My old Advogato blog (2001-2005)

Since Advogato may be closing soon, I’ve grabbed the text of my blog from there
and I’m making it available here. It’s quite long and unedited, here for
reference only really. All I’ve done is view the source of the blog on
Advogato and pasted it in here, so it’s a strange mixture of the minimalistic
look of Advogato embedded into my CSS-driven look.

13 Jan 2005  »

[Originally posted in my real blog]

Planet SuSE is one year old on Saturday,and so I’m issuing another call to the SuSE community to get blogging, and
contact me to swell its feed listing. Over the last year, the planet has grown,but there must be more. So, do you work for Novell::SuSE? Do you build
packages for it? Do you provide some sort of service or support around SuSE
based products? I want to hear from you.

31 Dec 2004  »

Happy New Year Advogato!

Real Blog

23 Dec 2004  »

Bored, so testing gnome-blog

2 Aug 2004  »

Okay, this is just getting silly…

20 Jul 2004 (updated 20 Jul 2004)  »

Haikus

Advogato back
I miss it when it goes down
Don’t do it again

I will eat curry

Garlic naan bread, poppadoms
And drink ale tonight

usr local bin
Will be retired this summer
Thanks for all the fish

15 Jul 2004  »

louie: Sorry to read that things have gotten on top of you. Really hope the your time out helps. be encouraged though that you’ve inspired a lot of people with your commitment to GNOME, to good bug-squashing work, and to Free Software in general, myself included.

13 Jul 2004  »

Catch up for Advo readers, my full blog for the last few months is of course at swamprat.

• Been selected for training for ordination within the Church of England, handed in my notice at Pinnacle yesterday, trying to sort out hosting for usr local bin and my personal site now
• Car insurance paid out more than the outstanding finance!
• Building GNOME 2.7.x packages for usr local bin
• Going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight

20 Apr 2004  »

Did I already mention that I’m going to see Kill Bill tonight?

20 Apr 2004  »

After work yesterday, I was heading towards Hitchin, where I was supposed to be meeting with a retired priest to talk about some theological stuff. En route on the A1, just out of Borehamwood, I was involved in a Road Traffic Accident, first time in my life (either as the driver, or a passenger).

I was driving at about 60 in the left hand lane, observed that the van ahead was going a lot slower than I was, so checked my mirror & blind spot in order to overtake. When I looked forward again, I realised the van was a) stationary and b) just about right in front of me. I applied the brakes, but the road was wet, and I skidded, glancing the rear-right of it with the front-left of my car.

Thankfully I wasn’t badly hurt, just a slight pain in my side, which has pretty well passed by this morning, but I was rather shaken by it. Now waiting to see what happens with the insurance. Hoping that it’s going to be repairable, because of the finance on the car, if it’s written off, I could end up out of pocket.

The police who attended the scene (from Hatfield station, in Hertfordshire) were very professional, did their job with the utmost consideration for the people involved, and I cannot commend them enough.

BT engineer is coming tomorrow, hopefully, I might have a phone service, and more importantly DSL back by the end of the day. I dread to think how much mail is queued for the various domains that swamprat deals with.

Kill Bill tonight, nearly three hours of Uma Thurman kicking ass should help me unwind, and take my mind off the accident for a bit.

19 Apr 2004  »

It’s a very strange thing. Once I’d left Chez Dave on Saturday night, his DSL stopped working under Linux. now, I suspect it might be related to the kernel update that APT sucked down for him, but I’ll check it out on Wednesday ahead of cell group.

One thing I didn’t mention on Saturday, because I was hoping to have photos for the gallery was the fact that I’ve had a haircut. The ponytail has gone, it is no more. It’s been replaced with a rather nice short hair do which apparently makes me look “younger and slimmer” (not my words, nor those of the hairdresser). The photos should be in the gallery tomorrow – I forgot to bring my USB lead for the camera with me to work today, so in the meantime, here’s one I took with my webcam (the online version of which is offline along with the DSL). Compare with what it looked like beforehand.

17 Apr 2004  »

</w00t>
Having succesfully had an error detected on the line by BT, the entire line has now died. That’s no phone service, never mind DSL! We’re still waiting on the engineer on Wednesday, and in the meantime, they’re redirected calls to our landline to my mobile, and are refunding us for the line rental.

Have had curry and risk with Dave & Catherine this evening (and am now using their DSL), it’s been a great evening. Regular readers of my regular (hosted on the DSL alas) blog will know Dave as the owner of the Binatone DSL500. Have been ironing out a few issues with my insserv headers to bring up the line, and will now get around to publishing it real soon on Rubber Turnip.

16 Apr 2004 (updated 16 Apr 2004)  »

w00t!
Just had a call from BT, they’ve detected a fault on the line (which is good because it means I’m not losing my marbles, and I don’t have to buy a new router. It also means I’m not going to be charged for the escalation), and an engineer will be sent out. Now, I could have had one first thing on Monday, but alas, work commitments mean the earliest I’m able to be in for it is Wednesday. Still, at least a resolution is in sight.

In other news, Kill Bill Vol II tickets should be booked this evening, to go see it on Tuesday.

15 Apr 2004 (updated 15 Apr 2004)  »

Nnnng, looks like I spoke too soon about my DSL working again, it was up and down all last night, and is currently down. have to run some tests this evening, and get back to Pipex. How annoying…

Update
Went home at lunchtime, and tested the router with BT’s test account, it still lost the sync with the exchange, so it’s now been escalated to BT. Meanwhile I’m going to contact Netgear to see if they have any solutions up their sleeve, given that it was they, not Pipex or BT who sorted it last time I had problems.

Update 2
Netgear not a huge amount of help, although they did mention that since I’d upgraded the firmware (anyone else using a DG814 – 4.10 is out now – go get it), I ought to do a full hardware reset, which involves holding the hidden reset button for about 40 seconds. Well, you never know, it could make a difference(!)

In other news, I’ve had a really productive afternoon, I’ve been knocking problems and issues off like there’s no tomorrow, whittled my INBOX down from over forty emails to a mere seven, which is a real result. There is a tomorrow of course, in case anyone was wondering, and that tomorrow is FRIDAY!!!

Out for a curry with Nick & Rosie tonight – w00t!

14 Apr 2004 (updated 14 Apr 2004)  »

DSL is down (hence blogging on Advogato). Pipex won’t do anything until I’ve verified that the router won’t bring the link up when it’s the only thing on the line, and with a different microfilter. What fun.

Hamsters
In addition to having to do that tonight, we also have to sort out the living room, because last night our female hamsters escaped (only a few days before they go to pet shops annoyingly). So for, goodness knows how much of last night we had eight hamsters loose in the house. We managed to recapture them all and re-cage them this morning, but the living toom is a real state. I have a certain amount of grudging respect for hamsters that manage to open the door of their cage though.

The annoying thing is that if Tia (mother) hadn’t been running across the floor when I went downstairs, we probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have just assumed they were all asleep (as they should be at that time of the morning).

Hacking
Work on GST::Network is progressing slightly more slowly than I had anticipated, just got to iron out some probs in the profiling at the moment I think – the tool SEGVs when it’s run. When I dump the output to an XML file, it all looks fine apart from the <profiledb> section, which to me looks like a bit of a giveaway as to the source of the problem.

America

Seems like the various strands of the US government are getting themselves into a real pickle in the 9/11 commission. Somewhere in there you might find the truth, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

8 Apr 2004 (updated 8 Apr 2004)  »

company: allow me to introduce myself

I run a couple of sites, usr-local-bin.org, which provides up-to-date builds of various GNOME apps for SuSE, as well as a replacement GNOME desktop to the one included in SuSE by default, and planetsuse.org, which is, well, Planet SuSE, in the same vein as Planet GNOME.

I also hack a bit on GNOME System Tools, doing SuSEfication, and also a bit of SuSEfication on gnome-themes-extras.

It certainly is weird when people you’ve never heard of certify you, but in your case the work you do on GStreamer is why I certified you as I did.

30 Mar 2004  »

Replicated from my real blog for Advogato
Added Nat to
Planet SuSE today. Reminded me of a
conversation I had with jdub a couple
of weeks ago. Planet SuSE seems, in addition to being a contact point for the
SuSE community to keep in touch with what’s going on, and the Ximian monkeys
are more than welcome. We love you guys, and the work you do rocks hard! But,
in addition to that, is filling void left by the (apparently) defunct

Planet Novell (link offline).

This is therefore a call to anyone from Novell, who feels they would be at
home with a blog appearing on Planet SuSE to get in touch. If you contribute,
we want to know how. Anyone from SuSE too who blogs, or wants to, to keep the
community informed, drop me a line, let’s make this the biggest and best planet
there is.

26 Mar 2004 (updated 26 Mar 2004)  »

Off to Wales for the church weekend away this afternoon, should be a good time.

One result of having lost that drive is that I was once again presented with the defaults in ULB GNOME. Noticed a small gotcha in the gnome-terminal settings, one gconf key I should have set to false that’s set to true. Will fix it and do a brown paper bag release on Monday.

At tigert‘s suggestion, I’m trying the Mist theme at the moment. It’s really nice, small, fast, and the colours are really quite calming on the eyes.

The reimbursement for the camera made it into my account at the start of business hours today, so that’s good. Will order it from somewhere else on Monday.

25 Mar 2004 (updated 25 Mar 2004)  »

Posting on Advogato because last night, the drive that contains /home on swamprat died a horrible death. There’s now a replacement drive in there, but here’s the seriously embarassing thing. No backup. Hadn’t taken a backup in so long that I couldn’t even find the last one I did! Hopefully most of the data will be restored, I have a colleague working on that, but I won’t be able to lay my hands on it till Monday. My blog, of course, resides on /home.

Thankfully, the Planet cache on Planet SuSE means that people can at least see my recent entries there.

usr local bin
Today’s the second birthday of the site, so I released a new version of ULB GNOME, with various minor improvements.

Cameras
Had ordered my new digicam from pixmania.com, they debited my debit card the amount for the camera, a memory card, and delivery. at that point they sent me an email saying that in order to ship it to me, they needed all sorts of proof of ID – passport, drivers license, utility bill with address, faxing to their office France! I cancelled the order, and they are reimbursing me. Don’t buy a camera from pixmania.com.

22 Mar 2004  »

Planet SuSE has now moved to planetsuse.org

20 Feb 2004  »

Not posted here in a wehile, got out of the habit, but just thought I’d say Planet SuSE is growing slowly but surely. Still waiting on the Novell news feeds being available in RSS 2.0.

Been hacking on GNOME System Tools adding SuSE support. Some of them are a darn sight easier to port to SuSE that others

16 Jan 2004 (updated 16 Jan 2004)  »

I decided to provide my own feeds of the SuSE News and SuSE Security channels
for Planet SuSE so
that they actually appear. It kind of makes the site seem a lot more useful
to me, even if it does mean a tiny bit more work for me in terms of updating
those feeds when there are security announcements (not loads) or Press Releases
(potentially one a day I guess at the moment,
Novell and all that…

I also got the gtkmm.libsigc++ packages done for LenZ at last, once I’d found
out that it was 2.2.x of gtkmm he needed, not 1.2.x
However, haven’t had a chance to look at GST as yet, that’ll have to wait till
next week, as will me seeing if getting involved with GNOME-MUD is feasible.

Had a great time last night, our best ever result in the quiz, we got 31/40,
which was only two points less than the winning team, and most importantly,
Amanda seemed to have a good time. Slightly more relaxing night at home
tonight, which will be nice.

15 Jan 2004  »

Announcing the launch of Planet SuSE

That’s right folks, we’ve been in a demo mode for about a week or so, added some RSS feeds, changed the codebase and settled on a design, and now, the time has come.

Launching today, Planet SuSE – www.rubberturnip.org.uk/planetsuse

The aim here is to be a one-stop shop for SuSE news, hacker blogs, that sort of thing.

So, for example, both myself and LenZ blog about packages we’ve been building, they appear. We (in theory) have feeds of SuSE press releases and Security Advisories, although at the moment these don’t work because of the version of RSS that they adhere to. (2.0 would be nice… )

What can you do? Well, I’m repeating my call for anyone who contributes to the SuSE community to get blogging, and send me the syndication details, you can link to p.SuSE, and best of all, you can read and enjoy it.

At some point, there’ll be an RSS 2.0 feed of the aggregated p.SuSE, and we’ll be getting included in the Planetarium section of other Planets such as Planet GNOME.

9 Jan 2004  »

And again I thank Jeff

This is getting silly, another day, another shout for jdub in my blog

He’s blogged a
reference to my call for SuSE bloggers
so that it gets picked up on Planet GNOME. Hopefully it help swell our numbers.Jeff, you rock!

Updated Rhythmbox packages today, damn that app’s nice, I think it’s one of
the proposed modules for GNOME 2.6, I think it’s more suited to 5th
Toe myself. ‘Course, I really think that GNOME D&D and GNOME Office could
be supplemented well by a GNOME Media platform including Rhythmbox, Totem,
Sound Juicer etc, but hey, what do I know?

9 Jan 2004 (updated 9 Jan 2004)  »

Calling all SuSE community members!

Some of you may be aware of “blog planets” popping up around the place, such as Planet GNOME (http://planet.gnome.org/), Planet Debian (http://people.debian.org/~keybuk/planetdebian/) and KDE’s blog aggregate (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog).

Well, I’m looking at putting together a “Planet SuSE” to provide the same service for the SuSE community, and I need your help!

Do you work for SuSE, or provide some sort of service (such as APT maintenance, or PackMan) for the SuSE community?
Do you blog? (If you don’t blog, now’s a good time to start)

Take a look at http://swamprat.homeunix.org/planet-suse/ – it’s quite embryonic at this stage, but once we get a few extra feeds in there, it’ll pick up, and don’t be put off by the Ximian feeds, they’re there to show how it works essentially (and hey, Ximian and SuSE, it’s all Novell now, in’t it?).

If you would like to be added to it, send me the URL of an RSS feed of your blog. One thing to note is that the RSS must contain a valid pubDate for each item. To see what it looks like, look at the RSS version of my blog, it’s linked in the ‘Subscriptions’ bit of the page.

Once it’s going, it’ll be cross-linked with the various other planets as part of the growing planet community, I’ve had some feedback from people involved with other planets, and they’re excited at the prospect of a SuSE one, so let’s make it happen!

(Originally posted on the SuSE-Linux-E mailing list)

3 Feb 2003  »

Have moved my diary to www.rubberturnip.org.uk

23 Sep 2002  »

Well, it’s been summer, and now it’s not! During the summer, I worked at Soul Survivor, gained another year of age (I’m now 26 – eek!) built a lot of packages (13 updates to usr local bin since my last diary entry) and, oh, lots of other exciting things I’m sure.

Was 13st again this morning, I had got down as low as 12st5 , and was 12st7 Saturday morning, but it was an especially take-away/eating-out oriented weekend, and I really put on. Going to try to hit the gym this week, and am being rather more strict with myself about food again now.

Doing a training evening today for the word projection team at church, in order that we can change to Presenter by Discovery Systems rather than the (increasingly ropey) system we’re surrently using. It’s impossible for us to go on holiday at the moment, because I’m pretty well the only one who can fix it if something goes seriously wrong (if it goes slightly wrong Amanda can fix it…

16 Jul 2002  »

Migrated to the new MySQL servers this morning, had to get up before 06:00 to get in to do it before office hours – serious killer, especially after a faily latish night last night.

It’s now 13:28 and I’ve only had one coffee all day, I’ll get through somehow, finishing work early today to compensate, will nap before going out tonight (jazz gig, mmm…

The new DB servers had such an impact on the performance of our (already high performance) web sites that our developers noticed it the moment the tested the sites, makes me wonder what the hell we were doing ever having the DBs on those lousy MIPS (Cobalt) boxen…

Course, once we’ve moved all the rest that those boxen do off of them, they can be put to use like installing Woody on them, and running them as name servers or something.

Next major project will be overhauling the company’s mail infrastructure, trying to get away from non-free software. We’ll likely investigate MessageWall as a replacement to MAILsweeper, and then we need something to replace Exchange. Were it just mail, it’d be simple, but just about the whole company uses the bloody shared calendaring, and as yet there’s no free backend calendar server for Evolution.

Ah well, it’ll come together, I’m sure it will

21 Jun 2002  »

Built Apache on the first of our new MySQL servers (cos they
double up as our web development servers)

Took 10 seconds!

Yay!

England 1-2 Brazil – gutted, absolutely gutted. Came into
work early to watch, and it was well painful!

A couple of friends (Assistant Pastors of our church in
fact) had their first kid this morning, a boy. Totally made
up for them.

20 Jun 2002  »

Well, for a while now, my DSL has been sorted – dogy
micro-filters was what was causing the noise on the line and
(it would seem that) a dodgy USB controller was causing the
link to be unreliable. PC is also back from the repair
guys, with a new mainboard and some serious uptime!

Spent most of the morning upgrading Apache servers to
overcome the vulnerability reported by ISS, also in the
process of installing new MySQL servers, which is actually
quite a nice project, especially when using SuSE 8.0.

I’ve fallen back in love the GkrellM as well, being online
24/7 at home makes being able to have all sorts of monitors
available constantly like that is a real boon, and I don’t
really miss the desktop space too much.

27 May 2002  »

Well, time for a TODO list I think…

• Rethink www.rubberturnip.org.uk
  

  Since I launched usr local bin I’ve not done
  anything to Rubber Turnip at all (save for fix my Jabber
  contact info). Not surprising, considering the amount of
  time u l b takes up in addition to my full time job. Think
  it might be time to retire it as a projecty type site, and
  make it a normal geek-personal site

• Sort out the noise-on-line ADSL problem
  

  Of course, first I need to get my PC back from the repair
  guys. Once I do, I really need to get the problem where
  having my ADSL modem connected to the line (or indeed, any
  micro-filters connected) puts so much noise on the line as
  to render the phones unusable. Hopefully Pipex support will
  be able to help me. It has occured to me that it may have
  something to do with the fact that I have old cheap & nasty
  phones, and it may be resolved when we invest in newer
  phones. It would be nice if I didn’t have to do that just
  to be able to be online 24/7 at home though – just adds to
  the expense.

Gosh, only two points, but they’ll do for now, bet your life
they’ll get added to

Making a lasagne tonight – yummy, can’t wait, really hungry…

23 May 2002  »

Wow, is it really that long since I posted anything?

usr local bin is just about 2 months old now,
is has served just short of 25Gig in that time! Nearly 3000
people have downloaded AbiWord 1.0.1 alone, which is great.

13st dead this morning, have revised my target weight to
12st by the end of June, which should put me right at the
top of my ideal weight range for my height, reckon I can
easily make it, and have got stable at it by then. After
that I’ll plan a steady drop to around the middle of the
range, and then I’ll be able to remain within the range
quite nicely.

9 May 2002  »

usr local bin is getting quite busy, I’ve put
three new sets of Evolution packages up in two days, not to
mention the recent AbiWord release.

Still, people seem to find it useful, so I don’t mind.

30 Apr 2002  »

Finally got through, and they’re going to get BT to reset
the card again.

Tech support person also reckoned the customer services dept
would be able to sort out some kind of refund, but their
line is engaged…

30 Apr 2002  »

Wow, I’m getting to be quite slack at updating this…

I’m now 13st 6, and feeling quite trim already, less than a
stone to go till I hit my target weight for the end of June
- quite a nice thought.

ADSL link is getting to the point of me considering it
useless. About a week and a half ago, the DSLAM for my line
locked up. Took almost a week to get it reset by BT, after
which point I managed an amazing 15 minutes (or so) of
connectivity, before it locked up again – what a joke. I’m
currently in a queue for Pipex’s tech support line. That’s
an improvement from not even being able to get through,
which is normally the case.

Someone on one of the Evolution lists mentioned that there
seemed to be no gnome-spell packages available for SuSE 8.0,
so I put some up on usr local bin

My new PC is also causing me problems. When I built it I
used the AMD supplied CPU cooler. A decision I now think
may have been a mistake, it keeps randomly powering down,
sometimes just a matter of minutes after booting. It even
does it if I just run it in the BIOS config. At first I
thought it was just that the CPU was overheating because of
the AMD fan, so I replaced it with a CoolerMaster, which
keeps it about 40 degrees (F) cooler, but the same thing
keeps happening. Wondering now if I’ve damaged the CPU by
running it so hot for so long, which could explain why it’s
still powering down.

Have now been in the queue for ten minutes…

19 Apr 2002  »

I put 4lb back on! Gyah! Still, I’m still ahead of my
schedule, so that’s something, plus I’m going to the gym
tonight, and probably on Sunday too, so that should help.

New AbiWord packages on usr local bin -
version 1.0.0 final. It’s not been officially announced
yet, waiting for the Win32 binaries, but it’s rocking. I’m
fully plugintastic, so I can edit images in documents using
GIMP, use a thesaurus and read/write BZipped documents. Now
the march towards 1.2 and table support begins

Going to a wedding tomorrow – I like weddings, but they do
seem to creep up you. I’d totally forgotten it was this
weekend, and then it’s like “but I had all sorts of things
to do” (well, to hack on)

Replacement micro-filter has arrived, and I’ll be hopefully
getting the link up 24/7 RSN. Message on the Smoothwall
list today suggests that dropped connections (and subsequent
need to reboot smoothie box to reestablish) may be down to
smoothie’s latest patch, not Pipex. Intend to test this theory.

Added packages of latest GnuCash to usr local bin
after people on the english language SuSE list expressed an
interest.

13st 8 this morning, another 2lb lost Going out tonight
for a church lad’s night, all you can eat at my favorite
turkish restaurant, plus pub, so goodness knows how much of
what I’ve lost I may put back on.

The thought of the US govt using href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/18/1457238&mode=thread&tid=103">MS
Passport as a national ID is scary enough as a UK
citizen (how long until here too, given we all know how
close Tony is to Bill – remember the XP ‘advert’ he did as
part of last year’s election campaign), it would be truely
frightening if I lived in the US.

How long until M$ control how we exercise what we choose to
call our democratic rights? Election.NET anyone? Short
step from M$ running the software to allow e-voting to them
guiding the decisions people make when they e-vote.

Gyah, and it looked like being such a good day too.

17 Apr 2002 (updated 17 Apr 2002)  »

Wow, over two weeks since I posted…

Updates

ADSL link is live, but Pipex sent me a faulty micro-filter,
so when I bring the PPP link up it kills my phones, waiting
on a replacement.
AbiWord now at 1.0.0 Release Candidate 1, builds are of
cours eon usr local bin. Really looking forward to 1.0.0
final, so that then good ‘n’ groovy Abi hackers can start
work towars 1.2 and the much-anticipated table support.
Somewhere along the line, they snuck in .doc export support
- kudos to them.
XFT issue solved by disabling nVidia hardware acceleration
of RENDER. Also resulted in faster 3D support.
/usr/bin/gears now runs at > 1400 FPS on my PIII 500, 128Mb
with a PCI GeForce2MX

Other blah blah
Using SuSE 8.0 RC4 on my machine at work (which I think is
basically the good-as-gold version), very nice. KDE3 is
rock solid as far as I can tell (not that I used it much,
mind… and the default GNOME setup is more than a bit sexy.

Losing weight. I’m using the Palm href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/palm/">Hacker’s
Diet software to help me. Started at the weekend at 14
st, and I was 13st 10 this morning. Aiming for 12st 8 by
the end of June.</b>

2 Apr 2002  »

I was right, GKrellM just took up too much desktop space!
Ordered my DIY ADSL connection today, should have it within
10 working days, also ordered a cheapo, dead-old PC to be a
Smoothwall box, soon be up and going!

Weekend work was a success, having some NTP probs today, but
don’t think it’s related.

Installed usr local bin packages on a fresh machine (plus
SuSE updates) with a fresh user, and they work lovely, plus
the default SuSE setup is to have a Galeon icon on the
desktop by default, which is nice, if you use Desktop icons.

Building the latest Garnome release, in the hope that XFT
won’t hang my machine this time

30 Mar 2002  »

Easter Saturday, and I’m at work! Gyah!

Still, Abi 0.99.4 is out, and I’ve put builds on usr local bin.

So far the big shutdown seems to be going well, all our
machines went down nicely, and our sites are still visible
to the outside world. Just got to hope it all comes back up
ok (it should)

Living room is mostly done, should be finished by the time I
get home today, then I’ll just have to run the phone cables
along the skirting boards.

Started using GKrellM, got a nifty ‘invisible’ theme – I’m
really into transparency at the moment – but I suspect the
desktop space it takes up is going to get too annoying for
me…

28 Mar 2002  »

Put AbiWord 0.99.3 builds on usr local bin today, they’ve
become semi-official builds now, linked to from the AbiWord
site. New builds of Galeon also availble, plus Gaim.

Good Friday tomorrow – day off, which I’ll be spending
decorating our living room I expect, won’t be able to make
it to the service at church. I’m in work on Saturday (on
double-time – should pay for my ADSL modem)

Built Nautilus for usr local bin too, but the tree view
doesn’t work, can’t fathom why, so I’ve not posted it yet
(plus it’ll take up a huge chunk of my quota on the server.)

Finally going to cable (phone – no real need to run Cat 5
around) up the house this weekend too, only been there two
years! At the moment, we have phone extensions draped all
over the place, up the stairs, etc…

In the event that at some point in the future, I need to
have network access from rooms other than my study, I’ll go
for a wireless setup of course

25 Mar 2002  »

Another day of database scaryness – moved them back to the
original server I moved them off months ago. Roll on the
arrival of our nice new hyper-powered machines so we can do
decent replication.

In other news, I’ve launched href="http://www.usr-local-bin.org">usr local
bin, a site for updated packages of software for href="http://www.suse.co.uk">SuSE Linux. Bunch of stuff
including latest Galeon and Evolution builds at launch,
planning TuxKart next, when I get around to build it, also
Gabber and Gaim to come I reckon. Planning to try and do
news on the site too about software stuff that interests me.

13 Mar 2002  »

Wow, actually used my webcam for something productive today.
We’re working on an online CCTV archiving system, which of
course we’re doing with free software. So my Linux box has
been a testing CCTV server today. It’s doing motion
detection on the cam, when it takes a motion-inspired grab,
it then uploads it to a machine which categorizes it, and
ooh, it’s all very clever!

In other news, I installed GNOME2 via Garnome on my machine,
and while it looks nice enough, it totally hung my macbhine
within a couple of seconds of logging in each time. Oddly,
so did KDE3 when I installed that! I think it’s probably
something to do with Xft, I’m going to install Xfree86 4.2.0
at some point, see if that makes a positive difference -
hope so.

Can’t wait till GNOME2 is really useable though – the
screenshots on the dotplan showing alpha transparency
support in pixmap themes are gorgeous, and frankly, I gotta
get me some o’dat!

12 Mar 2002  »

I was right, the issue with the cam was the drivers in
2.4.10, upgraded to 2.4.16 today, and sure enough it loads
and runs fine. Also got the new NVidia drivers, which is
nice for my machine, although I’m still waiting to see some
difference in performance

11 Mar 2002  »

Well, I lasted three days on my last attempt to come back to
work. This is the second day of my second attempt, lasted
Friday without too much agony, so hopefully I’ll last this
time…

Webcam’s still not working, think it may be a problem with
the pwc module in 2.4.10, I was using 2.4.16 on my old
install, but until NVidia do a new build of their 3D kernel
driver for SuSE to install for a SuSE 2.4.17 kernel, I’ll
not be changing kernel (too busy to build my own alas)

Looks like in my absence someone’s put together a new
Revo/Revo+ image, I’ll have to try it out, and then play
with it. The guy built it for the Revo+ so it’s quite
large, although it does apparently work on a vanilla Revo, I
could always strip it a bit if need be I guess…

Built a new PC at home, so finally have a LAN, and it’s
rocking – Athlon XP 1700+, 512M, GeForce3 etc etc…
Championship Manager 2001/02 works like a dream under WINE
on it, which is nice, and I certainly won’t be selling
Fowler to Leeds

26 Feb 2002  »

Well, yesterday was my first day back in the office after my
op. I was in so so so much pain by the end of the day

Reinstalled my machine from scratch with SuSE 7.3, and can’t
get my webcam to work now – ack

Also, I’ve had to setup the hotplug service to not load the
USB Audio driver, otherwise it knackers sound output on the
sound card.

Things like that say to me that we’re quite some way from
large scale desktop penetration, I’m quite happy to hack
about with config files of course, but Joe User certainly
ain’t. Think there’s another article there…

10 Jan 2002  »

Well, this is it – my last day online for quite some time I
expect, so I guess this will next get updated when I’m back…

3 Jan 2002  »

Happy New Year!

Life
A week tomorrow I’m going into hospital for surgery, and
I’ll be offline for a while afterwards. I’ve stepped down
from leading the Win2Lin FAQ team because of this, and today
we had a meeting to talk about what’ll happen in my absence.

Christmas was nice and relaxing – I spelt lots and hacked
none

Going out for a chinese tonight, which’ll be nice…

Hacking
Other people seem to be using my Revo Linux boot tree with
success, which makes me a happy bunny.

Next step will be to change the initrd so that it doesn’t
try to start installing Woody, but just boots

I’m hoping to work out if it’s possible to somehow
(realising it’ll take some hardware abuse) to expand the
Revo to allow me to attach CompactFlash or something
similar, 8Mb ain’t very much when it’s got to act as RAM and
a disk.

If I can, then it’ll make it easier to get a working system
going that will be good for something more than hack value
(cos really “ooh, I can run ash and ping localhost!” is not
what a PDA is for)

Wishlist for the future (if I ever get around to this… is
basically expansion, followed by a decent editor (more space
means I can have vi) and maybe MicroWindows.

Might also see if I can spot a cheap secondhand 5MX for
sale, so I can make use of the CompactFlash…

24 Dec 2001  »

Revo status: got kernel 2.4.16 booted, and shell & editor
running, nice

Happy Christmas! Back in the new year!

20 Dec 2001  »

Ooh, just thought of a use for my Psion Revo, time to see if
I can get Linux running on it, guess I knwo what I’m doing
in my lunch break tomorrow

20 Dec 2001  »

Party party party!!!

Cluster went into final-stage deployment testing today, when
we put one of our SSL/DB-driven sites on it internally.

It worked! It only flippin’ worked!

Suffice to say that makes me a happy bunny.

What makes me less of one is that my good lady, Mrs
Riggwelter departed today towards her parents for Christmas.
I’ll be following when I finish work on Christmas Eve.

Also, installed a new version of gnome-pilot today,
libgpilot.so was barfing when I tried to start the panel
applet, works nicely now.

I can hear the beer calling me to go home and celebrate, so
that’s what I shall do!

19 Dec 2001  »

Ooh, 9 days since I posted – bad, bad Riggy!

darkworm: You swine! Mention me, but not
certify me will you?

LVS setup is now in deployment tetsing, I’ve spent far too
long recently in our Comms Room, sure I’ve got frostbite as
a result

Christmas has sort of started here, people have started
vanishing for the break, I’m here till Christmas Eve, but
I’m not bitter (not much!)

Published another article on Gnome, which the community seem
to have gone bananas over. Had requests to look at direct
comparisons between Gnome & it’s apps and Windows & it’s
apps, in terms of issuing a call to developers to improve
the ‘snappiness’ of things. I’m not sure, the majority of
Gnome hackers are focussed on 2.0, Abi guys are looking
towards 1.0 and 1.2 and the Evo guys have got their own
things to worry about. As I’ve mentioned before too, Galeon
(IMHO) is there, period!

Oh, and apologies to the writers of SuSEconfig – it didn’t
break our rc scripts single-handed, bad use of insserv
settings helped it more than a little

10 Dec 2001  »

Not often I post two entries in a day…

Fixed the LVS entry, SuSEconfig had changed the order that
the rc scripts ran at boot time…

10 Dec 2001  »

Brain hurts

Been one of those days, seemed like someone had glued the
phone to my ear this morning. Broke our test LVS system
badly this afternoon in an attempt to change the IPs and
websites it’s running.

Worst thing is that I have no idea why what I did broke it.
or at least, not yet.

Found out it’s going to cost EUR125 to get my Psion Revo
repaired cos it’s out of warranty. Might just bite the
bullet (now that I’ve lost all the data contained therein
anyway) and get a Palm, at least I could sync that with
Evolution.

Had a nice lunch with a friend today, highlight of the day
so far, and going to see another good friend on my way home,
which will be nice.

Now, back to the LVS debugging…

6 Dec 2001  »

Oh, how I love meetings…

Not very much is how I love them!

In other news… …Win2LinFAQ is starting to take shape (in
the sense of how we’re going to structure it)…
…Evolution bugzilla usage… …Started evaluating href="http://www.cafedemocracy.org/">KioskLinux for a
little project in house…

Night off tonight, can’t remember the last time I had one!

4 Dec 2001  »

After a long weekend, it was scary to get back to thousands
of emails, sometimes I’m very glad to have filters, and
other times, like today I go further and wonder how I’d cope
without them!

Wow, Evolution 1.0 is out! Bling bling! Took
a while to build, but it’s super-schweet. I’m not 100% sure
about the proprietary release of the Exchange connector
being a good thing, while I recognise that Ximian need to
make money to remain viable and fund Free Software
development, I still think that you can make money from Free
Software. Also, making software GPL does not mean you have
to make it freely downloadable. They could produce the
connector GPL, but still make it available by sale only,
provided they provided the source with it.

(If any Ximian folks read this, maybe they could comment in
their diary?)

All that said, I can’t help but feel that the most important
thing is that even with it’s proprietary license, it will be
implemented in such a way as not to violate the GPL when
used in conjunction with Evo.

Well, it now appears I’m going to be the project leader on
the Win2Lin FAQ. It goes without saying, I’m very honoured
to take on that role, and will try to ensure that it becomes
a very useful document for those wishing to make the switch.

It’s “The Big Jam” at church tonight. All the musicians in
the church (and I think there are more than 60 of us, even
more if you count drummers ) getting together to jam
through a few songs, should be good good fun.

30 Nov 2001  »

Ah Friday, how sweet!

Into the final (hopefully) lap of testing our LVS setup
before moving it into a deployment-testing mode, which will
be a very nice situation.

Looks like I’m going to be a moderator/editor on the new href="http://desktoplinux.com">DesktopLinux.com
Windows2Linux FAQ for helping people migrate to our favorite OS.

The thing I love about Free Software (well one of them…
is the community aspect. There’s a bunch of us going to be
doing this, we’ve never spoken before, let alone met, and
yet we have a common purpose and interest. The emails
amongst the team have already become lively as we share
where we’re coming from, our particular interests and areas
of expertise, and as we start to plan how to actually run
this thing.

We went out with the department (and families) bowling last
night, simply a quality time. It’s great being in a
position where your colleagues are also your friends. We
were no different at the bowling alley or the restaurant
with each other than we are in the office, again that
community thing coming through, and it can’t be beaten.

The Top 100 greatest films list continues to be a hot topic
of conversation in the office. I appear to be the only one
here who agrees that A New Hope is the greatest film ever made.

28 Nov 2001  »

Very much a day of two halves…

Morning very chilled, Evolution bug stuff, and work stuff
making a heady mixture.

Afternoon of sheer panic! The anti-spam policy we’d put on
our MailSweepers was stopping a significant quantity of
legit mail from coming in, and it seemed that the entire
company noticed at once and started phoning.

Then MySQL went bananas and consumed an entire disk
resulting in much panic and alarm until we got it sorted.

They don’t pay me enough for this, they really don’t…

Prophecy night at church tonight, which should be a quality
time, looking forward to it.

27 Nov 2001  »

Mail server bashing, Evolution bugulating*, LVS
configuring, coffee drinking, phone bill paying, beer
anticipating kind of a day…

Got our mail sweepers to reject mail from invalid hostnames

& email addresses and did further setting up of our LVS boxen.

Also did some chasing up on company stuff, dull dull dull…

Going out for a beer with a good friend tonight, kind of
makes the day worthwhile I reckon.

*I like this word, I may have to use it more often…

26 Nov 2001  »

Survived the weekend

No hacking done, but muchos TV watched and take-away food eaten.

Back to the same-old same-old today.

Spent much of the day trying to sort out stuff relating to
connections to partner companies – what fun.

Also did some Evolution bug triaging, which
passed a bit of time over lunch. Awaiting the onslaught of
spam as Louie moves target milestones in Bugzilla.

23 Nov 2001 (updated 26 Nov 2001)  »

Wow, it’s been nearly a week since I posted an entry! So,
what have I done this week? Well, I’ve been loving having
my car. Had a day off work, which is always good, although
I did seem to be even busier than when I’m in the office!
went out for a superb curry on Tuesday night. Nothing like
a good Duck Balti

My mother’s arriving this evening for the weekend, which
gives me an excuse to cook my
famous lasagne, which is bound to go down well.

However, she’ll be sleeping in the same room as my PC, which
means I’m going to have to shut it down – bye bye uptime!

19 Nov 2001  »

I finally get to collect my car today. This makes me happy.

Spent most of my morning arranging meetings, am I turning
into a suit in my old (ahem) age?

More LVS work done this afternoon, security stuff mostly,
and load test preparation.

Just looked at my diary, I’m busy every night this week and
just about every night next week, when’s a guy meant to hack?

At this rate I may find myself doing diary work at work
during my lunch. It’ll make a change to have a lunch break
of any sort actually…

16 Nov 2001  »

Well, what a day, not a great deal of work done…

Spent most of the day in meetings (including a very nice
lunch meeting in a pub – my favorite kind…, then playing
golf upstairs to raise money for Children in Need. Never
picked up a club before, but I made it onto the leaderboard,
which I was chuffed with

Did some Papaya testing and helped iron out a bug in the
Preferences dialogue.

Did some diary work last night, the username cookie is now
set, but I can’t manage to get the CGI module to retrieve it
- most annoying.

15 Nov 2001  »

Well, don’t understand that, I did a make uninstall && make
distclean && ./configure && make && make install on libpcap
and then snort was able to find it.

Taken some silly pics with my cam for a “guess the objects”
competition we’re going to run at work tomorrow to raise
money for BBC Children In Need.

15 Nov 2001  »

More LinuxVirtualServer work. Getting
frustrated with snort. Keeps complaining that I don’t have
libpcap installed, when I know full well that I did it. Gah!

Fax server done – hyperschweet, another route for us to get
Linux in.

Got back involved with Papaya today. Helped
the lead developer get it working with HTTP proxies. I’ve
not some across any other Linux MUD client (and I checked
every one listed on freshmeat) that supports them, so that’s
nice.

Think it’s an Evolution bug day tonight, and I
also have plans to do some Rubber Turnip Diary

hacking when I get home.

14 Nov 2001  »

Spent much of today working on our
LinuxVirtualServer cluster, and adding
notes to our (increasingly) huge documentation. We’re
putting together instructions & scripts to aid in the
creation of multi-name and multi-IP clustered web sites
(with SSL). The intention is to produce a sort of idiot’s
guide, which we’ll then feed back to the project maintainers.

Also spent some time setting up a new fax server at work.
It’s a SuSE 7.3 box running hylafax and SAMBA. Found the
photo of the SuSE developers during the install quite
disconcerting, but otherwise it’s a damn fine installer.
YaST2 does seem to get better and better with each release.

Been thinking a lot about the diary, and the next release.
Going to try to include using cookies for user-remembrance,
and theming in the next release, so I’ll probably jump to
0.1 at that stage, and pop it on FreshMeat.

13 Nov 2001  »

Another day, another wild goose chase

Finally did the MySQL relocation. It now resides on a
partition of a decent size. Pity about the architecture.

Sent my car-related stuff to my insurance company today with
my claim form and acceptance of their offer on the salvage
of the car, with any luck the cheque will be on it’s way to
me before long, which will be nice, as I need it to cover
the deposit I’ve already paid on the new car I’ve ordered.

Hoping for a relaxing night tonight, might cook something
nice and then chill with a beer.

12 Nov 2001  »

As I type this, New York is on fire again. An Airbus A300
has exploded and crashed in Queens. While the cause is not
yet known, the possibility of another terrorist attack can’t
be ignored. My thoughts are with all those involved, their
families and their friends.

Spent the whole of this morning trying to track down a
non-existent problem with our mail servers, and the
afternoon preparing for an abortive MySQL relocation. None
of it seems significant in comparison with the incident in NY.

I need a beer.

9 Nov 2001  »

Nearly killed MySQL this morning, very scary time, don’t
want to go through that again!

And after that, this href="http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk/images/jpg/monkey.jpg"
target="_new">monkey tried to hack our network! Well,
after that he tried to steal my caffeine mints, so I href="http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk/images/jpg/me-code-monkey.jpg"
target="_new">shot him.

Car was written off finally, found out on Wednesday. So
tomorrow, I’m going car shopping. The dealership have got
the one I think I want in, so hopefully by Saturday
afternoon I’ll have my new car.

That’ll be nice.

Especially as I want to do some work on the diary – cookies
for username retention, and theming.

Likelihood is it’ll have to wait though.

6 Nov 2001  »

Yet another clunky day, mail admin – *yawn*

Worked on the diary last night. Merged in some changes from
Martin Bateman and made some changes myself. Finally have a
TODO list, time to start knocking items off it.

Looks like my car is going to be written off, should finally
find out for certain tomorrow morning, so looks like I’ll be
car shopping at the weekend, I can think of better ways to
spend a Saturday, but hey ho…

5 Nov 2001 (updated 5 Nov 2001)  »

Great weekend, after spending Saturday morning href="http://www.soulsurvivor.com/uk/events/the_noise.html">planting
bulbs on one of the estates in Watford, I spent the rest
of the weekend lazing around, which is always nice.

I was amazed at the number of responses I had to the article
on Gnotices, 99% were positive too, which was nice. The
general consensus seemed to be that more positive reviews of
Linux desktop apps are needed, so watch this space

Today was a real sys adminy housekeeping type day, but also
our copy of SuSE 7.3 arrived, took my boss 10 minutes (!) to
install and get logged in and using it from scratch – kudos.
My box is already more up-to-date that it, so I’ll not be
using it myself at work, might upgrade my home boxen though.

Bonfire night. Remember remember the fifth of November,
debugging, caffeine and code. While everyone else is
outside watching cleverly mixed gunpowder explode into
coloured shapes, I’ll be tucked up warm inside in the glow
of a CRT. The only place to be.

2 Nov 2001  »

Pretty cool day. The DeCSS ruling is great news.

Can’t for the life of me remember what I did this morning,
although I’m sure it was probably really important

Had an article linked on the href="http://news.gnome.org">GNOME News site about
Galeon, I think the Galeon guys are going to link it to
their site too.

Been robot-building today too, we’re building a robot that
comes with a fortnightly magazine in the office, and it
moves now, which is fun.

Managed to get side-tracked from hacking last night by
another box with a Cathode Ray Tube in, I’m so weak…

1 Nov 2001  »

…blah… …radius… …blah… …Apache… …blah…

Turned the cam off, it was hammering syslogd on the web
server, so I need to come up with a better solution

Balls.

Put up an href="http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk/perfectbrowser.html">article
about why Galeon is the perfect browser, and did some
karma whoring on /.

Still no news on the car. Might do some diary hacking
tonight if I can be bothered.

31 Oct 2001  »

2-0 and into the next stage we go, seeded too… nice.

Not an exciting day, fixed a slightly fubar’d MySQL setup,
and did some sendmail work.

Messed about with Mozilla source & .spec, might build a
0.9.5 SuSE RPM & devel RPM if one doesn’t appear on
ftp.suse.com before long.

Played with ffmpeg too, having a cam is schweet.

Tired, didn’t sleep great last night, dreaming of big,
BIG spiders – not nice.

I’ve now not had a car for nearly two weeks, the insurance
system is so slow, it’s doing my nut.

Off to get the bus shortly, what fun.

30 Oct 2001  »

Wasn’t sure what I was going to put today, not really done a
lot, except monkeying around with the cam and some *dull as*
BIND work, then I noticed I got certified as an Apprentice!

Nice.

Liverpool v Dortmund on Radio Five tonight, hopefully this
time tomorrow we’ll be in the next stage of the Champions
League…

Home time in 1 minute, time to save this…

29 Oct 2001  »

Great weekend, got home to find the bathroom redecorated!
Sheer quality, I hate doing the DIY stuff. Nice to have the
I/L’s with us too, always top to see them.

My href="http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk/webcam.html">webcam
came today – very quick delivery, kudos to href="http://www.dabs.com">Dabs.

Spent the day beating rsync into submission as well as
getting the cam up and going. For some reason rsync
insisted on dieing on a certain file in the directory I was
trying to transfer, always the same file. Google was oddly
useless, but I sorted it in the end.

26 Oct 2001  »

16:50
< 1 minute downtime during the migration!

OH YES!!!

26 Oct 2001 (updated 26 Oct 2001)  »

Scary database day!

Have spent the day getting ready to do the DB migration, and
on the way have migrated a Radius service!

It’s now 16:30 and the backup DB server is going to be on
for the weekend, I’m too scared to risk migrating back at
the last minute before I go home, I have much better things
to do with my Friday night.

Ordered the webcam, should be here in 1 – 3 working days,
which is quite exciting.

The in-laws are staying for the weekend, so hacking time is
going to hit zero for a couple of days, which is a pain, cos
I was going to try and get the new release of my diary ready.

About to do the migration, probably put my views of how it
went up on Monday.

25 Oct 2001  »

Well, figure I should pop a diary entry in to kick this off,
gonna try to keep it up to date from here on in.

Fun day writing some shell/perl scripts to migrate a whole
bunch of MySQL DBs from one machine to another. If only we
could get 3.23.xx to build on a MIPS box or two, we could
have replication, which would make our life considerably easier.

Been thinking about my own
href="http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk/diary.html">diary
software, definately needs some more work doing on it before
I totally get out of the groove…

Nearly bought (well, ordered) a webcam today, the RiggCam’s
been offline for far too long (over 18 months now) and it
should (and will) make a return, using Free Software of course.