Some news that's overdue to be blogged: a few weeks ago, I picked up the Debian package 'enscript', and fixed some of the easier bugs in it. This has been uploaded to unstable, thanks to Myon, who rocks. Having looked at the package, I realised that further work on it was unfeasible without a new upstream release. GNU Enscript had been unmaintained for a while, so I wrote to the GNU project and asked whether I could set up a Savannah project for it....

Last Wednesday, I gave two talks to WUGLUG; one on ssh security, and one on some ideas for making the UWCS website development process a bit easier. This evening, I've been following up on one of the ideas I presented. I want to get the website to run on SQLite (because sqlite3 is already installed in DCS). However, this is going to mean writing a date formatting module to match SQLite dates....

I have a lot of blogging to catch up on. Meanwhile, here's something completely unrelated. I keep having to use the 'Ctrl' key a lot, and it's getting a bit awkward having my little finger hover near the bottom left of the keyboard all the time. I also often have problems with hitting 'Caps Lock' when I don't mean to. (I mean, who uses it? Not me.) So, the obvious solution is to turn the Caps Lock into a second Ctrl key....

Having asked nicely for a WEP key from a housemate, I now have an internet connection in the evenings. I'm still not sure how much time I want to spend on a computer, but it might at least let me work on some free software outside of work. I've borrowed a huge book on PostgreSQL, so now have to find time to read it.

This week, I have mostly been in Mönchengladbach, at the German office of credativ GmbH. It's a completely different experience working here, compared to Rugby. For one, the building is a lot bigger - several stories, compared to the tiny room we have at the moment in England (soon to change, hopefully). I've been meeting a lot of people, and trying to remember their names. It's been a while since I was last in Germany - exactly seven years, in fact....

Oh Pete, I deliberately didn't use your name because I wasn't attacking you in particular; I was aiming at the completely misleading article whose pagerank you (and Digg) increased to the point where it achieves higher results in searches for "XDS drag and drop" than the XDS specification itself. Please don't take it personally. Of course, you still fail utterly for not providing any explanation of why you were so pleased to have this feature in your original post, and for not linking to, say, the GNOME 2....

Recently, people linked to a random news site claiming GNOME has added "XDS support" in 2.20. XDS is an extension to the XDND drag-and-drop protocol. This is very misleading. The headline reads as if GNOME has not had any drag-and-drop support until now, which is ridiculous. The Digg headline was even worse: "GNOME Gets Real Drag n' Drop Support with XDS". Bullshit. What actually happened is that Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) has received a patch to support this extension in the main window bit....

Today, I finally found a place to live in Rugby. It turned out that a landlord friend of my boss had a room to let, in a very convenient location. I'm within ten minutes' walking distance of the station, the town centre, and the (hopefully soon to be) new office. It's also quite cheap (university accommodation prices), with all utilities and bills except internet access included in the rent. Yay....

My first day at credativ went well. In the morning I updated some RHEL packages on a couple of test servers. I suspect the live systems will be next. In the afternoon I copied over some PostgreSQL configuration tuning for an upgrade from 7.x to 8.x. I'm getting up to speed with the various systems - there's even the threat of fixing bugs in Java code, in the future.

I just realised that my new job title is 'Technical Engineer', so will probably annoy Sadiq.