Today is our 8th wedding anniversary, we've been out for a lovely italian meal, which was fantastic.

Birmingham 0-7 Liverpool - RAR!

Updated banshee packages to the latest version, and added subpackage, banshee-plugins-default to match the SUSE package nomenclature.

Well, as of today, my placement at St Luke's has officially concluded. We're going to stay at the church as much as is possible though, they've been really great to us.

Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-1 this afternoon, pretty confident for third place in the Premiership now, but with Man Utd having two games in hand over us, I think second would be a bit optimistic.

Okay, first usr local bin packages for Factory/10.1 are available now. I've not updated the instructions of how to obtain them yet, but you can download them from here, or add that location as a YaST2 source (or YaST2 repository in Smart). The packages available so far are:

• banshee
• beagle
• gnome-themes-extras
• sensors-applet
• tomboy
• ulb-themes

My wretched Palm m105 has done it again! Batteries were running low, so I swapped them for new ones, and even though I did well within the minutes you supposedly have before data loss, everything went again! I'm this close ][ to giving up on the bloody thing. And, I've found the PDA that I think I would like to replace it with (if I could afford it of course), the Palm T|X (with a 2GB expansion card).

Now, in comparison with my ideal portable device it has two shortcomings:

• It's not a phone. Now, I know that Palm also make the Treo smartphones, but they're really expensive, and don't have the memory expansion slot that the T|X has. But to be honest, integrating my phone in with my PDA is not a deal breaker.
• No DAB digital radio. That would just be wishful thinking.

...to sum up Saturday.

A lazy lie in, followed by tweaking my CTW202 essay slightly was followed by heading into Nottingham where we had lunch at one of Nottingham's Slug and Lettuces, which was nice. Hadn't been before, but it was good food, and the wine was excellent.

Are you an alumnus of Lancaster University? Were you a user of LuBBs while you were there? Missed it since you left? Then your self on to LuBBs Alumni (or should that be AlUMNi?), the replacement bulletin board for ex-lubbers. Notable by their presence are myself, HAZEL, THE RIBENA KID, TENEBREUX, PI, MORDRED, MR BLUE SKY, TESCHI (WOWBAGGER), PHOENIX. Notable by their absence? You! Get it sorted now, register baby!

BS202 is approaching being finished. Got down to it at about 15.00 today after the college community day. I was on a small team that cleared out the games room/gym. So we can now actually get at all the equipment in there. Who knows, I may start using the exercise bike in there...

Timo: Cool beans! And hey, get Christian blogging!

Update: BS202 finished! It and CTW202 will be handed in Monday morning.

Wasn't able to see the match as it was on Sky Sports, and to be honest given the outcome and apparently woeful display by our forwards, especially Morientes, I'm quite glad. I still have photos from that night in May up in my study, and this year there's still the FA Cup, and who knows, we could still get past Man Utd for second in the Premiership.

BS202: 874 words ...

Update: BS202: 2066 words ...

• CTW202 finished. In fact, I went over the upper word limit, and had to edit it down.
• Bled all our radiators and re-pressurised the boiler this evening, which has allowed the house to be a lot warmer than it has been in a long time.

Wow, another ton of updates from Factory. One thing I've discovered is that Smart isn't happy with doing a full Factory update, this is (I suspect) because when you download over 2G of packages which it then has to install, it has to put the lot in memory (look at the output from free -m next time you do so if you're a Factory/Smart user like me). Some more investigation will probably result in a bug report, but for now I'm going to gradually do packages that are important to me or do it in YaST, which I think does each package individually.

We've had another rash of new members of the Planet SUSE community: Fred and Timo. Welcome on board guys. Planet itself is moving apace towards a 1.0 release and I'm going to make sure I do a package for 10.1.

CTW202 was at just over 1200 words when I left it last night, hoping to knock it off this afternoon, and then get on to BS202 (and who knows, with a couple of hours open tomorrow afternoon I could have it done by then). Will be working into the evening today, even though Amanda's going to be home tonight - normally I only work at home when she's out, but this time I have left it a bit late - oops!

Hopefully while I'm doing so, Liverpool can see off Benfica at Anfield.

Yesterday was the college quiet day, and my fellowship group went down to Edwalton to share communion before spending the morning in quiet prayer, reading etc.

Last night was the latest Worship Space evening at college. I was leading the meeting, and Mike was supposed to be speaking but unfortunately broke down on the way, so I spoke instead. Seemed to go well, so that's good.

Attacking CTW202 tonight. It and BS202 are due in on Monday.

Loving the goodness, reporting bugs, ranting on the opensuse-factory list. This is good, and I like it.

TODO:

• Package up Gimmie, and patch it to behave right on SUSE
• Do all the appropriate usr local bin packages
• Okay, mad idea, but a way for me to get into C#/Mono programming, want to write a replacement for the (frankly awful) ooqstart (that seems to have been dropped in 10.1) using Mono/gtk-sharp. Plan is for it to use the Notification Area, and perform basically the same function as the Quickloader that OOo itself provides on win32. Whether it'll happen or not, I dunno but hey, might as well think about it...

A while ago a posted information on how to obtain and configure commercial plugins on SUSE Linux OSS 10.0 along with a package, setup-commercial-plugins, to do the leg-work for you.

Well, you don't have to do that any more thanks to the wonderful magic of the "Extra" repository. This has been around a while, but I've never mentioned it because shortly after posting that information, I switched to the boxed version of 10.0.

Anyway, you can get them directly from here, or you can add ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse/i386/10.1/inst-source-extra/ as an installation source in YaST, or as a YaST2 channel in Smart (I'll be doing the latter). You don't need the extra package, SUSE's packages put the plugins in the right place.

Incidentally, you can get smart and smart-gui for the Betas/Factory from here.

Update: You can get the MS TrueType font collection by downloading and running (as root) this script.

[Ref]

Blair: "If you believe in God (the judgement) is made by God."
Reg Keys^[1]: Mr Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure".

Blair was also asked if he had prayed about whether to invade Iraq, and said that of course he wrestled with his conscience.

My inclination is that Mr Keys is right here. Blair is trying use God to deflect difficult questioning. No-one is suggesting that praying about a decision is wrong, but saying "you can't judge me, God will" (paraphrase) is bang out of order for an elected leader.

This is (one reason) why we need to separate church and state, and why the US is the poorer for the continuing erosion of that separation to the point where you can't get elected unless you're seen to go to church.

I should also point out that the church and faith communities across the world have been very vocal in their condemnation of the unjust. immoral and illegal invasion of Iraq.

Three cheers for new Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, for putting pressure on Blair to push for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (ref).

^[1]Reg Keys' son was killed in Iraq, and Mr Keys stood as an anti-war candidate against Mr Blair in his Sedgewick constituency at the last General Election.

Polling closed at 14.00 yesterday, and the result will be announced in Morning Prayer today (08.00). So, I've removed the links to my campaign site from my sidebar, and between all four candidates, we've cleared college of all campaign literature ready for the Vice-President election for which nominations close at 16.00 today.

Update: I can now confirm that the new student president will be Mr Chris Ramsey. Congratulations to Chris.

Roger: Congrats! I think I cracked your cryptic code, so are there any of the old gang still there?

So, today's Ash Wednesday of course, first day of Lent, and this year I've given up a few items that probably have some hold over me: caffeine, chocolate and sweets (barring mints - that would be unfair on those around me^[1]).

Laptop is currently installing 10.1 beta 5 (well, it's probably asking for CD3 at the moment, and will simply have to wait till I get home). After checking that the partitioner wouldn't blat my existing /home, I realised that I wanted to redo my whole partition table anyway. So, I ended up backing everything up onto weasel (Amanda's machine) and removing all the Linux partitions before starting over. Have to say that the new bootsplash theme is pretty gorgeous.

^[1]And to be honest, being around me while I give up caffeine for Lent is unfair enough on them...