MaW’s Blog

Well, my phone suddenly started working today for no readily apparent reason. I’ll try and let people know the number but as I said before if you don’t have it and want it, drop me a line.

I’ve bought a new phone on a new contract and couldn’t be bothered trying to keep my number (even though I had a very nice number) so I’m going to be sending out change-of-mobile-number messages fairly soon (although I have to charge the battery before I know for sure what the number actually is).

So consider this advance warning. Also, if you have my number and don’t get informed of the change, get in touch with me and I’ll rectify the oversight, as I am sure that, as usual, I will forget someone or several someones.

For the curious, the phone is a Siemens S55 and I’m still with O2

UPDATE: well it appears that they don’t seem to have managed to register my phone and SIM card on the network yet, so whenever I turn the thing on I get ‘SIM rejected’. Let’s hope it goes through by tomorrow, or I’m going to have to phone people up and get cross, because surely it’s reasonable to expect it to work by now.

Since it’s the bank holiday weekend, my parents are off to Cromer and I’m going with them. Actually, they’re going for the week, but I’m coming back on Monday so I can go to work, as I haven’t accumulated anywhere near enough holiday yet to have four days off!

Not that I actually want any time off at the moment, I’m really rather getting into this whole work thing. Next week should bring some interesting challenges, and I might even get to do something that’s not in Perl. Who knows? Miracles can happen — I got the job in the first place, after all.

Anyway, I’ll be back online again Monday evening, if all goes well.

Aaah, it’s always fun to try a new development release of the GNOME desktop. I use it too much to really have patience with the early releases of a development series (this may change if and when I get around to hacking on GNOME) but by the time the betas come out it’s usually pretty stable, and this time it’s more stable than ever before at beta stage, largely due to the new GNOME policy of always-building CVS, and the time-based release schedule which has ensured that not too much was broken during development. Certainly, this way makes development a bit more gradual, but we get stablisation as well as new features, which is always good.

Perhaps the biggest thing to change is the panel structure — gone are the different types of panel, and instead we have but one kind of panel which can pretend to be all the other kinds of panel, leading to much greater flexibility. The rounded corners on the menu panel are gone of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an applet to emulate those before too long. However, I personally don’t miss them, as it’s a bit odd to have rounded corners on a dead-square TFT screen like mine.

The other biggest thing one notices is that some of the library dependencies and packaging have been moved around. The one that may cause upgraders compiling from source the most grief is the removal of the liblinc package. All liblinc’s functions have been moved into bonobo-activation, and so if, like me, you upgrade using the ebuilds from BreakMyGentoo — which are no doubt similar to the ebuilds which will end up in Portage for 2.4.0 final — you will find that you have to recompile everything which links to liblinc, as bonobo-activation blocks on the linc package, thus forcing an unmerge before you can continue.

Happily, emerging a recent version of gentoolkit gives you the revdep-rebuild script, which although slow, is capable of finding everything that’s linked to libraries which don’t exist and attempting to remerge them. It doesn’t work out of the box, as if you don’t do an emerge -u world regularly (which I do not recommend as it’s the way to all kinds of grief especially if you’re using unstable) you’ll find it trying to remerge versions of packages you have installed — versions which have been pruned from the Portage tree.

My tactic, which worked fairly well, is to take its temporary file .revdep-rebuild.4_ebuilds, edit it to take out all the versions and then do something like ‘cat ebuild_list | xargs emerge’ to emerge all the packages in the file. You might want to do a pretend emerge on that first of course…

Hmm, I’ve digressed somewhat. One disappointment in GNOME 2.4.0 beta 1 is that the click-in-window-to-raise-it behaviour is back in Metacity, despite being out of CVS HEAD last time I checked it out. I shall check it out again and compare; with any luck the 2.5 Metacity is coming from a branch. I don’t want to have to try and persuade Havoc to change this behaviour a third time…

UPDATE: Looks like the Metacity maintainers have gone for the Bad Way to do quite a few things, so I’m trying out how well GNOME and xfwm4 get along, because although I love GNOME’s environment over XFCE, xfwm4 seems so much more sensible, and for some reason manages to have almost all the correct behaviour. What a shock that is.

Well, now I’m working for CacheLogic — and a very interesting first day it was too! It’s odd having a proper job, I get an entry card for the building and an office key and all strange things like that, not to mention a telephone with a direct-dial number, and my own desk!!!

And the root password for my computer. ‘Install anything you like on it’ they said. So I did. Not entirely happy with the working environment, there are all kinds of little tweaks I’ve done to my home GNOME system over the time since GNOME 2.0 came out (which was the last time I had a fresh config), and I’m sure from work I’ll find more tweaks I can do to my home system as well. I just wish I could find a way to completely remove all traces of that nasty Bluecurve icon set (it’s a DeadRat box) — most of it’s gone, but the foot menu is still a red fedora and looks very silly next to the default GNOME icons! I’m actually quite tempted to download Ximian Desktop 2.0, but I don’t think that would be a particularly good use of the company’s 20 megabit/second Internet connection.

They do pay for volume, after all. So I satisfied myself with Evolution 1.4, and am considering Mozilla Firebird since I couldn’t get Galeon 1.3 to work (probably needs a new Mozilla RPM as well I would think, I hate RPMs!!!)

Still, I got to write some useful Perl today, and have lots more to write tomorrow. Good thing we’ve got the entire set of O’Reilly books in printed and electronic form really.