[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.