Power struggle

Discovered one of the drawbacks to living in a top floor apartment today– your water goes off when there’s a power cut, because the pump that compensates for the minimal head of water is electric too. Luckily I hadn’t quite made it to the shower…

Accessible theme thoughts

[Also posted to d-d-l]

Since I seem to be spending most of my time playing catch-up with GNOME’s increasingly-sprawling accessible themes these days, I got to wondering if going forward we can’t put more of the responsibility on the individual modules to install accessible icons alongside their regular ones.

The current situation just doesn’t seem very workable going forward, if we’re considering accessibility to be a core feature. We don’t expect applications to submit all their icons to gnome-icon-theme for inclusion– they just install their own. A similar process for accessible themes seems like a logical extension to me.

Modules installing appropriate icons into $(themedir)/HighContrast etc. would be one way, assuming it’s actually possible to work out where those themes lives at install time, but that sounds rather ugly. Anyone any better ideas?

WAH

Spent my first full day working at home today since I got to the bottom of my VPN/wireless router problems. If Sun had their way I’d probably be doing it three or four times a week, but immeasurably improved as the experience is compared to teleworking over a dial-up connection, I just can’t imagine wanting to do it very often while the office is just a 20 minute drive away.

What do customers know anyway?

Last night we had our last ever Cadbury’s Choc Fudge bar. Only ever available in Ireland as far as I know, we’ve been stockpiling them since Christmas, when Cadbury’s told us that they were being withdrawn due to lack of customer demand.

If you know of a country with more discerning customers where Choc Fudge is still available, you know how to get in touch :)

Photo Printer

PC World in Dublin are flogging off HP Photosmart 7760 printers for 145 euro this week (which is virtually free by Irish standards), and I was needing a new printer anyway, so Julie popped over to get one for us yesterday afternoon. It put a nice a big scratch down the middle of every photo it printed though, so I had to go back and exchange it this morning…

Print quality is fairly impressive, despite some faint paper feed marks on photo prints, even on the exchanged one. It’s quiet and fast, it has a nice little screen for previewing and cropping, and it’s kind of cool just to be able to plug your camera card straight into it and set it going.

Quiet day

Sent the final draft of my Interfaces article off to the editor yesterday to wield her red pen. Spent much of this morning trying to debug whatever is causing my new wireless router to timeout my VPN connection to the office every five minutes on the dot (given that it works great if I bypass the router and connect my laptop straight to the modem)… was hoping there might be an obvious “xxx timeout = 5 mins” setting somewhere, but sadly it looks like it’s not going to be quite that simple…

ADSL Update

Gah, turns out there’s nothing (much) wrong with my broadband connection on Linux at all… in fact, the only thing that doesn’t seem to work is ping! But it never occured to me to try anything else when I couldn’t ping anything, like just firing up Epiphany and loading an actual web page… d’oh! :)

(So, anyone know what would cause ping not to work…?)

ADSL DOA

Failing miserably to get my broadband connection working on Mandrake 10.0 at the moment, for some reason. With everything configured by DHCP, the Prestige 623 router/modem works a charm under Windoze, but booting into Linux with the same config results in zero reponse when I try to ping anything, although name resolution is apparently working perfectly. Not even a “network unreachable” or “unknown host” to show for my troubles.

Answers on an e-card please…