I was once told of a man who had hiccups for three weeks, night and day. I get hiccups occasionally, and over the years I have come to try different methods for getting rid of them. For a while I tried swallowing a spoonful of sugar, dry, with surprisingly good results. Eventually the time came when it didn’t work, and I just ended up with mouthful of sugar… and hiccups. Not wanting to try the sugar again, I’d get someone to give me a shock — but I’d just end up shocked, with a mouthful of sugar, and hiccups, like something out of The Producers.

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I’ve just finished coding up a performance enhancement for system-config-printer. Now after clicking “New Printer”, it starts fetching the list of printer models and available devices while you are still thinking of a name to give to the printer. Previously it would only fetch those lists when you click “Next”.

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Some films seem to be about special effects, or are vehicles for particular actors or celebrities, or are cynical attempts to make money from the movie-going public. That’s why it is so great to see a real story told in moving pictures.

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This week’s Guildford Times is running a story about a notorious local businessman who runs several of the night spots in the town centre, and it made me chuckle. This guy often runs into planning permission problems and the like (such as his plan for a huge casino in the town centre), and he is very often in the paper. He wanted to open a snack bar called Scooby Snacks but had to change the name to Zoooby Snacks to avoid legal action from Warner Bros.

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This question seems to keep cropping up. I’ll explain why printconf-tui is no longer in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and what its replacement is.

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