I pay my telephone bill to British Telecom by Direct Debit — it's taken from my bank account directly, under their control (albeit with fairly decent safeguards).

Strange, therefore, that I got a call yesterday from their missing payments department chasing up my last bill, which they hadn't bothered to take for some reason. They left a message with a number to call them back on, and a reference number. Yet when I called, the person there seemed unable to do anything useful like checking why they hadn't bothered to take the payment. She just said she'd have to get someone more clueful to call me. I wonder why I wasn't asked to call that person in the first place?

Immediately after the call I checked my bank statement, and it seems that the Direct Debit was actually taken — yesterday. So I helpfull called back and told them that, since they didn't seem clueful enough to work out for themselves what they were doing.

Today I got another phone call, and another British Telecom representative lied to me by telling me that the bill was still unpaid.

Fucking Useless Telco.

I suppose we should try to keep the ppc64 ExcludeArch bug as empty as we've been keeping the 32-bit one, despite the fact that we don't really use much 64-bit userspace on Fedora/PPC.

So let's make a start with the fun bits... OCaml now builds on PPC64 Linux. Maybe I'll take a look at Modula-3 if I get a few moments to myself and need a little light relief.

I've looked at a few build failures on PPC/PPC64 this week, and (aside from the 'we need some nutter to port OCaml' bit) so far they've all turned out to be generic problems which just happened to bite here first. As usual, Fedora on other architectures benefits a lot from the mere fact that we also build it for PowerPC.

Apparently travellers have voted Seoul Incheon airport the best in the world. I can't say I agree. I don't particularly enjoy airports at the best of times, but ICN was especially crappy.

For a start, there are almost no useful shops. Now, I can deal with airports without shops; there are a lot of those. But Incheon is just packed with perfume and shiny things and tat of all kinds. Although there's a huge concourse of shops, it's really disappointing to find that there's nothing but rubbish there, aside from two tiny bookstalls. And absolutely nobody selling DVDs, thus failing to provide the two basic ways of whiling away the time spent locked in tin cans. It was extremely disappointing.

If I'd wanted to buy 500 handbags from 17 separate but (to the untrained eye) identical shops, I'd have been perfectly happy though.

There was no Internet access either. Again disappointingly so -- it looked like there was, but on trying to pay for an hour's access and getting a few screens through the process you get a popup dialog saying "Try again, please after setting the Plugin!". Closer investigation shows that it seems to be trying some Windows-only plugin just to register for access!

Not a good airport. Hong Kong, from which I type this, is much nicer. Also lots of tat shops, but at least there are some real shops amongst them. And working (and free) wireless access. And a Virgin lounge, which helps... :)

I'm slightly confused by Jeremy Clarkson's admission that he was wrong about the safety of publishing his bank details.

The Direct Debit Guarantee promises him a full and immediate refund in this situation. If he phones his bank, the money should be back in his account by the time he puts the phone down.

I have heard that Barclays Bank are very bad at honouring their obligations under the Direct Debit Guarantee, and one person tells me that's one of the reasons he now banks elsewhere.

But that's a reason for Jeremy to change banks, not to admit that he was wrong about publishing bank details -- which are, after all, on every cheque he's ever written, too.

(Oops. Updated to use anoncvs as I originally intended. Not everyone has an account)

Why is it that the easy way of obtaining and building a Fedora kernel isn't documented anywhere? It looks something like this:

$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/pkgs co kernel/F-8
$ cd kernel
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/pkgs co common
$ cd F-8
$ cat > GNUmakefile <<EOF
ppc: DIST_DEFINES += --without smp
ppc64: DIST_DEFINES += --without kdump
i686: DIST_DEFINES += --without pae --without xen
include Makefile
EOF
$ make $(uname -m)

There are HOWTOs out there, but they seem to recommend that you download the SRPM and extract it, instead of working directly from the original. And presumably if you ever want to update it you need to download a whole new SRPM and do it all over again, instead of just 'cvs update; make $ARCH'. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to work directly with SRPMS like that, for any package. Even when I'm just building local hacks I wouldn't do it that way; I'd always take a copy of the Makefile from CVS and keep everything together in its own directory rather than scattered around ~/rpmbuild mixed together with potentially conflicting files from other packages.

The bit with the GNUmakefile is optional, but useful -- you can disable the builds you aren't interested in to save time, and more to the point if the last package built is the one you're interested in, you have the fully compiled source tree left behind (in kernel-$VERSION/linux-$VERSION.$ARCH) when it's done. This makes it easier for you to hack on it and debug it. After installing the built RPM on the target machine, you can individually rebuild and replace files -- both modules and the kernel image.

For the development ('rawhide') version, you'd use 'kernel/devel' in the first cvs checkout instead of 'kernel/F-8'. You can obviously have both at the same time, or even just checkout 'kernel', which should get you the common/ directory too. And a bunch of other 'branches' of the kernel.