A mere matter of hours later and an updated version of Gwibber has been pushed out that supports the new “OAuth” method.

People using openSUSE have two options to get hold of a fixed version. The first is to follow the relevant links on the openSUSE wiki entry for Gwibber and grab the version from GNOME:Apps. I just sent an update request for this package so again, in a matter of hours at most, you should get an update.

If you can’t wait that long, you can get the latest version from home:Riggwelter:GNOME. This package comes with a health warning though. Although at this moment it is the same as the version in GNOME:Apps, it tends to track the very latest code ahead of a released version. That can occasionally cause problems and instability.

I’m going to try to get a patch done for the packages that were in 11.3 for those who don’t want to add any repositories but that could take some time – and may not happen at all.

Just to be clear, I recommend using the packages in GNOME:Apps.

I was listening to the Sunday Roast on BBC Radio 5 Live and on that programme, a City fan said he worried that all the money was “sucking the soul out” of the club. I thought to myself “you’re right – it’s already happened at Chelsea”.

Here’s the thing: it’s not the so-called “fans” who latch onto these clubs when they get a backer with seemingly unlimited resources for whom I feel sorry (although they have their issues such as why they are so dependent on success to follow a club) but the genuine fans, the ones who were there before, who have followed their clubs through thick and thin and who now see the clubs they love being turned into the plaything of someone with the money to create the sort of merry-go-round of players the City of Manchester Stadium has been witness to over the last 12 months.

I also feel sorry for Manchester United fans from Manchester – both of them! As a fan of Liverpool, I have no small dislike for the club I refer to as “Surrey Utd” but it’s hard to not have a grudging respect for their dominance in English football in the pre-Abramovich era. Sure, they were favoured by Sky since the creation of the Premier League and referees have largely leaned in their direction over the last few years. The thing is that they also had a squad that was based on a good academy system, that bred success which in turn generated revenue, which allowed the squad to built upon and so on… That attracted the Glazers. Here, as a Liverpool fan, I have a lot of sympathy for United fans – the Glazers have loaded that club up with their own debts in the same way as Hicks and Gillett have done at Anfield. Both clubs have been placed in seriously precarious situations financially because the football authorities in England didn’t have the guts to properly apply fit and proper persons tests to these American “investors”.

It’s worth noting that, although Abramovich has not set about asset-stripping Chelsea in the same way that the Americans have done in the North-West, it’s a similar tale of financial danger in West London. Chelsea were, before everyone’s favourite oligarch rolled into town, doing things the “right way”. They played good football, won some cup competitions – both domestically and in Europe – and generally matched the expectations one had for a club of their stature. That’s what attracted the interest from Russia. Most of the money that has been spent by the Stamford Bridge club has been loaned by Abramovich, putting their level of indebtedness as a result of their ownership arrangements on a par with United and Liverpool.

All this has a bearing on what I think about the current question of who will buy Liverpool. The accepted wisdom is that Liverpool needs an Abramovich or Mansour to compete with the other big-spending clubs in the Premier League. That may well be true but I’m not sure I want to compete if it means becoming like Chelsea or Manchester City. I find myself thinking about some words of Jesus on this point:

What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? (Matthew 16.26 (TNIV))

Back when Liverpool were dominating English football in the 1970s and 1980s, they were the biggest spending club. This spending was done in the right way though. There are two valid options for football clubs to raise money in my view. Firstly, through success breeding success and secondly if a genuine fan of the club wishes to spend their own money. What I hope for from the current attempts to sell the club is the latter of those. Failing that, someone who will rescue the club from Tom and George and stabilise the finances so that the former can happen. That may mean a generation in the wilderness of English football but at least we’ll still have our soul and will be able to honestly sing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

1. Your first post – 25 Oct 2001
   Advogato doesn’t do post titles so it’s just dated. I’d registered on Advo and wanted to get it going. Posted about some coding stuff from work and my personal projects.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most – And the winner is…
   Someone posted a review of the three main GNOME offerings on SuSE at the time – two commercial options (SuSE’s own and Ximian’s) and my community packages. The best of the three was judged to be mine which excited me somewhat as at the time, I was putting in a lot of time to trying to produce the best possible desktop experience on SuSE Linux. This narrowly beat Accused of trying to con Nando’s which is just very, very funny.
3. A post which had a great discussion – A Biblical approach to voting
   This category had a much smaller pool from which to choose. When I started blogging, people didn’t generally have comments enabled on their blogs. People on Advogato would respond to each other in referential posts (much as people do on Twitter now with @ replies) and discussions would happen on Planet sites like Planet SUSE or Planet GNOME. When it came round to this year’s General Election, I enabled comments on most of my election posts and this one generated some really interesting thoughts. I still default to not enabling comments as I don’t generally have the time to moderate and respond to them.
4. A post on someone else’s blog you wish you’d written – London Bombs
   (And all subsequent posts on the subject) I used to work with Roger and he has a remarkable knack for getting under the skin of an issue, particularly when it comes to this kind. His perspective is generally opposed to what the authorities would want to propagate and I’ve commented in the past that he’s paranoid enough for all of us. He also runs Nightmare News (web/world) which does what it says on the tin.
5. Your most helpful post – Importing the Lectionary into Evolution
   I keep going back to this post – because I have a bad memory and because I’ve never bothered to bookmark the lectionary download site. Plus the guide I provide is useful in and of itself.
6. A post with a title you are proud of – You can taste the goat – or your money back!
   Post is nothing to do with goats. It came out of a conversation with one of our Church Wardens. Make of that what you will.
7. A post you wish more people had read – Adam – male?
   Discussion of whether Adam (prior to Eve’s arrival) is male in Genesis. With funky Hebrew script.

So, what have I learnt? I’m pretty random, varied, diverse – take your pick. I post what I think and I don’t post as much as I used to (since Twitter basically). Maybe I’ll post more. Maybe not.

Thank you for your kind attention, you may now return to your regular activities.

Why?

What is it doing on my keyboard?

I mean, it looks packed with awesome but I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it – what is its purpose?

Update from Jeffrey Cook:

Back in the dark ages (before the were any PCs, mainframe connected
terminals like the IBM 3270 were used for data entry and programming),
IBM used ¬ (EBCDIC code 0x5F) to represent (among other thing)
negation…like we now use ! (bang); also, see wikipedia “Negation” for
an example and its general use in logic.

Turned on my laptop (just over four years old) this morning to find the display ghosting (photo though due to the ghosting, I can’t tell how well it’s come out). It’s got worse over the course of the day (and it was happening in the BIOS so I know it’s not a software problem).

For quite a while, the display has flickered increasingly badly so I’ve bit the bullet and ordered a replacement. I’m a little annoyed as I’d planned to wait until I start my next post (whenever and wherever that may be) before replacing it.

Anyway, thanks to Dabs, I’ve ordered a refurbished Acer Aspire 5532. That means 8 times the RAM and more than 6 times the hard disk space of the out-going machine.

Given that openSUSE 11.3 is merely days away and may have gone gold by the time the laptop arrives, that’s what I’ll be installing.

I am loving the X6 on the whole. The ‘X’ range is targeted at entertainment based users but, running Symbian^1, it’s fulfilling my Smartphone requirements. There’s an irony in that my reflection on the N900 was that I had to keep reminding myself that it was “a tool not a toy” whereas with the X6, its work functionality is married up very well with its fun applications.

I’m going to do a straight mirror of my positive and negative points from the N900 – that is to say for each point in turn there, I’ll post the X6′s response. That means that unlike in the N900 review, they’re not necessarily divided into positives and then negatives but reading the two next to each other could give a simple comparison of Maemo (MeeGo that will be) and Symbian^1 (as yet, there are no Symbian^3 phones on the market but I’d love to get my hands on the N8 when it is unleashed later this year). After the responses to the N900 review, there’ll be things that are either unique to the X6 or that didn’t occur when reviewing the N900.

• Symbian doesn’t have the same wealth of applications as Maemo – and what there are are often payware rather than Open Source. That having been said, there are a few that I have found invaluable, along the same lines as those for Maemo:
  • Funambol Sync – allowing me to sync with Evolution on my main computer. Now, it bears mention that in theory I don’t need this. When I first got the X6, I set it up to sync over bluetooth using SyncEvolution. This worked great but where I had long descriptions on calendar items (such as the lectionary entries), these are truncated. I think this is an issue with doing it over Bluetooth generally so I’m not blaming the X6. It does mean that I reverted to using Funambol.
  • Gravity – a superb Twitter client. It’s payware and I must confess that I paid because it’s fantastic. I would love to have Witter on Symbian and if that were a possibility, I’d never have gone near Gravity but the best Open Source Twitter client for Symbian in my view is Twim which is Java-based. I used Twim on the N95 but found it far too fiddly with the touch screen of the X6.
  • SymbianBible – Bible software that uses the file format of the venerable PalmBible+. This has the advantage that over the years a lot of translations have been produced for that format but the disadvantage that also a lot of those translations have ceased to be available for download. If it could be ported to Sword (and a conversion script from PalmBible+ to Sword produced), it would be near perfect. It does suffer from a general issue I have with Symbian – of which more below.
• The default browser is pretty poor. I’ve never got on with the Symbian’s browser but I’ve installed Opera Mobile. Sadly, there isn’t an obvious way in Symbian to set a default browser so other apps open the Symbian browser if they need to open a link.
• Symbian doesn’t automatically switch between WLAN and mobile data services. I really hope this has been added in Symbian^3 as it’s really frustrating to keep having to tell apps which network to use. Gravity makes a decent effort at switching but it’s not perfect.
• I love Ovi Maps. With the X6 (as with all recent Symbian based Nokia phones), I get free Sat Nav, worldwide. The GPS seems really strong, picking up my location very quickly and the navigation in Ovi Maps is exceptional. I’ve switched to it wholesale in preference to TomTom. Frustratingly, you need a Windows box to install the map and voice data. This is the only function for which I’ve needed a Windows box. It seems strange to me that I can install the Maps app itself directly on the phone and it can even update its firmware directly without needed a computer yet I need to plug it into a Windows box to download and install this data. Again, I hope this will be resolved in a future version.
• The X6 has a notification light like the N900. Simple idea but extremely useful.
• As is the case with most Nokia phones these days, the camera is of a very high quality. It comes with Carl Zeiss optics of course and although it’s only 5MP, for someone of my standard of photography, that’s plenty (although I’m loving the prospect of the 12MP widescreen camera in the N8). Here’s a picture I took with the X6 that try as I might, I simply could not get with my “proper” camera (Fuji FinePix F40fd, 8.3MP) without it blurring.
• The switching between portrait and landscape mode is amazingly smooth. The homescreen only works in portrait mode (the opposite to on the N900) but otherwise, every app other than the camera (for which, forcing landscape makes sense when you think about it) works fine in either orientation and the rotation detection is setup perfectly to rotate at the right time, most of the time. This is a small thing that makes a big difference and it’s made using the X6 a lot easier.
  • The charging socket for the X6, like the N900, is on the top. At the time of reviewing the N900, I said this was a failing on its part. I’ve changed my mind. What it actually serves to do it to ensure the charging cable is out of the way of the car’s dashboard when it’s in a windscreen mount. Using the maps in portrait mode (as the universal car mount requires) makes a lot more sense than using it in landscape as it provides more information about what is ahead rather than what is around. This makes me wonder why for so long, SatNav companies have produces units with landscape screens.
• The battery lasts a full day under constant use (mostly data in my case). This is perfectly adequate as it’s not that uncommon or difficult to have it on charge at some point in the day whether on the desk in one’s office or in the car.
• In addition to the points from the N900 review, I also want to highlight the music functionality of the X6. 16GB is plenty of storage and it’s meant that I’ve switched to using it as my music player. So happy have I been with it in fact that I sold my Cowon S9 on eBay.
• Two niggles that I want to mention:In the “Orange” homescreen. This is the screen I’d like to use but I’d need to have the option to put application shortcuts on it but when I tap “Add a shortcut”, nothing happens. If I try to drag it to the screen, it locks it up until I change to a different homescreen. It’s a small issue and it’s not ruined the phone for me. When I first got it home, it worked fine but had ceased to work before I’d added the shortcuts I wanted. I suspect that if I do a factory reset, it may work again but I am concerned that it might also reset it to Nokia’s default which doesn’t even include the Orange home screen so I’d lose it altogether (a soft reset didn’t solve it).
• Font support is pretty poor.You can add TTF format fonts by putting them in a specific directory (C:/Data/Fonts although it’s not documented and I only found this out from the SymbianBible site) but you can’t then use them in the menus or homescreen or select a default font for apps to use. Moreover, not all characters from fonts are available. This is a particular issue in apps that require characters other than the basic Latin set. For me, this applies to SymbianBible and texts in Hebrew and Greek. They simply are not displayed correctly. I know this is a niche use but failing to support fonts fully in this way is appalling for any Operating System on any platform in 2010. I really hope this is resolved in Symbian^3.

So, yet again, in my quest for the perfect smartphone for Linux users, I find myself bound to say it’s Symbian despite the niggles – and roll on Symbian^3 for even more goodness!

I recently upgraded my mobile phone from a Nokia N95 to an X6. Having done so, I had to use for the N95 so I looked at Mazuma to sell it. It was late on a Thursday afternoon that I registered on their site and submitted the details of the N95. The first way in which I was impressed with Mazuma was that the pre-paid envelope and posting instructions arrived in the post the next day having been dispatched First Class. When I sent the phone back, it was also delivered First Class as that was the postage provided by Mazuma and by 10:00 the next day, I had received an email confirming it had been received. Most impressively of all, by lunchtime of that day, the payment for the N95 had arrived in my bank account.

So, had I not delayed a couple of days between receiving the envelope and posting it back, it would have been under 24 hours between registering on the site and having the money arrive in my account.

So well done Mazuma, it takes a lot for a company to impress me but you managed it.

• Exodus 14.10-31 – Journeying On
• Acts 2.42-47 – Everything in Common
• Acts 4.23-31 – Prayer and Power
• Luke 11.1-13 – Prayer (Part One, Part Two to follow)

Anyway.  What the results show is that this country desperately needs electoral reform.

The Liberal Democrats had a great showing though you wouldn’t know if from the make-up of the Commons.  The share of the vote for the Liberal Democrats went up – and the share of seats went down.

Can you work that out?

If you were a dictator, attempting to create a faux democracy that gave people the impression of having a say while ensuring tat the majority voice is not heard, you’d still probably come up with a fairer system than the UK.

Yesterday, thousands of people were disenfranchised completely by an inability to properly administer the polling stations, some stations ran out of ballot papers, postal ballots went missing and it is even alleged that in Lancashire, a 14 year old boy managed to vote.

So, Nick Clegg has made his position clear – he believes that the Tories ought to be allowed to form a government on the basis that they have the most seats and the most votes.  He also said that they should govern in the national interest.  That means electoral reform.  It cannot be right that a party wins over 1/5 of the votes cast yet only takes 1/12 of the seats in the Commons.

Digby Jones on BBC Radio 5Live just described Nick Clegg as Statesmanlike and pointed out that he’s proving to be that rarest commodity: A politician who keeps his word.

Some people warn that a move to Proportional Representation means an end to stable government.  Government isn’t looking especially stable this morning – a PR-based system would have meant that we went into the election knowing it would be coalition government the next day and would be set up to cope with it.

Some others warn that PR would allow extremist parties like the BNP into parliament.  The thing is that experience shows that where the BNP are elected, they are not re-elected.  Putting them into a position to actually do something shows the electorate how moribund, odious and pointless they are.

No-one won and maybe that’s okay.  Maybe it points the way to a system in future that ensures that no-one ever wins except that the majority of the people want them to.