Well, it's taken the best part of the day, but all the songs I've been sent so far for the conferences are now set up for Presenter. Still waiting on others but least I'm not behind.

IRC meeting regarding GNOME packaging tomorrow. Been trying JHBuild and it's failing on libXrender at the moment because it's looking for x11.pc which isn't provided by xorg-x11-devel on SUSE 10.1.

Last episode of the West Wing.

Tears.

All the best to President Santos as he takes office.

Nine inaugural balls!

After Soul Survivor, I'm planning to watch every single episode of every season (156 in total) back to back before the start of term. Stay tuned for the Great West Wing Marathon.

"What's next?"

I promise to write about my holiday soon, it's going to take a while to do though. Anyway, Tuesday night Steve and Ali put a team together to do the pub quiz at the Cadland and we won! Finally!

Thanks to my mum for her early birthday present for me, a Palm LifeDrive. All I need to figure out now is why it won't talk to my WPA-PSK encrypted Wi-Fi router. It can see it but the signal icon seems to suggest it thinks the signal is basically zero and then it fails to connect. So, oh LazyWeb, can you tell me what I might need to do?

I can't help but be amused anytime I see one of the GNOMErs talk about the WSOP. I always initially think of the other WSOP

LifeDrive Update: It works fine with the unencrypted Wi-Fi connection at Caffé Nero so it must be something to do with the encryption. Interestingly my laptop (well specifically the wlan adapter's microcode) isn't happy at Nero at the moment. Since the last kernel update when I come here there are loads of errors dumped to /var/log/messages about problems with the microcode by NetworkManager. No problem whatever at home though. Weird. And it's not about the connection either, happens even before it attempts to connect.

I've uploaded my photos from Italy to the gallery. They're divided into four galleries.

Sermon last night went pretty well although I was a little long (32 minutes by my reckoning).

Will write-up the holiday soon.

When I powered off my mail server before going away, I somehow didn't consider the possibility of a 12hr (or whatever time scale) timeout on mail delivery. It seems I've lost all mail for the week. If you emailed Amanda or me during that time, would you please resend it?

Holiday notes coming real soon, along with around 150 photos, but got a sermon to finish right now.

Rob: From opensuse-commit...

+- Update to NetworkManager 0.6.4
+       - Lots of bugfixes
+- Drop upstream patches
+- Remove libnotify support and drop dependencies

Why remove libnotify support? I for one find the little popups very handy...

Spent the morning mowing the lawn (see the webcam) and trimming (significantly) the hedges and now I'm in a small amount of pain. Playing golf this afternoon which might help - getting some movement in the shoulders.

Big shout out to Andy and Liz who will be joining us at St. John's in the autumn. They're currently in Africa and it's good to read what they're up to.

Waterfall by the Stone Roses on 6music

Jeff:
As usual great to hear things from the horse's mouth as it were, but just wanted to respond to what you've said. This is in no particular order and entirely off the top of my head.

You say that people aren't interested so much in the kernel but more in the services provided. I agree with you to a point. The kernel does matter to people. The reasons it matters are in terms of performance. A poor kernel (be that in terms of speed, memory management, I/O performance, stability or whatever) passes on its defects indirectly to whatever runs above it in user space. This is one of the main reasons people switch from less free kernels (including Netware) to Linux. It has a profound impact upon TCO, which for suits is the bottom line, and uptime, which is one of the key points of interest for techies.

Please be careful singing the praises of ZENworks. Many people who have installed SUSE 10.1 have experienced problems with this package. Now, I know that updates are being tested and becoming available but it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. My advice to anyone using 10.1 would be to abandon ZENworks/YaST for software management and updates and use Smart (included in the distro in the smart-* packages, or you'll do better to grab Pascal's packages and get some channels pre-configured).

I hope you know that when you use words such as leverage people find it hard to take the rest of what you say seriously, irrespective of how much sense you make.

All that said, always good to read what you have to say.

From this Friday I shall be out of the country for eight days. I'm not taking my laptop and I shall be shutting down the servers at home. Mail for rubberturnip.org.uk, usr-local-bin.org, jamesthevicar.com and amandaloveshamsters.com will be queued by my ISP and the main website will obviously remain available but the photo gallery will be offline as will the webcam.

When I get back, I'm anticipating having a lot of mail to deal with, so please don't be surprised if I take a while to respond to anything I get sent.

Updated packages of AbiWord to 2.4.5 (i586/i686). At the moment the following plugins are missing: Link Grammar; MathView; Aiksaurus; GDA and XHTML is built without all options. I'll be working on adding as many of them to the next build as possible. This week, sermon preparation for when we get back from Italy is going to be my priority though.

Did something I should have done a long time ago this morning. I set my DNS server up to act as a DHCP server as well instead of using my DSL router for the task, given the router's limited feature set in terms of DHCP.

I'd actually never done this before (hard as that may be to believe), so I referred to the relevant chapter in the book (the server runs 9.x) and it was just a breeze. Thanks to whichever of Justin and Roger wrote that chapter.

Have spent most of today doing housework. Well, specifically washing up because I'd managed to let it get a bit out of control. Also had my hair done this morning. Gosh, what an exciting life I lead.

Down in Watford and St. Albans tomorrow. Meeting with the DDO in the afternoon and popping in to the offices in the morning to touch base ahead of the conferences. Having lunch with Hils which will be nice.

Had an email yesterday from JPR about GNOME packaging and stuff. Should be having an IRC meeting next week sometime to discuss it.

I think I need to get out more:
<Riggwelter> Hmmm, the CPU fan in my DNS server just dropped by a few RPMs by the sound of it...

Been looking at the notes on the YaST2-GTK+ project for the Summer of Code. Good to see progress being made. I've downloaded the code and it builds and even runs!

Glad to note that the target date for this is the autumn with inclusion pencilled in for 10.2. I'll look into producing packages for 10.1 when it's nearing readiness.

Wow, what a weekend. We've done both London and Derby's ordinations yesterday and today (photos in the gallery). Was amazing to see Jo, Liz, Simon, Mike P and Sarah S undergo the ontological change.

The London ordination clashed with the match. I was listening to it on fivelive. Still haven't seen any of the game and I suspect I'm now at the stage where I'm unlikely to see anything like extended highlights. Anyway, seemed to me that once England went down to ten men they were in the ascendancy. Sounded like Gerrard started playing in a role more like that he plays at Liverpool and became the driving force. Someone needs to have a serious talking to Rooney though.

Anyway, the interesting thing was that the winning penalty coincided exactly with the dismissal from the Bishop of London. Afterwards we went to Jo's post-ordination party, along with Pete Broadbent, among others.

Today was the ordination of Liz and Simon to minister at St. Alkmund's, Derby. A much smaller-scale affair followed by a lovely buffet lunch at the church.

Update:Fixed bad HTML that made this entry make no sense whatsoever.