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A cool machine is a happy machine

I have been having repeated problems where my desktop just powers off if its overloaded. Its an Athlon XP 2400 and the CPU temperature was showing 79 degrees C and up (sometimes 129 degrees but I'm sure that was a bad reading...)

A positive dental experience

Danielle and I went to the dentist today for the first time in around 10

A great leap to freedom

We had a great Bug Day for the Translate Toolkit.

Zimbra messaging server

I've set up a copy of Zimbra, an open source messenging server with a beautiful AJAX webmail and calendar client on a local machine. Planned a while ago to move my mail to an IMAP server with a nice webmail frontend so it can be accessed from more than one place, and Zimbra seems like the best of the bunch.

Jingle builds of Psi and Kopete for Fedora Core 4

Was excited around Christmas to see the Jingle signalling protocol for Voice over IP through Jabber, which was jointly authored by Google and JSF people and is used by Google Talk.

OpenOffice.org building day

Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating.

All South African locales in OpenOffice.org

All 11 South African locales

Where's the beautiful Nivo from Ndiyo?

In about May I read about Ndiyo, a non-profit that's making ultra-thin clients called Nivo (Network-In, Video-Out). They're basically designing an FPGA that can support VNC or RDP and so creates a tiny little box that has a network connection, keyboard and mouse connectors, and a VGA out. Some of the team are the original VNC developers, which must help.

Session Saving

SessionSaver is the most useful extension I know of for Firefox, and it's surprising it doesn't have a real home - it seems it gets passed from person to person to fix things up for different releases.
Basically it records the set of windows and tabs you have open in Firefox (including the history etc) so that if you quit or the browser crashes, they can be restored on startup (you can also save named sessions and switch between them). (It stores this in prefs.js which is arguably not the best for performance but seems to work fine without corruption).
Now, I just crashed my X server for some inexplicable reason. Which led me to think again to myself, I wish I had a SessionSaver for Konsole. I tend to use both Firefox and Konsole as task lists - web pages I must look at / process, shell operations I'm busy doing.
A long time ago I coded up a Python program to periodically dump the different tabs open in Konsole along with the processes running in them, current directories and open files. The idea being you can run this in a cron job and at least be able to see what was happening if Konsole crashes rather than losing track.
I've now fixed this up and got it running again. It could do with improvement but it definitely counts as helpful. The file is at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/konsolesessions.py and it gets run like this in a cron job:
  export DISPLAY=:0.0
  su username -c "python2.4 -m konsolesessions --html --output" 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/konsole.log

This then produces an index of konsole sessions in /home/username/konsolelog/index.html, each of which has its own html file like this:

Konsole session at Mon Dec 5 16:47:02 2005

Interesting articles...

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org.

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