This evening, my order from amazon.com arrived. It took a few weeks, but the savings with the USD exchange rate were huge. I'm now the proud owner of the first two volumes of The Art of Computer Programming (3rd ed.) by Donald Knuth. First impressions of volume one are that it's quite heavy on the maths; I'm pretty sure the first chapter will go slightly beyond most undergraduate maths courses, mostly because it is focusing on a few key areas....
My mum will shortly receive a laptop with Ubuntu installed (from Dell). She will be the second of my relatives to start using Ubuntu, after my brother - the advantages are the lower initial price, no recurring anti-virus software costs, better interoperability out of the box with cameras and printers, and photo management software for no charge (again, out of the box). I'm really hoping Dell don't mess this up.
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....
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....