I installed 10.2 Beta1 yesterday and I have to say I think this is going to be a really good distro when it's finished. In the meantime, I've filed seven bugs so far today:

• 216129
• 216313
• 216317
• 216319
• 216328
• 216352
• 216353

One gripe I have, and I'll raise this on a list because it's not a bug, is that the traditional three part menu (Applications/Places/System) was replaced automatically by the new SLED style GNOME Main Menu (recently proposed for GNOME 2.18) without me asking. Now, I like the new menu up to a point but I don't want it to be forced upon users. I knew about it, but seeing it there where the old one had been confused me at first. Imagine the reaction of a user who doesn't know about it, upgrades and it's all different.

My other gripe about it is 'Favourite Applications'. It's not immediately clear (or indeed even a day later) how I change this list. My question, therefore, is whose favourites are these? They should be mine, I suspect they're Novell's.

Finally, the Application Browser accessed by clicking More Applications on it is rubbish! What would be much better would be if clicking that button spawned the Applications menu.

The new menu looks like this:

Finally got around to installing the Flash 9 Beta and sure enough, YouTube is now usable, video and audio in sync.

This means that you can now enjoy this video of Lex leading worship at Week A this year. The reason I chose this video is that at 00:30 or so in it, you can also see the work done by our team on the big screen.

Yes, I know it's entirely unscientific but among those people who read the technology section of BBC News Online and could be bothered to vote, Firefox is the more popular browser. What surprised me was the number of people who said they use both.

Update to my earlier post...

It's not just SSH I can't do, it seems the only open ports here are 80 and 443.

Current repository status: mostly good. Things that require PyGTK on Factory are blocking on bug #214046 at the moment - that's beagle and gimp-unstable.

Spent the evening with Carole and Andrew last night. Was just lovely to see them and the food was excellent.

I'm posting this from Presence on Watford High Street, a cracking shop and coffee house where a lot of my friends work and which provides free wi-fi. Only thing is I don't seem to be able to SSH home for some reason which means I can't check my email.

openSUSE 10.2 Beta1 is out, and feel the goodness: Firefox 2.0, GNOME 2.16.1, KDE 3.5.5, X.Org 7.2RC etc etc etc. Think it's time I moved to this branch rather than 10.1...

So, what did I do yesterday?

Well, I had a couple of hours of Acts and Mission at college and finished the day with a research induction session looking toward dissertations and all that malarky. In the evening, we watched some telly and I 'cashed' in a play money Hold'em tourney on PokerStars.

Think by the end of the day I'd come down with Amanda's cold and this morning confirmed that. Pah!

[Ref]

This evening, I shall post an entry which will discuss what I've done today and then I'll add it to the blog of Britain. If you're in Britain, I suggest you do the same. Who knows what future generations will make of it, but I bet they won't really care all that much.

[Ref]

Justin: What model of Palm and what method are you using to blog from it? I occasionally SSH from my LifeDrive to my web server and vi myself a blog entry.

A while ago there was some discussion on the Factory list about the compositing manager in Metacity. I've built packages that enable this (and the required package libcm), which intrepid testers can grab from the Factory section of my repository. When I next deal with mail at home, I'll post the same message on the list.

Have removed the multisync-gui package from my repository, it's been moved into the main OpenSync repo and at some point may well replace the current FACTORY package. The result of this is that my repo no longer depends on the OpenSync package.