Older blog entries for riggwelter (starting at number 43)

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 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.

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 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>

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 ;)

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...

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 :)

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 usr local bin, a site for updated packages of software for 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.

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!

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 ;-)

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 ;)