Older blog entries for riggwelter (starting at number 56)

Announcing the launch of Planet SuSE

That's right folks, we've been in a demo mode for about a week or so, added some RSS feeds, changed the codebase and settled on a design, and now, the time has come.

Launching today, Planet SuSE - www.rubberturnip.org.uk/planetsuse

The aim here is to be a one-stop shop for SuSE news, hacker blogs, that sort of thing.

So, for example, both myself and LenZ blog about packages we've been building, they appear. We (in theory) have feeds of SuSE press releases and Security Advisories, although at the moment these don't work because of the version of RSS that they adhere to. (2.0 would be nice... ;) )

What can you do? Well, I'm repeating my call for anyone who contributes to the SuSE community to get blogging, and send me the syndication details, you can link to p.SuSE, and best of all, you can read and enjoy it.

At some point, there'll be an RSS 2.0 feed of the aggregated p.SuSE, and we'll be getting included in the Planetarium section of other Planets such as Planet GNOME.

And again I thank Jeff

This is getting silly, another day, another shout for jdub in my blog ;) He's blogged a reference to my call for SuSE bloggers so that it gets picked up on Planet GNOME. Hopefully it help swell our numbers.Jeff, you rock!

Updated Rhythmbox packages today, damn that app's nice, I think it's one of the proposed modules for GNOME 2.6, I think it's more suited to 5th Toe myself. 'Course, I really think that GNOME D&D and GNOME Office could be supplemented well by a GNOME Media platform including Rhythmbox, Totem, Sound Juicer etc, but hey, what do I know?

Calling all SuSE community members!

Some of you may be aware of "blog planets" popping up around the place, such as Planet GNOME (http://planet.gnome.org/), Planet Debian (http://people.debian.org/~keybuk/planetdebian/) and KDE's blog aggregate (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog).

Well, I'm looking at putting together a "Planet SuSE" to provide the same service for the SuSE community, and I need your help!

Do you work for SuSE, or provide some sort of service (such as APT maintenance, or PackMan) for the SuSE community? Do you blog? (If you don't blog, now's a good time to start)

Take a look at http://swamprat.homeunix.org/planet-suse/ - it's quite embryonic at this stage, but once we get a few extra feeds in there, it'll pick up, and don't be put off by the Ximian feeds, they're there to show how it works essentially (and hey, Ximian and SuSE, it's all Novell now, in't it?).

If you would like to be added to it, send me the URL of an RSS feed of your blog. One thing to note is that the RSS must contain a valid pubDate for each item. To see what it looks like, look at the RSS version of my blog, it's linked in the 'Subscriptions' bit of the page.

Once it's going, it'll be cross-linked with the various other planets as part of the growing planet community, I've had some feedback from people involved with other planets, and they're excited at the prospect of a SuSE one, so let's make it happen!

(Originally posted on the SuSE-Linux-E mailing list)

Have moved my diary to www.rubberturnip.org.uk

Well, it's been summer, and now it's not! During the summer, I worked at Soul Survivor, gained another year of age (I'm now 26 - eek!) built a lot of packages (13 updates to usr local bin since my last diary entry) and, oh, lots of other exciting things I'm sure.

Was 13st again this morning, I had got down as low as 12st5 , and was 12st7 Saturday morning, but it was an especially take-away/eating-out oriented weekend, and I really put on. Going to try to hit the gym this week, and am being rather more strict with myself about food again now.

Doing a training evening today for the word projection team at church, in order that we can change to Presenter by Discovery Systems rather than the (increasingly ropey) system we're surrently using. It's impossible for us to go on holiday at the moment, because I'm pretty well the only one who can fix it if something goes seriously wrong (if it goes slightly wrong Amanda can fix it...)

Migrated to the new MySQL servers this morning, had to get up before 06:00 to get in to do it before office hours - serious killer, especially after a faily latish night last night.

It's now 13:28 and I've only had one coffee all day, I'll get through somehow, finishing work early today to compensate, will nap before going out tonight (jazz gig, mmm...)

The new DB servers had such an impact on the performance of our (already high performance) web sites that our developers noticed it the moment the tested the sites, makes me wonder what the hell we were doing ever having the DBs on those lousy MIPS (Cobalt) boxen...

Course, once we've moved all the rest that those boxen do off of them, they can be put to use like installing Woody on them, and running them as name servers or something.

Next major project will be overhauling the company's mail infrastructure, trying to get away from non-free software. We'll likely investigate MessageWall as a replacement to MAILsweeper, and then we need something to replace Exchange. Were it just mail, it'd be simple, but just about the whole company uses the bloody shared calendaring, and as yet there's no free backend calendar server for Evolution.

Ah well, it'll come together, I'm sure it will :)

Built Apache on the first of our new MySQL servers (cos they double up as our web development servers)

Took 10 seconds!

Yay!

England 1-2 Brazil - gutted, absolutely gutted. Came into work early to watch, and it was well painful!

A couple of friends (Assistant Pastors of our church in fact) had their first kid this morning, a boy. Totally made up for them.

Well, for a while now, my DSL has been sorted - dogy micro-filters was what was causing the noise on the line and (it would seem that) a dodgy USB controller was causing the link to be unreliable. PC is also back from the repair guys, with a new mainboard and some serious uptime!

Spent most of the morning upgrading Apache servers to overcome the vulnerability reported by ISS, also in the process of installing new MySQL servers, which is actually quite a nice project, especially when using SuSE 8.0.

I've fallen back in love the GkrellM as well, being online 24/7 at home makes being able to have all sorts of monitors available constantly like that is a real boon, and I don't really miss the desktop space too much.

Well, time for a TODO list I think...

• Rethink www.rubberturnip.org.uk

  Since I launched usr local bin I've not done anything to Rubber Turnip at all (save for fix my Jabber contact info). Not surprising, considering the amount of time u l b takes up in addition to my full time job. Think it might be time to retire it as a projecty type site, and make it a normal geek-personal site

• Sort out the noise-on-line ADSL problem

  Of course, first I need to get my PC back from the repair guys. Once I do, I really need to get the problem where having my ADSL modem connected to the line (or indeed, any micro-filters connected) puts so much noise on the line as to render the phones unusable. Hopefully Pipex support will be able to help me. It has occured to me that it may have something to do with the fact that I have old cheap & nasty phones, and it may be resolved when we invest in newer phones. It would be nice if I didn't have to do that just to be able to be online 24/7 at home though - just adds to the expense.

Gosh, only two points, but they'll do for now, bet your life they'll get added to :)

Making a lasagne tonight - yummy, can't wait, really hungry...

Wow, is it really that long since I posted anything?

usr local bin is just about 2 months old now, is has served just short of 25Gig in that time! Nearly 3000 people have downloaded AbiWord 1.0.1 alone, which is great.

13st dead this morning, have revised my target weight to 12st by the end of June, which should put me right at the top of my ideal weight range for my height, reckon I can easily make it, and have got stable at it by then. After that I'll plan a steady drop to around the middle of the range, and then I'll be able to remain within the range quite nicely.