Helped Liz move into her curate's house in Derby today. pretty wierd - the start of the end of an era. Over the next month or so the lion's share of my year group at college will be leaving to start their curacies. Thankfully Liz is just up the road, but some, such as Jo, will be quite some distance away.

England 3-1 Hungary
What did we learn tonight?

• Steven Gerrard can play anywhere. That's not to say he should, he's definitely best when he has the freedom to break from midfield as he does for Liverpool, but he looked very good in the "just off the striker" role tonight.
• Owen's not as sharp as we'd like. He's not anywhere near it in fact, in the 65 minutes he was on the pitch tonight, he was very anonymous, barely did anything. If he doesn't look better on Saturday, it's very worrying.
• Beckham is very important to us. Okay, he may not be the best player on the pitch over ninety minutes, in my opinion he's not among the best five players for us, but those set pieces are like gold dust. Like it or not, he has to start.
• This is not the time for Walcott. He did nothing when he came on, was only slightly less anonymous than Owen who replaced. The World Cup is not the place to blood players who have never played top flight football before. People will liken him to Owen in 1998 and Rooney in 2004, but both those players had had experience in the domestic top flight.
• Eriksson persists in playing men out of position. Tonight we had Carragher as a holding midfielder, Gerrard as a second striker and Walcott on the pitch. They should be, respectively, centre-half, attacking central midfielder, in the Arsenal reserves. Why does he view versatile players as people who can be played out of position like this, rather than starting them in the positions they perform best in and then moving them should that be required due to injury as the game goes on?
• Crouch is a serious option. When he came on, he showed excellent touch, vision and movement especially the goal. He took it with the poise and precision of a man a foot shorter than he is. Not many people you can say that about.

Friday is D-Day for the laptop. By the end of Friday it'll be repaired or written off.

Realised this morning that I'd never updated the information on installing usr-local-bin packages on SUSE 10.1. Admittedly, those packages are a couple of months out of date since I've not had a build machine, but now that 10.1 is out, it made sense to update the info.

See the updated info here.

[Ref] So, the latest underhand tactic employed by the Bush regime is to plant fake news stories on dozens of US TV stations to, among other things, talk up the "success" of the conflict in Iraq. This should come as no surprise after he and his colleagues spent the time after 9/11 trying desperately to scare the American people into believing there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, when there was none^[1].

Think it's too late to do something about Bush? You're wrong. Firstly, you can vote Democrat in this year's mid-terms, more Democrats on the hill means it's less likely that Bush can execute more anti-American plans. Secondly, you can impeach Bush for intentionally misleading Congress and the public in order to justify a war in Iraq.

^[1]In which respect it that "link" was just like the Weapons of Mass Destruction: There were none, there never were, there was no likelihood of there being any any time soon, and the White House knew this.

Well, yesterday we had our final lecture as a whole year group, which was also John Darch's final lecture before he takes up his new post as DDO of Blackburn Diocese. We had cake. I like cake.

They really are, and if you're a Windows user, they're going to more or less control everything about your PC. If you're a Windows user, find someone you know who uses Linux and ask them to help you migrate. You will want also to read this.

Soooo tired, got to bed well after midnight last night. Party was great though, had a great time, took some photos which, along with all the other sets I've still got on the camera, I will upload at some point. Reason I've not done it is that the /home partition on Amanda's machine is currently quite small and full compared to that on the laptop, so I'm waiting until I have a laptop again whether that be the beast, or a replacement.

YaST2=GTK+ Google Summer of Code project now has a student coder who in turn has a collection of mentors. Apparently it was the most popular project in terms of applicants. Seems GnUSE could well have a native YaST at some point - w00t!

SUSE Linux 10.1 boxed copy arrived yesterday too - many thanks to SUSE for providing this.

Well, first match (and only match actually) of the season this evening, a sixteen over a side affair against the Church of the Assumption, Beeston. It was an enjoyable match, that finished in an Assumption win. They posted 123/1 in their sixteen overs, we managed 58/4. However, given that they play thirty matches a season and some of us had never played a match before, we did quite well.

That was the conclusion to a very full day, with no work being done at all. Tomorrow night is a '100th Birthday Party' in honour of the fact that Amanda, Liz and myself are a total of 100 years old when our birthdays this year are added together, so this morning I was shopping for nibbles for that. After lunch I went out for a couple of drinks with Fiona N who's up visiting this week. Good to get news from the front. Thing was that that meant I barely had time to get home and get changed (well, managed to bash out a couple of pressing emails too) before getting back to college a bit early so I could see Amanda (who had a music practise) before heading out to the Rec Ground for the game.

Just posted this article to Planet SUSE News. One thing I would like to say regarding it, but can't be bothered to say in the site's forum thingy is that the author only mentions PackMan as an external installation source. Now, I know the article is looking in this case as at a specific area of functionality that the PackMan crew cover (namely the availability of Win32 codecs), but it gives the impression that they are the only source of third party packages, simply not true. In addition to my repository and Pascal's, there are a large number of other installation sources to choose from.

Wow, I've really got out of the habit of blogging this month. I suspect it's a combination of not having done a great deal outside of college and still not having my laptop, so not being able to work on anything openSUSE related. Anyway, last Wednesday, we went out for an Italian meal and cocktails with the rest of the Naughty Table gang from college. Simply a fantastic evening, we had a lot of fun, but it was also quite emotional because all of us with the exception of myself, and possibly Rachel, will be getting ordained in the next six weeks or so and it's going to be very strange not having them around college every day. I forgot to take my camera too, so I have no photos of the evening.

I've been asked to add this blog to Planet SUSE, but I don't know the name or email address of the maintainer. If you are that person (I assume you read PS given you link to it), please get in touch if you would like to be added.

Laptop: New mainboard was fitted and the machine powered on at which point it exhibited the original error, which is annoying. Waiting to hear back.

So, to finish my catch-up of the last ten days or so. Friday afternoon was the latest Community Day at college. As part of the day's activities, we cleared out the Chapel music & sound store room of all the junk that had accumulated in there over goodness knows how many years. The difference was remarkable, for one thing we can actually see the floor in there now.

Yesterday.
What a day, what a game and what a goal to take it into extra time. Liverpool were, for large portions of the game, as poor as I'd seen them all season, but Gerrard was brilliant as always. Reina did a Dudek - villain during the final to hero of the shootout. Gerrard though - wow! Possibly the greatest player ever to wear the red jersey, could well become the best player in the world because he just keeps on improving. That's 23 goals for him this season and I think only Henry and van Nistlerooy have scored more this season in England.

Laptop: A replacement mainboard has been sourced, all being well I should have it back in the middle of the week.

Ref 1; Ref 2: I am a proud member of the openSUSE staff.

Goodness me, it's been a long time since I blogged. So, what have I been up to? Well, last weekend, we were @lancs.ac.uk for the weekend. I actually managed to go the entire weekend without logging on, and only checked out one lab. Friday night we did a mini bar crawl on campus. Fantastic night, great to see some people we hadn't seen in a very long time, but also to put faces to some names that we'd never met in the flesh before. We started at Grad Bar, before moving on to Furness, and finally, the new-look County Bar (where Cartmel Bar used to be).

Saturday, we had lunch in the best pub anywhere, Ye Olde John O'Gaunt before mooching around the new South-West Campus, including a visit to the new Lonsdale Bar. I have to say that I found the new campus area to be totally soul-less. It's block after homogeneous block of very modern, very expensive accomodation. The bars, if Lonsdale is a reasonable example, reminded me of a trendy city-centre bar and as such will date very quickly. The colleges won't have the finance to keep refurbishing in the way that the big bar chains can. By contrast, Grad Bar, which only opened in 1998 if my memory serves me, was designed to look like a traditionalish English pub and so, like the John O'Gaunt, has not aged. The John actually has not changed one iota, they didn't even appear to have reprinted the menus - and long may it remain so. Saturday night we had a meal at The Honey Tree, Morecambe which was superb as always. It's just about our favourite Chinese restaurant in the North-West.

Sunday was the purpose of our visit, the dedication of Lauren Hamilton at Morecambe Community Church. It was a lovely service, very accessible and very moving too. There was a buffet lunch afterwards with some of the best stuffed olives I've ever had Was great to catch up a bit with Neil and Emma, as well as everyone else who was there, some of whom we hadn't seen in quite a while.

Wednesday, there was a college trip to Alton Towers. Five of us went and, with it being school term time and university exam time, it was really quiet and we hardly had to queue for anything. We had a great day, loads of fun and good to do something together, albeit a small number of us, before the majority of my year group are ordained and move on into curacies.

[Ref]
w00t! Go Michael, can't wait to have a machine I can build that on.

You actually beat me to doing mockups, which I was going to try to do when I had some time. I dunno how feasible it would be, because I've not looked at the YaST2 codebase, but it would be very cool if YaST2-GTK+ was HIG-compliant as far as possible. My vision for the GTK+ frontend is that it allows YaST2 to appear more integrated with GNOME (and XFce) and the HIG will help that of course.

Okay, the GnUSE Vapo-Project I mentioned a while ago now has a Summer of Code project that you can sign up for through openSUSE.

Look at the list of openSUSE projects, and select the really neat idea of a new GTK+ frontend for YaST. Then, apply, get accepted, and get your code-fu on!

Help the GnUSE Project, you know it makes sense.

Been a really full day even by St John's standards. Started at 8am of course with Morning Prayer and then five hours of lectures, with a break for lunch. Then, we had the first cricket practice of the summer or, in my case, of the last ten years. Bowling went quite well, was happy with my length and, most of the time, my line. Plus was getting some nice turn on the ball. What made it difficult for us on both batting and bowling fronts was that the college field gave almost no bounce whatsoever. After that was music practice for Thursday evening, so I got home, finally, at about 6pm.

Laptop news is that the mainboard needs replacing, the repair guy's going to try to get hold of one, but Acer don't make that model anymore so he's going for second hand. Seems more likely with each bit of news that the end result is that I buy a new laptop.