So apparently "learning git is like learning vim". Putting aside the incremental learning aspects of this, and stretching the point a little, will you allow me to say "git is like vim"?

We all understand there is no way in which you would mandate that all contributors use vim. You …

The lecturer who taught me evolutionary computing was also a devout Christian, who believed that the world is the way that it is because God created it, rather than it evolving via natural selection.

This was quite surprising to us when he revealed this, but he did not see a …

I came up with this the other day. It's pretty rich and indulgent, but not too hard to make. The lamb could perhaps do with something else, but I can't think of anything at the moment.

• 4 Lamb steaks
• New Potatoes if in season, otherwise any small potato.
• 4 Carrots …

A lot of my friends are on the Facebook site, and they upload pictures there, so I joined to see those. One of the things the site has is a profile picture, and I wanted to upload one for me. I chose one and entered the filename in the box …

Hannah is very interested in radio, and is planning to set up her own Internet radio site. I wanted to try out icecast to see whether it would be suitable. I have jotted down a few notes about how to set it up here as I couldn't see any others …

I returned today and I had received the email I had been waiting for.

To: James Westby <jw+debian@jameswestby.net>
From: Debian Installer <installer@ftp-master.debian.org>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:00:09 -0700
Subject: seccure_0.2-1_i386.changes ACCEPTED


Accepted:
seccure_0.2-1.diff.gz
  to pool/main …

We hadn't really realised but some gnutls related packages are Priority: Important, and as such are due to be frozen soon for etch. There has been some upstream activity in the area recently, with several releases. Luckily the timing was really good, and the uploads made it in such that …

The other day I decided I wanted to try out one of the more modern revision control systems. I decided on bzr as it seemed to have some features that I liked the look of. I still intend to try out darcs one day though, as it looks very interesting …

After I got a working wireless card I was finally able to fix the xfce4-wavelan plugin. After I had ported it to the Xfce 4.4 API it stopped working on a lot of systems. I don't think that I caused this, I think it was more the recompilation against …

So after I had such a problem with my rt2500 based card, I ordered an rt61 based one. It arrived this morning, and it works. Here's what I did to get it to work.

First download the cvs snapshot driver. The beta release one doesn't work, and you shouldn't try …

On my girlfriend Hannah's last night in Bristol I took her out for a meal. I wanted to do something special, so I asked around at work the night before for recommendations of really good places to eat. My friend Isla said the Boca Nova was her favorite place, so …

An RFP was filed for seccure, a small program allowing ECC based public-key crypto. I snapped it up and produced a package. The packaging was simple, but I enjoyed playing with the software while I was doing it.

The upstream author, B. Poettering, has been fantastic, very responsive and helpful …

A while ago now there was a power-cut in our area, and this took my box down quite hard. The main effect of this was that my Belkin F5D7000UK PCI 802.11b/g card stopped working. This was at a time when I was supposed to be working on the …

After a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about having a system for unifying the way packages create SSL certificates, a couple of things became apparent. Firstly that the idea was a good one, and secondly that the existing tool that tries to do this (ssl-cert) is not good enough …

Recently apt-listbugs was orphaned, and it was in a bad shape, including an RC bug that makes it virtually useless at the moment, not showing some bugs, and showing ones that were closed long ago.

I then started work on the package, fixing all of the easy bugs while I …

If you've ever been here before then you might have noticed that I have moved my 'blog to pyBlosxom. I did this as wordpress was a little large for my needs, and didn't make it this easy to create a post, meaning I was wirting less entries.

I have endevoured …

Maybe my google skills are failing me, but I was trying to use an xubuntu live cd I had lying around to resize some partitions on a VM, and I couldn't find the username and password that are required to login. Someone on #xubuntu gave me a pointer and so …

With the 4.4 panel comes a new API. This change is to allow external plugins, which are run as processes separate from the panel, increasing its stability. This means that all plugins for the 4.2 panel have to be ported to work with the new API. The process …

So another post trying to help with common problems in xfce4. This time it is sessions.

By default xfce4 uses a session manager to decide which programs to start when logging in. There is also a mechanism for autostarting programs which is more appropriate for external programs. Here are some …

I have put together a few pointers on the things that are required to get the compositor to work in xfce4. I have tried to include both 4.2.x and 4.4, but I might have missed something.

First you need an X server that supports composite, e.g …