Andrew's diary

Thursday, 26 January 2006

At 03:26, Alex Flegg was born by Caesarean-section, weighing 4.13kg (9lbs 2oz). Mother and baby are both doing well.

Friday, 20 January 2006

Think I may have cracked componentisation - if only everything was that easy. Still no baby, and found out that when Mel goes in to be induced, she stays in. She thought I knew. Doh!

Watched the Money Programme's The World According To Google whilst in bed on my Nokia 770, and realised how high-tech and sci-fi-like this would have seemed just five years ago. Very cool for my not-so-inner geek.

Alan Cox seems to like it as well.

Thursday, 19 January 2006

Missed work due to a migraine. Mel went to see the consultant in the hospital, but he seems nonplussed.

Wednesday, 18 January 2006

bleb.org was inaccessible during the transfer of the domain hosting from Register.com to Just The Name - a sister company to Metronet, also just bought by PlusNet. Very helpful support, unfortunately it seems either Register or JTN didn't manage to get a seamless transfer of the DNS records before it was too late. Annoying.

Tuesday, 17 January 2006

This sounds like bollocks to me. PlusNet used to be good, but the consensus is that them buying Metronet can only be a bad thing.

errno = ENOSPROG;
return;

Monday, 16 January 2006

An otherwise dull day at work was brightened up by a phone call when I got to the office from Archos, saying they'll be round tomorrow to pick up the broken Gmini. Impressive service.

Sunday, 15 January 2006

A quiet day (perhaps we should appreciate them whilst we've got them!): destroyed the Christmas tree and took it to the tip, did a bit of shopping and then in the afternoon David and Alison came round for tea. Still not got around to starting on the menu editor for Maemo, but had a thought as to how the top-level, root-requiring, menu could be edited without having to start the app from an Xterm.

Another app I didn't do anything with is TinkerTool for providing an easy interface to set-up swap, turn on/off swap & USB host etc.

Enterprise and Stargate both good, as ever. As was Scrapheap Challenge at the US "Punkin Chunkin'" contest. Odd that both my listings, and the C4 announcer described it as a "Top Ten" clipshow, however.

Saturday, 14 January 2006

Played (briefly) with a full GNOME-based desktop on my Nokia 770. It worked surprisingly well at 800x480: OpenOffice was impressive, as was Firefox.

OK, it was a bit of a cheat to use vncserver on the house server, and Aaron L's VNC Viewer on the 770, but still... Unfortunately it didn't work straight off, with the vncserver package: the VNC Viewer would disconnect - apparently a side effect of it not supporting the encoding. But installing tightvncserver (based on TightVNC, unsurprisingly) worked well. Odd that the RealVNC-based server crashed it. Unfortunately, the handy "no authentication required" mode of the former isn't available on the latter.

Day ended badly: my Gmini 400 died again and in exactly the same way as before: press the power button, the start-up screen briefly appears, but then it shuts down again.

My guess as to the cause is based on the fact that even when it's on charge, there's no guarantee it'll be receiving enough power. If the battery died whilst plugged in and acting as a USB Mass Storage device, perhaps it's now confused... Unhappy email sent to Archos: we'll see what they say.

Friday, 13 January 2006

Baby's due date, but still no sign of it.

Second episode of My Name Is Earl was just as funny as the first: a few laugh out loud moments, and a constant smile.

Thursday, 12 January 2006

Lots of discussion on maemo-developers about alarm notifications, I'll leave off porting atd until I see what Nokia are planning. Also on the 770 front, Andy Dillera explained how he recovers from a backup. I've modified his script slightly: it now only needs to be run once as root, and will install all debs in a directory, rather than them having to be explicitly listed.

There's still plenty of room for improvement in the process, though.

Caught up with Monday's Smallville: first we had Clark's girlfriend becoming his mum; then his sworn enemy becoming his dad; then Superman himself becoming Clark's mentor and now we've got Spike crossing-over to become the black goo from The X-Files. Oh no, hang on, I'm getting my modern sci-fi/fantasy mixed up...

Mel's chilli from last night doesn't seem to have had an effect.

Wednesday, 11 January 2006

Drove home from Redhill in time to see the new sci-fi comedy on BBC2, Hyperdrive. The comments that it's a cross between The Office and Red Dwarf are accurate, though it definitely seems to tend more towards the former. Still, after Supernova it bodes well that BBC2's been showing both science-based and science-fiction comedy recently, and I'll be watching it again to see how it fares.

Saturday, 07 January 2006

Mel cooked some really hot enchiladas for dinner, but still no sign of the baby... Mum brought some of my baby stuff around which'll have to go up in the loft tomorrow.

After Mel had gone to bed, I finally got sounds played from a command line on my 770, which is the first step to getting alarms running. I'm fairly confident that atd has been coded well so it won't busy-wait, but it'd be useless if I couldn't get sounds out.

I installed (using dpkg -x) the Debian gstreamer-tools deb, and then did:

sleep 30; gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=/usr/share/sounds/ui-clock_alarm.mp3 ! dspmp3sink

Wednesday, 04 January 2006

The Cloud (a company homogenising different wifi providers) is launching city-wide wifi in the Spring. Great news, but their providers are all so expensive. It's ridiculous when you go to a captive place such as motorway services and you're expected to pay £6 for an hour of access. That's more expensive than an Internet café which has to provide and maintain machines as well as connectivity. You'd expect Burger King, Costa et al to want to keep customers at services as long as possible and therefore subsidise the access; but instead they want to fleece those who have a need, rather than those of us who'd just be tempted to sit down, have a drink and check unimportant web sites and so on.

The commercial PIM suite for Maemo which had been hinted at on IRC has now been released as DéjàDesktop. Interestingly, the PIM bit itself is free (if a little bare ATM) and their business model seems to be based around a subscription to the synchronisation service.

Still no sign of the baby...

Sunday, 01 January 2006

A quiet night to welcome the New Year in: watched Doctor Who repeats on BBC 3, followed by 2005 TV Moments (which, of course, Doctor Who won ;-)) and then Jools' Hootenanny.

Yesterday was a productive day: wrote a synchronisation & backup tool (well, a Makefile) for my Nokia 770, given firmware upgrades blat the internal flash.