Gentoo

I finally found time to wipe Fedora from my harddisk and reinstall Gentoo. On the downside, I'm still watching stuff compile in the background. On the other hand, I managed to get X to use both video cards at the same time, something which always managed to crash Fedora for some reason (its amazing how used you can get to a 3000 pixel wide desktop - and how horrible it is to lose it). I also bothered to set up my mouse properly, so my scroll wheel and navigation buttons work once more. Things seem a lot nippier too - although that's probably due more to running Openbox instead of Gnome and a pile of servers.

CMS

Work progresses, slowly, on the CMS. It still isn't ported to Class::DBI (it didn't want to compile on Fedora and, like so many other things, didn't get investigated becuase I was planning to switch back to Gentoo (since Christmas)). Lastest bit is a hacked version of Justin Koivisto's "Defining An Image Crop Area With Javascript" script which will see patches submitted to the author once I get it doing everything I want. (I did send in one patch, only to find out that he had implemented the same feature the day before but hadn't published yet - ho hum, that's life).

Amazon

I'm unhappy with Amazon at present.

• A SCART lead arrived 3 hours before they posted it (if I believe their email).
• A DVD player posted before the SCART lead still hasn't arrived ... and was due today at the latest.
• Higher Order Perl arrived nice and quickly, but in paperback - the website claims Amazon only sell a hardback edition.

Its been a bad week for online shopping.

Perl

Looks like the Apps team at work is off to Braga this year. Yippie. I must arrange to take some of my holiday time off while I'm out there (shockingly I failed to use all my holiday last year, so I'm landed with six weeks to use up before next April - its a hard life).

The Dark Side

I've been drooling over X-boxes lately. Now I have a decent sized screen in my living room it would be nice to get a computer plugged in to it. Scarily, it looks like an X-box (with a mod chip) is the most cost effective way to go. Plus it has the added bonus of being able to play Fable and Jade Empire.