An Australian, a Kiwi and South African are in a bar one night having a beer. All of a sudden the South African drinks his beer, throws his glass in the air, pulls out a gun and shoots the glass to pieces.
“In Seth Efrika our glasses are so cheap that we don’t need to drink from the same one twice,” he says.
The Kiwi, obviously impressed by this, drinks his beer, throws his glass into the air, pulls out his gun and shoots the glass to pieces.”Wull mate, in Noo Zulland we have so much sand to make the glasses that we don’t need to drink out the same glass either,” he says.
The Australian, cool as a Koala, picks up his beer and drinks it, throws his glass in the air, pulls out his gun and shoots the South African and the
Kiwi.
He turns to the astonished barman and says, “In Strailya mate, we have so many bloody South Africans and Kiwis that we don’t need to drink with the
same ones twice.”
I spent today playing with Beryl and getting it running on Debian Etch. Beryl is a fork from Compiz and similar to XGL, and if you do not know what is is, have a look on google video or wikipedia. It is visually stunning, and while not completely stable I have not had any problems with it so long as I kept the blur and focustrail plugins turned off.
Setting it up was actually very easy. The Beryl wiki has a nice Debian install page, but to sum it up I had to add a new apt sources entry, install a few packages, edit my xorg config file, restart X and then just run it!
This is the kind of thing that will make every windows user say “What are you running? Where can I get that?”
If you are running linux I would definitely suggest you install it and give it a go. It runs as a window manager, and can be simply run manually so that you don’t have to have it on all the time (it is so new I would not call it stable, but it seems pretty reliable to me).
The transparency of a playing movie is incredible, not to mention all the other wonderful effects.
I used to use samba for sharing files on my home network (most of my data is on a “server”) but it seemed to have nasty problems with wireless. It turns out NFS copes far better and allows mp3’s to stream nicely, so I fixed my IP address and got that setup (pretty easy actually).
The only problem I have found so far is that by default OpenOffice.org does not like to edit files across NFS as it wants to be able to lock files. I am not sure if you can allow file locking across NFS or not, but I found a workaround for OpenOffice, and I am not going to have a problem editing the same file from two places anyway.
Simply edit /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice (or /opt/openoffice2/program/soffice on non-debian distros) and comment out the lines
# file locking now enabled by default
SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1
export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING
and you can now open documents across NFS in write mode!
I have wondered for ages whether the times of sunset and sunrise are equally spaced around the solstice’s. It turns out they are not. The author has also linked to a far more thorough explanation by John Wholtz, which is a fascinating read
The last few days have seen two socials at work for me. First I had a Christmas pub lunch with the test department as I spent the first six months of the year there, and then yesterday we had a thank-you trip to London for the whole department. The thank-you was of course for the realease of the latest version of the product, which was almost a year ago and well overdue.
Yesterday was the most interesting, as we went to see The Producers in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Despite having lived in London for three years during my degree, and a year after I never got round to seeing a West End musical.
I thoroughly enjoyed the show - the cast were incredibly talented, and the whole thing incredibly well produced. I would recommend it to anyone, though it stops running soon.
Then we went for dinner in Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, part of the Savoy. The food there was incredible. I have to say that it was the best steak I have ever had! The service however was not what I expected from the Savoy. I was wondering if perhaps I should have had a tie on, but in retrospect it was certainly not necessary. Maybe the main restaurant is better, but the private function room we had simply lacked the quality of service I was expecting. I won’t bash them too much, but suffice to say I have had better service in cheaper places.
