Happy New Year, etc..

First, before I forget Happy New Year folks :)
I spent one week at Christmas in my family house with my mom and I could enjoy viewing for a second time both LOTR 1 & 2 (full edition) and Dune and Children of Dune (and also playing a lot to Jak 2 on my PS2 :)
Last week wasn't a busy week at the office (only two days of work, mainly reading emails), I celebrated New Eve with friends and when we woke up (at 9:00 by the 9 month old baby of my friends), there was snow all around.. Really nice.
Today, I was able to push a new metacity theme named Galaxy2 by our marketing people, which is a small evolution from the original Galaxy metacity theme.
Havoc, you should read your email :) I sent you, before Christmas, my first fixes for desktop-file-utils so it almost validates menu-spec 0.8. I was able to work on it today and I'm hoping to really fix the remaining non-compliance this week... But I must confess d-f-u should be released with aspirin :)
On the hardware side, my LCD monitor is doing strange things again : I had the following problem only from time to time and it was disappearing after 30 mins of activity. The problem rans away but last thursday, I got this : . Problably the snow version of the initial problem. It disappeared after 45mins and I didn't get it back until now. I know I have to return my LCD monitor but it is the only monitor I have at home. So, I'll have to plug my tranquilPC on my TV set and use 40px fonts for two weeks :((

Back online

So, I've found some time to update my blog.
Mini-itx/TranquilPC sent me a new system (they had to send it three times because french postal service wasn't able to access my home building to put a receipt so I could get my system at the post office :(
It is working fine but it had 2 problems : the internal Firewire/USB plugs are missing (I'm waiting for a response from Mini-itx) and one of the soldering on the PCI adapter was too big and was causing the internal ethernet plug to go offline when a PCI card was plugged. Fortunately, I was able to fix it with my own soldering iron..
Anyway, my server is back online and silence is back in my flat :)

New planet gnome bug :)

Jeff, why do I have the feeling I'm somehow related to the bug you found in the new version of planet gnome ? :)))

Bad luck or what ?

Today, I went to my post office since I never got AR for my tranquilPC I sent 3 weeks ago. And I've learn there was massive strike at English Postal Service. Must be destiny or something like that..
Better news : one of my Tai Chi friends wanted to buy a PDA so I proposed her to buy my Clié so I could buy new Palm Tungsten T3. I've ordered it yesterday and I should get it in about 10 days. Which mean I'll be able to drop MP3 and switch to Ogg Vorbis. Yepee.

XMLRPC - Gnome-blog powered

After a little fight with pyblosxom, I've got xmlrpc running on my server and this is my first post using gnome-blog..

TranquilPC, unreliable ?

Well, it seems it is not a good week for my hardware.. Yesterday, my server (the tranquilPC one) was no longer responding and when I tested
it today, I discovered it no longer boots at all :(
I've revived my old Pentium 233 as webserver/gateway (damn, it is really noisy) and I'll contact TranquilPC directly to see if they have
an idea on the problem and after that, Mini-itx to see if I need to return it (which will mean paying to shipping from France to UK :(

It is alive...

Yes, I'm not dead :)
Distribution release rush is history now (back in 6 months), so I have a little more time for myself.
On the hardware side, I'm quite happy with my Sony LCD except I had two "glitches" with it recently : last Saturday, when I turned it on, I
got a big vertical black stripe for 2/3cm on the center of the screen (from top to bottom), where even OSD wasn't displayed. I was dialing my
web vendor support number when it came back. And this morning, I had the same problem and screen went back to normal operation after 15 minutes on. I'm a little afraid to send my screen back for repair because it is a somehow random problem and I'm sure it won't appear when vendor will test it :(
Another hardware notice : oops, I did it again.. I've replace my main system (too noisy for my taste) with a Shuttle SN45G three weeks ago and I'm really happy with it (exception with proprietary driver for built-in ethernet adapter). I replace its main fan with PAPST one last Saturday and it is very quiet now (well, you can still hear fan noice but it is not very disturbing, compared to my previous PC), thanks to Shuttle smart-fan technology (I'll have to dig in lm-sensors code because enabling them cause smart-fan to shutdown and fan runs at full speed :(