Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Lori has an essay in for 16:00 today, so I’ve been up since 09:00 on Sunday morning helping her. I think we’ll be finished in about three hours. Then she has the crappy job of traveling all the way into Durham to deliver it. All I can say is that if it wasn’t for Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport it’d take an awful lot longer.

I’m also getting more used to Ubuntu. The only feature I miss from Fedora is the gnome-network-manager stuff. That rocks, I can’t wait untill other distros pick up the NetworkManager technology. Ubuntu comes with a massive array of software compared to Fedoras feeble 3000 or so packages. Ubuntu does the Mono thing, which makes it good.

That was yesterday, we’re expecting worse tonight.

The weather over the past few days has been deciding whether to snow or thaw. Last night we got about 4cm of snow but thismorning it’s melting. I had to walk Lori into Nevilles Cross so she could get the bus to Durham. On Monday she had to walk all the way to college (about 5km).

It also appears that even though my parents finally have broadband, they haven’t mastered the whole email thing. I’ll probably have to get home and set up stuff for them. My waste-of-genetic-material brother, in his infinite electricial engineering wisdom, can’t seem to manage it either. It’s understandable that my sister can’t use a computer, after all she’s a Garda who have one of the most crappy websites on the net. Their “(FAQ) page, which is designed to answer the most common question” that they receive. Given that they only ever have to answer one question, they must be doing their job well and therefore don’t need computers

I love the new GTKFileChooserButton widget

It saves a loto of space in UIs. It’s also fully Gnome-VFS aware so it allowed me to save the screenshot directly to MiNDS>; no other applications involved, no fancy “sftp magical magical” commands….just easy

My ADSL has been down for the past 24 hours or so because of BT. I have never experienced a network outage from any provider in any situation for that long. The only explaination is that they are truly incompetent. I’ve seen bare metal recovery of whole networks that is faster than BTs fixing of this outage. I’m going to ring them first thing on Monday to cancel my “contract”.

My “contract” is a strange thing. It seems that by verbally agreeing to take-on the BT service I agreed to terms and conditions that were only available on their web-page. These terms and conditions are reasonable if BT were a competent provider, but given that they’re incompetent the terms are not. It’s not the first time I’ve had problems with BT. In fact I’ve repeatedly asked them for a paper copy of the terms and even sent them a letter last Septemeber. They’ve never replied to me about this matter.

BT suck, do not use them as an internet service provider. They won’t be getting money from me in the future.

It’s

• non-standard
• unportable
• bloated
• undocumented

and shit.

Let’s hope for a new OASIS OpenDocument future as it’s

• a standard
• portable
• not as bloated
• an open standard

and good