…watching angels celebrating.

At 00:04 today I broke Pepperfish and had to make a trip to London to fix it. I’d like to thank the staff at telehouse for being incredibly friendly to a scowling geek who rolled up at 02:00 to (as it turned out) push a power-button on a 1U server and wait for it to come up properly.

I got home at 04:30 and slept poorly until 08:00 when I gave up and lay there until a bit past 09:00. I hate doing this because I have to jack-up on caffeine in order to drive home without being asleep and then I can’t sleep when i get home. Suckage.

…Evil number two.

Last weekend I helped my parents to install and use Ubuntu as their primary desktop. After all their comments I’m confident that as competent as Debian is; it simply isn’t aiming itself at the same market that Ubuntu covers. Debian just wouldn’t be able to be as cuddly/friendly to use because it tries to be everything to everyone. I’m very grateful for the changes the Canonical guys feed back into Debian and I’m sure everyone else is too.

I also got to taste Cawl for the first time and it is a rather nice stew. I also had the joy of working from my parents’ very comfy sofa which was rather enjoyable.

…I’m insatiable.

I’m now two and half weeks into my new job and I felt I ought to let you all know how I’m doing. I’m pleased to say that the horrors I had been warned about wrt. working with friends have not been borne out. However the ones related to working from home are ringing a little true.

I need to learn to control my distraction level a little more so that I can work a more normally lengthed day and get everything done. I have been working until I have my work done rather than until a certain time; and I’m getting better at achieving my goals within a sensible timeframe. When I started I was doing 09:30 -> 23:30 on average. Now I seem to be doing about 09:30 -> 18:30 which is much better.

I’m very pleased that the interest-level and challenge-level present in my job are high. I also like the fact that I now have a boss I feel I can argue with (even if I tend to lose) which is a refreshing change. My concerns about my personal time and Debian are manifest however. It’s not that I don’t have time; for I could surely make the time; it’s that I don’t have the mental energy left by the time I’ve given my all to my work.

I’ve promised jvw that I’ll do my best to do some Debian stuff this weekend. I hope I can keep that promise. Also today I head to wales to help my parents install Ubuntu on their desktop. I’m very much looking forward to finally ousting Win2K from their house :-)

…there’s a thought now you decide

Today marks the first release of Ubuntu Linux. The Warty Warthog is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a very dedicated team which I feel proud to be associated with. I’d like to thank them all for the work they’ve put into producing a linux distribution which I am finally prepared to let me parents loose on. Expect an entry here in a few days to let you all know how it went.

In other news; WinXP sucks. That is all.

(Perhaps I should justify that. It manages to unceremoniously reboot the system when playing games)

…I wanna make a movie so let’s star in it together.

LJ exports a <comments> tag in its RSS export; but not in its ATOM export. It also fails to take notice of the <comments> entry in my ATOM feed. This means that the LJ syndication lacks any form of obvious direct-link to my blog’s comments system. As a result; people reading my blog via LJ are commenting on the syndicated feed which of course doesn’t come back to me.

What we need here; is a defined way to specify where to go if someone clicks a ‘Comments’ link and some way to provide the number of comments etc; so that instead of the LJ comments system you go straight to the one on my pyblosxom.

Of course; a way to export the comments interface over the syndication feed entirely would be nice. Perhaps with some sort of XMLRPC way to feed comments back to the owning blog.

… the explanation is that it is in fact, my hand …

I’m trying to find out if it is possible to place (using CSS) a div in a specific place in the flow of a document when the source for the div is specifically elsewhere.

In this instance I’m trying to get the right-hand div thing in my blog to float there, but the source for it to be at the end of the document not at the start. (For accessibility reasons). Unfortunately if I do it the only way I know how; then it floats there but overlays the stories underneath (which leads to having to put unwanted borders in which sucks. As I have it now, it sits in the right place on the page and text wraps how I want it; but the source for the sidebar is at the top of the file where I don’t want it.

If any of you have any idea how to solve this; please do let me know.

…Ubuntu, erm, 0.75?

Today I attempted to install Ubuntu on my shiny new desktop computer. Of course; me being me decided that WinXP would be a good plan so that I could dual-purpose the machine as a games box too. (Command and Conquer just doesn’t work under wine; at all; no way) So I installed WinXP; marvelled at how WinXP didn’t support the USB, Ethernet or VGA, dug around to find the files on the CD and installed those drivers; upgraded WinXP to SP2, and then decided to install Ubuntu.

I popped the disc in the drive; booted; hit enter a few times, typed in a hostname, did a little fiddle with the partitions since I had WinXP to preserve and let it get on with things. It installed; grub found my XP install and enabled that; everything was fine; it rebooted into Ubuntu and walked me through base-installer. Feels like a slick Debian so far. Then it goes ahead and installs the desktop stuff (slick) and all seems well. Then we hit X, and lo and behold it looks pretty; has detected the abilities of my monitor; and then what’s this? My mouse pointer won’t move.

Unfortunately Ubuntu doesn’t do too well on serial mice. I’ve reported it here but I doubt it’s important to the Ubuntu guys because it’s only cranky old geeks like me who still have and use serial mice. It might be a kernel issue because the sermouse module didn’t help either.

However whatever way you look at it, the Ubuntu pre-release of WartyWarthog is an impressive bit of kit and I can’t wait to get it onto my parent’s computer in a little over a week from now.

…It’s been over two years you know, my old friend.

I’m now just over a week into my new job working for Canonical Ltd and I don’t seem to be being disappointed. The work is hard, I won’t deny that, but really enjoyable.

In other news; I have finally given in to the pressures of life and ordered a desktop computer. I ordered it from my friendly local store who read my requirements back to me and asked “No operating system?” to which I replied with something akin to “No thanks, I’ll be putting a very new Linux on it” and they left it at that. They also questioned my “no keyboard, no mouse” requirement but I already have keyboards and mice I like. I should collect that machine either today or tomorrow and I will, naturally, be installing Ubuntu onto it.

A friend and colleague of mine, SteveA, recommended an accountant to me after I said that there was no way I’d be able to keep on top of the accounts for myself and Pepperfish Ltd on my own. The accountant has mailed me back and now telephoned me and I must say that it is refreshing to deal with a human being.

… 9! I F E10 M L…

Chatting about life, food and music with new colleagues today was a nice way to slip into the life I am about to live. I’m in London this week trying to get into the Canonical work ethic.

Several people have been expressing concern that I will effectively be working with my friends and while I can’t see it being a direct problem for me (I’ve always been friends with my colleagues as it were) I am expecting the shift to be quite painful in the first few days.

My only hope is that the people I will be working with will work to make my transition as easy as it can be by humouring me as I try and move myself up about nine gears.

…I can see that look in your eye…

Unfortunately I can’t see the nice simple account name that Evolution’s mail component provides from the camel-imap-folder backend where the ‘Original Location’ column is populated. sigh—I guess I’ll have to give up on that little patch for now. For my next trick… can I get Evolution to have a ‘go to next unread mail’ keypress which actually crosses the folder boundaries?

…a biactrian has two; it’s easy to forget this fact, so here is what to do…

This day, I have been mostly hacking camel. (namely camel-imap-folder.c)

I have been trying to make evolution display a friendlier name in the ‘Original Location’ column of vfolder displays because ”dsilvers@pepperfish.org@secure.pepperfish.net:/ZZ/Spam” sucks, where ”ppf:/ZZ/Spam” sucks less. After some help from Colin Watson in pointing out quite where my one g_message() really should go to help me debug; I spotted the right place within about 12 seconds. I therefore humbly announce the creation of a new product “Powdered Colin”—For all your debugging needs.

Today I had my second bite on the arse from having an XFS filesystem under a 2.6.8.1 kernel. A while ago I upgraded my fileserver at home and decided that 2.6.8.1 sounded like a good plan. It tried to eat my filesystem and pure luck and judicious use of temporarily incomplete MD configs saved my 80 gigs of data.

Today my Ubuntu install started being odd. A quick boot into d-i later and a prod around with xfs_check and subsequently xfs_repair and all is well. I am running Debian’s 2.6.7 kernel until I can work out what is up with 2.6.8.1. sigh