You don't get a LIM race report, because I didn't race at LIM. Although I was expecting to, but while swapping wheels before the skate I noticed a bit of flex on the frame: then I took the frame off the boot and found that the problem was that the mounting block for the rear bolt had come away from the carbon. So, uh. Boots are now on their way back to Germany for Daniel Junker to look at.

This week I have been mostly finding a new flat. And adding 3d Secure support to Stargreen. And playing with my new mixer. I got sucked into running the development version of Mixxx (because it works out of the box with the x-session) which, being C++, taxed my poor old 512MB RAM like nothing since the Roman Empire. So, now 2GB heavier and circa 60 quid lighter - let's hear it for Yoyotech, a bricks & mortar central London computer parts shop whose prices are, unlike Maplin or PC World, vaguely comparable with what you'd pay if you were patient and went mail-order.

Right now, I'm too angry to be dead, but this is a natural result of attempting to use GNOME. In general I'm not dead but too busy (and with too little internet) to be blogging about it right now.

Stuff I hope to write about someday

• new laptop (see above)
• Thames Festival
• new boots are arriving some day soon, yay
• the experience of going back to FSKs temporarily
• moving house with a Cycles Maximus workbike. If you knew my old address and I haven't told you the new one, please hassle me for it.
• and there was something else I can't remember, too

but for the moment I leave you with this: the point of Unix is that you can tell what's going on, and have a clue where to start looking when nothing is apparently going on. To get GNOME Network Manager (apparently the approved thing for a wireless laptop) working is needlessly complicated when (a) the icon which I guess should appear doesn't, (b) the manual doesn't actually explain that there even should be an icon (as I said, I guessed), (c) googling - thank goodness I still know how to configure interfaces manually, eh? don't know what the GNOME Typical User would do here, other than reinstall Windows - is the only way to find out that nm-applet is the magic thing to start, (d) googling again for the error message it produces when it starts directs me via a snotty message to /usr/share/doc/network-manager-gnome/README.Debian (again, I wonder how the Gnome Typical User would find this) which says I should add myself to the netdev group, (e) having done all that it produces a list of local wireless networks and/or a swirling thing in the top right hand corner of the screen, but doesn't actually connect to my wireless router - even after asking (twice, now) for my WEP key

Running iwconfig and dhclient from a terminal works perfectly (and is how I'm connecting to post this), so I can't even guess what the error message it's hiding from me might me. It's been sitting there swirling for the entire time I've spent writing this, though.

If any of the developers of this misbegotten creation stumble across this blog entry, they will probably even now be muttering "so send a bug report" at their screens. Because rants like this aren't helpful, and reports are. Let me be absolutely clear about this, because I'd hate to be misconstrued: I have no intention of helping. The purpose of reporting bugs is to produce better software, and this software is so completely misguided that I have no interest in making it better. It's one thing in normal use to hide technical messages from users that might be confused by them, it's quite another to hide them when the bloody thing doesn't otherwise work.

I don't think this GNOME installation is going to last the day, to be honest.

Nice laptop (HP nc2400), though.

The other day I was musing:

as we get more and more email of different kinds, a generic mail-with-lispy-bits-in package would be increasingly useful.

Er, maybe that's what text-template will do for us.

In the spirit of Mark Jason-Dominus' Text::Template perl module, though much less featureful, text-template is at http://www.cliki.net/text-template and has been for nearly a year. Not sure what I think about that.

I wrote

Battery query: I have the 3 cell battery for this machine, which is labelled as 28Wh @ 10.8V - so I calculate the expected capacity as 2.55Ah

However, /proc/acpi/battery says the "design capacity" is 1481 mAh. Actual battery life is ~2h30, but the system indicates 0% at 1h30-2 hours, so I don't know when to save work and hibernate. I have tried (twice) a full charge and discharge to calibrate the battery as described on your web site, but it has had no effect.

 # fully charged, and with the ac adaptor connected 

dan@toy:~$ sudo cat /proc/acpi/battery/C1B6/* 
alarm: unsupported 
present: yes 
design capacity: 1481 mAh 
last full capacity: 1481 mAh 
battery technology: rechargeable 
design voltage: 10800 mV 
design capacity warning: 75 mAh 
design capacity low: 15 mAh 
capacity granularity 1: 100 mAh 
capacity granularity 2: 100 mAh 
model number: Primary 
serial number: 29392 2007/02/10 
battery type: LIon 
OEM info: Hewlett-Packard 
present: yes 
capacity state: ok 
charging state: charged 
present rate: 528 mA 
remaining capacity: 1467 mAh 
present voltage: 12337 mV 

How do I make the capacity gauge work? Linux kernel version is Linux toy 2.6.22-2-686 #1 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:24:01 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard's Commercial Solutions Center.

This is with reference to your e-mail regarding the HP Business notebook Nc2400.

From the information provided in your e-mail, we understand that the Battery is not providing the optimum performance

We would like to inform you that we do not support Linux Operating system because of which we would not have any idea regarding the capacity gauge.

We would like to inform you that different Operating systems and its functions would consume different amounts of battery power. For e.g. with Windows XP installed, the battery should provide 2.5 hours of backup. While with the Vista Operating system, it would be 1 - 1.5 hours. This is subject to the number of applications running and devices that are connected to the notebook.

In order to check for the battery you could download and install the battery health test from the following web-link:

http://h20239.www2.hp.com/techcenter/battery/battery_ts.htm?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

This would only work for the Windows XP version.

In the meantime, http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3537 seems to describe a similar problem, albeit on different hardware