I signed up with Smart Telecom early December, I was hooked up finally by mid January, broadband was working – but no dialtone on the phone line Two weeks ago close to midnight my net connection went dead and when I checked there was no voltage coming from the phone socket. So finally last night after a call to Smart almost every day I’m back up and running! If things with Smart stabilize from now on in – I’ll forgive all – 3mb down 256kb up and no bandwidth cap.

The first thing I did was upgrade my Dapper Drake install. Helluva lota updates in two weeks! And guess what – some kind soul has put compiz in the universe repository… Wobbly windows and cube goodness! It really is slick and the F12 zoom feature is very genuinely useful. It all made me a bit woozy though – looking at those windows womble about the screen.

The good people of Linden Labs have released their promised Second Life Linux Client. It’s in alpha, but I’ve found it very usable, stable and smooth. Ever since I first heard about it – it’s captured my imagination the way the MetaVerse did in Snowcrash. Poor Impulse Control.

The FonePIM Developer Program has been launched in the last few weeks. I had the pleasure of working on this project inside in NewBay before christmas. The FonePIM developer program is the first developer program uniquely designed for developers to test both SyncML v1.1.2 and v1.2 clients against a SyncML server.

I got a subversion repo. up and running on my desktop at home over the weekend. The reasoning was two fold – 1. A manageable way to work on some of my projects from my desktop and from my laptop without anything like rsync or copying directly. 2. To get familiar with subversion at last! And wow – I”m not particularly excited about how easy it was to setup, browse or the speed of it checking out / committing – but simply excited about the lack of network access required to work away on the code base! Perforce and CVS – two version control systems I’ve used before heavily are a dog for this – and even with network access, if it’s low bandwidth – the pause between opening for edit and editing is significant. So wahey subversion!

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hand replacing my xorg.conf file with xorg.conf.dfp or xorg.conf.dfp.crt or xorg.conf.dfp.tv etc… Until today! Finally gave the README of nvidia-glx a read and noticed I can specifiy TwinView as true but set a NULL entry for one of the monitors in the meta-modes. Cool! Now I can changes the resolution and monitor setup on the fly from within X.

I spent this weekend playing with getting hibernate via suspend2 working on my laptop and getting a xgl/glxcompmgr/compiz demo up and running on my desktop. Both attempts failed basically. Suspend to ram/disk never worked on my laptop even though Ubunutu provides menu options for both. I got a suspend2 patched kernel compiled and rejigged my partition layout to have a bigger swap space partition. Booting to a single user shell with a limited amount of kernel modules installed hibernate on my laptop gets to ~50% and crashes. An FAQ from the suspend2 website indicates this is most likely a problem with an unsupported kernel module. Well Phooey! On the flip side I have configured the booting of Ubuntu on my laptop quite a bit… it’s much faster now; with some services in and out. mmm why doesn’t Ubuntu come with a nice equivalent graphical sysv-rc-conf tool? The xgl/glrxcompmgr/compiz experiment was looking good when i manged to get a wobbly window up and running very briefly – but was flakey and played awfully with the window manger. Mmmm… I discovered quite a cool tune, “Telepopmusik – Just Breathe”, on pandora.

Spent a crazy night yesterday in Doyles, Dublin having a few drinks with Liam and co. Managed to stay out of Eddie Rockets – it looked so tempting at 4am with a belly full of drink. Noteworthy topics of conversation included AIB online account lock down policy. mmm… But Wait! That’s not all – theres more tonight – different venue – different outcome?

I’ve been playing alot of chess on gameknot over the last month or so. But recently I played a game on gameknot with a friend of mine, overcanyon, who told me about the internet chess club and the free internet chess server. I’m just aftering finished my first blitz game as a guest – and I really dig the interface. Hats off to the creator of Jin. A whole new online chess world has just opened up!

Today with the release of IntelliJ 5.1 – we can now all look forward to the new EAP cycle and IntelliJ 6.0. I’m getting ahead of myself of course; but the Demetra Roadmap sure looks packed full of goodness. I really need to get my act together and start coding plugins!

I’ve been listening to pandora over the last few days. It’s very impressive and has already led me to consider buying a number of new albums I’ve been introduced to. Wow! everybody wins.