A simple matter of…

James I share your pain. Fortunately it’s been pretty quiet recently, however I generally get a batch of people phoning every few months. It was particularly bad after I started my job. “Oh, but I found your CV on $random_job_site”. Which really really annoyed me – I had put my CV up on two sites [...]

I listen to music in the kitchen a fair bit – normally whilst cooking (or washing up). I currently do this using my old discman and swap the CD occasionally. I think it’s time to enter the 21st century – particularly if I hook it up the hi-fi which I plan on doing eventually. I [...]

First of all I should make it clear – I loathe adverts and advertising. When I go and buy something I like to make an informed decision, advertising is rarely aimed at providing this. Just “we are cool”, “nothing is more effective” or just complete abuse of science and statistics (which IMO should be banned [...]

As the government announces that 25million records have been lost including social security numbers, bank details etc, I can only shake my head at the reports and comments. “It was sent by someone at a low-level”. So someone at a low-level can get _hold_ of this information in the first place – that shows an [...]

Works very nicely thank you. However I’ve just spent some time trying to optimise it a little for my laptop (Dell D630). Currently the suspend timings are: * press power button and select “suspend” * T+2secs /etc/acpi/sleep.sh is called * console switch causes 2 sec delay * alsa stop causes 1 sec delay * T+5secs [...]

It looks like my wish was correct – using the _non_ static 32-bit skype means that Skype logs into D-bus (at least when you start it using “skype –enable-dbus”). So now I can test my program – which logs into D-bus and talks to Skype to update the mood-status. Why am I doing this? Well [...]

Decided to try the new Skype client for Linux. As usual I hit the hurdle of “no 64-bit binaries” I went to [http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/non-free/s/skype/ medibuntu] to get the 64-bit variants they do and found that they’ve not done v2 ones yet. So I made my own: * install skype-common from medibuntu * download the skype-static v2 [...]

Another month, another LUG meet. This month it was another meeting with [http://www.surrey.lug.org.uk SurreyLUG] kindly arranged by Dominic. All three speakers were from HantsLUG though – including an Ubuntu Developers Conference talk by Alan Pope and one on bitlbee by Tony Whitmore. The first talk up one by yours truly about [http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/ puppet]. I was [...]

For a little while openoffice has been very unstable for me on my laptop which runs Ubuntu (my desktop is Debian). A bit of googling found the workaround – remove openoffice.org-gtk and openoffice.org-gnome. This blog entry is just to spread the word.

Another year has gone by so it’s the usual self-analysis phase with the usual outcome I’ve reduced the amount of home-time that work eats into – considering I often start at 07:30am that wasn’t too tricky. Now I just need something to do at home. For the last six months I’ve been considering taking a [...]