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.