Amanda's in QMC for observation now. I'm getting in to see her at least once a day and other people are visiting which is great.

The reason she's in is that the baby's going to be coming by Caesarean Section Tuesday of next week - the 16th January.

So, since GNOME is currently broken in Factory, I've decided to try out KDE since it's several years since I last used it. To that end...

smart install kde*

I've also started changing the packages in GNOME:Community that I maintain to use /usr for the prefix on Factory, will do the same for my home repo next.

If, like me, you're a user of openSUSE Factory then you know you're basically using it at your own risk anyway. This is an added warning. The work from GNOME:UNSTABLE is now going into Factory and, at the moment, things are quite broken. I'm using FVWM2 at the moment and trying to avoid GTK+ apps. Doing a command-line smart update suggests there are further updates now which may make it more usable. I hope so.

Read why this is being done.

Update: While I was typing that, the smart update finished and there were no new packages from Factory yet. I knew I should have put my Factory image in a virtual machine, but I just like living on the edge...

Over the last few days, the US has launched air strikes against Somalia, supposedly targeting al-Qaeda leaders. This unilateral action by the dangerous Bush regime demonstrates that the sovereignty of any state^[1] can be compromised by the marauding forces of 'democracy'.

In other news, Tony Blair yesterday said 'the manner of the execution of Saddam was completely wrong'. Let's ignore the fact that he waited so long after the event to comment for a moment^[2] consider what he said. Mr Blair, it was not the manner of the execution that was completely wrong, but the fact of it. Taking a life is always wrong and just because Saddam committed state-sanctioned murder does not mean that he should be the victim of the same. Blair and his government are totally morally bankrupt and the fact that they refuse to condemn the taking of a man's life by the state is further demonstration, if it were needed, of that fact.

^[1] The fact that Somalia is a seriously failing state without an effective government for the last 30 years shouldn't affect this.
^[2] Presumably, either he thought that his ministers could get him out this duty in spite of the fact that it was him who got us into the mess and so he must comment or he was hoping that Bush might tell him what to say.