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. ...

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. This time round, I get to visit German pubs, and try Kölsch and Pils. I discovered yesterday that I share a birthday with another credativ employee, Bernd. ...

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 2.20 release notes, the relevant bug, or just writing something that won't feed anti-GNOME trolls for the next five years. But I'm glad to see that I've at least provoked the former, even if you also called me an ass at the same time. :) ...