Liverpool 4-2 Arsenal (5-3 Agg)

Liverpool Walk On to a third Champions' League semi-final in four years.

Managed to find a bar that was showing the first-half - they then agreed to stay open so we could see the whole game. Along with a crew of neutrals (mainly Plymouth and Leicester fans), we watched a scintillating game of football that - although the purists will have gained most from the spectacle - was certainly entertaining due to the fact that neither side could afford to be cagey. Arsenal had to attack out of the blocks and Liverpool knew that playing for 0-0 was going to be doomed to failure.

So, the semi-final is Chelsea and we all know where that led last time...

I will be uploading photos from the holiday when we're back but for now, just one of something I spotted as we were leaving our hotel this morning.

The hotel has a monitor on the reception desk which runs a custom application to display local flight, weather and other information and as we were leaving this morning, the machine it's connected to was booting.

I saw a penguin! Not just any penguin, it was Tux - the hotel runs Linux! The quality of the pic's not great because I took it with my phone as we walked past, but you can make Tux out okay.

That's right, I'm on holiday in Florence until the weekend (and very nice it is too) so I won't be doing any work, church or openSUSE related, until I'm back. Bugs and Planet SUSE updates will have to wait.

Did I mention I'm in Italy this week?

What happened to Spring?

I've finally got mail-notification (with its new non-standard build system) to build in GNOME:Community so once it's synced out to the servers, you should be able to grab 5.2.

I've given up on GYachI because it depends on XMMS which we no longer ship (this is bug #373123 if anyone wants to throw rocks at me).

Spent a fair proportion of this afternoon chasing Callum around our most local Starbucks - fun

We're having a night out for a pub dinner & drink tonight and then tomorrow, it's Jo and Harry's wedding in London. Camera at the ready...

• Tuesday afternoon, PV walked me through the baptism service ahead of doing my first one on Sunday afternoon.
• Last night, we were at the bishop's house for supper with a few other clergy & spouses.
• Hair appointment today, giving rise to a new hackergotchi (below).
• I am currently getting frustrated by trying to build GYachI for GNOME:Community as its configure script doesn't seem to check for any of its hard dependencies and so each time it builds, the build fails on another pre-requisite which I then have to add to BuildRequires and then wait for it to build again...
• I'm also ticked off by the fact that Mail Notification has abandoned the standard ./configure ; make ; make install system.
• Finally, this Build Service problem has, for the time being, halted any further attempts to get these working (and anyone else's packages).

The Bursledon Parish website is now hosted on a new service provided by God's Web, a Christian hosting company. GW have also taken control of mail hosting for the parish. It means a lot less traffic for my server (yay!) which should mean slightly better performance for my own site and for Planet SUSE.

Planet SUSE addicts will have noticed that the last time they hit reload, some people's IRC nicks appeared alongside their real names in the blog list.

I just quickly went through the list and added nicks I was aware of without thinking too much. If you're on Planet SUSE and I don't have your nick listed (or indeed, if I have it wrong), please drop me a line...

It annoys me when a package is blocked from building because the whole of Factory is waiting to build.

I recognise the necessity but it annoys me.

Thought you might like to know.

• Took a bunch of photos of Callum at the weekend.
• We went kite flying with Si, Ellen, Anna and Ben yesterday at the Royal Victoria Park. There wasn't much wind (not nearly enough for my quite small stunt kite) but Si's very large kite was able to catch what wind there was.

Congratulations Andreas and Jana on the birth of the latest member of the openSUSE community.

For the benefit of anyone who's been living under a rock recently, openSUSE 11.0 Alpha3 was released on Wednesday. It's already shaping up to be a great release - I'm using Factory on my work laptop and on the whole it's pretty solid already (some annoyances from the move to NetworkManager 0.7 not withstanding but hey, it's still Alpha right...?).

There are a bunch of screenshots of the latest Alpha, including the installer and the default KDE and GNOME setups on the openSUSE Screenshot Wiki page.

My new camera, a Fuji FinePix F40fd was delivered today, along with two 2GB SD cards so I'll be ready to take lots and lots of photos when we get to Florence.

To test it, I've taken the picture below. The camera works perfectly with F-Spot thanks to the gPhoto library. I've also used the new camera as a prompt to start using F-Spot to manage my galleries rather than the method I'd got used to using (from before F-Spot came along) that involved importing them with gPhoto's own gtkam utility, then using the CLI converter from Original.

Okay, after the registrar utterly failed to renew planetsuse.org for Justin, he's sorted it out and the DNS is now propagating. If you tried to get to the site in the last couple of days, it's likely that your (or, more likely, your ISP's) DNS server has the wrong IP cached but this will expire before too long. The correct IP has been confirmed by lookups done at multiple sites on both side of the Atlantic.

We're back in business....

Please, no-one else email me about Planet SUSE's DNS.

I know, I'm on it and I don't own the domain so it's not as simple as you may think.

In meantime, use planet.opensu.se.

In addition to being Good Friday, today is also my and Amanda's tenth wedding anniversary.

I have been blessed by being married to the most wonderful woman in the world for exactly ten years and tonight we've been out for a quite superb meal to celebrate.

This afternoon was our Good Friday service, The Hour at the Cross. A series of readings from the gospels about the Passion followed by reflections and silence interspersed with music. The photo below is the church at the end of the service.

Mark 15

The domain planetsuse.org was renewed yesterday and it's taking a bit of time to propagate at the moment. Just in case anyone looks here because they can't access Planet SUSE, simply add the following line to /etc/hosts:

77.74.198.174   www.planetsuse.org planetsuse.org

I ordered my new digital camera and so was going through the SD card in my current one (ordered some higher capacity ones for the new one) and I found a few photos of Callum that hadn't made it into any of my other galleries. They range from very shortly after his birth to not long ago. Click here.

With my new totem-xine packages, you can also listen to the full range of BBC radio stations in with Windows Media or Real Audio format (codec availability allowing). Download the playlists below and, in GNOME, they ought to be associated with Totem already.

Windows Media Real Audio

Using Factory?

Like Totem?

Want to use it with the Xine backend?

Then you need totem-xine.

You can grab it from my home repository (note: Factory only) - it should replace totem. You can now, if you want, use the full range of media types that Xine can handle. Furthermore, if you install the PackMan libxine* packages for 10.3 (yes, on Factory), it will use them too - including all the Windows codecs.

Why not just use the PackMan totem package? Because if a newer version number appears in Factory, you'll lose the Xine backend when you do an update. This way you're protected from that.

Once you've installed it, you can check within Totem that you're using Xine by doing Help; About and you should see the following information:

Roger's mention in my sermon is a classic example of a 3am(ish) idea.

In other news, I just broke my tall Maisel's Weisse beer glass by knocking it out of the draining rack.

Recorded Sunday at St Paul's, about 15 minutes long. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

openSUSE got accepted to the Google Summer of Code 2008. A couple of years ago, I got the GTK+ front-end to YaST accepted as a project and so this year, I've suggested a GTK+ version of the YaST installer.

Yesterday, a couple of people asked in #openSUSE-GNOME about the origin of my nickname, Riggwelter.

Well, the name, of course, comes from the Black Sheep beer of the same name but there's more to my use of it than simply my openSUSE guise.

I think I first used it on LuBBs, possibly during one of the periods I was banned on my main account and had to "borrow" someone else's. That would have been around 1995 or 1996 I think. It may have been while I was not at uni and so was reduced to using other people's accounts. (See a nearly complete list of my LuBBs names)

Not long after that, I started using Asylum MUD and that's when the name stuck because, having registered with it, it couldn't be changed so for the last decade (more in fact) I've been known as Riggwelter or variations thereon.

Any questions?

• Lunch & afternoon walk around Christ Church in Oxford with Rachel and Duncan. What a great way to spend a day.
• My Bill Bailey DVDs were delivered - rar!
• Kauto Star didn't win the Gold Cup! Glad I didn't have a punt...
• MoD continues to attempt to re-write history over Iraq

• Popped up to Novell UK and had lunch with Roger.
• Started thinking about my sermon for Sunday.
• I'm co-ordinating the Good Friday service at church this year and I'm putting together the order of service today. Found this handy mini-tutorial on printing brochures in OpenOffice Writer. One change for my printer is that when I put the paper back in to print the reverse side, the previously printed side needs to be facing up and I don't need to specify Landscape. So for an HP PhotoSmart D5100 series it's:
  • Right Pages, Reversed, Brochure.
  • Left Pages, Brochure

That's right folks, as of this morning I'm back to using openSUSE Factory. This is currently what will end up being version 11.0 and it's already really nice. The most noticeable thing for me so far has been how much quicker it feels that 10.3. This is because gcc 4.3 apparently produces binaries that are 20% faster than the previous version! The effect is that it zips along.

Speaking of zipping - or indeed, zypping - the new Gtk+ UI for the YaST package manager is a huge improvement. It's by no means pretty yet but so far I've not had need to use Smart.

About a week ago, Netscape ceased to be supported. This is an event I could not allow to pass without comment as it has been a very significant piece of software (and company) in my time online. Rather than add to the reams and pages of history of the company, I'm just going to list some of my abiding memories of Netscape:

• The excitement of the arrival of the first betas after using NCSA Mosaic and Lynx.
• Being able to fit it on a floppy with Trumpet Winsock for those occasions when you had to use a PC computer lab rather than an X-Terminal (thanks to Nick for this one).
• How elegant being able to center text made a page look.
• How quickly blink became really annoying.
• Having to use a friend's account on a Sun to be able to use it because it wasn't available for Dynix.
• Being granted access to a cluster of HP UNIX boxen by the university's Sys Admin just so that I could use Netscape.
• Extensions to the body tag allowing background colours and images and the arrival of tables.
• Reading jwz's accounts of the early days at Netscape and thinking how cool it must have been to work there.
• The increasingly bloated nature of Communicator as more and more features got added (mail reader; news reader; IRC client; dog walker; kitchen sink ...) but it was still hipper than switching to IE.
• The code being opened and the long long wait for a release as the code got tidied and then totally rewritten.
• The pointless portal (did anyone really want to get their news from Netscape rather than from a news service?).
• Discovering that a friend at church used to work for them - how cool?

I'm just stunned:

• Last month, the Bursledon Parish site served just short of 5.5GB!
• Over 330 people have downloaded my sermon on Titus 2 so far.
• In February, over 2,000 unique visits led to nearly 14,000 hits on the site.
• Six days into March and it's looking likely to far exceed February's statistics!

Today, Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont go to the polls in a round of primaries that will likely sew up the Republican nomination for John McCain at last.

Meanwhile, for the Democrats, unless Hillary Clinton takes the two big states - Ohio and Texas - her campaign may well be dead in the water. It's Senator Obama who has the momentum and tonight could see him effectively wrap up the nomination.

Michael: Good to see Rupert's still got a life after his retirement. I've an arrangement to meet up with him in Florence next month - pictures will ensue...

...possibly on this digital camera that I'm thinking about buying...

Whoops, I'd made the cookies that hide feeds in Planet SUSE only last the duration of the browser's session - why did no-one spot this?

Anyway, feeds you hide are now hidden for a year unless you subsequently show them again.

As of the 12:00GMT update on Planet SUSE today, readers of the web-browser editions (i.e. those who access it directly, not via RSS feeds) will be able to block feeds which do not interest them.

The blocked feeds will still be visible in both the blog list and the main body but their content will not be visible - allowing the reading of individual entries that look interesting.

I think this functionality in this form is unique to Planet SUSE among the planet sites and, once the template work used has been tidied up, it will be fed upstream to the main Planet project.

Spent the morning working on allowing people to block individual feeds on Planet SUSE. The basic functionality now works but I have some things to iron out.

If you want to play around with it and see it develop, point your browser here.

It's currently Fair Trade Fortnight - 2 weeks of raising awareness of the importance of ensuring that trade with the majority world is fair rather than free.

As part of this, Oxfam's intrepid Becks has become Fair Trade Woman and will be surviving on nothing but Fair Trade food for the full fourteen days.

Monitor her progress and show your support by joining the Fair Trade Woman group on Facebook.

[Ref]

Thanks to Mr Foil Hat for providing me with this fascinating link on this issue:

Sleeper Cell or Dozy Bastards?

Weird songs to have stuck in your head #348:

The theme from Rentaghost

From BBC News:

"A man said to be one of the most important recruiters for Islamist extremism in the UK has been convicted at the end of a major trial."

One of the most important recruiters and yet this is the first we have heard about his trial. The trial actually concluded about a week ago and is only now being reported.

This is yet another example of the way New Labour is eroding our rights in this country. Most people will not bat an eyelid at this yet it was a secret trial. Once the waters have been tested and public opinion found not to be opposed (basically apathetic is the likely reality), the slippery slope towards the government being able to make people disappear with impunity has begun.

Now, it may well be that Mohammed Hamid is guilty of the crimes he has been convicted of but the fact that the proceedings of the court and trial were kept secret makes one wonder who substantial the evidence against him really was.

One of the hallmarks of a free and open society - which the UK is supposed to be - is that the judicial process is open to scrutiny. This trial was not - we should all be afraid.

Confirmed this morning that my @opensuse.org email address now works. The left-hand part of the address is my usual online alias, riggwelter and so this morning I've resubscribed to my selection of mailing lists (having been unsubscribed in the fairly recent list server issues) with that address. I've also updated the contact link on Planet SUSE to reflect it.

Now, just waiting for the FreeNode IRC cloak to be activated...

The main "Occasional Office" you're supposed to learn in your first year as a curate is funerals. As yet, I've not had one to do (fellow Johnian curates have done dozens) until today.

Bailey, our hamster, passed away last night. He had a good innings - over two years - and died in his sleep. This afternoon, he was committed to the earth.

From BBC News:

Bush does the Funky President

Enjoy, lovers of freedom...

Recorded Sunday at St Paul's, 30 minutes long (including the reading) available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

Many thanks to Ben, Bj�rn and Justin who contacted me via blog, email and IRC to give some more information on package management and updating on openSUSE 10.3. Ben's post (linked above) is a really good description of the situation. Bj�rn sent a screenshot (below) of the GNOME updater applet's preferences. Justin points out that the QT/KDE version of YaST "has the ability to select all packages that need an upgrade for installation". My understanding is that the package management bits of YaST-GTK are being updated and improved for 11.0 so I hope this feature gets included.

I have a friend who is tentatively dipping toes into the world of openSUSE with some old laptops in the hope of resurrecting them and making them usable. Being old laptops, they don't have built-in NICs but what they do have is a PCMCIA/CardBus slot each. My friend has a couple of NetGear WG511T adaptors - one for each laptop. This is the same piece of kit as I use on my laptop when I'm at home to be able to talk to my sexy NetGear router at the full 108M (although that only works in Windows at the moment).

The WG511T is supported using the MadWiFi modules, the repository for which one can add in either YaST/zypper or Smart. This should mean that the whole process of keeping one's wireless drivers up to date (and so, keeping oneself online) is pain-free from here on in but nothing could be further from the truth. Please note that the following applies to any repository other than the official online update channel - any repository from the Build Service for example is also affected.

The thing is that, if someone's not a hard-core Linux guy, you want them to be able to use the 'official' tools to manage their system. That means using YaST, its software management module and its online update module (why these still have yet to be combined is simply beyond me). As I've said, you can add any repository you like to the list of repositories and sure enough, they then show up in the software installer so you can install, in this case, madwifi-kmp-default and let it get on with it.

The trouble is that that's then it. You don't get any further updates to that package you installed because YaST's online update doesn't ever touch a third-party repo. That's okay though because we have a command-line tool (ooh, that's going to pull in the new users, isn't it?) called zypper. Trouble is that that doesn't do it either. I discovered this earlier today while trying to upgrade mail-notification from 4.1 to 5.0 (it's in GNOME:Community). I executed zypper ref ; zypper up and was told there was "Nothing to do". However, when I then executed zypper in mail-notification, it went ahead and installed the new version, along with its new -lang sub-package.

So, why not have my friend use Smart? Well, apart from the reasonable question of "will openSUSE's own tools not allow me to do this?", there are issues with Smart itself. Smart is undoubtedly very powerful but it rather assumes that you really know what you're doing. In the above example, if there had been a kernel update but the madwifi packages had yet to be updated to match, Smart would remove madwifi unless you explicitly told it not to, leaving you offline suddenly.

This needs sorting out, YaST's online update moduke ought to have the option of using third-party repos as well as the main update channel. Where upgrading one package would result in another being removed, a question ought to be asked explicitly about whether you want to proceed with that upgrade or not. What is at stake is whether people trying openSUSE stay with it because this is something thought ought just to work and currently does not.

It's very nice of "Bishop" Andrew to promote me

I think Peter may have something to say about it though...

With help from a combination of sbrabec and darix, I've fixed the lion's share of the Expansion Errors we'd been seeing on GNOME:Community/openSUSE_10.?+GNOME_[UN]STABLE by tinkering with the project metadata. This means that a raft of packages that wouldn't update if you had one of those variations of G:C setup in $PACKAGE_MANAGER will now be upgraded the next time you update.

Forgot to mention yesterday, changed the flag for the default edition of Planet SUSE from a US/UK combo to the UN to indicate that it's not just English but any language other than German or Spanish.

So, what have I achieved today?

• Inbox reduced in size from 200 mail to 0 (yes, ZERO!). All mails were dealt with - not simply deleted.
• Several people added to Planet SUSE, interesting bug in the RSS feed fixed, sidebar in German site translated thanks to Christian.

Catching up on all sorts of things today, including blogging. I've neglected the blog a bit of late and need to catch up a bit.

Peter's been in Uganda the last couple of weeks (gets back on Wednesday) along with several other people from church, working with our deanery's link diocese over there (Bukedi). The first week of their trip coincided with my week in College. In his absence, we've started our Lent series of sermons on the subject of the cross. I preached session two yesterday and I was a little bit long. Not got the CD yet to put it on the website though.

Callum's started experimenting with walking and is starting to get quite good at it, managing up to about ten steps unaided now. Unfortunately, he's also been a bit ill the last week or so and his sleep's been thrown off slightly by that. Amanda and I are also under the weather with a touch of flu (or something similar).

This morning, my inbox has 200 emails in it - I need to catch up on that, have a serious dig into them and try to knock as many things off as possible.

[Ref 1; Ref 2]

A bit of jiggery-pokery means that this laptop is now working. Last time I recorded that, having tried to ram a CardBus card into an ExpressCard/54 slot, I thought a 3Com USB Wifi dongle might work. I bought one. It does. Had to install the zd1211-firmware package from the install media (note: the install media, not a third-party site) but with that in place, it was a case of plug it in, let NetworkManager scan, find the network and connect. What's even better is that the module's in the main kernel package not a kmp package. Reasons why that is good are below.

Novell bug #350717 is resolved by installing the relevant Factory kernel from here. Reasons for doing this are in the bugzilla entry. Now, this has the secondary effect of meaning that no 10.3 kmp packages are installable. Having removed the need to use one for the Wifi, the only one left was for the ATI graphics adaptor. I switched this to use the radeonhd driver which works a treat. No hardware 3D acceleration but, with a dual-core 64bit CPU, it's not a disaster by any stretch.

A bit more reading upon first discovering that I was going to need to buy a separate Wifi adaptor would have brought a quick resolution at a price that would still have been acceptably small. Incidentally, an external Wifi dongle is needed in the Less Free OS^TM as well as the gain on the internal one is so poor that unless you're in the same room as your access point, the signal is totally unreliable, which makes one wonder what the point of it is...

It annoys me when people use the word unique to mean unusual. Unique means that something is one-of-a-kind, that there's nothing like it.

Unique is a binary state, something is either unique or it isn't - there are not degrees of uniqueness.

So please - please - stop employing phrases like "very unique". I may have to start punching people who abuse this glorious word.

Planet SUSE now has editions for blogs in German and Spanish. At the moment, there's only one feed syndicated on each and all the site information is still in English.

So, this is a call firstly to openSUSE contributors who blog in languages other than English - and especially German or Spanish - to get in touch so we can beef these new editions up.

Secondly, a call for someone to translate the site information into these languages.

I arrived to college yesterday to find that the router had died so I've been offline for over 24 hours. Not a long time normally but, as my mail is downloading, I can see that there are a lot in my inbox that appear to need attention. A lot of those regard Planet SUSE. I've not had the chance to look at any of them yet but please be patient because I do also have other things to do while I'm here.

A demonstration seems a good idea: This is my keyboard with Alt Gr:

|¹²³€½¾{[]}\
@łe¶ŧ←↓→øþ
æßðđŋħjĸł
|«»¢“”nµ·

And now, Alt Gr+Shift:

|¡⅛£¼⅜⅝⅞™±°¿
ΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞ
ƧЪŊĦJ&Ł
¦<>©‘’Nº×÷

Thank you for reading this drivel.

Garrett: To an extent, that's what your Alt Gr key is for.

Play around with the keyboard and the following combinations:

• Alt Gr
• Alt Gr + Shift

Oh, and my bonus points come from Alt Gr+4.

[Ref: BBC News item]

So, the Democratic contest is now officially down to two and the Republican race effectively reduced to the same number of realistic candidates. McCain gained Giuliani's endorsement while former Senator Edwards has yet to endorse either of the remaining Democrats, possibly not wishing to alienate either side in what is still likely to be a very close race. Meanwhile, Senator Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama, saying he feels "change in the air".

Of course, the big and possibly decisive day is this coming Tuesday - Super Tuesday - with 24 states holding caucuses and primaries. I'll be doing my best within the confines of being in college for a week (which will be fairly full-time) to keep track of news as it breaks from the States.

Also keep an eye on:

• BBC News US Election coverage
• Electoral-Vote.com
• The Independent's Americas section
• The Independent's US Election Blog
• The Guardian's US Election coverage
• CNN's Election Centre

[Ref]

Still no resolution to either of the bugs I have open regarding Amanda's laptop. This, coupled with the facts that (a) I found a CardBus slot on the side of the machine and (b) We're changing our ISP and getting a NetGear 108Mbps WiFi router in the process led me to purchase a pair of NetGear WG511T CardBus dongles. These are supported by the MadWiFi openSUSE packages and in conjunction with the new router will give us the full 108Mbps. They arrived today.

I plugged the first one into my notebook (I'd already installed the appropriate packages) and it was detected and showed up in nm-applet's menu - I can choose to connect using either it or the in-built adaptor.

Next, I plugged it into Amanda's machine. Or at least I tried. This is the point at which I ran into problems because (and obviously this is an issue with the machine, not with openSUSE or Linux before anyone flames me thinking I don't know this) it turns out the slot is not an extremely useful CardBus slot but a next-to-useless ExpressCard/54 slot.

So, I'm back to thinking about working USB adaptors. Some Googling around suggests that the 3Com 3CRUSB10075 ought to work out-of-the-box but I'm now feeling reluctant and aware that I'm building a collection of functioning (so I can't return them) wireless adaptors that make slightly geeky paperweights. Has anyone reading this on one of the Planets had experience of this particular dongle with Linux (preferably openSUSE)? Get in touch...

Man, I should work for a tabloid with headlines like that

"America's Mayor", Rudy Giuliani had pinned his hopes of gaining the Republican nomination on the Florida primary. He'd forgone the prior - smaller - caucuses and primaries to focus on the big states, of which Florida went to the polls first yesterday.

Had it worked, he would have gone down as a genius of election strategy - irrespective of how he had fared against whomever becomes the Democrat nominee.

It didn't work. Yesterday, Giuliani came a distant third in Florida behind Senator McCain and former Governor Romney. After this, it's hard to see him continuing in the race and the obvious candidate for him to endorse is McCain.

Mike Huckabee finished fourth in Florida and remains defiantly in the race although, like Giuliani, it's hard to see him coming out on top now, although everything could change on Super Tuesday of course. It's hard to discern who Huckabee would endorse were he to withdraw. As a southern Baptist, he'll be distrustful of the Mormon Romney and the generally moderate McCain.

Senator Clinton won the merely symbolic Democrat primary - no delegates from Florida will be permitted to vote at the Democratic convention.

More analysis of McCain's win in Florida and the Super Tuesday implications.

Stephen: Here's a 1-click icon for ya!

• Finished my "Deacon's Essay" and sent it to Peter. He now adds a covering letter and sends it on to Church House. I await their response and shall don my asbestos underwear when the time comes...
• Added a small patch to bluez-gnome in GNOME:Community which adds a menu option to the applet to launch the bluetooth module of YaST. This is in keeping with the menu of the respapplet for example.
• We bought Callum his first pair of shoes this morning

Someone buy Federico and Oralia one of these please!

Fred: I say get it as it is - bet you'll look fabulous in a skinny shirt like that

Update: To prove my point...

...although the second I've hit in less than six months.

I made a Royal Flush on PokerStars tonight (note that the odds listed on Wikipedia for being dealt any given hand are, I think, for Five-Card Draw but it's still extremely rare - in all the poker I've watched on TV for example (and it's a lot - and just about ever variant you can think of that's played seriously), I've only ever seen one RF - at the 2007 World Series of Poker).

Proof of my Royal Flush

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton fall out; Giuliani's strategy looking less wise; Republican race likely to get bloody.

Worth reading/subscribing to: Justin Webb's blog on the BBC.

Recorded yesterday at St Leonard's, 21 minutes long available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

69% of votes in Nevada are counted and the BBC are confident enough to call Nevada for Clinton. Clinton's support in the Hispanic community seems to have won out over Obama's support in the unions. The nexus of these two lobbies is the casinos of Las Vegas and some of them - for the first time - held caucuses on site to make it easier for their employees to vote. Kudos to them for doing so, below is a photo of the Clinton family in Vegas.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have basically seen Nevada wrapped up by Mitt Romney thanks to the state's 7% Mormon population and attention has been focused on South Carolina. In South Carolina, Senator McCain seems to hold a narrow lead. As all elections since 1980 will attest, McCain will be the Republican nominee come the autumn.

Photo courtesy of the BBC/AP

We had our PCC and Leadership Team "Away Day" today. The reason I've put Away Day in quotation marks is that we went to the coffee lounge at St Paul's - hardly away.

Anyway, we were meeting about our Mission Audit and the feedback we've received from the church through anonymous questionnaires we gave out over the New Year period.

All in all it was a very fruitful time and should give us a great platform from which to minister into 2008. Some of the discussions also fed into my sermon for tomorrow, Titus 2: Live Wisely. Ogg Vorbis/MP3 available on Monday (I expect) from the Bursledon Parish Sermons page.

I'm so dozy. I phoned Orange this morning to ask about upgrading my phone (to a Nokia N95), thinking I was around 16 or 17 months into my 18 month contract. I was told that I was actually only in month ten and so there would be a significant charge were I to upgrade. I had to look back through my blog to confirm that the bloke I spoke to was indeed right.

Less dozy is the fact that all my mail now goes to my GMail account rather than me hosting my own mailbox. The only thing with this is that I don't seem to receive mail I've sent to mailing lists myself - if anyone (oh, Lazy Web, help me!) knows of an option in GMail's settings to remedy this, could they please let me know as I can't find it. What it does mean is that I'm downloading a lot less mail now as it all passes through their spam filter before then also being filtered by Evolution's SpamAssassin plugin.

[R.I.P. Bobby Fischer]

[Ref]

My packages, bluez-gnome, gimmie and mail-notification are now fixed and comply with the packaging guidelines.

This will probably be discussed in the Task Review at Thursday's GNOME Team meeting.

Speaking of Planet SUSE, which I was earlier, a quick preview of a thought.

We now have over 100 feeds aggregated on Planet SUSE which is a lot. Not all of the are prolific. Some, I'm sure, must be out of date and no longer maintained.

A while ago, I had an email complaining (politely) about one of the people who is syndicated. I was reluctant to remove said feed and so it remains but it got me thinking.

It's my intention to add an easy way to block individual feeds. The way I'm planning to do it will require no patching of the Planet code on my part which will mean that it's not broken by future code updates. This is a good thing.

Anyway, just thought people would want to know.

Of course, the 80% of readers who do so via the RSS feeds won't get this facility - sorry.

Caught up on Planet SUSE additions, including Jan who works for Novell in the OpenOffice.org team.

What's interested me about Jan is that he's producing a HOWTO for Debian people moving to openSUSE. People who read my People of openSUSE interview will know that I generally wouldn't want to pressure people to switch from another distro to openSUSE but if people want to move from Debian to openSUSE, Jan's HOWTO could really help.

Posted on opensuse-gnome this morning.

We now have a list of packages in GNOME:Community that do not yet comply with the packaging guidelines. The team (myself included) can now set to work at bringing them up to code.

Jakub: Sweet! Do you have an SVG of that?

Aaron: Smooth move adding a 1-click link, you might want to use the button below instead:

Update: Inspired by Andrew, a second option added.

[Ref 1 Ref 2]

I'm currently listening to Five Live through my bluetooth speakers. I've achieved this by forgoing Banshee for this facility and turning instead to MPlayer. This was really easy, especially as I use the gmplayer GUI.

If you're in a similar position to me then firstly, you have my sympathy and secondly, do the following to hear your MPlayer output without wires:

Right-click and select Preferences; Select Audio; Select alsa; Configure driver; Type bluetooth in the Device field.

This assumes that you've done the .asoundrc magic detailed in the BlueZ Audio Wiki entry.

If you want the same to be your default in the command-line version of MPlayer, put ao=alsa:device=bluetooth in your $HOME/.mplayer/config - you can make the same change to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf to send browser plugin audio across the ether.

I'd still rather the BBC switched to Ogg Vorbis but it's better than nothing. Plus, it means that I've now set the MPlayer browser plugin up for bluetooth audio which is handy for me.

Update: Don't forget that it simply wasn't possible to set the speakers up within Windows beyond bonding with them.

I've added an Ogg Vorbis podcast to the Bursledon Parish sermons page. I'll be sending the patch to make this work to the maintainer of DirCaster real soon.

Sixteen years ago, it was her husband's turnaround to finish second in New Hampshire that earned him the nickname "The Comeback Kid". Last night, Hillary Clinton won in the granite state against all the odds (apparently, UK bookies were offering 8/1 against her) as well as the polls which showed a ten-point lead for Barack Obama. In the Republican primary, John McCain also turned things around to take first place. So, four elections (two each for the two parties) and four winners. What have we learnt, if anything, so far?

I'm not sure we've learnt anything other than that polls are unreliable and that this election really could see anyone representing either party. It's going to be exciting over the next 300 days to see how it pans out.

One of my plans for 2008 is to lose some weight. Strictly speaking, I'm not overweight but I am right at the top of my weight range. So, over the 12 months of this year, I hope to lose 1st (that's 14lb for any Americans reading). I started the year at 14st exactly which doesn't include additional weight gained over Christmas - I was very restrained over the festive period and 14st is roughly my average before Christmas too. I'll try to post progress at around the end of each month. In theory, losing a relatively small amount over a relatively long period should make it sustainable.

So, how will I be achieving this? What clever diet programme will I be following? None. Last time I lost some weight, I did so by simply eating less (well, taking on fewer calories), walking a bit more and drinking more water. Amanda's been in Somerset with her family the last few days and in that time, I've done the first two of that list (the latter out of necessity as she had the car) which has got me off to a good start. If I can maintain them and start replacing some of my coffee & tea intake with serious quantities of water, it's very possible I can achieve my goal.

The BBC polltracker shows clear leads for Clinton on the Democrat side and Giuliani on the Republican side - notably different from the result in Iowa.

Of note is that Fox's poll has the relatively liberal Republican, Giuliani, showing a much narrower lead than the other polls - make of that what you will and while you do, remember that Fox are evil.

[Ref]

Obama won the Democratic caucuses by a clear distance from John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, Edwards just edging Mrs Clinton into second place which is a surprise. At this early stage, a three-horse race is good because it allows a variety of voices to be heard but I hope that by the time it gets closer to the convention (perhaps after Super Tuesday), the field will have narrowed to two so that it's less messy.

In the Republican caucuses, Mike Huckabee has a clear lead over Mitt Romney with 96% of them complete. This is quite a scary prospect if the shape of the Republican race doesn't change dramatically. One the one hand, there's Huckabee, a southern Baptist minister who doesn't believe in evolution and on the other, the socially conservative Mormon, Romney. On the basis of Iowa, none of the other Republican candidates are close although don't bet against John McCain making a strong run and Giuliani possibly picking up some votes in the larger states.

With 305 days until the election, it's getting interesting already.

Read: BBC News' coverage of the elections; The Independent's Americas section; The Guardian's coverage of the elections.

Sankar: I'd love to add myself to the Cc: but I'm not able to see that bug - can you open it up to non-Novell employees please?

[Ref]

Speakers are working fine now, I noticed that the batteries in the mouse were getting low, replaced them and the audio started working at the same time. In fact, I just hit play in Banshee without thinking about it and only later did I notice that I was using the mouse without breaking the audio.

Now if only the BBC would move to Ogg....

Regular readers may recall that about a year ago - just before Callum was born - I spent a while using KDE instead of GNOME. Well, the information that the new layout of my site doesn't quite work with Konqueror has prompted me to do a similar experiment this year with KDE4 to see how that's progressing.

I'll bear Stephan's wise words in mind as I do.

Roger informs me that the new layout of my site is slightly broken in Konqueror - so apologies to any KDE users out there who read my site directly. It seems that Konq doesn't honour an aspect of the CSS I use (in spite of that particular aspect being perfectly valid). Interestingly, Safari (based on KHTML just like Konq of course) seems to work fine.

Anyway, I'm working on it, will probably have to do some user-agent detection.

Watched Die Hard 4.0 last night - leaving aside all the techno-b*ll*cks it was good, fun action movie. After that, it was Jools Holland's annual Hootenanny which last night features Sir Paul McCartney proving he sucks anytime of the day or night (or indeed year), Kylie being fabulous but failing to save Sir Paul in their duet, Kaiser Chiefs rocking as always, Lulu being even more forgettable than in the supermarket adverts and Madness being, well, Madness. I know it's pre-recorded but it's a great way to see in the New Year if you can't go out.

Launched the new-look jamesthevicar.com this morning. By default it only shows the most recent blog entry now, with a link to see the whole thing - I may change this back to the old way of doing it but for the time being it looks a lot tidier. It also gives greater prominence to the irrepressible.info banner as this is a cause I really believe in.

Update: I changed it back to a regular blog view already - was annoying me already only being able to see one entry.

Alternatively, if you want to help me out with buying things I'm going to need for my time at college, training for ordination, such as buying me book tokens, please contact me using the email address in the right-hand sidebar.

• Oxfam Unwrapped
  Oxfam Unwrapped provide "Famously Funusual" gifts. If you share my passion for international justice, for the poor of this world and for helping those with less than yourself then buy me a gift from here. You can buy me a goat for a village in Africa for example.
• Amazon
  Amazon UK seem to change the way their addresses work for wishlists occasionally, so rather than try to link to it directly, simply follow this link, and enter the name James Ogley to find my wishlist. Here you can buy DVDs, CDs, books etc for me. Why I no longer boycott Amazon.
• Think Geek
  Think Geek are based in the States, so anything you buy from here is subject to import duty according to tthe rates specified by HM Customs and Excise when it's shipped to the UK. Here you can buy geek type stuff - toys for the office, geeky t-shirts, gadgets etc for me.

• openSUSE GNOME Team
  I'm a member of the openSUSE GNOME Team where I mostly look after the Community GNOME repository but also help with the other GNOME repositories.
• Planet SUSE
  Planet SUSE is an insight into the lives of member of the Novell/SUSE community. Inspired by Planet GNOME, I set up this blog & news aggregation which includes a large number of contributors to openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise.