While driving to Oxford yesterday (more on that tomorrow I feel) I was listening to Radio 1. The Scott Mills show had someone ring in asking for Laura's autograph. (I'm not sure exactly who she is other than someone who's having her diary from university read out on the show and appears to work for it somehow.) Scott then proceeded to try and get people to ring in with more pointless autographs that they had.

This got me thinking. I don't think I've asked anyone for an autograph since Eddie Izzard signed my jacket when I was 15. I don't think I'd be that bothered about getting anyone's these days. But there are probably a bunch of people I'd quite like to have a drink and a chat with.

And that led me down the path of the people I consider famous in the Free Software world that I've met and had what I consider proper conversations with. They probably don't remember them or me, but it's a level of access that I don't think is mirrored in other industries, such as the music biz. If I were a lowly guy with a band in my garage then I'm unlikely to get to meet the movers and shakers of the record industry and even if I managed to be in the same room as them they're unlikely to have a decent conversation with me.

Yet in the Free Software community even a lowly unknown like me can rub shoulders with people who really make things happen and actually have meaningful exchanges with them. How cool is that? All you have to tend to do is make the effort to turn up to events; sometimes just your local LUG if you're lucky, or maybe a free LinuxExpo, or maybe something like Debconf. I think this is a pretty low barrier to entry. And I think it's a real strength of the community. In fact, it's part of what helps us have the community.

(Maybe I'm just easily impressed by people though. And to be fair the people I'm viewing as famous probably aren't widely known to the non IT world. I still think it's a remarkable thing about the way in which we operate, something to be proud of and to not forget about.)

I've been using MRTG for many years now to draw pretty graphs. It's a bit inflexible though and I'd written a kludgy script or two to graph things that wanted more than 2 lines, or that I wanted to dynamically configure. I'd been on the looking for something simple that would do this all for me and replace my MRTG + scripts setup. All of what I'd seen seemed a bit complicated to get up and running, and what I had was BALGE, so I hadn't really looked that hard.

At the start of the week, however, I got pointed at someone else's stats page, generated by Munin. The graphs were presented in a nice clear format rather than a million levels down a tree, and all the graphs for a host were on one page for at at-a-glance view. Of course there's a Debian package, so I thought I'd try it out. Very quickly I was up and running with my local machine being monitored. A little extra work and I had SNMP monitoring of my switch, allowing me to ditch MRTG. Slightly more work and I had my UPS being graphed too. Finally I installed snmpd on my wgt634u running OpenWRT and had that sorted too. Excellent. A lot less work than I expected and a much nicer setup than before. I'm sure there are other good options out there, but I found this one worked for me.

Oh, and while I was at it I discovered mbrowse, an SNMP MIB browser. I think I'd rather have something that showed me the values read from the device in tree form, but I still found it quite handy.

I finally replaced my aging SCSI scanner over the weekend. It was making really odd noises while scanning, and had somehow upset my SCSI chain such that the BIOS could load GRUB ok, but GRUB then couldn't load the kernel. I have better things to do with my time than sacrifice goats, so I went looking for a cheap 'n cheerful replacement.

Oddly enough PC World provided an acceptable option. They have a system whereby you can reserve an item on the web for pickup from your local store, and get a reduction off the in store price. I have no idea why they don't just reduce in store prices anyway. I ended up with a Canon LiDE 60 for £44.82, slightly less than ebuyer charge before P&P and with the added advantage that I could go and pick it up on Saturday.

I had, of course, done some research beforehand to ensure this was a supported scanner, however it turned out I'd misread. I thought the version of SANE in Debian was a little old; turned out the versions for sane-frontends and sane-backends differ and I'd looked at the former instead of the latter. Plus I thought I was going to need to pull a CVS or snapshot copy to get the support I needed. So I unwrapped the scanner, plugged it into a spare USB port and checked lsusb showed it up. Then, just to see what would happen, I tried scanimage -L and was rewarded with device `genesys:libusb:004:009' is a Canon LiDE 60 flatbed scanner. Rock. scanimage just worked and produced a nice PNM of my Electric Six CD inlay.

I don't think installation could have got any easier than that. Admittedly I already had SANE installed as I'd had a previous scanner, but if I hadn't the only addition would have been aptitude install sane-utils.

Last night I dreamt I went drinking in the Reindeer with Phil Daniels.

Rock. I've now got the LCD on my E3 working; blurry picture at https://www.earth.li/~noodles/images/e3-lcd.jpg (I couldn't convince the camera to both focus well and shoot the flash in a way that made the text visible). I've updated my Amstrad E3 page with a few of the recent 2.6 developments as well. I'm quite chuffed with myself; while Mark did the original work of getting it booting with serial and USB I've managed to write the NAND driver, the LCD driver and sort out the keypad keymap.

There's still quite a lot left though:

• Get u-boot onto the actual device rather than having to load it over the serial port on each reboot.
• Add NAND support to u-boot.
• Get the modem setup.
• Sound
• Handset - both mic/speaker and off-hook detection.
• Mailboard (the pull out keyboard)
• Camera

And then I can worry about the application layer. :)