At work, we have a customer who are having problems with their web server. So many problems, in fact, that I felt the need to write a Munin plugin to graph the uptime of Apache, so that I could tell when it had been restarted. The graphs are as boring as the code, which is entirely stolen from Munin's 'apache_volume' and 'uptime' plugins.

Three weeks ago I swapped capslock and Ctrl on all my usual systems, much to the chagrin of Daniel when he foolishly tried to use my keyboard. I'm now quite happy with the positioning of Ctrl - it was surprisingly easy to get used to. It is not a coincidence that this is Tip #1 on various lists of ways to use emacs more effectively. I find myself wanting to ditch vim… perhaps this is just asking for a holy war. ...

I just got back from the inaugural Rugby LUG meeting which I helped arrange. It went better than I was expecting - in total we had eight people there, and some interesting conversation over three and a half hours. The next meeting will be in January, but after that I'm hoping we can do something more often than once a month.

My laptop has a Broadcom 4311 rev 01 wireless chipset. The drivers from the latest Linux git releases are vastly superior to the old bcm43xx driver... so as of yesterday, I'm back to running the latest wireless-2.6 code. The former upstream maintainer claims that he gets better throughput with the reverse-engineered Linux driver than he does on Windows XP. While I was at it, I compiled in dynamic tick (tickless) support. I then had some fun with powertop, and managed to bring CPU wakeups down to about 8 per second. It seemed that using the framebuffer console required 5 wakeups per second, but the non-framebuffer one needed around 250... this was dreadfully unscientific, though.

Today I created a git repository for enscript's Debian packaging. The upstream repository is in git as well, of course. Next I need to work on pulling any distro fixes I can find into upstream, and getting a new bugfix version released. This should hopefully obsolete most of the Debian patches.

Following my update on Monday, I've made changes to the build systems of both DateTime::Calendar::WarwickUniversity and DateTime::Event::WarwickUniversity, in my search for higher kwalitee. These are not important updates, they just add a few more tests, and so on.

Warwick University appear to have changed some of their future term dates, so I have released version 0.02 of DateTime::Event::WarwickUniversity to CPAN. This release also fixes bugs which were happening when using DateTime objects with time zones, so everyone should probably upgrade. Overall, I'm surprised that it took me a year before I had an excuse for a new release. It would be worth adding the ability to get a real date from a given term week, but I haven't quite needed it yet.

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. A few days later, rms dubbed me the official maintainer. ...

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. Still, such a thing could be useful more widely than CompSoc, so hopefully I can get that on CPAN once it's written. It might also be a good excuse to join Debian's Perl packaging team. ...

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. ...