(and Dynix etc before that...)

[Ref]

The so-called hidden feature of killing the X Server by hitting CTRL-ALT-BS is totally awesome, more than handy at times (especially if one gets hit by bug #244713).

We cannot do without this, it is the very bedrock of the Linux desktop. What sort of person accidentally hits those three keys at the same time - accidentally people! It's hard to conceive of a situation where those three keys could, without the user intending, be pressed simultaneously.

Do not remove this feature by default, please don't.

Or, if you do, include an option in SaX2 to enable it so when I change the xorg.conf to re-enable it I don't lose it subsequently.

Random thing I discovered today: The final episode of season one (man, I hope there's going to be a season two) of Studio 60 is entitled What Kind of Day Has It Been?. This triggered something in my mind because, of course, the final episode of season one of The West Wing has the same title.

That made me wonder, which in turn made me check, and sure enough, the final episode of season one of Sports Night also bears that title.

Mr Sorkin, do I detect a theme?

New paragraph. Insert a link: Planet SUSE Insert an image: This a test posting with Drivel. New paragraph. Insert a link: Planet SUSE Insert an image:

It's been a morning of mundane tasks. Amanda took Callum to a playgroud with EV so I spent the time vacuuming, then cooking, then attending to laundry. All very mundane things. The thing is that it's doing those things here that makes it home. A good feeling to realise that the parish already feels like home.

In light of that fact, here is a photo of part of my parish, this is just down the road from the Jolly Sailor pub.

More mundanity this afternoon as Peter and Sandy are coming round for dinner and the house is still in something of a state.

Whoooa, integration, that's what you need!

I closed bug #222182 this morning after finding that it appears to be fixed in the latest Factory. That means I can now synchronise my LifeDrive and Evolution again which just makes my life a lot easier.

This makes me happy

Quite a fun weekend on the whole. Yeaterday morning we had a men's breakfast at church part of kick-starting the men's work then I took Callum into Southampton for a couple of hours. In the afternoon, I went to the beer festival at the community centre where I enjoyed, among others, some Lancaster Bomber and met some people from the village who I'd not met before. This morning we had a cafe-style breakfast service at St Paul's which was sort of half-way along my imaginary cafe-church slider between cafe and church.

Also been an interesting poker weekend. Yesterday afternoon I made a Royal Flush while playing in a Hold'em Sit-and-Go tournie and then this afternoon I had the pleasure of playing about an hour of Omaha with John Duthie who, along with Katja were playing on micro-limit tables today "to be nice". Undoubtedly good for the site and if Team PokerStars generally start playing on a variety of levels I think it will pay dividends for the company.

The new server is basically ready to go and as soon as I have control of all of my domains, it'll be sorted.

Planet SUSE is already there although you may have to click through to get to it.

If you can see this, this is running on bartlett.

I just did something idiotic - I nuked my inbox!

So, if you had emailed me recently and I had not responded, I've probably now also lost the mail that you sent - sorry.

Stupid, stupid James...

Update: Whoops-be-gone! Inbox restored.

I decided to do the update in Smart instead:

• Install Pascal's package for 10.0.
• Various iterations of adding appropriate channels (openSUSE OSS, non-OSS, updates, Pascal's repo)
• smart update
• smart upgrade
• Above step fails: error: filesystem-10.2-22 requires rpmlib(BuiltinLuaScripts) <= 4.2.2-1 so do it in stages...
• smart upgrade rpm rpm-python pam pam-modules
• At this point I cheated and did rpm -Uvh /var/lib/smart/packages/*.rpm
• SuSEconfig ; ldconfig (just to be on the safe side)
• cat /etc/SuSE-release
  openSUSE 10.2 (i586)
  VERSION = 10.2
• Reboot!
• At this point I had to use the hypervm frontend to login and restart the SSH daemon and insserv it. Another reboot to confirm that it had "taken" and voila! I have updated it to openSUSE 10.2

I have my nice shiny new VPS from a company I'm likely to sing the praises of, based on my communications with them so far (Cheap VPS). The thing is it's a SUSE 10.0 box so, I'm having a small adventure in doing a system update to openSUSE 10.2 using YaST.

Maybe I should just use Smart instead

Packages I have updated and/or fixed in GNOME:Community today:

• gimp-unstable
• mail-notification (note: build fails on Factory due to weird Evolution bug, will resolve tomorrow)
• pidgin
• tomboy

Hoping to get an agreement to change the target for G:C to be GNOME:STABLE for products 10.2 and older which will really help in keeping stuff in sync.

Note to self: Do the gnome-python-desktop work to allow gimmie to support launchers which require su permissions.

• Led worship and the service at St Paul's this morning which went pretty well
• All rooms upstairs are now painted so the house is very close to being done
• Have filed a few bugs over the weekend and provided some info for others - looking forward to hearing how the Bug Slashing Weekend went as a whole.

It's the openSUSE Bug Slashing Weekend and so, in between looking after Callum and painting the upstairs of the house, I'll be on #opensuse-bugs - will you?

Server failure at PinkDylan (hardware apparently) meant that I lost one day's worth of blog and it was only two lines, so no biggie.

• I caved in and am now on Facebook.
• Added a bunch of feeds to Planet SUSE.
• We got back from Soul Survivor Cheshire on Wednesday. The drive back turned out to be a lot better than the drive there.
• SSC itself was really good. Lots of young people came to know Jesus and so did one of the guys running the food vans that were hired in (!) but my favourite moment was on the last night when three couple did the Gay Gordons across the front of the venue during the worship.
• Am looking at alternative hosting arrangements, probably going to go for a VPS service.

I'm 31, so old!

Congrats to JT - you know who you are.

DSL is active at home - yay!

It took us about seven hours (!) to drive up here on Wednesday.

Got to do that all again this Wednesday.

Joy!

(Still no DSL!)

No, I haven't died. Nor have I just decided to keep quiet (like that would ever happen!). This has been a period of enforced non-blogging. I don't like it, I would not recommend it. I do however want to talk about it. So don your best therapist face, let me lean back on my virtual sofa and I'll tell you all about it (and in the words of Niles Crane, "Whereas my brother is a Freudian, I am a Jungian so there'll be no blaming mother today!").

I will instead be blaming BT. More specifically, BT Wholesale who are an odious company in the BT Group. We moved to our new house on the 3rd July and our phone line was activated on the 4th. At that point, my lovely ISP requested that ADSL be activated on the line and were given a date when it would happen. On that date, BTW decided to point out (NOT, please note, when the DSL activation was requested but on the activation date) that there was a conflicting service on the line. Simply finding out what that service was was a feat on the part of the technical manager at the ISP. It turned out that the previous residents' ISP hadn't requested a cease of their DSL. The cease was ordered for a week hence, the 19th. The ISP couldn't request activation until the previous service had been ceased (go figure!) and so, on the 19th, the activation request went in. When BT finally acknowledged that request, they provided an activation date of the 31st(!) The 31st came and went, no DSL. By lunchtime on the 1st (when we were supposed to be heading off to Soul Survivor Cheshire), still no DSL. BTW then informed us that the activation date was the 8th August, when they'd informed the ISP it was the 31st July. Suffice to say, the ISP were livid, as were we and started chasing BTW. As I type this, at Soul Survivor, still no DSL at home. I'm not very confident in the 8th as an activation date either although if it does happen, at least it'll be active when we get home that evening.

BT Wholesale are abusing their monopoly position of providing DSL services on bog-standard telephone wires by getting away with shoddy service, providing conflicting information to people and being singularly unhelpful at every stage of the process. Were there any competition in that sector of the market, they couldn't behave the way they do and get away with it. Short of switching to a cable provider (and buying a whole set of new kit as well as being restricted to their options - I have a static IP and custom DNS configuration from PinkDylan), you're stuck with BTW. Wholly unacceptable.

So, what has happened in the last month? Well, I've started at Bursledon and preached my first sermon there which went okay. It's been a fairly light month as things wound down for summer. The house is coming together thanks to a lot of help from Amanda's parents and their paintbrushes. We've had Caz to visit and my study is just about ready.

We're currently at Soul Survivor Cheshire which is going pretty well although the site is pretty basic - next year the northern event is moving to Stafford.