2007 was the year that I became a father, was ordained and finally got a degree.

Originally emailed to Richard Bacon on Five Live.

This got me invited to speak on-air but I wasn't at my laptop to respond to the request in time.

My ongoing efforts to eliminate wires from my desk (I'll just about accept that I have to have a power lead running into the back of my laptop but I want no more than that) led me to buy a set of Acoustic Energy bluetooth speakers to replace my rather old and ailing set. Much like my adventures with openSUSE 10.3 on a Samsung R60plus, this has good and not-so-good aspects.

Now, I'm not daft and I'd checked the BlueZ wiki on audio devices to ensure that it should be possible. The AE speakers support A2DP and so I figured I'd be in business. I was right. To a point.

First, the good news. I followed the guidelines on the Wiki for setting Banshee. I use Banshee for all my listening needs as Helix Banshee allows me to listen to BBC Radio on the RealAudio streams (as an aside, my life would be a lot easier if the BBC would do the Right Thing^TM and start streaming in MP3 or - even better - Ogg Vorbis like Virgin Radio do). This worked perfectly - I enabled the Audio Service in the GNOME bluetooth applet, edited .asoundrc, started Banshee and hit play. A notification popped up inviting me to bond with the speakers and, once I'd done so, the White Stripes came blasting out of the speakers which I hastily turned down (wow, a lot of power). Success.

Now, the not-so-good news. RealPlayer is not listed as a supported player on the Wiki but I had reckoned without Banshee not playing RealAudio streams through the GStreamer plugin. I suppose it should have occurred to me but it simply hadn't. So, if I'm listening to a radio stream I have to either listen through the internal speaker in my laptop or plug into the speakers' mini-jack input (or hope that the BBC do indeed at some point sort out their streaming and not require people to use a proprietary codec). The other not-so-good news is that my bluetooth mouse interferes with the audio so it gets choppy and slows down if I'm using my mouse.

Still, all that is put into perspective by the fact that, other than actually bonding to the speakers, I couldn't use them at all in Windows.

I bought Amanda a Samsung R60plus laptop for Christmas and, while it's a very nice laptop, it has caused some degree of pain so far. This is by no means a full technical review, just a comment on my experiences with it.

First, the good things. It's based on an Intel Core2 Duo CPU with 1G of RAM, this makes it pretty nippy, the dual core of the CPU makes for a noticeable performance jump over my Core Solo-based laptop. The onboard graphics adaptor is an ATI Radeon and the openSUSE ATI guidelines worked perfectly. These drive a very clear and easy to view 15.4 widescreen LCD at 1280x800. The huge hard drive (120G) has plenty of space for the pre-installed Vista^TM and openSUSE 10.3.

Now, here come the problems. The wired network adaptor couldn't be detected and configured during install meaning that I couldn't add online repositories. I proceeded with the installation and installing from the DVDs went very smoothly and quickly but after the installation, the machine apparently would not boot Linux. A bit of experimenting with kernel command-line options revealed that the ACPI stack was the problem. This became Novell bug #350717 and also served to explain why the network adaptor hadn't worked during installation. The default boot option now has acpi=off while I await responses on that bug. The bug incidentally means no power management and the machine doesn't power-off on shutdown.

The wireless adaptor doesn't work, period. lspci reports it as being based on an Atheros chipset so naturally, I downloaded and installed the MadWiFi openSUSE drivers but no dice. So, I tried ndiswrapper following the openSUSE guidelines for Ndiswrapper on Atheros chipsets. This showed some improvement as I could now see my wireless network in NetworkManager but couldn't connect even with no encryption enabled on the router. Now, I can't help but wonder if this is in someway related to the ACPI issue but I can't be sure - especially the MadWiFi issue. I decided to buy a USB dongle that would work and settled on a Ralink based Edimax dongle after seeing it listed on Linux Emporium's Linux-friendly WiFi page. This uses the rt2x00-kmp-* package which is part of the openSUSE core distribution. Cue another bug: Novell bug #350956 and this also doesn't seem to work. Thankfully, with ACPI disabled, the wired adaptor works with the sky2 module so Amanda can at least get online in my study.

Now, some good news and something weird to finish with. It's a little thing but the R60plus has an SD slot in the front. My Asus A6J has one in the side. Mine doesn't work but the one in the R60plus does exactly what you'd hope. Plug in an SD card and it's detected and mounted. If it appears to be from a digital camera, it's treated as such by gnome-volume-manager. Excellent. The weird thing is that plugging speakers or headphones into the headphone mini-jack doesn't cut the internal speakers. It's not a software issue because it's the same in both OSs.

• Think I've done something to my neck in the night, really stiff
• Have just sorted out a huge backlog of hackergotchis for Planet SUSE. If you're a Planet SUSE blogger and you still have Geeko^[1] next to your posts, please let me know and we'll sort out a proper hackergotchi for you.
• Tonight we have A Christmas Journey, the live Nativity walking through the village. The church has partnered with a local arts foundation to make this happen and I'm really looking forward to it.

Last time we did the quiz at the Vine, we came second on a tie-break.

The same happened tonight but still a valiant effort by Team Sluts and Faggots.

Note the time on this entry - I just got home.

I got interviewed for the People of openSUSE section of openSUSE News.

If you want to know more about me then

• You need help
• Click here

This morning on Five Live, there was a chap from Hull City Council talking about compensation for the floods earlier this year. I nearly choked when I heard him use the word co-ordinaztion (sic). Why, when there are perfectly good real words in the English language, do people feel the need to make their own words up?

In the odd bit of spare time I get here and there, I've been working on a new look for my site. The current design was done before I started theological college, so it's about time. It's basically complete now so I'm planning to put it live on New Year's Day.

Anyway, as part of doing it, I wanted to replace my current 'mates' list with a blogroll that's a bit more up-to-date. As I trawled around people I know who have blogs, I discovered just how few of them have kept up with posting. You hear in the tech news from time to time how many dead blogs there are. Most of them belong to my friends it would seem.

Which leads me on to Nick. Nick's blog is not dead, just not updated very often because it's about his travels. What is dead is his Google Ads account. Why is it dead or rather, why did he get banned? Because Nick just clicked through all the ads that got put on his site himself to generate income. Nice one Nick. Shame you got rumbled.

Marseille 0-4 Liverpool

A comfortable win with what Rafa described as a 'near perfect' performance. Goals from Gerrard, Torres, Kuyt and Babel meant that the Reds scored sixteen goals in their last three group games to reach the knockout stages.

Porto also won, to top the group, meaning that Liverpool will have to play one of the seeded Italian or Spanish sides in the next round. I think that's a good thing because you have to beat the best to be the best - if Liverpool are to have another deep run in the Champions' League, they're showing the sort of form that could see off anyone.

Astoundingly, today we received an item of post which was correctly addressed: The Revd James and Mrs Amanda Ogley. It turned out to be a Christmas card from the Bishops. So I suppose one would hope they'd know how to address it.

In other news, I've uploaded a load more photos of Callum and I'm being thoroughly festive this year:

I've updated gconf2-rpm-macros in GNOME:Community in preparation for adding a new target repository, openSUSE_10.2+GNOME_STABLE. The update tests the %suse_version macro and %_repository to determine whether the package needs to be populated. If it doesn't, a dummy package is generated which makes life easier for maintainers of packages which have it in their BuildRequires lines.

This is how it's done: The contents of both %install and %files are wrapped in the following:

%if %suse_version < 1030
%if "%_repository" != "openSUSE_10.2+GNOME_STABLE"
Section content goes here
%endif
%endif

Obviously, if we a 10.2 and GNOME:UNSTABLE repository, an extra layer of %if can be added.

Stephan: It's worth bearing in mind that most of the people who said Mono will be using Gtk# making a possible total of 19.9%.

Ultimately, who cares so long as they're developing [decent] apps for Linux?

You may not have noticed this as it happened without announcement but, as a result of a conversation on #openSUSE-GNOME, there are now versions of GNOME:Community available for the following arrangements:

• 10.3 + GNOME:STABLE
• 10.3 + GNOME:UNSTABLE
• Factory + GNOME:UNSTABLE

I also said this to members of the team on IRC but for the benefit of people who will have missed that, as a member of the clergy, we're coming into my busiest time of the year so I'm officially unreliable on the openSUSE front until December 26th - I'll try to respond to emails and may even update the occasional package (tomboy was upped to 0.8.2 for example) but nothing that's going to require a time investment of more than about a minute.

Does anyone believe that this election was remotely fair and free? When is the international community going to start treating Russia like what it is: a de facto dictatorship and stop fawning over them because they have oil and gas and don't like Muslims any more than the US or UK governments?

...until this moves beyond simply being wanted for a crime?

Those of us who are vocal in pointing out that the current US President is a war criminal and must be held accountable may start being silenced at some point.

Don't think it can't happen.