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.