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. It will probably help File Roller act more intuitively with respect to dragging files to Nautilus windows, and it is a good thing. It won't work with Nautilus's list view, yet. It is also possibly the least interesting of the new features in GNOME 2.20. It deserved one sentence tagged on to the File Roller bit of the release notes. I am not going to "scream with joy". ...

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.

Late on Tuesday evening, I successfully got a branch of Choob to run without its 'Object DB'. Presently, it runs only a few of the more simple plugins - for instance, the 'Alias' plugin is not supported, so I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out why it wasn't replying to commands. With ODB gone, vast swathes of complicated parsing code can be removed from the bot's core. JJTree should no longer be needed to compile the bot. The next step is probably to consolidate the core database code using Hibernate, and then get the more complicated plugins to work again. ...

So, during a conversation at PyCon UK, Keith White noticed that he owned the same model (HP nx6325) laptop as me. He also informed me that his processor was 64-bit, and asserted that mine probably was as well. I was sceptical. It's a Mobile Sempron - last I checked, all Semprons were 32-bit. Of course, I don't keep up with hardware at all. Checking /proc/cpuinfo: tim@regulus:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo <br /> processor : 0<br /> vendor_id : AuthenticAMD<br /> cpu family : 15<br /> model : 76<br /> model name : Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3500+<br /> stepping : 2<br /> cpu MHz : 800.000<br /> cache size : 512 KB<br /> fdiv_bug : no<br /> hlt_bug : no<br /> f00f_bug : no<br /> coma_bug : no<br /> fpu : yes<br /> fpu_exception : yes<br /> cpuid level : 1<br /> wp : yes<br /> flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni cx16 lahf_lm extapic cr8_legacy ts fid vid ttp tm stc<br /> bogomips : 1597.70<br /> clflush size : 64 ...

Of course, there are no packages for Jackfield yet. Rather than mess about with installing Jackfield, I badgered Stuart Langridge to do it for me. So, I now have a working shiny clock thing. Making packages for Jackfield requires solving a few problems, like gconf keys for showing Jackfield and multiple instance detection.

My conference tradition is to occupy myself with activities completely unrelated to the main topic. For instance, at DebConf I hacked on GNOME stuff, at GUADEC I hacked on Debian stuff, and at LinuxConf.eu I did very little. At PyCon UK, I've built the wireless-dev tree of Linux, and got the new b43 driver to run. So, it works. It appears to have increased the transmission power of the card, and limits the bit rate properly, so should work at longer ranges without fiddling about. Having said that, I've been using it all of five minutes, so all kinds of bugs could be lurking around the corner. ...

I've accepted a job at credativ, in Rugby - I start on the 17th. This means I'm preparing to move back to the Coventry area. (I just can't get away.) It's very exciting, and all that. :) I celebrated today by getting an overpriced lunch at Starbucks. The other thing I've splashed out on has been a bunch of German reference books - I want to brush up for communicating with the German branch. I believe I'm going to be sent to Germany for a few days to meet the rest of the company, soon. ...

On Saturday, I travelled to Cambridge via Coventry, seeing lamby, benji and mulletron's new house en route. LinuxConf.eu has been pretty good. It's a technical enough conference that 'Linux' actually refers to the kernel, for the most part. I've learnt a few things about Linux development, and I'm vaguely curious now about getting involved there. Also, I took lots of photos - yesterday we got to see Linus Torvalds, who was quite entertaining while leading the git BoF session. I'll put the photos online when I'm back at a connection with decent upload bandwidth. ...