'Free Tibet' flags made in China

I find when tired
My mind can wander a lot
It's in Brazil now.

When I get sleepy
I seem to think in Haiku
Why does this happen?

I am at St Paul's
Church is praying through the night
Need more caffeine please.

Just been looking at Electoral-Vote.com and specifically its poll trackers for Obama/Clinton vs. McCain.

According to the latest polls, Senator Clinton would beat Senator McCain by possibly as many as sixty electoral college votes. Senator Obama would also be projected to win but in his case, only by at most thirty votes and possibly it would be an exact tie.

Now, of course there's a long way to go but based on these polls, the accepted wisdom that there's no way a Democrat loses this year's election doesn't seem to hold entirely true if Obama gets the nomination.

What's interesting is (as I said earlier) that in the key swing states, Clinton's the horse to back. Let's look at some specifics (and of course, this is just based on the latest polling data). In Florida, Clinton beats McCain by a whisker while McCain pummels Obama. This is a characteristic I suspect of the elderly population in Florida. In Ohio, Obama loses to McCain by roughly the same margin as Clinton beats McCain. There are a couple of notable states that go the other way of course. Michigan projects an Obama victory (by a whisker) but a Clinton defeat and North Carolina sees Obama and McCain tying while Clinton would lose to McCain. Finally, in Missouri, Obama loses by a sizable margin while Clinton sneaks a win.

At one of the debates before the Pennsylvania primaries, both candidates were asked if they would make the other their running mate if they win. Neither answered. It's looking like Clinton's going to be best placed to win in November but Obama could make a fantastic run in eight years' time. The dream ticket could be the one with both names but Clinton's at the top. After all, right now she's the one with the Big Mo.

• Overnight, Senator Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary by about nine points. This not only the effect of giving her the lion's share of that state's delegates at the convention but also swings the momentum back to her. Her appeal to the super-delegates may have seemed a little undignified but she may well be showing that in key swing states, she's the democrat best placed to beat Senator McCain on November 4th.
• Zimbabwe's churches appeal to the international community, warning of genocide if there is no intervention. Mugabe's determination to steal another term in office by brutalising and crushing the people of Zimbabwe sickens people around the world and it's important to see clerics from across the ecclesiastical spectrum standing up and allowing themselves to be counted.

I just added a big list of people to Planet SUSE. I won't list them all here - there were loads. Why were there loads? Partly because there were a couple in my inbox waiting to be done but mostly because a lot of people had emailed me and those emails hadn't arrived. I suspect GMail's spam filter was somewhat over-zealous but with tens of thousands of mails in the spam folder (and it only keeps them for a week...) I really didn't have time to check.

Thanks to Beineri for providing me with the list. Sorry to those who have been delayed in being syndicated. I've changed where my mail goes and have gone back to doing all my spam filtering in Evolution (although I've switched to Bogofilter instead of SpamAssassin).

I've produced a screencast of using the multihead stuff I blogged about yesterday. A couple of things to mention. I'm using an external CRT Iiyama monitor but it could be a projector for doing a presentation. Also, I have Screen Resolution added to my main menu to speed the process up - you can find it in Control Centre if you have the packages from Federico's project installed.

multihead-screencast.ogg (Ogg Theora, 6.3M, 4min 39sec)

Oh yes! This is a big shout out to Federico who's co-ordinating the work to make the multihead situation rock a little bit harder on Linux/GNOME.

Firstly, I'll point to the wiki page about the effort and now I'll say how I've got to a stage that's on the way to me not having to boot into a Less Free OS^TM in order to do presentations with an external projector.

My laptop has an nVidia chipset in and I'm using the Nouveau drivers (which are in Factory). I did have to do a bit of manual editing of xorg.conf. Specifically, I had to edit the Device section that relates to the display and the relevant section within the Screen section and I'll mention the latter first. My default colour depth is 24bit, so here are the lines in question (my changes are in bold):

  SubSection "Display"
    Depth      24
    Modes      "1280x800" "1280x768" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480" 
    Virtual 2304 800
  EndSubSection

The numbers are based on the fact that the built-in laptop display is 1280x800 and I want my external resolution to be 1024x768. The maximum width therefore is 2304 and maximum height is 800. Now to the device:

Section "Device"
  BoardName    "Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300"
  BusID        "1:0:0"
  Driver       "nouveau"
  Identifier   "Device[0]"
  VendorName   "NVidia"
  Option       "Randr12" "true"
EndSection

Save the file, logout and log back in again.

Now, open the GNOME Control Centre and select Screen Resolution and you'll get the window that you can see below. Don't worry about the slightly ropey interface - it's a work in progress. What you see is the result of me having dragged the Iiyama monitor to the right of the AUO display rather than being a part of it - how easy is that?

I think a good aim would be to avoid having to edit xorg.conf at all and for this window to popup when an external monitor is connected but as the product of only a short amount of time's work, I'm really impressed. Nice on Federico, I'm in awe!

One last link: This is the tracker bug for multiscreen-related issues.

Martin: I was just thinking about TWM over the weekend, remebering heady days back in the mid '90s when I first switched from TWM to FVWM (1.x) but TWM still rocks.

When you say "make it the default in openSUSE", do you mean make that the default TWM behaviour or make TWM the default desktop?

Can we have the following options at install time please:

• GNOME Desktop
• KDE4 Desktop
• KDE3 Desktop
• XFce Desktop
• TWM Desktop
• Etc ...

A while ago, Michael reported on Rupert's trips to various places. For the unenlightened, Rupert was the mascot at Ximian Inc. back before it was bought out by Novell. Well, Rupert's been to Italy recently and here's the story of his trip...

Thanks to JP for nudging me to use small versions of the images

Rupert holds up the Leaning Tower of Pisa

Rupert at the Ponte Vecchio

Rupert at Michelangelo's David

Rupert enjoys some tasty pasta

Rupert drinks a cappuccino while checking the guidebook

Rupert relaxes on the train back to the airport

Apologies for Rupert's apparently huge monkey-hood while looking at the statue of David, it's his tail between his legs - honest

A few new galleries from the last few weeks:

• Jo and Harry's Wedding
• Pisa
• Florence

• YouTube: Catchphrase
• YouTube: Family Fortunes

The server hosting Planet SUSE will be being physically moved to a new rack this afternoon - some downtime will result.

Can't remember where this started but the most recent version I've seen is Garrett's...

ogley@riggwelter:~> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
1 history

Notes:

• For security reasons, I set my history to zero.
• This makes for a very dull history game.
• Sorry.
• A proper version of this would probably show a lot of vi and also a lot of osc.