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 up the ghost, disk errors being thrown as the kernel just gives up on trying to read it, and the BIOS sticking at Verifying DMI Pool Data. Time to get a new drive.

Photos of tonight's karaoke.

Native Google Earth for Linux is now available. It's the latest beta (version four), but seems rock steady. Just download the installer and run it. You can install it locally as a user, so you don't even need to be root. Runs pretty quickly on my machine (Intel Core Solo 1.66 GHz/512M/GeForce Go7300+OpenGL), I suspect it might be a bit ropey without hardware accelerated OpenGL . The thing is, it's very pretty and very cool, but I'm not actually sure what it's for - doesn't serve any useful purpose for me.

Interesting discussion about finally dropping GTK+ 1.x from the distro.

Mixed day really. My intentions to start work on my CTW204 essay were scuppered for reasons for too mundane to go into. I'll be attacking BS204 tomorrow instead. Deadline for both is a week today, so time's not too tight.

After that, some interesting discussion on opensuse-packaging about GNOME 2.15, wherein Jonh and I might be helping Stanislav with the packaging ahead of 10.2, the aim being for 10.2 to include GNOME 2.16. Jonh's also working on one of the SoC projects, and will hopefully be on Planet SUSE soon.

Watched Australia beat Japan this afternoon, absolutely cracking game, especially the last ten minutes or so. Those Aussies just don't know when they're beaten. Watching USA v Czech Republic at the moment, it's 0-1 right now, but still early days.

Out for a chinese tonight with the others in my year who will be doing a third year.

Three Guantanamo hostages (sorry, I cannot use the term inmates, these men are hostages, plain and simple) have committed suicide. In a typically hawkish statement, the camp commander described this as an act of war. Subsequently, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (whom the BBC describe as a 'top US official', seems pretty low to me, third tier of a role that isn't a cabinet post) described it as a PR move. If this was an act of war then it's possibly the most futile of all time, but why should the facts get in the way of a good bit of rhetoric? The reality is far more likely to be that the men in question were at the point of utter desperation. As Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch said, they were being held lawlessly.

Totally unrelated, but the BBC's World Cup coverage's theme tune is Thine be the glory.

Thai meal for Jo's birthday was fantastic, had a great time. The amusing thing for me was that on Thursday night, the college meal was Thai green curry.

Also on Thursday it was, as most Thursdays are, a college open day. I was hosting a prospective student who's an engineer at HP. He mentioned he was thinking about switching (a) to a laptop and (b) to Linux so I went and got my new machine. To say that both elements impressed would be an understatement. In fact the Xgl desktop effects are turning a lot of heads at St. John's.

After the meal Thursday night, we set up the chapel for last night, this year's College Summer Bash, Gameshow Gala which was a right laugh.

Amanda got home yesterday, so good to see her I'd missed her like crazy last week.

Amanda's bag was stolen this morning! Thankfully she got it back, but all the cards were taken (and so, cancelled). So annoying, and to say what I think about the people (or person) who did it wouldn't look good for a proto-vicar.

New DSL router arrived today, with a built in WAP, so I'm now online wirelessly at home at last. The NIC in my new laptop not working wasn't the end of the world because I happened to have a PCMCIA card handy which uses the tulip module, but so much better to be wire-free, especially with a near four hour battery life(!)

Happy Birthday Jo! So far today we've had a cooked breakfast and tea and cake. Tonight we're going out for a Thai meal.

New laptop arrived today, and it's niiice. SUSE 10.1 is now installed, installation went like a dream - Windows partitions were resized perfectly. Interestingly, I've managed to find a laptop where the WLAN adaptor is supported out of the box (Centrino), but the NIC isn't^[1]. So, I now have a nice, widescreen, Xgl-enabled notebook.

^[1]02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Unknown device 8168 (rev 01)

Spent a fair proportion of Saturday in Derby helping Liz celebrate her birthday, saw the last 15 minutes or so of the England - Jamaica match, so not in a position to comment other than to say that a hat-tick from Goal Machine Crouch can only be good news. I look forward to seeing the robot dance in Germany.

Today was Steve's (the vicar) tenth anniversary at St. Luke's. There was a real air of celebration at the service, plus it's Pentecost today, so that helped the mood. I debuted an alternative third verse to Matt's song, Lord, let Your glory fall with a particular Pentecost focus.

Amanda heads down to London tomorrow for a course with work, so I'll be fending for myself until Friday.

R.I.P. "The Beast". It was finally pronounced dead yesterday, and this morning I have ordered its replacement - a much lighter option with a longer battery life. It should arrive Monday or, more likely, Tuesday.

Happy Birthday Liz!

Holy moly, how did it become June so soon?

Been a good couple of days, dinner with John & Linda last night which was cool. Today I actually did some reading for my CTW204 essay. Out for a drink tonight with Andy and Anthony who's up for a couple of days from his curacy. Top banana to see him, and glad to hear he's doing well.