairily (that's not a real word, I know) with equipment not working and too many PCs dieing at inconvenient times but it now seems to be going swimmingly.

It's been great catching up with people who we've not seen in a while (and in one case since university!) and they're far too numerous to list here.

So, what's been going on in the world while I've been offline? We have access to TV news so I've been monitoring the situation surrounding the alleged terrorist plot as much as I can. This is very convenient timing for western governments who want to push through a weakened resolution at the UN. It also serves to help those who want to keep the people in a state of terror. That's not the 'terrorists' that are banged on about ad nauseum by those in authority but rather the 'hawks' within the UK and US governments and security services. A handy link to Roger's blog with a list of other events in the last few years that have resulted in some yolk and white on the faces of the security services. It also helps John Reid who, in Blair's absence, has supplanted Prescott as the person apparently in charge. Could it be that the Blair camp in the Labour party are using this event (be it real or concocted) to push their candidate for the leadership? Surely not even they would be so craven. Would they?

The terrorists continue to bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age and the UN (well, mostly the US and UK actually) continue to do nothing to try to stop them. Thank goodness we now have a resolution that requires them to withdraw, but it doesn't require them to cease 'defensive' operations. Now I have no problem with Israel, or any country, being able to defend itself, but (a) that's not what Israel have been doing, they have been bombing civilians, especially when those civilians have been trying to escape the bombs and (b) Israel describes the whole war as a defensive operation, whose job is it to determine what is and isn't defensive? It should be the UN but is the US really going to allow any vote that might cause Israel to be censured?

openSUSE is one year old - happy birthday to this rocking, kick-ass project. Celebrate by downloading the latest version.

It's 1-1 at half-time in the Community Shield - come on you reds!

With reference to my previous entry, I often get emails when I post screenshot type things asking what the icons on my panel are, so from left to right in that short, you can see:

• Beagle search
• Tomboy notes
• Gaim
• Screen resolution changer
• Mail Notification
• GNOME Power Manager
• NetworkManager
• Volume Control
• Connect to a remote server
• Pilot Sync monitor
• Workspace switcher
• Clock
• GNOME Blog editor

Look at the date in this image:

I'm 30! I'm officially old.

Going out for a meal with a few people connected with college tonight.

Had a few more songs sent through for the conferences, they're all now set up in Presenter. We head down to Somerset tomorrow for the events.

Planning to add the latest gimp-unstable version to my Build Service repo. Anyone who wants to test the multisync-gui package from there needs to use the OpenSync repo as well.

...is my middle name.

Mowed the lawn this morning, no mean feat given the size of our garden, then set about doing some more work using the Build Service. The repo is in the process of being reorganised, but basically you want Factory, 10.1 or 10.0 depending on your SUSE version. The following packages are currently available from this repo:

• mail-notification
• multisync-gui (note, this package also requires you to be using the OpenSync repo
• tomboy

Not all packages are available on all SUSE versions yet.

Yes, that's right folks, mail-notification is now in my home repository on the Build Service. If you're using 10.0, 10.1 or FACTORY on i586 or x86_64 then you can get it.

The repo is here and you can either download directly or add the repo to your favourite package manager.

I finally got around to getting myself a Build Service account and I have to say it's really nifty although I've got to add BuildRequires lines to all my spec files. I'll do that as I move my packages over to the service. At the moment I'm trying to get mail-notification 3.0 to build for 10.1.

We've opened #openSUSE-GNOME on freenode for GNOME discussion. If you're interested in GNOME on openSUSE then pop in and say 'hi'.

Well, it's taken the best part of the day, but all the songs I've been sent so far for the conferences are now set up for Presenter. Still waiting on others but least I'm not behind.

IRC meeting regarding GNOME packaging tomorrow. Been trying JHBuild and it's failing on libXrender at the moment because it's looking for x11.pc which isn't provided by xorg-x11-devel on SUSE 10.1.

Last episode of the West Wing.

Tears.

All the best to President Santos as he takes office.

Nine inaugural balls!

After Soul Survivor, I'm planning to watch every single episode of every season (156 in total) back to back before the start of term. Stay tuned for the Great West Wing Marathon.

"What's next?"

I promise to write about my holiday soon, it's going to take a while to do though. Anyway, Tuesday night Steve and Ali put a team together to do the pub quiz at the Cadland and we won! Finally!

Thanks to my mum for her early birthday present for me, a Palm LifeDrive. All I need to figure out now is why it won't talk to my WPA-PSK encrypted Wi-Fi router. It can see it but the signal icon seems to suggest it thinks the signal is basically zero and then it fails to connect. So, oh LazyWeb, can you tell me what I might need to do?

I can't help but be amused anytime I see one of the GNOMErs talk about the WSOP. I always initially think of the other WSOP

LifeDrive Update: It works fine with the unencrypted Wi-Fi connection at Caffé Nero so it must be something to do with the encryption. Interestingly my laptop (well specifically the wlan adapter's microcode) isn't happy at Nero at the moment. Since the last kernel update when I come here there are loads of errors dumped to /var/log/messages about problems with the microcode by NetworkManager. No problem whatever at home though. Weird. And it's not about the connection either, happens even before it attempts to connect.

I've uploaded my photos from Italy to the gallery. They're divided into four galleries.

Sermon last night went pretty well although I was a little long (32 minutes by my reckoning).

Will write-up the holiday soon.

When I powered off my mail server before going away, I somehow didn't consider the possibility of a 12hr (or whatever time scale) timeout on mail delivery. It seems I've lost all mail for the week. If you emailed Amanda or me during that time, would you please resend it?

Holiday notes coming real soon, along with around 150 photos, but got a sermon to finish right now.

Rob: From opensuse-commit...

+- Update to NetworkManager 0.6.4
+       - Lots of bugfixes
+- Drop upstream patches
+- Remove libnotify support and drop dependencies

Why remove libnotify support? I for one find the little popups very handy...

Spent the morning mowing the lawn (see the webcam) and trimming (significantly) the hedges and now I'm in a small amount of pain. Playing golf this afternoon which might help - getting some movement in the shoulders.

Big shout out to Andy and Liz who will be joining us at St. John's in the autumn. They're currently in Africa and it's good to read what they're up to.

Waterfall by the Stone Roses on 6music

Jeff:
As usual great to hear things from the horse's mouth as it were, but just wanted to respond to what you've said. This is in no particular order and entirely off the top of my head.

You say that people aren't interested so much in the kernel but more in the services provided. I agree with you to a point. The kernel does matter to people. The reasons it matters are in terms of performance. A poor kernel (be that in terms of speed, memory management, I/O performance, stability or whatever) passes on its defects indirectly to whatever runs above it in user space. This is one of the main reasons people switch from less free kernels (including Netware) to Linux. It has a profound impact upon TCO, which for suits is the bottom line, and uptime, which is one of the key points of interest for techies.

Please be careful singing the praises of ZENworks. Many people who have installed SUSE 10.1 have experienced problems with this package. Now, I know that updates are being tested and becoming available but it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. My advice to anyone using 10.1 would be to abandon ZENworks/YaST for software management and updates and use Smart (included in the distro in the smart-* packages, or you'll do better to grab Pascal's packages and get some channels pre-configured).

I hope you know that when you use words such as leverage people find it hard to take the rest of what you say seriously, irrespective of how much sense you make.

All that said, always good to read what you have to say.

From this Friday I shall be out of the country for eight days. I'm not taking my laptop and I shall be shutting down the servers at home. Mail for rubberturnip.org.uk, usr-local-bin.org, jamesthevicar.com and amandaloveshamsters.com will be queued by my ISP and the main website will obviously remain available but the photo gallery will be offline as will the webcam.

When I get back, I'm anticipating having a lot of mail to deal with, so please don't be surprised if I take a while to respond to anything I get sent.

Updated packages of AbiWord to 2.4.5 (i586/i686). At the moment the following plugins are missing: Link Grammar; MathView; Aiksaurus; GDA and XHTML is built without all options. I'll be working on adding as many of them to the next build as possible. This week, sermon preparation for when we get back from Italy is going to be my priority though.

Did something I should have done a long time ago this morning. I set my DNS server up to act as a DHCP server as well instead of using my DSL router for the task, given the router's limited feature set in terms of DHCP.

I'd actually never done this before (hard as that may be to believe), so I referred to the relevant chapter in the book (the server runs 9.x) and it was just a breeze. Thanks to whichever of Justin and Roger wrote that chapter.

Have spent most of today doing housework. Well, specifically washing up because I'd managed to let it get a bit out of control. Also had my hair done this morning. Gosh, what an exciting life I lead.

Down in Watford and St. Albans tomorrow. Meeting with the DDO in the afternoon and popping in to the offices in the morning to touch base ahead of the conferences. Having lunch with Hils which will be nice.

Had an email yesterday from JPR about GNOME packaging and stuff. Should be having an IRC meeting next week sometime to discuss it.

I think I need to get out more:
<Riggwelter> Hmmm, the CPU fan in my DNS server just dropped by a few RPMs by the sound of it...

Been looking at the notes on the YaST2-GTK+ project for the Summer of Code. Good to see progress being made. I've downloaded the code and it builds and even runs!

Glad to note that the target date for this is the autumn with inclusion pencilled in for 10.2. I'll look into producing packages for 10.1 when it's nearing readiness.

Wow, what a weekend. We've done both London and Derby's ordinations yesterday and today (photos in the gallery). Was amazing to see Jo, Liz, Simon, Mike P and Sarah S undergo the ontological change.

The London ordination clashed with the match. I was listening to it on fivelive. Still haven't seen any of the game and I suspect I'm now at the stage where I'm unlikely to see anything like extended highlights. Anyway, seemed to me that once England went down to ten men they were in the ascendancy. Sounded like Gerrard started playing in a role more like that he plays at Liverpool and became the driving force. Someone needs to have a serious talking to Rooney though.

Anyway, the interesting thing was that the winning penalty coincided exactly with the dismissal from the Bishop of London. Afterwards we went to Jo's post-ordination party, along with Pete Broadbent, among others.

Today was the ordination of Liz and Simon to minister at St. Alkmund's, Derby. A much smaller-scale affair followed by a lovely buffet lunch at the church.

Update:Fixed bad HTML that made this entry make no sense whatsoever.

Vague invitation to speak at Notts LUG about [open]SUSE. Nice.

Will be sticking this on opensuse at opensuse dot org too, but I'm going to throw this open to my fellow hackers and packagers to say:

What should I tell them about SUSE?
Would I be able to get hold of any official freebies to give away?

Haven't done a tech-type talk since I presented on the SUSE stand at the Linux Expo back in 2000.

We've got a new Caffe Nero in Beeston. It's so new, in fact, that it's not even in their online store locator yet. Anyway, I'm sat there at the moment, and in spite of the fact that their leaflet on Wi-Fi says it's a pay-for service, I'm online for free. I suspect it's not their service I'm picking up but don't know for sure. Anyway, it means that I have a nice, air-conditioned coffee shop, with free wi-fi and relatively ethical coffee, to sit in. Now, if only they had some power outlets about the place...

As might reading this blog or this article. That's right folks, it's time we kissed goodbye to any notion of free speech or especially freedom of press in this country. Under the guise of fighting terrorism¹, this government has been steadily eroding our freedoms our liberties and our rights since 1997. It is time for it to stop. When possessing copies of an article from Vanity Fair (Vanity Fair for goodness' sake!) is deemed to be an action against the state, when people can be jailed for up to five years without being tried or even committing acts that are illegal, when suspicion and hearsay are enough to put someone under effective house arrest it is time for it to stop.

All that is required for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. All that is required for the state to control the people is for the people to do nothing. It's time to do something, people. We still have the ability to kick this authoritarian, reactionary, lying, cheating, dishonest, cynical, controlling, corrupt, sleaze-ridden government out of the power it craves but does not deserve. It's only just over a year since the last general election, which means that at most it is a little under four years until the next. Don't let them win, find an alternative. Use your vote or lose your freedom. In the meantime, write to, email or fax your MP to ask them to vote against ID cards and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill². Keep yourself informed about what's going on, and most of all, keep your mind open and free.

Finally, in the words of Winston Churchill, "It is better to perish than to live as slaves".

¹Judging by the things they are combating, I think I qualify as a terrorist, so look out.
²This bill, should it become law, would allow ministers to enact laws with reference to our elected representatives -- Parliament. It would, in effect, bring to an end our democratic system as we currently know it. It is being proposed under the guise of improving efficiency and speeding up government. It must be stopped.

[Ref]
Okay, so I had an email from one Richard Meyer which got me giving some further thought to the issue of the second amendment. First off, it needs to be said that Richard's an Aussie (commiserations on the Italy game incidentally, that was never a penalty) and I'm a Brit, so the constitution doesn't affect either of us directly. The thing is that I happen to think that the US Constitution is one of the most profound statements of democracy there is and as such it behoves those of us who are committed to democracy, freedom and liberty to take an interest in it.

Now, I accept that perhaps I wasn't quite as clear as I should have been in my earlier post. It cannot be stated categorically what the 1791 authors of the Bill of Rights had in mind in terms of the militia they refer to, but it could well have been all men of fighting age. The thing is that this is a very different world to that of 1791, and the statement that a militia is necessary for a free society doesn't hold water anymore. Once you remove the reason for the right to bear arms, the supposed right is also removed. The interesting thing is that the wording of the amendment suggests that the right to bear arms was a presupposed right, rather than one being conferred by the bill.

In the twenty-first century perhaps it's time, in the words of President Bartlett, to "agree it's a stupid-ass amendment that was written before there were street lamps, much less police forces, and move on". The thing is that the need for a regulated militia composed of the general public is obviated by the existence of police forces, local, state and federal. The need of a civilised and free society was not for a militia itself, but for the enforcement of law and order.

So, perhaps it's time for a new, 28th, amendment that doesn't ban gay marriage, but revokes the second.

...I don't like Mondays...

Well, today's been okay actually. Had a nice lunch with Rachel (I provided pickle, cos y'know, sometimes you just have some pickle to hand) and morning prayer at college was pretty cool - it's a liquid worship type affair this week, and I'm providing some percussive sounds.

Updated Mauricio's hackergotchi on Planet SUSE.

Linux on the LifeDrive. Interesting.

Nice one Stephan on the Kerry 0.2 packages, and for providing Beagle packages, I've also got 0.2.7 packages up (must get myself a Build Service account...) which include the risky, unstable, do not use unless you have a death wish, insecure Epiphany extension and the Python bindings. Oh yeah, you can get them i686 optimised too if you want.

I once didn't get a job because I use vi (actually, Vim) and the interviewer used emacs.

Was having a drink with an American last week and we were talking about the second amendment. She pointed out that the amendment does not provide the right to bear arms to all people, but only to a militia. Having had another look, I'm not sure that's 100% true, but it does seem to be the jist - it would seem the people writing the Bill of Rights did not envisage a free-for-all on weaponry.

England 1-0 Ecuador
Absolutely rubbish performance by England, save for about five minutes or so after the Beckham goal. None if Eriksson's experiments worked in my view. Carrick was useless in the holding role, most of the time when the ball came to him he just passed it back to one of the centre-halves (who were also both having shockers) and on the rare occasions he tried to push forward, his passes were poor and incomplete. Rooney as a lone striker wasn't able to do the business. Everyone else in the world knew this would be the case before kick-off, why didn't Eriksson? Beckham was looking sick for a large part of the second half, but Eriksson left him on pitch until the 87th minute. Lennon looked good when he replaced the skipper, but didn't really have the time to make a difference, perhaps if he'd been utilised earlier it would be a different story.

They're going to have to do much, much better or they're just going to be taken apart by Holland or Portugal, oh and can we go back to 4-4-2 please?

Last night, thought Mexico were unlucky. The Argentinians were not the better side and perhaps they've peaked early. Heinze should have been sent off twice - once when he was only booked in the first half and once when he should have been booked for raising his arm against a Mexican player and nothing was given - symptomatic of the referee apparently favouring the South Americans in the majority of decisions.

Dinner with Liz last night, was great to see her and catch up (after all, it had been a massive six days since we'd seen her!). It's her ordination next Sunday. She made a lovely chicken dish in BBQ style sauce followed by a gorgeous chocolate brownie, hot with ice cream.

This morning was the Extension Studies commissioning. I was leading worship with Amanda singing and Marc on bass. Service went well and it was a lot of fun. Nigel di Castiglione who's on the college council (and whose son, James, is in the first year) preached.

And what have I achieved?

• CTW204 and BS204 were in on time.
• Had a very fruitful meeting at Trent Uni on Tuesday before spending the afternoon tidying, cleaning etc so that I could have the guys round to watch the England match in the evening.
• Wednesday had the induction for year three at college which was very helpful and illuminating.
• Yesterday was a pretty light day, watched the Italy-Czech Rep. match in the afternoon and then chapel and pub in the evening.
• Had the inaugural meeting of the new college Learning & Teaching Group this morning

So, about the England match. First half I thought they were very good, especially given the enforced change after Owen's injury so early on. Hargreaves had a great game. Two fantastic goals and some schoolboy defending. Must try harder but reckon we'll beat Ecuador before going out to Holland or Portugal.

What a weekend! Saturday was the college Commissioning Service (photos), quite an emotional time saying farewell to this year's leavers. Saturday evening we went to Derby to warm Liz's house with a BBQ. Quality moment at about 18:59 when a chorus of "Doctor Who time!" went up and everyone decamped to the living room to watch it.

Yesterday we were down in Watford for a leaders' day ahead of the conferences. Great to see loads of people we'd not seen in ages, catch up and chat.

Today I need to finish CTW204 and shall be focusing on nothing else. Period. I promise.

Maybe.

Firstly, last night. England 2-0 Trinidad and Tobago. Well, the match clashed with the weekly college service, so we watched it "as live" on tape-delay on the big screen in the Common Room after the service. England were abject for most of the ninety minutes, the only light for most of the match being Steven Gerrard (how often, as a Liverpool fan, has that been the experience?). They'll have to do a lot better if they're going to mount a serious challenge. That having been said, job done. Two wins, no goals conceded and qualification from the group stage assured. Lennon looked great when he came on and Rooney was running after everything when he replaced Owen. Crouch stank the place out for most of the game but frankly, having broken the deadlock, who cares?

Right, today. Making very slow progress on CTW204, but will be uploading abiword packages shortly. These packages fix Novell bug #162346.

Well, as I mentioned in my post last night, it was another karaoke night at the Double Top last night.

Prior to that, I finished BS204, although I think I'm going to tweak it slightly before submitting it.

Annoyingly, the hard-drive in weasel seems to be giving u