Martyn Russell

Yep, I am off to New Zealand for my vacation from February 1st to the 29th with Sue.

Anyone know how to revert this? Thomas Thurman sent me a comment and I accidentally pressed the “mark-as-spam” link in the email I received and I can not find a way to revert that. It also seems he can’t post his entry again
The comment was about my image and how it would be a good GDM greeter screen. I agree and had this in mind at the time of taking the picture. So I uploaded it and it is pending on arg.gnome.org.

Recently I tried Initng on my Ubuntu distribution using some handy pages from the Ubuntu forums.

To say the least, I was amazed.
My boot time on Ubuntu Breezy was 58 seconds and now it is 29 seconds (that is from Grub to GDM).

Give it a try, there are only a few steps to follow, it takes 5 minutes.

Signed up with Servelocity and now have a new domain (http://bytejunky.net). They provide a really good service compared to the last hosted solution used.

Took the opportunity to look into original which has been used in many places already for some of the 450 odd images I took in New Zealand. They will be there soon

Spent the day in Cambridge botanic gardens recently for Sue’s Birthday. Took the digital camera along for the ride and using the power of original I can now bring to you some of the superb scenery that I was able to capture.

Another Birthday

25 years old!

I think it will be a nice night in with the family and and some good food.

My brothers asked what I wanted, and I couldn’t resist

Gnome Blog 0.8

Saw Seth’s announcement for gnome-blog 0.8 and thought I would try it, so this post is my first post with it. Very simple to use, needs a little more in the formatting department perhaps, but great none the less.

Tried out www.blogger.com too, it seems very comprehensive.

Half Life 2 with Cedega

A friend of mine recently bought Half Life 2 and I have been meaning to try it out but have been busy with Gossip. Now that I have set up my new GeForce 6600 GT, I thought I would try and get it running under Cedega. Transgaming’s site boasts it working fully out of the box and I got it going on my Fedora Core 3 distribution with no problems - oh and the game is superb too

Also - as I didn’t have the DVD to install it, I used Steam’s installer to download it all which works well.

New Stuff
Recently looked into Stream Tunner which I have to say is superb! Look into it if you get the chance.

Also, I thought I would try to get Windows XP going with Vmware for Linux. Again, worked flawlessly, and am quite impressed with it.

Gossip Transports
Still plodding along with this. Things are going really well at the moment actually. Mikael and I spoke about what will happen over the next few weeks and we will probably merge our branches then and get things cleaned up ready for a new Gossip release.

Fine tuning the wizard last week meant that now people no longer need to wait for a list of servers they can use. It is much more efficient now.

Ubuntu anyone?
I have been trying Ubuntu Linux this last few weeks and I love it! Previously I have used mainly Red Hat and occasionally Mandrake. The best thing about it has to be the eye candy

Family Visiting
My partner’s (Sue) family were down from the Lake District recently and we all got together at a local restaurant for a good slap up meal. Thought I would make use of the recently aquired digital camera and record the event.

Gossip Transports
Branched Gossip (branch name: gossip-transports) to work more closely on the getting multi protocol support working.

Support for adding and removing transports is now available, just need to focus on adding contacts for the transports as currently you would have use a FULL Jabber ID (e.g. someone%hotmail.com@jabber.someserver.com) which isn’t very user friendly.

Mikael has recently been hacking on the core of Gossip and changing a lot of the roster/contacts API which I depend on for the transport work so merging that is all going to be interesting.

Building a new shuttle
One of Sue’s uncles wants a new machine and after looking at the prices of his last quote, I told him I would do it for him cheaper. Not long ago I bought a Shuttle system (using Mini ITX technology) and was really impressed with it and am going to use one for this new box too.

Barn Dance Anyone?
Last night I went to my third barn dance. As Sue and I are thinking of doing something with a barn dance for our Wedding (to get people really enjoying the night) we went along and had a great time. No matter how many times we go, it is still funny seeing people (that you may not even know) falling over each other trying to keep up with the caller, moves and music