Updated gstreamer010-plugins-good to enable the libcaca plugin. That means that the only plugin not enabled now (in good anyway) is sunaudiosink. Since we don't have a SPARC port at this time, I don't really consider that a big issue

Also built gstreamer010-ffmpeg and at some point I think I'm going to do a gstreamer010-complete meta-package that will pull the whole lot in.

Someone else found my Galago bug in Tomboy, and it's fixed. Looking forward to that new release. In the meantime, new packages with all the other plugins enabled have been uploaded. Have then made the necessary changes to tomboy.spec to strip out the plugins as a a sub-package tomboy-plugins.

Have had an Inbox purge, was previously at around 250 mails and I got to the point saying, again, Happy Zero Day!

• Packages: tomboy 0.3.4, beagle 0.2.1 (currently building)
  Tomboy package doesn't currently include the new Galago presence plugin because it wouldn't build - need to investigate why at some point and then fix it (if needs be). It also doesn't include any of the new plugins that are not installed by default, new packages to do so will appear soon.
• Church: Started working on my sermon for Sunday. The passages are Luke 5:17-26 and Isaiah 11:1-5.
• Today is my brother Philip's birthday. Somehow it just seems wrong that both of my younger brothers are in their late 20s...

Have uploaded updates to the full GStreamer 0.10 stack - including plugins (although, please note that plugins-bad has simply been rebuilt against the updated main package to meet the dependencies). Also updated are gnonlin and pitivi.

Uploaded updated gnome-python-extras and rhythmbox packages (i586 and i686 architectures). This is because PackMan updated their totem package which screwed the dependencies of SUSE's latest packages. This weekend I'll be building the latest gstreamer010* packages, as well as the latest pitivi.

Been out for a curry with various people from college tonight, and it was a fantastic evening. Seriously beer and curried out!

This week it's been announced that the West Wing is to be cancelled after season seven. I have to say that this is no surprise as it'll be a natural point in the plot arc to call it a day, but I'm still in mourning for the passing of the most erudite, intelligent and witty political drama in a long, long time.

Bartlett for America!

Beagle 0.2.0 has been released, and I've uploaded SUSE packages. Note that the beagle-firefox package is currently empty, because it's not installed by make install. I'm assuming this is because it doesn't work with Firefox 1.5. The package remains to ensure RPM database sanity. Since Joe had a screenshot of it, I figured I would too...

Have finally got around to putting instructions up on how to access my packages using Smart. They're listed along with all the other methods, and have supplanted APT as my preferred option.

2006-01-19  Lukas Lipka  <*****@*****.***>

        * search/Search.cs: Hide the search window when we click the tray icon.
        This must have been deleted during merge, since it worked before.
        Spotted by James Ogley.

That's my patch that is! New packages have of course been uploaded and are available for your searching pleasure.

Have been at home today, was ill overnight and pretty rough this morning. Thankfully feeling better now so will be able to be back at college tomorrow.

... Banshee!

That's right folks, Aaron has released version 0.10.4. It includes a full-on plugin infrastructure, as well as four plugins to get you started. When more are added, I'll strip them out into a sub-package. There's a funky new tooltip on the notification icon too. Not sure, but it looks like it uses libnotify, and that's just packed with creamy goodness!

Guess where you can get SUSE packages! Go on, have a guess!

Hope no-one's getting bored of Beagle stuff Currently road-testing more new Beagle packages. These represent a massive 24 hours (or thereabouts) worth of CVS commits. More to the point they represent my first non-translation contribution to Beagle (See bug #327223). Most of the commits are to the new UI, which is the point of me doing this round of packages, so it made sense.

Uploaded new Beagle packages (versioned 0.1.5, which is today's CVS). These use the new UI and it's seriously cool. Have followed the new SUSE package naming and stripped out a couple of extra sub-packages, so here's the full list of what's been uploaded:

beagle-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm            beagle-firefox-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm
beagle-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm            beagle-firefox-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm
beagle-0.1.5-1.0.src.rpm             beagle-python-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm
beagle-devel-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm      beagle-python-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm
beagle-devel-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm      libbeagle-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm
beagle-epiphany-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm   libbeagle-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm
beagle-epiphany-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm   libbeagle-devel-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm
beagle-evolution-0.1.5-1.0.i586.rpm  libbeagle-devel-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm
beagle-evolution-0.1.5-1.0.i686.rpm

Spent the weekend celebrating Amanda's birthday, which was yesterday. Went out for a lovely meal Saturday night at Trattoria Antonio in Nottingham.

Have also spent some of the weekend wrestling with Beagle CVS and SUSE's patches. I think I've won at last so by the end of today I hope to have packages uploaded that use the new UI (formerly briefly known as Holmes).

Unlucky for some...

Add Danny to Planet SUSE. Danny works for SUSE, on mobile devices. (Does that mean laptops, or PDAs?)

We're gradually getting Bailey used to his new home, and to being handled and he's starting to get quite friendly which is nice.

Wrote just over 2100 words on CTW201 today, and handed both it and BS203 in. In fact, CTW201 went in on the stroke of 16.00 (the deadline) and boy was it a relief!

Uploaded new abiword packages of version 2.4.2. These come with a fully loaded plugin set across the two plugin sub-packages.

We got our new hamster at the weekend - he's a long-haired honey rust, and his name is Bailey.

BS203 exam on Monday seemed to go okay. The text study for it, and the CTW201 essay are due in tomorrow.

Big thanks to Stanislav for the two-line patch to enable cdparanoia in gstreamer010-plugins-base. I realised when I looked at his why mine didn't work - I was making the same changes to configure that he was making to configure.ac, but of course I was then running autoconf and obliterating my changes - daft bugger! Anyway, those packages are now built and uploaded, and by the way, that means that all the plugins in that particular set are now enabled and included in my package. Will start trying to make some head-way on enabling the missing ones in good and ugly too. bad is less of a priority

Really should do a downloadable channel information file for my packages to add them to Smart, especially now that Pascal has built packages with the YaST2 repository support enabled but for the time being you can do:

smart channel --add usr-local-bin-yast2 type=yast2 name="usr local bin 10.0" \
baseurl=ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/usr-local-bin/10.0

We're going down to Watford today, seeing various people and then tomorrow we're picking up our new hamster - rock on!

• Uploaded updated gstreamer010-plugins-base packages that remove the broken post install and uninstall scripts - expect an error when upgrading as the previous version's broken uninstall script is run. Thanks to Stanislav will be doing another update with the cdparanoia plugin enabled.
• CTW201: 625 words

I've uploaded packages of Banshee that use GStreamer 0.10, and add support for NJB based MP3 players (Creative Nomad, Zen, Zen Micro, Dell DJ, and more). The GStreamer 0.10 backend is experimental at this time, so be careful

Just before Christmas, I noticed that SUSE had built GStreamer 0.10.x packages and put them in the GNOME supplementary repository (package name is gstreamer010), but hadn't built any of the plugins to go with it.

So, I've uploaded what you need: gstreamer010-plugins-[base/good/bad/ugly] as well as gstreamer010-python (Python bindings) and pitivi, a new video editing application (and gnonlin another library it requires). PiTiVi is very much a case of only use it if you want to help fix it - be sure to report any bugs to the developers.

Oh yes, anyone who wants to know why the plugins have been divided as they are should read this.

Thanks, Stephan, this could be a really handy way of maintaining multiple VMs for package maintenance on different versions of SUSE, I shall have aplay with it...

Well, 2005 was an incredible year for a variety of reasons. This isn't going to be anything like a review of the year, but just some thoughts.

First off, the most important thing that happened last year was the MakePovertyHistory campaign. 2005 was a year to remember, and combined with the Live8 concerts (which revived the notion of the rock concert as demonstration) have actually made a genuine change in the world. I think it was Bono who said that this generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet; the War of Terror; and the way we treat the world's poor. In July, 250,000 people took to the streets of Edinburgh to tell the leaders of the G8 that we need to treat them better. This has always been about aid, debt and trade, and some movement happened, but we need more.

So, what have we achieved? The G8 summit signalled an extra $48bn a year in aid by 2010 (of which up to $20bn is new commitments). But this is nowhere near enough, the pressure needs to stay on the world's politicians. The G8 also agreed to cancel up to $1bn per year of debt for 18 of the world's poorest countries, but this still needs to be ratified by the IMF and World Bank, and is a fraction of the $10bn per year needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The area where the least has been achieved has been in the area of Trade Justice where the rich countries, including the UK, EU and USA favoured their own interests over the world's poor at the WTO Ministerial conference in December. Read full details of what was achieved in 2005.

So, what do we do in 2006? Well, maybe it's time to match talking and demonstrating about poverty with action. Oxfam have launched a campaign to get 1,000,000 people committed to act to end poverty, so sign up to say "I'm in". By no means should stop campaigning though, join the Million Faces petition to demand a global arms trade treaty, and campaign to make trade fair.

2005 has an incredible year, hopefully 2006 can be even bigger.