Bagel Belly Blog

Pronunciation

In response to Frank's request for a solution, here's a British guy's attempt at interpreting The Chaos. Note no effort goes into oratory skills, I was just desperately trying to get through it in one go without too many hideous blunders.

Some points on mistakes, etc ...

• Corps rhymes with corpse or "core"? The former seems to be getting common (the latter is more correct)


• Terpsichore is not a word I'm familiar with.


• Not sure on pronunciation of 'bier'


• Not sure on 'Melpomene'


• Billet, billet, billet ... I think it's supposed to be pronounced hard, so billet as in "fill it".


• plover?!


• chaise should be "shez"


• I got alley instead of ally. oops.


• Neither vs. Neither, tomato, tomato ...


• My pronunciation is off on preface.


• rowlock is off ... it usually rhymes with bull's testicles.


• There's a typo near the end I think: is a paling should be is appalling?

I definitely need a few glasses of wine before attempting that again.

Anyway, my attempt is here: Chaos.

Update: Gianugo points me to this version. Only a few minor differences... mostly down to interpretation and context, says I, being particularly defensive!

The Great British Summer

Ah, that most traditional of things, the great British Bank Holiday weekend. Tradition dictates that I should either sit in a traffic jam en route to a coastal resort, hop on a plane to 'guaranteed sunshine', have a barbecue, or spend the three days gardening. As I don't own a car, have done the plane thing all too recently, and haven't any food in for a barbecue, I choose option four: three days of gardening.

Of course, this being England, what I really mean is I choose to spend 5 minutes in the garden then an hour waiting for the rain to stop before returning to my digging. Rinse and repeat all day long.

While I wait for the current inclemency to pass, here's pictures of what I just found in the garden. Seems like a family of frogs have taken up residency in the (soon to be gone) overgrown plant life that used to be a flower bed. Say hello to Kermit and Kermit Junior.

Home

I have seen the future of international travel, and it is .... Norwich airport.

Landed at 13:10. Walked through my front door at 13:30. I like that very much.

Cleaning the outbox

Ok, so now I have decent bandwidth and time to kill waiting for my connection from Schiphol back to Norwich, I can post some of the snapshots from the last week.

When we went out drinking on Monday night, we went to a pub called "The Ruins". It was a totally open-air bar, which consisted of a gravelled area between two ramshackle buildings. Unbelievably cool in a strange kind of way.

The place we got our kebabs on the first two days was at the bottom of a tower block (the entire main street in Bucharest was made up of tower blocks much like this). On the first day, it was obvious that a window had fallen out of one of the higher flats, as an area of pavement was roped off and glass was everywhere. On the second day, we got to watch this masterpiece of engineering, as two guys hoisted a uPVC window frame up and into the flat. If you look carefully, you can just about see it. What you can't see is that it looks like every other window in the building will submit to gravity's many charms in the not too distant future.

I think I mentioned the other kebab shop was next to one of the two Bucharest football clubs. Here it is, for your delectation and delight. The team lost 3-0 to Manchester United on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I didn't get to watch the match as I was busy authoring slides ...

One of the curious things about Bucharest is how old and new seem to mix together with no sense of planning or design.... like in this picture, where an ornate old building sits between concrete monstrosities.

This church (I think that's what it is) was pretty much surrounded by huge buildings. This was a common site throughout the city: churches were hidden away by the buildings around them. Apparently it was a deliberate ploy by (I think) Ceausescu to lessen the impact of the Romanian church without overtly deprecating it.

Ok, the last picture (until I get the high-res stuff off the digital camera). This is one of the many parks in Bucharest, and has an artificial lake in the centre. We went there last night for a few beers before moving on to a pool hall (!) and then The Ruins, mentioned above. Several things were striking about the place: the crows in the trees above were incredibly loud, and added a curious atmosphere especially in the late evening light. Also, a huge number of bats could be seen swooping and soaring through the sky, and doing extremely close fly-bys of pedestrians. All of a sudden last night I really understood where the whole Dracula legend sprang from. Cool. Speaking of cool - apparently, this lake is artificially frozen every winter to allow skating. Sounds like it would be fun to visit in the winter!

Right, I have a plane to catch. Norwich, here I come.

Johnny-boy is coming home

Job done.

Today the temperature reached scorching (by my standards), and by 10am, the training room was already unbearably hot. We soldiered on through the toughest material so far (Forms), and the guys picked it up admirably despite the unfavourable conditions.

We broke early for lunch, before ploughing through the last set of exercises to finish in time for afternoon tea.

A word on lunches. All this week we've frequented two fast food vendors, which are about the equivalent of kebab shops in the UK. What they serve is pretty similar to chicken kebabs when the chicken is on the rotisserie, like with doner meat. One of them was right beside one of the two football clubs in Bucharest.

Last night I put on my fancy pants and went to the best restaurant in town, a place called Balthazar, which was recommended to me on Sunday. The place was incredibly pretentious daaaaaarling, but the food was nothing short of amazing. I had duck, then fillet of beef with vegetables and an onion chutney. Best of all, they sold wine by the glass, so I was able to try out a marvellous Pinot Noir.

Dessert was a filo parcel of tropical fruits with vanilla bourbon ice cream - the chef advised me it would take thirty minutes to prepare, so I resigned myself to continuing to drink glasses of wine. I guess I was fooling myself when I pretended it wasn't worth getting a bottle to begin with. I just about managed to stop myself after four glasses. And yes, the dessert was exquisite.

For comparison with the previous night, this little excursion set me back £18 (not including tip).

So that's it, time is up. Tonight I'm going for a few farewell beers, and then at an unreasonable time in the morning I shall hop into a cab and start my journey back to jolly old Blighty.

I'm going to miss this place.

Whilst eating pizza

Some thoughts on this whole thing, as I sit in this Western atrocity of a Pizza Hut grabbing a quick bite to eat before returning to squeezing my brains out into Powerpoint.

I could quite enjoy becoming a travel author. I might not be particularly original or full of deep and meaningful insights, but this life is definitely something I could get used to. Throwing myself at random foreign countries, playing on my Englishness to get by where I don't speak the language ... it's a blast. Though it probably says something about my method of enjoyment that I can now say "cheers" in more languages than is entirely reasonable.

So last night, over beers with the guys I'm training, I learnt a great deal about this country. I'm sure much of it is muddled by the amount of beer involved, but I'll try and recount it with some semblance of sanity.

The roots of the language are predominantly Latin then French. Back in the 1800s-1920s when Bucharest was "little Paris", the upper classes used to send their children to French finishing schools, hence the heavy influence. I can practically count 1-10 in Romanian by using French with a heavy accent.

They have a large number of electric busses and trams here. This surprised me ... but it turns out that in the time of Ceausescu, he attracted a lot of foreign (particularly Saudi) investment which was spent on big infrastructure like hydroelectric dams. Apparently, they got the cost of electricity down to practically free. They also have a Canadian nuclear reactor. I don't quite know where that fits into things.

Road design and planning hasn't progressed from 30 years ago. The city is grinding to a halt with congestion. Feels like home.

Crossing signs are funky animated dudes with a countdown timer to the next light change. Will try and grab a video of that ...

Some things never change. Taxi drivers here shake their heads at bills of large denominations, in just the way they do back home. I'm tempted to call out a plumber just to find out what the Romanian equivalent of a sharp intake of breath and "it's gonna cost you" is.

Which brings me to another subject, wallet anxiety. I get nervous if I don't have the equivalent of two meals in cash in my wallet back home, but turns out that to carry more than 100,000 lei is considered a bit daft by the guys over here. I didn't like to tell them I had closer to 2 million lei in my wallet at the time. I now check my wallet is with me every 30 seconds.

These guys I'm training are like sponges, soaking up knowledge faster than I can throw it at them. They are all young and still studying at university, and last night I think they drank rather more than they are used to - judging by their overall appearance this morning (the joys of the metric system - I'm used to pints, so was depressingly sprightly this morning). Despite their general malaise, they still managed to kick me mentally around the block several times, and by the end of the day I was totally wiped out. I think they are going to be first class Cocooners.

Their upbringing has some interesting contrasts with my experience in the UK. Over here, they are very much encouraged to rely on parental support until late in life (like, over 20). The guys range from 21-22, and still receive cash and food parcels from back home, and aren't expected to get even temporary jobs for quite some time. It seems strange at first, but they explained it as being a throwback to the tough times in the Communist era, where everyone had to rely on their relatives for support.

In restaurants over here (in a random sampling), they don't seem to sell "post-mix", syrupy reconstituted carbonated drinks. All fizzy drinks come in cans. It seems to be something of a marketing manoeuvre as much as hygiene-related, but it must surely hurt profits.

Being on my own has many inconveniences. The lack of scintillating conversation over dinner, no-one to bounce my deranged ranting off of before blogging, to name two examples. The one I feel most grievously though is the lack of another body to share a bottle of wine with. Wine by the glass is not an option here, that I've seen. Really, a whole bottle is too much for me in one night, unless I plan to sit in a restaurant for many hours on my own and oversleep in the morning. Apparently Romanian wine is exceptional, but I don't quite know how I'll get to find out except by bringing some back with me.

Mobile phones are big business over here. Of a population of 22 million, over 1 million rushed out to get mobiles in the first year they were available. Apparently it was the fastest take-up in Europe. (My numbers may be wrong, as they are subject to alcoholic reminiscence on my part and possible exaggeration by my Romanian informants). Calls are cheap - a bill is not likely to be more than a couple of dollars a month at most. Many people are getting mobiles as their very first experience of a phone over here. Another way to look at it: I could buy a car here for what I spent on my mobile phone last month.

They sell beer in McDonalds apparently. Fantastic. Would you like beer with that?

I'm going to don the closest I've got to a linen suit tomorrow, and try the restaurant where all the embassy folk hang out.

Cost of tonights meal (bruschetta, pizza, 2 beers): £2.98 (not including tip).

Laughed so hard ....

Dear Lord, this isn't cricket! Where's my Earl Grey?

Thanks, David ;-)

Inconvenient

David has a good old rant about travellers abroad. Don't wanna turn this into a ping-pong match, but he's wide of the mark at the very end:

people should realise they are actually away and try a bit of 'When in Rome...'

That's the problem. I am positively revelling in the culture over here - the chaotic relaxed air of amused decay, the acceptance of one's lot, but at the same time the insane attention to detail (pictures to post when I have bandwidth) and the gorgeous gothic architecture. I love the very smell of the place, something in the atmosphere puts a skip in my step and makes me feel like I could live here at the drop of a hat.

It's the people that are over here to exploit their position in life that piss me off. Whether outsourcing to these guys means I'm included in that exploitation, or whether it's a simple matter of economics where they get as much out of it as we do is left for the reader to discern.

Oh well. I'm going to put some beer tokens into the local economy now.

No-one said it would be easy

Boy oh boy, that was a tough day. Some confusion at the start over where the English guy was (I'm here! Look! Sat in this chair waiting!) was resolved when one of the attendees started talking to me while googling for a picture of "Andrew Savory". Seems the girl I spoke to when I got there didn't pass the message on. Then there was a bit of a delay while the room was rearranged to accommodate us all, and while aging 64mb machines were replaced with ones that could run an editor and Cocoon without a seizure.

Anyway, we got underway, but it was so humid I felt like passing out a couple of times. My legs feel like lead now - I love to pace while I present, but I'm not used to 8 hours of non-stop pacing.

Enough with the grumbling. All in all, the first day of training was a blast. The developers are a good bunch of guys - many of them still at university - and some of them are incredibly sharp, and have taken to XSLT like ducks to water. When they start playing with sitemap wildcards two exercises before time, you know you're gonna have your work cut out for you in keeping them busy!

So now it's time to tidy up the slides for tomorrow based on what I've learnt of their experience levels, and then it's off to the pub with them to show them how us English chaps drink.

Tally ho!

The venue

I tracked down the venue, by the way. I think. This looks like it. The picture doesn't really do it justice - it had started to rain, so I just snapped and ran for cover. I'll try for a better picture tomorrow when I have time and bandwidth.

A quiet day in Bucharest

More specifically, a quiet day cooped up in the hotel writing slides. I don't mind putting presentations together, but workshops are far tougher... for each set of slides there has to be written and tested code, and this takes time.

Still, I think I have the first 2-3 days comprehensively worked out, and the last day was always going to depend on how the attendees coped with the material, so I'll be happy putting that together from the plans and slides I've got as the week goes by.

I spoke with a German guy this morning at breakfast, who is over here selling construction equipment. Apparently he sold 8 cranes in one month recently, so either the economy is booming and buildings are flying up, or someone has a serious crane fetish.

Anyway, the guy tipped me off to some decent restaurants a shot taxi ride away, so I went to one of them this evening: Casa di David, an Italian restaurant. Funny on so many levels. It was pretty good food, but considering the number of waiters and waitresses (we're talking maybe 30 for a place that wasn't exactly huge), the service was somewhat lacklustre. Certainly worse than the service I got last night in the out-of-the-way place I ate (where the customer - waiter ratio was far less, too). The restaurant had the air of "the place you go to be seen to make people know you can afford to go there". Urgh. Every country has pretentious places, it seems.

The restaurant was on a lake near to the Palace of Parliament, and I just caught a glimpse of it on my way back - impressive building (the second largest building in the world). I'll try and visit it before I leave, time permitting.

Another thing that bothers me - or surprises me, at least ... I haven't made my mind up whether I should be bothered, pitying, disgusted or just to accept that it happens and ignore it. The open reference to the sex trade here. The guy this morning said "so, what are you interested in, theatres or women?", and a guy in the hotel bar this evening appeared to be on a very particular kind of holiday - he was comparing prices at various establishments with the barman. Hmm.

Oh well. I'm going to be terribly English and curl up in bed with a book now, rather than a prostitute.

One last thing - I forgot to pack tea bags. I had a weird herbal concoction masquerading as tea this morning. Damn. Poison to an Englishman abroad :-)

Currently listening to Bach - English Suite No.1, A M from the album Johann Sebastian Bach, The Eng by Glenn Gould

Really the last thing. On iPods and Amsterdam

David and I passed through Amsterdam a month or so back to meet with Motorola and Cap Gemini. Being the eager geeks we are, we tried to track down iPods at Schipol airport to take advantage of tax-free prices. None in stock. In the entire airport. And this is a big airport.

Fast-forward to today. I queued for 10 minutes in the electronics store to find out whether they had any in stock or not. Same message: "sold out".

Are they selling like hot cakes, or are Apple just crap at meeting demand?

(Apparently they are ~ £250 for the 40gb version. Hmm. And they won't have any in stock on my return journey, so I'm told. This is probably a Good Thing.)

Oh, and re: my previous post - John says you get 60274.68 lei to the pound. But damnit, I'm still a multi-millionaire over here, so hush!

One last thing

My room is costing twenty-four million, forty-five thousand, four hundred and eighty eight lei.

Boy, I hope the exchange rate is good.

Dining out

I impressed myself (not too difficult).

David's recommendation was to find the scummiest purveyor of food down the nastiest back street, and to try eating there.

Bucharest has Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonalds, and numerous cheap knock-offs of said franchises. It was tempting to take the easy route and crawl into one of them, and fill up on ubiquitous carbohydrates.

In the end, I wound up in a back street, dining on food I cannot pronounce or spell. And it was good. And so was the beer :-)

So, what is with the language in this place? I can understand it written down - it's like the bastard offspring of French, German and Latin all getting it on in a distinctly unpleasant fashion. Very confusing.

Went for a bit of a hike after dinner (possibly the fault of those beers), and it turns out there's some real gritty backstreet watering holes and restaurants round the corner from the hotel, so I'll be trying one of those tomorrow night. I didn't find where I'm supposed to be doing the training on Monday, but I know the street now, so I'll find it in the morning.

Right. The aircon is saying this room is at 29 degrees celcius, so it's time to get away from the furnace that is my laptop and pass out with a good book. I'm discovering the joys of the cocaine-fuelled sleuth that is Sherlock Holmes. Don't know quite how I missed reading the collected adventures before. Terribly remiss of me.

Breakfast at 7.30am tomorrow. That's 5.30am UK time. Ouch.

Airports and travel in general

Some thoughts on airports.

I love the buzz and hum of activity that airports have - especially somewhere as huge as Schipol, which has insane numbers of flights to all corners of the globe (there's an oxymoron). Not quite as busy as Chicago, but not a bad effort.

The thing that gets me the most is seeing all the faces and hearing all the accents from different places (Paul and David will know exactly what I'm talking about). It makes me feel alive and puts life and the world in general into a glorious sense of perspective.

I'm not a particularly nervous traveller, but I do like to know what I'm doing and where I'm going and to be there in good time. So this trip was something of a worry for me, since I effectively landed at Bucharest with no idea how to get to the hotel or even where the hotel was aside from a street name and number.

But there's something soothing about the strange other land that is airport arrivals, where you go through the little rituals - passport control, baggage reclaim, customs - and the routine of all that put me at ease, so I was able to cheerfully walk out of the airport and straight into a cab.

I think I paid over the odds for the cab - my haggling skills aren't all that great - but who cares? I'm here, the aircon is on (boy is it hot outside!), and now I can get down to some work before going out to look around later on when it's cooled down.

Currently listening to The Well-Tempered Clavier Book1 Nos.1~24 from the album Bach:The Well-Tempered Clavier Book1 Nos.1~24 by Glenn Gould

Bucharest, 1pm

Schipol, 9am

Schipol, 8am

Norwich, 5am

Wheezer

John is suffering health problems. This is actually really good news, at least to me. For the last month I've been having progressively more problems with my asthma, and have doubled up doses of everything along with trying some new tricks too. I've also been waking up regular as clockwork at about 4.30am, unable to breath properly.

So while I sympathise entirely with John's predicament, it's a 100% relief to hear that it's not just me. Phew.

(It does make you wonder though ... what are we doing to our atmosphere to make so many people ill? This seems to be a progressively worsening situation each year.)

Fly the foafers' favourite airline

Oh dear. Ominous news from libby: KLM screwed up their flights to foafcamp. I'll be flying KLM to Bucharest. Let's hope it's a random event.

On the plus side, I do get to leave from Norwich airport for the first time in my life - it'll be a luxury to travel for ten minutes to and from the airport instead of the more usual 2-3 hours. I'm really looking forward to the return journey, when I can hop off the plane and be home before you can say "cor blimey guv'nor that's convenient"!

Right, now back to writing the workshop materials. *sigh*

Virii

2 months ago, we installed clamav on our mailserver.

Up to last week, it had found and filtered 12,905 virus emails - a total of 25.7MB.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Blog spam continued

So, having renamed my comment script and removed links to it from the front page, comment spam continued to hit.

Today, I added a hidden form field to comment entries, and turned off comments on most of the blog entries. I now have a db script to automatically turn off all comments on entries older than a set time.

Let's see if that stems the tide of trash...

Get Real

Russ talks about Real, and gives them a whole load of favourable commentary:

[...] the app is great and the company is really making amends [...]
It's a good product and getting better with every release

Now, I like Russ and I have a lot of respect for the guy (though I've never met him in person), but this has to be some of the most absurd nonsense I've heard in a long while.

Having spent the last few weeks watching a colleague go slowly insane whilst dealing with the media player "state of the art" (and I use those words in an ironic sense), I have nothing but scorn and derision for the crazy fools at Real, who churn out release after release of pustulant, obnoxious sub-standard heinous crap and foist it on an unwilling and unfortunate public, who are forced to lap it up because it's the only well-promoted alternative to that abomination coming from Redmond, the festering turd whose name is Windows Media Player.

Hmm. That could have been a well-balanced and incisive commentary on the state of the media player industry. But wait! You get that too. A rant and incisive commentary? What value for money!

But you'll have to wait until tomorrow, when we'll hopefully publish the results of our descent through the very rings of Dante's Inferno. Or possibly, just a report on the state of media players on various platforms when trying to achieve a relatively simple content delivery task.

Note to self: don't drink so much tea late at night. And read less of the Bile Blog.

Where do you want to go today?

Uh, Romania. Bucharest, in the south, to be specific. I'm departing in a week or so to train a development team out there in the art of Cocoon, forms, flow, and open source development methodologies. It should be interesting. Yes, I'm using 'interesting' as a synonym for nerve-wracking and terrifying!

Olympic stupidity

Via Dan Gillmor: the Athens 2004 Hyperlink Policy is complete stupidity. Apparently I can only use the term ATHENS 2004 to link to these morons (oops, that's twice I got it wrong already), and I'm supposed to send a request letter asking permission to link.

Yeah, right.

Here comes the GetTogether

The first (public) step in getting this year's Cocoon GetTogether began today with the call for proposals. If it's even half as good as last year, it should be an excellent event, a chance to catch up on all the cool technical happenings in Cocoon land as well as catching up with friends and colleagues from all over the world. Time to start work on that abstract!

Novell, SUSE

A couple of days ago, I received the Linux Technical Resource Kit I ordered some time back. I heard a Novell guy speaking at the OSS Watch conference, and although the guy was a bit annoying, some of Novell's big ideas still managed to leak through. With this in mind, time for another evaluation.

Obviously, I'm still a die hard mac addict, and you'll have to wrestle my Powerbook from my cold dead hands, but it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on the competition. Besides, I've got a pretty powerful intel laptop doing nothing, and at some point I do need to send the Powerbook off for repair.

Anyway. So far, the install process has been pretty smooth. Booting from DVD, the presentation is slick and most of the default options were fine. Somehow, the installation even knew I wanted to install on the spare second hard disk that only contains the backup of my music collection, and not on the live linux install on the main disk. Sweet.

One curious thing to note is that the default desktop environment being installed is KDE. I don't quite know why it's not Gnome, given all the Ximian guys now at Novell. I guess it's not a bad thing - the more people using both desktops, the more chance there is that competition will improve them both beyond what a single desktop could achieve.

Another observation: the PCMCIA wireless card I have wasn't recognised by the kernel used during installation. My guess is this means it won't work when the system is up and running, either. This is a permanent annoyance for me: the ability to drive it has been available in linux for a couple of years now, but none of the distros seem capable of getting this right. (Ok, so I only tried RedHat then Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Xandros, Linspire, Libranet, and Progeny, but I feel reasonably justified in making broad sweeping claims now!)

So, it's rebooted. First thing to note is that grub has had a makeover, and shows a fancy progress bar before booting, instead of the dull old countdown timer. And, of course, it looks the part, in the shades of blue SUSE seem to be using now. (SuSE? SUSE? Suse?)

Booting time was less than impressive, and it seems to have dumped me back into YAST, to ask for root password and stuff. Seems straightforward, but less help text now, so newbies might get a bit lost at this point. There's a box for advanced options, which lets me pick the type of password encryption - DES, MD5, Blowfish. It claims DES is the "linux default" ... is it really? Debian seemed to encourage MD5 for at least the last few years. I can't think of any reason why SUSE wouldn't use MD5.

Interestingly, I typed in my generic password that I use for every test system, and got my wrists slapped about the poor mix of characters and numbers. "This is not good security practice. Are you sure?" Alright, I'm sorry, I'll fix it.

Network detection. Well, it lists my Linksys wireless card, and surprisingly, it's also listing my internal modem. Haven't seen that recognised and listed before. It also got the internal NIC, so full marks! Well, maybe not. Wireless configuration is screwed.

I run my wireless network with a hidden SSID (the name of the network) and using a WEP key (like a password), to prevent anyone else randomly accessing it. It's not 'secure' by any means, but it does act as a deterrent to the average user. If you'd seen some of the people I live near, you'd understand why this is a good thing ;-)

Unfortunately, SUSE's network configuration doesn't seem to give me the option to set up the SSID or WEP key. It seems to know it's a wireless device (the configuration was automatically named 'wlan-bus-pcmcia'). What's going on? I guess I'll just trust to luck for now, and continue. Hopefully there'll be better configuration tools once it's finished installing.

Now it's asking me for my user authentication method, giving me the choice of "Stand-alone machine" or "network client" (with "NIS" and "LDAP" as network authentication methods). Now I know it's talking about directory services here, saying will my users log in using usernames and passwords coming from a remote server, but I did have to think for a second. It's like Microsoft's "type in the network name or join a workgroup". A little more explanation for the user would be nice here.

At the end of configuration, you get the release notes. Probably not interesting to most people, but a couple of things caught my eye:

* the filesystem is UTF-8. Coo.

* The FHS makes direct reference to XML resources. Coo.

* Standby / Suspend is supported with ACPI. Will it work on this laptop? My bet is no.

... and we're back in device configuration again, this time graphics, sound, printers etc. As per usual, the wrong choice for my gfx card: 1024x768 instead of 1400x1050, and 3d acceleration disabled. Urgh. After a bit of fiddling around, I convinced it to run at the right resolution. Turning on 3d seems to be a simple case of clicking a checkbox - if that works, I'll be extremely impressed!

Looks like SUSE are using CUPS for printing. It'll be interesting to see if it can talk to printers attached to the powerbook ....

Ok, installation / configuration completed. Now it's switching to X ... and logging me into KDE.

First impressions: nice! I love the default theme. I have anti-aliased fonts from the start, good. The mouse is on acid and impossible to control, but easily fixed.

So, that WLAN card. It looks like everything is set up through YaST, so I started that up and went to Network Devices. I clicked on Network Card, then configure beside the Linksys. In the Advanced tab, I selected Hardware details, then Wireless Settings. I could then enter the network name (SSID), and WEP key. I then clicked on OK, Next, Next, Finish, and Close. The network is now working - hurrah! But c'mon guys, this is too difficult.

Now I'll play with the running system a bit, and see if it's truly usable or yet another linux disaster ...

Blog spam

... is running at 5-10 spams a day, and now I'm back on MT2.661 this is a real problem.

I've decided to implement the rest of the tips for a spam-free blog... I'd already done tip 1 (renaming my comment CGI). Let's see if this improves things.

Inch-thick, knee-deep

... in Cocoon Forms and Flow. Very powerful, once you get your head round the many many layers of abstraction.

iSync 1.5 released

iSync 1.5 released

Wednesday, 11 August 2004 00:25 |Savs6600| An exception has occured. Please try to sync again. Conduit Savs6600 generated exception NSSyncConduitException: An exception has occured. Please try to sync again..

Oh good. Glad they fixed all the bugs then. I may as well be using linux. Ug.

Ouch

Been a bit quiet around here, hasn't it?

It's probably something to do with the horrific experience I had with MovableType 3.0D. If you're thinking about trying it - don't even go there.

Not only did it fail to upgrade and then break all my urls, but shortly after installing it, the XML-RPC interface would no longer accept my password. I fought with it for a few days, then thought "I don't have time for this shit" and abandoned the blog.

I woke earlier than expected this morning, so I took the opportunity to downgrade to version 2.661 again. Almost there ... I've imported the old entries, but most of the IDs are currently screwed. Expect lots of broken / incorrect links until I find out what's gone wrong.

Sigh.