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I mentioned early that the latest version of Ubuntu Linux (7.04 ‘Feisty Fawn’) has been released, and that I was upgrading to it. Well, I’ve been using it now for a short time, and it seems pretty good. The graphics have been reworked a little bit, there are a few refinements here and there… haven’t really been using it long enough to say!

Unfortunately, the main problem I’ve had is that my wireless network card disappeared once I’d upgraded. I think the reason was, for some reason it didn’t install ndiswrapper. So, if you’re upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04 and have a wireless network card, make sure you have a network cable to hand – once you’ve installed the packages ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 things should start working again. (You will probably need to add ‘ndiswrapper’ to /etc/modules as well).

I found that once I’d done that, my wireless settings magically came back (it had remembered the settings for my wireless card previously), and I was able to connect to the internet once again.

That’s all for now… I’m off to bed (early start tomorrow!)

Max Barry has written a great post on his website advocating Linux. I agree with him 100%… these days I think a distribution like Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows XP (I haven’t used Vista so I can’t comment about it).

Speaking of Ubuntu, the latest version was released yesterday. I left mine upgrading overnight (one good thing about Ubuntu you don’t get with Windows? You can get the latest version with the click of a button) – I will update later in case there are any problems. Note: the latest version of Ubuntu even includes a windows migration tool!

Anyway. Tomorrow we are off to a wedding in Leeds, so I probably won’t get a chance to post until next week now. Have a good weekend!

Yep, it’s that time of the week again folks!

What did we get up to this weekend? Not a lot, as it turns out. I’ll skip over most of it. On Saturday we did some shopping during the day. In the evening we watched “Doctor Who”. I did quite enjoy this week’s episodes, I think the series has got off to a good start! Although I hope that the best is still to come…

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, went for a walk in the afternoon, and went round to Alex’s in the evening. Alex has bought a new “Bop-It” game, which is tremendous fun and very addictive! We spent half the evening playing it, could have gone on as well but it was getting late.

I thought I’d probably better post something up to let you know what we’ve been doing this week! On Sunday, as I mentioned before, we went down to see Philippa’s parents. We were there until Wednesday. It was rather nice actually, as well as having a break we were able to be productive by talking to the Catholic Building Society about our mortgage.

When we got back home, we spent quite a lot of the time working on house type stuff (application forms, letters to solicitors, etc)… it’s moving forward slowly! We have until the end of June before we have to move out of the place we’re renting at the moment, so hopefully everything will be sorted by then.

Yesterday, I dropped my car off to be serviced, and then we went round to Alex’s for a bit. We had an omelette for lunch (cooked by Alex, it was very nice!) and then we came back here in the evening for dinner (lasagne) and rented a film. We watched “Stranger Than Fiction”, which is actually a really good film.

So… that’s been our week in a fairly short summary! All for now…

Ok, I know that this is still technically “bank holiday weekend” because it hasn’t finished yet, but I thought I’d post something up anyway. What’s been going on this long weekend? Well. On Friday we went to the Good Friday service (see my last post). On Saturday we went into town, did a bit of shopping, and generally had a fairly quiet evening. We did watch Doctor Who, however, which was really good (once again!). Although the plot was fairly ridiculous as Doctor Who plots often are (numbers and words don’t directly influence the universe…) it was nonetheless fun to watch and reminded me once again why Torchwood was so rubbish!

Anyway. On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then headed off down to London as we are staying with Philippa’s parents for a few days. We’ll be here for a few days, which is nice!

Right, I think that’s about everything for me. All for now….

We went to a Good Friday service today. It was called “An Hour at the Cross”, looking at Psalm 22. It put me in quite a contemplative mood… well, that and having to study for the Moore Course exam we’re doing tomorrow morning! So I thought I’d post something up contemplative.

Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:1-5

Some interesting verses to think about over the Easter period!

I’ve got a new book in the post called Pierced for Our Transgressions which will also make interesting Easter reading. Hope you have a good one! I’ll update again soon.

I thought I’d probably better post up a quick note to say that Philippa and I have made an offer on a house, and it has been accepted 🙂 We made an offer towards the end of last week, and it was accepted on Saturday. We are currently in the process now of dealing with the Estate Agents and the Solicitors, hopefully everything will be sorted out soon…

I have to say, I’m really looking forward to living in a house and not a flat! There are advantages to where we live at the moment (it’s a really convenient location, and it’s a fairly big flat) but living on the fifth floor does have its inconveniences – as does having to park bit of a walk away from where you live!

So yes, we’re looking forward to moving out. Just hoping and praying at the moment that everything goes through OK!

It’s been a while since I did a “The Weekend” post, and this was a rather unusual weekend, so I thought I’d write one for a change 🙂

On Friday evening we went out for a meal at Sloppy Joe’s, along with a bunch of other people (Alex, Chris, Dan, Alison, Steve, Karen, Anne-Marie…). It was the first time we’d been to Sloppy Joe’s, and it was actually rather good. I had a steak, and Phil had a “Sloppy Joe” (basically a burger but more of a mince-style meat). The food was very enjoyable and I think we all had a good time!

On Saturday morning, we had a relatively early start in order to drive up to Sunderland. One of Phil’s friends from university was getting married and we were invited to the reception. The journey was quite long (about six hours on the road, not including an hour’s stop for lunch), but we got there in plenty of time and managed to relax a bit beforehand. The reception itself was at the Quayside Exchange in Sunderland, which seems like a really good venue to have that sort of function in. Although we didn’t know many people there was a Ceilidh [pronounced kay-lee, apparently it’s a Celtic word — it’s basically a barn-dance style thing], which you don’t really need to know many people to have fun with. After that there was a disco, but we didn’t stay very long because of being rather tired from the journey! It was a good evening.

On Sunday we started out fairly early again and drove home, and we arrived back at about 3:30. After collapsing with a nice long drink for a while, we had dinner and then headed over to Alex’s to watch the first episode of the new Doctor Who series (due to being away on Saturday we’d unfortunately missed it when it was on TV!).

We enjoyed it as well – although there were a few holes in the plot / details of the episode, it wasn’t enough to stop it being… well, fun! Which is why we all love Doctor Who. [Oh, and the Judoon looked like Vogons from the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hope that was intentional!]

Aaaanyway, I’d better get back to work… all for now!

*sigh*

Why is it that you can spend an hour trying to do something such as… oh, I don’t know… restoring a corrupt Subversion database, you don’t have any success in an hour’s work, but once you get home you manage it in about five minutes? Not that it’s ever happened to me, of course 😉

Seriously though, for future reference (for me), the command to restore a Subversion Berkeley DB is:

svnadmin recover /path/to/repository

NOT — and I want to make this absolutely clear — NOT this command:

svnadmin recover /path/to/repository/db

Because, you see, that second command will not work. It will just give you a strange error message about the version of the repository. Which is not good, and makes you waste an hour looking round various forums trying to upgrade the thing when it’s absolutely unnecessary…

It’s probably a bit late really to be posting up my regular “The Weekend” post. So I’ll just post up a couple of other random things instead!

I bought a couple of new CDs at the weekend: “Stop the Clocks” by Oasis, and “Black Holes and Revelations” by Muse. The Oasis album is great – it’s got a good cross-section of their songs on it, and brings back a few memories… there’s not much to say about it really! The Muse album I’ve listened to a few times now. I didn’t think it was quite as good as their first two albums when I first listened to it, but it’s actually been growing on me. I think ‘Starlight’ is my favourite tune on there at the moment – it has such a catchy piano riff! So, yes, those are a couple of new musical purchases.

On a totally different note, I noticed something recently. You know how in the past, BMW drivers and “White Van” drivers have had a bad reputation for being… well… a little inconsiderate on the roads? I’m not sure how well that holds any more, but I have started to notice that there is a not insignificant number of Ford Focus drivers who are behaving a little discourteously. This is a bit of a mystery to me, because I don’t think the Ford Focus is the kind of car you would expect to see that kind of driver in. Well, no more than average, at least.

If anyone has any insights on badly behaved Ford Focus drivers, post them up here!