Wow! Two years since Beagle was first unleashed (geddit? unleashed, beagle? Oh, suit yourself!) on the world. Really honoured to be included in Joe's list of contributors, especially being right next to Jakub (yes, I know that's because it's alphabetical). My contributions have been confined to a couple of lines of code so far (although I'm planning to invest some time in learning C# a bit more this summer) and packaging. On that note, as soon as the laptop situation is resolved one way or the other, I'll make sure that the packages for SUSE are up-to-date.

Have switched all Blogger blogs to their Atom feeds rather than the FeedBurner versions on Planet SUSE.

Congratulations to Chelsea on retaining the Premiership title. Just a pity it took billions of money cheated out of the Russian people to do it. You know that as long as Chelsea are backed by Abramovich they deserve no respect at all.

Latest situation on the laptop is that the repair was done, and it was working fine, but when the repair guy powered it on the next day it was back to how it was at the outset. Further investigations are being done and I should have an update on Tuesday.

Have to say though that I'm not liking my chances so much now, looks like the outcome is going to be that I have to buy a new laptop.

Many thanks to Linux Today for posting a link to this insane article by hard-right republican blogger "Shelley". In it you can read the "truth" about how radical left-wing liberal (eeew, evil!) European and Chinese hackers (and I suspect it's using that in the incorrect way^[1]) have created it to undermine America. Read the dangerous "truth" about Osama bin-Laden's use of Linux to circumvent DVD encryption(!)

I have to hold my hands up here and say that I can't tell whether this article and the site as a whole is real or if it's a spoof. The views are so extreme, so racist in some cases that they must be a spoof surely? Also, the grammatical errors and occasionally broken English suggests it's actually written by a non-native English speaker. Even for an American it's poor.

Anyway, it gave me a little chuckle this morning.

^[1] See definition 8 in this entry of the Jargon File (maintained by noted right-leaning (GUNS! GUNS!) Linux and Open Source advocate ESR).

Someone posed the question on LuBBs Alumni of whether the current round of cock-ups spells the end for the Labour government. Here is my response (originally posted on LA)

It really could be the beginning of the end not for Labour, but for Blair^[1].

Some of us really do care about affairs, because if someone can lie to their spouse day in day out for two years (I think that was how long the affair lasted) then they can certainly lie to the electorate, probably with even less of a conscience-prick.

The Clarke scenario is a real blunder. Let's ignore the fact that people who don't have a British passport are treated unfairly and differently to UK citizens (and see also this story in yesterday's Guardian, along with this letter from the letters page) and skip to the fact that the Home Office, which everyone knows is a nightmare to run because it covers such a diversity of areas, was unable to put 2 and 2 together and figure that when the law says that foreign nationals commit certain crimes they are to be considered for deportation^[2] on their release. In terms of what the law says should happen, it is undoubtedly a resigning matter, but Blair won't accept his resignation (at least, not yet) because it would leave him even more isolated than he already is.

As for the NHS, well, if I was Pat Hewitt I'd be very glad of Clarke right now. To say that it's having its best year ever while at the same time laying off thousands of care staff, struggling to justify the fact that PCTs across the country are failing to break-even^[3] and admitting that whole hospitals may have to close is hubris to say the least. To say the most it is out and out lieing (or spin as we also call it) and she should go.

The big problem in both these cases is who would replace either Clarke or Hewitt.

The big problem if this were to prove to be the end of Labour is who would replace them? Unfortunately, the Lib Dems cannot be considered a realistic government after the next General Election, which only leaves Cameron's New Tories. That just makes me shudder.

^[1] Yes, I know in one sense the beginning of the end for Blair was when he announced he won't contest the next GE, but I mean the real beginning of the end.
^[2] Note: considered for deportation, but actually deported.
^[3] Since when did profitability and breaking even matter more than the health of the nation's citizens?

Well, yesterday was the first Wednesday of the new term. Not normally something of significance except that this term we have no lectures on Wednesday and this early in the term I can't really use that time to write the assignments. So, other than work out, what did I do with myself?

Well, I helped Jenny and Dan with their home networking and had a pub lunch before spending most of the afternoon in the kitchen cooking for Andrew and Elaine who recently had their first kid.

Jogged part-way into college today (like, about a minute's worth) and then used the mini-gym for about 20 minutes. I'm so out of shape it's not funny.

Need oxygen...

Have fixed the Planet SUSE RSS feeds. The 2.0 version is done now, the 1.0 will be done in the next update (which should be any minute because the system clock on that machine is off again).

Many congratulations to Nick and Rosie on the birth, yesterday, of Harvey Daniels.

Chelsea 1-2 Liverpool! We're gonna win the cup, we're gonna win the cup...

I love it when I find a 'bug' that I'm sure I can fix. Now if only I had a machine that I could actually build Beagle HEAD on.

Been thinking a bit about the openSUSE 1 CD install project that's looking a little defunct at the moment (especially the GNOME one) and how neat it would be to do somethig based on this as just a straight GNOME install, no QT libraries at all - not even for YaST! It would need someone to write a GTK+ frontend to YaST of course, but how neat would that be for SUSE generally? Would mean YaST could look 'native' in both GNOME and KDE. Thinking about the name GnUSE for it, anyone interested in lending a hand if I do it?

Yes, that's right, I've finished PT201 which means that all my writing for over the vacation is done. I've actually lost count of how many words I've written over the last few weeks, but it sure feels good to see my placement report chugging away in the printer.

What it means is that on Monday all I have to do is photocopy some sheets of paper to form an appendix to one of my reflections and hand it all in.

Mixed day in terms of success really.

On the positive side, PT201 is now only about 1400 words away from being done and so I should polish it off tomorrow in time for my hair appointment at 16.15.

On the negative side, finding books in the college library was like finding a needle in something or other - I forget what, but it was the sort of thing that it's tricky to find needles in.

Soup possibly...

Have upgraded Planet SUSE to the Planet 1.0 code this morning, if you see any weirdness, please let me know at the usual address. (I know about the (feed) link for each blog not being right, so don't hassle me about that please, because I've now fixed it in the template ready for the next update.)

Hoping that this might mean I can move away from using Feedburner for Blogger XML feeds.

Update: It seems to have had the desired effect, so I'll be gradually moving the Blogger feeds over from Feedburner to use their native Atom feeds. It's also fixed Marc's feed.

We bought some garden furniture yesterday, which is quite exciting. Kind of makes mowing the lawn in the back garden worthwhile now that we can actually make use of it.

PT201 is about 30% complete now, plan is to hit 50% tomorrow morning and try to finish it off on Thursday. Then I can use Friday to polish off the loose ends in time for term starting on Monday.

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Miguel.

Have suggested that working on cross-distro .spec files might form part of a Summer of Code project sponsored by GNOME. If anyone wants to work on this, I'd be very happy. I won't have time to do so myself over the summer, I'm away quite a lot this year.

LuBBs Alumni is back after the hosting issues, and I'm working on a MyCroft plugin for it.

...and then they crucified him...

Matthew 27.27-61
Mark 15.16-47
Luke 23.26-56
John 19.1-42

Had my final debrief at St. Luke's yesterday afternoon, which went well.

Jenny and Dan's wedding tomorrow in the college chapel. All the best to them as they start their new life together.

The following IPs have been added to my block list as a result of attempting to compromise my server:

69.59.184.196 86.105.128.75 124.0.93.67 216.244.149.117

Updated my Cross Distro Spec Files notes on GNOME Live!

[Ref]
So, yesterday a High Court judge told the world what some of us had known all along, that Charles Clarke's "control orders" are incompatible with human rights.

The orders which basically amount to a form of house arrest, and can actually go as far as full-blown house arrest, are applied to people suspected of having a connection with terrorism.

Suspected. That's a big word folks. These people have never been charged or tried, never mind convicted, of any terrorism offence. If they had, they'd be in jail. If there was a scrap of evidence against them, this government would waste no time in going through the courts so I think it's fair to say that in all likelihood they have not (yet) done anything wrong.

I also have not (yet) committed an act of terrorism^[1] and under the regime introduced by Clarke^[2] I could be placed under house arrest, my passport confiscated and my movements monitored.

The Labour government has shown itself time and time again to have scant regard for legality, human rights, civil liberties and the dignity of the people of this nation. Some people in England and Wales have an opportunity in a couple of weeks to pass judgement on local representatives of the Labour party, and I hope they give this reactionary government a kicking. When the next general election rolls around, it's time for a change, it's time to elect a truly liberal government.

^[1]Nor do I intend to incidentally.
^[2]My views on Clarke are well known, he's a thug and bruiser. He's worse than Blunkett and shouldn't be in government.

Yesterday afternoon I noticed A LOT of traffic going across my DSL router when I wasn't logged in and it wasn't a time when a cron job would be doing anything, a quick bit of investigation revealed that home.rubberturnip.org.uk was the subject of a sustained attack on the SSH daemon. Looked like a brute force job, and it wasn't being successful unless the intention was to piss me off.

It triggered me to finally install logcheck on that box (thanks Justin for the package) and I noticed that there were other machines attempting similar attacks (is there a worm abroad at the moment that I'm not aware of?) although not quite as sustained as that first one, which was doing it for about two hours!

So, firstly, I've started blocking the originating IPs (and I reported the first one to the ISP in question), and secondly I'm going to post offending IPs here. The IPs I am currently blocking then are as follows:

62.80.128.11 203.130.33.203 213.56.25.38 212.227.21.132 202.110.193.231

Other news: CTW203 finished.

Did some work on Planet SUSE this morning, it was having some cache issues. This has now been fixed, with the result that Scott's posts appear again, sorry for losing you mate. It also meant that I had to remove Togan's blog. It hadn't been updated in around two years, so I'm assuming he's not blogging anymore. Andreas G's blog has also vanished, although I've not removed that from the blogroll yet. If either Togan or Andreas are reading this and you've simply relocated your blog, please let me know. If anyone else who sees their name down the right hand side of Planet SUSE doesn't see their blog posts on the site, please also let me know and I'll look into it. I'm afraid I don't have the time to check every blog and news feed I aggregate there.

Have got the pre-writing preparation for PT201 finished, but I'm not starting work on writing yet, I have a meeting with Steve, the vicar of St. Luke's tomorrow to talk about it. Instead, today, I'm going to finish off CTW203, current word count is 2159.

Laptop status is that it seems to be the main chipset on the mainboard that's faulty, not the VGA chip. This is a bit of a relief as the VGA chip would be considerably more expensive to replace. I'll be so glad to get it back, I have packages that are in serious need of updating and the keyboard on Amanda's box is driving me insane.

It's supposed to be April. Look at our back garden, that white stuff you can see, that's hail! (I know it looks like snow, but it's really hail.) Looking out the front window, the cars look like it's December. What's going on?

Work status (as of close of play Friday): CTW203: 2159 words (3000 +/- 10% target); PT203a: complete; PT203c: 1447 words (1500 +/- 10% target); BS205: 1383/1606 words (2x1500 +/- 10% target); PT201: Not yet started (7000 +/- 10% target)

Firstly, Planet SUSE. A big welcome to Jeff and Jared. Jeff is Novell's CTO, and Jared works for Novell, hacking on iFolder I think, but also doing the "submit patches to fix bugs" thing on other stuff

I should have mentioned earlier, but my laptop being out of action means I can't build packages at the moment because it's my build machine. The latest news is that it's away for repair and apparently there's no display at all now on either the TFT or the external VGA. Quite worried about that.

Web 2.0 is here, it's now and it's the future. You better believe it baby because all the cool analysts say it is. But, I hear you ask, how do I know if I'm down with that phat fun of Web 2.0? Follow my simple test below, and you will know if you are truly Web 2.0 Enabled.

Do you have an RSS icon or link on your website?

If you answered Yes, then you are Web 2.0 Enabled.

If you answered No, then you are not Web 2.0 Enabled, you must try harder to get with the programme.

Novell's CTO, Jeff Jaffe, has launched his blog. I'd love to add it to Planet SUSE, but want to ask his permission first. Could someone at Novell ask him to drop me a line?

And anyone else who hacks on SUSE who blogs, or plans to blog too

Update: A couple of people have emailed me to say they've contacted Jeff, no-one else need do so now...

Well, managed to achieve nothing yesterday^[1], so today really need to make good progress on PT203c, and hopefully make a start on CTW203. Just couldn't quite get focused yesterday after being thrown by the laptop situation. Need to nip up to college as well today, so it's going to be a squeeze as far as getting stuff done is concerned.

By the end of the week, I really need to have PT203a&c, both elements of BS205 and CTW203 complete, so I can attack PT201 (which is much longer) over the remaining two weeks of the vacation. Good job I've left this Friday unplanned as a catch-up day. May need it.

^[1]Well, that's not quite true. I actually made a couple of corrections in the Romans bit of BS205 and did the footer for PT203c.

So, what did we do over the weekend (and my word, it's been a long time since I blogged before today!)? Well, we went down to Knightsbridge where we had a photo shoot done at Studio64. It was a prize in something Amanda entered, and we were made up and our hair done for it. The results are in the gallery - check them out.

Looks like it's probbaly the backlights that have gone in the notebook, which is something of a relief if that is all it is. Could be so much worse.

Well, okay, note quite dead, but very, very dim.

My Acer Aspire's display is very very dim and dull today since I powered it on, and in fact at one point almost totally blacked out. Thankfully I was able to SSH to it and rsync my $HOME onto another machine.

Have called a local notebook repair place, and am waiting for them to get back to me with details, and hopefully an estimate on the cost.

Really hope it's an easy and cheap fix, can't really afford to replace it (it's out of warranty).