Well, no, there isn't at present, 'cos she's out and not officially a Dr until she graduates. However, Kathy had her viva yesterday and passed with only minor corrections, which she now has a month to make. W00t.

Matthew, I saw a poster for this today and thought of you.

JD will probably welcome you when you get there.

I suppose I should really update the status of various things I've mentioned in the past.

xsm: I gave up and just added the appropriate magic to my xinitrc to start my common apps. I tried fluxbox again for a while, but although it could cope with one of each app it didn't seem to do too well with half a dozen xterms. Maybe with a little effort it could, but xinitrc does the trick well enough.

RSS reader: I've settled on Liferea for the moment, with my evil lj-openid-fetch script fetching LJ posts for me.

Netgear DG834G: I wrote up a page of info about this, just to have something static. Unfortunately it seems that the Marvell 88E6060 switch chip used only supports port based vlans, which I think means you can split the switch up so that you can have completely separate ports, but doesn't allow the creation of a wan port on the device. This is a shame, as it means I can't use it to handle my setup unaided (I need wan, lan, wireless + adsl ports).

X11 programming: I ended up using SDL, which gave me a framebuffer to play with. I suspect I could easily convert the code to run on /dev/fb0 directly, which is nice, though I should look at how to do the same with X again at some point.

Rar. Beware. I've now got the M&S USB missile launcher working under Linux. I hate libusb, it's very badly documented and seems to assume you know the USB spec inside out. Anyway, usblauncher-0.0.1.tar.gz does the appropriate magic (if crudely) and includes a basic GTK2 Perl program to control it.

Ian Jeffrey has also produced some code that works in much the same way, but it's only a command line example and I couldn't see a license that allowed redistribution attached to it. It looks like he went about things in much the same way as I did though.

Not long back from Oxford where Dom had a rather good New Year's Eve party - good to see people and I'll stick photos up later today hopefully.

Kim asked me what I'd remember about 2005 (her engagement was obviously her big thing) and I didn't have an answer. However I thought some more about it during the drive home and Tristam and Angharad (two of my best friends) getting married is probably my best memory of the year; I actually had to remind myself that it was only back in March - it seems like ages ago! It was a great day and lovely to see the both of them so happy (and I confess to rather enjoying my role as best man as well).

Let's see what 2006 has to offer all of us...