therning.org/ magnus

Has anyone paid full price for a sofa at DFS, ever?

My old one has expired so I had to create a new one. It should have hit a keyserver close to you already. I even remembered to upload it to biglumber.com this time

Now gel bras aren’t allowed. What’s next? Will women have to remove breast implants? I guess we’ll end up flying naked if this continues.

I have to admit I wouldn’t mind working in airport security if this continues. “Raise your arms Ma’am, I have to examine your breasts!”

I think we can safely say that nowadays you don’t actually need to perform an act of terrorism to terrorise people!

Recently I’ve had some problems with the printers at work. I had it all working just fine a few weeks ago, then I must have upgraded CUPS or something because without me changing the configuration I first lost duplex and then the ability to print black-and-white (it’s a colour printer).

After fiddling with it for a few days finally remembered that foomatic can configure printers. After a few searches I found out how to use it:

1. Find the ID of the printer and what driver to use:

   foomatic-configure -O|less
   

2. Do the configuration:

   foomatic-configure -s cups -n <printer name> -c <printer location> \
   -p <id> -d <driver>
   

   Printer name is anything you want to call the printer. The location is the URI where the printer is found (e.g. ipp://10.70.3.4). The ID and driver comes from step one.

It worked like a charm!

I really should have posted about this months and months ago! I unlocked my phone a while back. My phone call lasted 5:35 minutes so I was expecting to be charged less than £8.20, since the charge for the premium number is £1.50 per minute. However, I was charged about £14! Several calls to Homecall’s customer service (I spent more than an hour in total on the phone with them), one call to ICSTIS, and a fax to Homecall’s billing department revealed the following:

• Premium services are obliged to tell you the charge “from BT landlines”. In this particular case “BT landline” means that your service provider is BT. I pay line rental to BT but Homecall is my service provider, i.e. I don’t have a “BT landline”.
• Service providers regularly add charges to premium services, since that is considered a “non-essential” telephone service.
• Homecall negotiates charges with premium services on an individual basis. This means that there is no simple formula to calculate what Homecall will charge you to call a premium service.
• There is no simple way to find out how much a call to a premium service will cost you with Homecall. Their customer service can’t tell you, there is no web site, there’s nothing! That this prevents their customers from making informed decisions doesn’t seem to bother Homecall the least.
• ICSTIS can’t help you either. Their website only tells you the charge to a “BT landline”.
• Homecall is one of the worst offenders (according to ICSTIS) when it comes to charging for premium services.
• Only Homecall’s billing department know, but you can’t ring them directly. The only way to find out, it seems, is to ring Homecall’s customer service and ask them to forward your question to the billing department. They will then get back to you about 24 hours later. This pretty much prevents Homecall customers from voting in any of the many shows on telly.

The only saving grace is that there is a prefix Homecall customers can use to “get away”. By dialling 1280 followed by the phone number you’ll make that individual phone call using BT rather than Homecall. At least that works if you are paying line rental to BT, I don’t know if it still works if you pay line rental to Homecall.

Homecall was bought by Pipex but I doubt that any of this has changed. So, remember that prefix, 1280. If you’re using another provider I’d encourage you to find out how they operate.

Well, at least it seems it is. I’m wondering when they will release all the information to the public so that we can see if Aigarius’ rant comes true.

Apparently Heathrow is being sued by one company. From a business perspective it makes sense to pass on the bill. As a private person I don’t really care though, since I know in the end it’ll be me and all other “small people” that end up footing the bill. Whether it’s through higher ticket prices (preferable) or through tax money (not nearly as good a solution, but very probable given the pro-business climate in this country). No matter what I’ll end up paying for this whole mess.

If this is indicative of how the terror-antiterror race (sorry, but no, it’s not a war) is going to be fought then I think we might have to rename the worse guys (both sides are pretty bad as it is, but one side is still holding on to the rhetoric and at least pretend to be doing this for the common good). Terrorists will in the future be referred to as “inconvenientists”.

RyanAir must be rather happy with the situation. They’ve been charging for checking in luggage for a while now and they are raising the prizes on September 1. With the new limits for handluggage they stand to benefit. Which reminds me, we have a flight in September, booked a few months back. I wonder if they will let us amend our ticket so we can avoid the £7 charge for checking in a single bag?

After taking some advice I got on #epiphany I’ve finally managed to get both epiphany and epiphany-extensions out of CVS to compile. In this case jhbuild buildone was my friend. I installed gnome-devel and python-gnome2-desktop-dev and set to work.

I used jhbuild to build glib and gtk+ (setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH in between). Then I tackled epiphany from CVS. It gave me no grief at all, though I did forget to enable Python support at first. epiphany-extensions was equally simple.

Finally I can get serious about getting epilicious into GNOME

I started trying to compile GNOME 2.15.4, but as you can read from the comments things didn’t quite work out. After a few emails on the gnome-love mailing list I switched to release 2.15.90.

freetype2

I quickly ran into problems with freetype2. It seems Sid’s version is too new. I added a new moduleset to the regular ones I got off the GNOME site:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<moduleset>
  <tarball id="freetype2" version="2.1.9">
    <source
      href="http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/freetype/freetype-2.1.9.tar.bz2"
      md5sum="ec1b903e4be5f073caa72458ea58c29c" size="992394" />
  </tarball>
</moduleset>

I saved it as freetype2-2.15.90.modules. You need to add an include tag in gnome-2.15.90.modules and a dep tag on gontconfig in freedesktop-2.15.90.modules.

gtk+

The next thing that failed was gtk+. It said Pango wasn’t built with support for Cairo. A look at config.log for Pango showed that Cairo wasn’t built with the Xrender backend and a look at Cairo’s config.log and output of ./configure --help showed that it inspected the system during configuration to see what backends it could build. (I have to say I really don’t like that sort of behaviour, I prefer it if all configuration options are explicit. Currently it’s trying to be smart but only ends up screwing the user.) I made sure libxrender-dev was installed and I put a link to /usr/lib/pkgconfig/xrender.pc in ${prefix}/lib/pkgconfig (not strictly necessary for Cairo but it seems the resulting cairo-xlib-xrender.pc depends on xrender.pc so I suspect compiling Pango might need it, no harm in having it there anyway, right?).

dbus-glib

Next dbus-glib failed. It’s a well-known problem and the patch is available. However, it seems it wasn’t applied properly by jhbuild and I still got an error saying that ${prefix}/var/run/system_bus_socket - file doesn't exist. Apply the patch manually, re-run jhbuild, answer no to all questions asked by patch (reversing, apply anyway), then skip the patch stage. That should do it for that package.

firefox

Well, that failed as well and I really can’t figure out why. It seems it doesn’t find my installed X libraries during linking. Very weird indeed. I learnt on IRC (#epiphany) that it probably is easier to use Debian’s libxul-dev package. After installing that, and setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH to include both $prefix/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/lib/pkgconfig (it’s better than linking files like I did earlier).

epiphany

This was the package I really wanted all this time. Here things are failing in new and interesting ways. It seems Debian uses a sligtly non-standard split of xulrunner packages for pkg-config. I needed to stick the following line in m4/gecko.m4:

gecko_cv_extra_pkg_dependencies="${gecko_cv_extra_pkg_dependencies} xulrunner-js"

It goes after the if-statement in the pkg-config area of the file.

Still, that doesn’t make it compile successfully. It seems that my two conflicting freetype2 versions are confusing the build… For now I’m giving up, but I’ll be back with a more targeted build story… I will build epiphany from CVS and live to tell about it!!!

I wonder what howto on codex.wordpress.org Wolfgang’s talking about. I’ve been trying to get an SSL certificate onto my blog as well, but that didn’t seem possible at the time.

(I would have left a comment on the entry itself if I didn’t have to log in. Why on earth would I want to create an account of another person’s blog?)

Isreal has the right to exist!

So say every official Israeli spokesperson that is interviewed. It’s interesting that they feel a need to repeat that over and over again. Are they worried they will lose that right?