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As I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, I had trouble installing Fedora Core 5 earlier this week. What I did instead was wipe my machine and install Ubuntu Linux. I have to say I’ve been very impressed! My wireless card didn’t need any messing around with ndiswrapper… Ubuntu detected it and configured it automatically, all I needed to do was input the SSID etc! Now that is progress. I think it’s generally a more polished distribution than Fedora – they’ve obviously put a lot of effort into making it user-friendly. I’ve installed it onto Philippa’s machine and she’s had no problems to date, so that’s a good sign!

So, yes, I’m very happy with Ubuntu so far 🙂

The other thing I wanted to mention is DWR. Now, I’ve mentioned AJAX on here before. I think the stuff you can do with it is really cool. The only problem I had with it with J2EE was on the server-side. I had previously used ARSCIF (a good framework, by the way) to do my remote scripting, but it was a bit fiddly because it used quite a few servlets and I found things started to get a bit untidy.

DWR on the other hand is a bit different. It comes with just one servlet, and you use an XML configuration file to tell it which java classes you want to expose the methods of. When it loads up, it automatically generates the JavaScript that you need to access those methods, all you need to do is write functions to call them / receive the callback. Anyway, long story short — it’s made my life a lot easier!

If you’re involved with AJAX in a J2EE environment, I’d definitely recommend checking it out!

Sorry for the techy nature of this point, normal service shall be resumed soon…

Apologies for the previous rant, your normal blog service is now resumed. So, what have I been up to this weekend? Not much really. Unfortunately at the moment, the heat seems to be affecting my memory! On Friday evening, we went round to Alex and Chris’ new place in Wivenhoe, and then went down with Alex to the Bengal Spice to have a (really nice) curry. I can heartily recommend the Bengal Chicken Tikka Masala from there 🙂 And afterwards we went down to the Rose & Crown for a drink.

I watched the England game on Saturday – bit of a disappointment, although I can’t say I’m surprised. Andy Murray though – that game was fantastic! I saw bits of it and then watched the end… I definitely think Britain has a future champion there — if Federer moves over (at the moment, Federer is an absolutely unstoppable, unflinching tennis machine whose sole objective is to destroy all those who would play against him. Not literally, of course). In the evening, we watched Doctor Who (it was a great episode – I think the next episode, last of the series, is going to be a great finale!).

Yesterday morning we went to church as per usual. In the afternoon I did some preparation for a home group study I’m leading this Thursday (we’re working our way through a book called “Growth Groups”, which is basically leader training for home groups. Most people have to lead a 20 minute short study during a session as practice). In the evening I had my woes installing Fedora Core (read about it below), and afterwards we rented a movie:

It was called “Flightplan” and was pretty good. It’s about a mother who ‘loses’ her daughter onboard a flight, and finds that no-one else believes she actually had her daughter onboard in the first place. It was very well written, and quite clever. I would recommend it if you like thrillers / suspense kind of films. (Not sure if that’s how it should be categorised, but oh well).

Anyway, um, I think that’s just about it.

TTFN!

A few weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora Core 5 and burnt it to a DVD. I finally got round to (trying to) install it yesterday evening.

All I can say is, what a freakin’ disappointment.

Why oh WHY does Anaconda always seem to crash on me? This has happened now for the past two versions they’ve released (four and five). For version four, I just assumed that it was a dodgy CD (corruption can sometimes happen if you download a large file), but two times in a row? This has got to be more than a coincidence.

What basically happened is that around 96% of the way through copying the files, it came up with a message saying that a particular package was corrupted – the only options given to me were to retry or reboot. This in itself is stupid – it should at least give the option to “ignore”, so that it can just ignore any packages which might have been corrupted, and then you can maybe download the proper versions from the net once it’s all there. It should at least fail gracefully! What actually happened is (after I’d selected the option to ‘retry’), it then waited for about ten minutes, before coming up with a message saying “An unhandled exception has occured. This is probably a bug”. And then made me reboot.

Needless to say, the system was NOT in a consistent state when I rebooted, the installation was only partially completed… I managed to back up my files, but couldn’t start the GUI and had to do it all from the commandline.

What I don’t get is why this happened two times in a row on my installations of Fedora Core, but has never happened on any of my other Linux installations (and I’ve tried about four *nix distros – Gentoo, CentOS, Ubuntu and FreeBSD).

Needless to say, I am now switching away from Fedora Core. If the upgrades between versions are going to be this painful, I don’t want to use it anymore — I’m going to stick with something like Ubuntu — you can upgrade automatically and it downloads all the required packages from the net, rather than having to download a whole CD (or four CDs in the case of Fedora) or a DVD.

Grrr.

Hello loyal blog-readers! I am now back — I hope you didn’t miss me 🙂 So, what have I been up to the past few days?

Well. On Saturday, I got married! It was a really lovely day. I would like to thank anybody reading this who came along for making it such a special day – everyone said to me how much they’d enjoyed it, and that made it all worthwhile! It was so good to see everyone, and lovely to see so many of our friends there. There are some photos up already if you’d like to take a look. Firstly, Foz has uploaded a few photos onto The Campus Crew Group. You might have to login / sign up in order to be able to see the photos. Secondly, Matthew has uploaded a few pictures onto his website, so do pop on over and have a look. Thirdly, Paul has emailed me a few pictures — if you’d like to see them then I can forward them on to you; I’m sure he wouldn’t mind! Just drop me a line 🙂

Anyway. After the wedding, we went down to a place called Worples Field which is a little Bed and Breakfast place near Westerham in Kent. It was a really lovely place actually, and the setting was beautiful! We took a few photos while we were down there, and you can now see them online.

I think that’s just about everything for the time being. Hopefully soon we’ll have the proper wedding photos and I’ll be able to post those up, or at least the edited highlights!

Well, this has got to be a first – a “The Weekend” post BEFORE the weekend! Shocking, I know! The reason is, of course, this particular weekend I know what I’m going to be doing 🙂

I’m getting married! Yay!

I will be travelling down to London tomorrow, and won’t be back here until Tuesday. So, don’t expect any updates from me for the next few days 🙂

But do expect some photos here when I get them…

Unfortunately, this isn’t a post trying to link together football and theology. I don’t want to espouse a “Goal Difference” method of judgement, or even a “Golden Goal” salvation… I just wanted to say I watched the game earlier. It was a good game, although a little nerve-wracking for England fans (aren’t they all…). The second Swedish goal was probably about the lamest goal I have ever seen England concede (recently), but I think it was just poetic justice for those goal-line clearances (and possible hand ball) earlier on in the game.

Actually, what I wanted to mention was an article on Simon Cozen’s blog entitled, “The Theologian Has No Clothes“. The reason I mention it is because I was rambling on about something like this at home group last week, and this article sums up my thoughts quite nicely. In fact, puts it a lot better than I ever could… I think Simon Cozens is (or was) a theology student, which probably explains a lot 🙂

Anyway, here’s a quick quote for those of you who don’t like reading things without reading quotes:

Now one of the things that deconstruction has set out to show is that everyone works from a set of assumptions about how the world ought to be seen, and this decides how we think about truth. There is a choice of epistemologies, and they’re all biased. This is a problem in all spheres of knowledge, not just theological knowledge.

So for instance, one very common claim is that we should base our theology on the Bible. This is a good claim. I would not dispute this claim even though we have twenty thousand different viewpoints on how the Bible ought to be interpreted. (By what criteria do we choose the right interpretation? Biblical criteria? Which interpretation of Biblical criteria? How do we know?)

Anyway, that’s it from me tonight. It’s goodnight from me, and it’s goodnight from my web server (well, not really, but you can pretend…)

… we’re both – at times – surrounded by frickin’ idiots!!!

And, I’ll stop this rant before I start, it could well be libellous 😉

So… what’s been happening this weekend? Well. You already know what I was up to on Friday, so I won’t mention it! On Saturday morning, Philippa and I went into town as there were a few bits and pieces that we needed to get. In the afternoon we went out to The Beth Chatto Gardens for lunch and a quick look round the gardens – it was beautiful! We took a couple of pictures, they’ll be up on the Yahoo! photos page soon.

In the evening, we headed down to Harlow: Rich (one of our friends from uni) is graduating soon, and so his parents held a party for him, his brother (21st birthday), and their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a really good evening actually – they had a band there doing the same kind of stuff as at the barn dance at Fordham a couple of weeks ago.

Yesterday, in the morning we went to Fordham, and then went back to Phil’s to have lunch and do some packing (she was moving some of her stuff to my place so that next week we won’t have loads of stuff to move over!). In the afternoon we went to Colchester Arts Centre for a piano recital. Someone called Trevor Cordwell (who I think is a local musician – I don’t know anything more about him) was playing two Beethoven sonatas (‘The Tempest’ and ‘Appassionata’), and Liszt’s sonata in D. It was really good – very enjoyable, even if it was quite humid in there! I don’t get to hear enough live music, so it makes it the more enjoyable when I do.

In the evening we moved some of Phil’s stuff to my place, and then spent the rest of the evening relaxing! And… that’s about it. So now you know 🙂

Last night, after meeting our landlord to sort out contracts for next year, Philippa and I went down to Wivenhoe to meet up with Alex and Elisa for a drink at the Rose & Crown (and dinner from the chippie). It was a really nice evening – we hadn’t seen Alex and Elisa for a while so it was good to catch up, and it was also a really beautiful evening!

I took a few photos, and they will be up shortly on my Yahoo! Photos Page. Which brings me to the next thing I want to blog about: Greasemonkey. I’ve never tried it before, but I’ve heard about it… it’s basically an extension for Firefox which lets you insert JavaScript into pages to do — well, whatever you want really.

What I was able to do (my first ever Greasemonkey script!) was create a script which made the photos in a Yahoo! Photos album clickable, so that you could then download the hi-res version. I know that’s not particularly exciting, but the problem with Yahoo! Photos is they don’t always give you the link to the hi-res version, so actually it is pretty useful. If you want to try it out, you’ll need a copy of Firefox and Greasemonkey and a copy of my script. Then, just browse to a Yahoo! photos album, click on a photo, and you should be able to click on the photo and get the hi-res version 🙂

There’s a great post on The Register about spyware — it’s very funny! Check it out…

In other news, I’m sorry about not updating very much this week. I haven’t been up to a huge amount really! Yesterday I went to home group in the evening after watching the England game. I have to say, although England won in the end I was pretty disappointed with the performance… then again, I can’t remember the last time I was impressed with an England performance recently!

Anyway, all for now…