# list all disabled repos
rypper -d

# list all enabled repos with autorefresh off
rypper -e -R

# list all repos which have anything to do with KDE
rypper -x kde

# list priority and URIs for all repos whose alias contains 'home:'
rypper -a home: l -pu

# enable autorefresh on all OpenSUSE Build Service repos
rypper -u download.opensuse.org -R mr -r

# remove all repos on external USB HDD mounted on /media/disk
rypper -u /media/disk rr

I only got one response so I assumed it wasn’t that useful to other people.

However here I am at BrainShare EMEA in Amsterdam surrounded by like-minded geeks, and in a fit of enthusiasm / procrastination, I have finally got round to learning how to build openSUSE Build Service packages, and so proudly (?) present my first OBS package release: the 1-click install version of rypper. Enjoy!

Great news. Every year we invite an exclusive group of customers to join our Premier Service for 12 months – and this year you’re one of them.

It went on to offer me a dedicated customer services and a USB dongle providing 3 months’ free mobile broadband, then 2p per MB after that.  Amazingly generous, no?  Then I realised why they’re being so nice to me:

• You can’t sort search results by popularity
• You can’t restrict search results to answered or unanswered questions

Well, that pretty much renders it totally useless right there, for both customers and companies, unless the community you’re searching is tiny, in which case why would you need the site anyway?

Oh yeah, and the undocumented boolean AND searches don’t work.

Staggering.  (I’m praying someone will tell me I’m wrong about at least one of these.)

Update 2010/03/07: got a reply from getsatisfaction on search results sorting – I was right but there is a kind of lame alternative.

Just got a Milestone and am impressed with the hardware but disappointed with Motorola’s attitude towards European customers regarding the closed bootloader. [An official statement from the manager of the technical team behind the MOTODEV program at Motorola] says “This practice is driven by a number of different business factors” but does not explain further – what are you hiding, Motorola? You seem to be underestimating

• (a) the potential of a technology community which promotes collaboration rather than hindering it (why do you think Android grew so quickly in the first place?), and

• (b) the importance of regular, open communication with your customers.

Sadly if this continues, I expect HTC and your other competitors will leave you far behind.

We believe that cyclists should be able to download their power data to the computer of their choice, analyze it in whatever way they see fit, and share their methods of analysis with others.

If only companies like Suunto “got it” rather than shipping miserable excuses for software such as Suunto Training Manager… *sigh*. Anyway, looking forward to getting my media PC fixed and trying this out soon… maybe I’ll even find some time to help improve it

Four hours trying to figure out why the hell my changes to .java source files weren’t showing up in the compiled binaries, debugging an unholy mess of ant XML files, before I finally realised how badly ant’s dependency checking sucks … Then 5 minutes of googling for ‘ant sucks’ and I find two excellently written rants which confirm my discovery (you might need to consult google’s cache for the latter).

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Anything which uses XML as a domain-specific language should have already set the alarm bells ringing, but my excitement at learning something new initially blotted out the dull headache caused by hacking in XML.  Bah!

• My team is amazing. Really – full of uber-smart, motivated, helpful guys supported by great management, great interface to the business, and very slick, well-oiled processes.
• This was a huge sideways move, so the learning curve has been a similar experience to last year when I started triathlons and had to learn to freestyle without drowning. I love learning new things, definitely feel like I am over the hardest part now, and am trying to contribute to the team effort with as close as I can get to the breakneck speed the other guys do.
• When you really love something, it sucks you in – sometimes too much. Last night I was up until 3am   I need to follow the advice Michael Meeks gave me when I asked him for tips on how to deal with being a full-time home-working geek:
  

  Sure – get up at the same time every day; and quit work roughly 9 hours later without fail.

  Then you stay sane

• It’s a more solitary lifestyle than my previous role, so I need to make more effort to get out and socialize in the evenings. Actually this could be a good thing because I used to occasionally use “work is quite social” as an excuse for not going out if I was tired.

For the last 3.5 years I’ve been working as a Solutions Architect for Novell, a job which has:

• trusted me with working from home, even before I’d proved myself,
• introduced me to some great colleagues and new friends (Novell is full of highly motivated and talented people),
• pushed me outside my comfort zone many times (and in case it’s not obvious, that is a very good thing), including forcing me to confront and completely overcome my phobia of public speaking,
• taught me a whole range of technical and “soft” skills,
• given me the opportunity to work on projects with some of the finest minds in the industry and stay at the cutting edge of technology,
• given me the opportunity to meet, learn from, and help countless client customers and partners, both existing and prospective,
• rewarded me for innovation (I co-filed two patents),
• taught me how to understand, and where possible sidestep people politics (although politics are inevitable in any large corporation, Novell is relatively free of it and even the CxOs at the top are very down-to-earth, approachable people)
• and probably many other things I missed.

Despite all that, a while ago I started feeling that I needed a fresh challenge. And the feeling wouldn’t go away – in fact it kept growing. I started thinking about what to do, and as often happens when you open your mind to possibilities, a very promising new opportunity presented itself to me out of the blue, in the form of a job at another company.

So we come back to the crazy thing. I interviewed for this job, found out that it was certainly challenging role, and had phenomenal opportunities for career growth and networking, got an offer, and after much stress and agonizing, turned it down.

Two weeks later, almost exactly the same thing happened with another company.

Especially in today’s economy, what the hell was I doing turning down two great job offers? Well, I was taking a gamble based on the possibility of being offered something new at Novell which sounded more exciting than either of those.

Let’s back up again, this time much further. When I was about 8, I first discovered computers and quickly realised that they presented a whole new world where you could invent all kinds of wonderful new creations and you were pretty much limited only by your imagination. Well, this was quite a long time ago, so admittedly having only 1 kilobyte of memory and a cassette tape recorder which only worked once every 10 times for storing your programs on was a bit of a limit too, but hopefully you get the point. I realised that I liked making stuff.

This passion has stayed with me my whole life – it sort of went into hibernation for two amazing years at music college, although even then you could argue I was making stuff (i.e. music). And it’s why I turned down both those two jobs – even though they were great, they didn’t present immediate chances to create, and my instinct was telling me that’s what I needed.

So the great news I received earlier today is that the gamble paid off, and I have been formally offered a job as a Software Engineer Consultant, joining an extremely talented team based mainly in Santa Cruz in California. This is getting scarily close to being a dream job! I remember years ago voluntarily pulling 100 hour weeks at guideguide despite terrible pay, simply because I loved it so much – and I think this will give me the same kind of rush

For those wondering whether I’ll be relocating to California: for now, I’ll still be officially working from home here in London, but I’m crossing fingers for a business trip across the pond to meet the new team soon I hear it’s a beautiful stretch of coastline, and would be triathlon training heaven …

Finally started using my CompuTrainer a bit more. Just rode 20km in the lounge with the computer pacing me at 200 Watts. After so much riding with guys way stronger than me, the temptation to draft the computer is difficult to resist. However in the last 500 metres it spontaneously decided to make a sprint for the finish line – the bloody cheek! Obviously I couldn’t allow a bunch of transistors to beat me so I sprinted after it and hit the finish line 0.05 seconds ahead, narrowly avoiding embarassment. Next step is to start doing brick sessions …

By the way, in case anyone googles for computrainer linux, I am actually running it under VMware Workstation on LinuxMCE 0710 which is based on Ubuntu Gutsy. It works great with the unfortunate exception of the Interactive Real Course Videos (IRCV), which seems to be due to missing support in VMware Workstation for VMR9. I’ve posted about this in both VMware Communities and the RacerMate Forum but noone has been able to suggest a solution so far.

UPDATE 15th February 2010 – great news! Check out this fantastic new piece of software called Golden Cheetah!

“That’s weird, it’s got a strange line through it”, I said to Becky, and then 3 seconds later swore loudly as I realised what it actually was:

These nice images come from an amazing piece of software called Stellarium which is free and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

But actually after my mouth got X-rayed, peered, poked and prodded at, my new dentist announced with some astonishment that indeed apparently all my teeth are basically fine. So I’m remaining a member of the elusive “zero fillings” club for now. Ah, the virtues of being raised with good dental hygiene habits by a health-conscious mum …

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

By the way, when Matt got back, he promptly went for a 10 mile run with his mates, and apparently followed it the next day with another 20 mile run and an appearance at the swimming session…

View Larger Map

Thanks Matt for providing the .tcx file of the route recorded by his Garmin, which I converted to KML using this converter. I also recorded the route on my phone as per normal, but it was so damn long that the phone ran out of battery before it finished recording…

There were other things, like korganizer getting slower and more buggy, phonon not working right, plasma’s bizarre customisation UI and tendency to leak memory like a sieve, a device notifier pop-up which often makes new devices invisible and unclickable … but enough is enough, life is too short. GNOME does what I need (which isn’t much, thanks to the flexibility of openbox).

• A real programming language (PHP) rather than some lame imitation which doesn’t even have proper flow control structures. Of course this also means it’s very easy to set cookies, use CGI parameters etc.
• More more out-of-the-box flexibility and functionality on the backend
• Unbelievably easy to set up on my own webserver
• Over 4000 plugins! including ones for SyntaxHighlighter and Google Analytics
• Countless themes, many of which support fluid width content columns.

So I’m totally sold; now I just have to make different RSS feeds available for my different audiences (none of which exist yet…)

1. In MyTracks, copy the track to SD card as a KML file
2. Plug the phone in via USB and mount the SD card’s filesystem
3. Copy the KML file from the kml directory to a local directory.
4. Open the KML file in an editor, search for 7f0000ff (light orange) and change it to ffcc66cc (purple) or something more visible
5. Ensure the track name is correct
6. Go to http://maps.google.co.uk/ (ensuring I’m signed into my google account)
7. Click “My Maps”
8. Click “Create new map”
9. Click “Import” and upload the KML file
10. Edit the route if necessary and save changes.
11. Sometimes it’s necessary to click on another route and back to this new one, in order to make the “View in Google Earth” link appear.
12. Copy the URL of the “View in Google Earth” KML link and paste it into the Google Maps *search* bar (yes that’s right, *not* your browser address bar)
13. Click “Link” near the top right
14. Share the link with friends and/or paste the embeddable HTML into a new blog post.

The copy of the “View in Google Earth” KML link back into the search bar in step 12 is necessary to stop Google Maps from splitting the route up into multiple pages, which would only show shorter segments (“lines”) of the overall route at one time.

View 2009/05/02 120km with Tritons in a larger map

View Tritons 112km in a larger map

That’s about 350km I’ve covered over the last 3 Saturdays, hope I can keep it up…