Christmas 2021

Unbelievable! It has been over a year since I moved to the new house and posted here. I have obviously been busy setting myself up with a new way of life. There has not been much time for some of my hobbies and I have gone back to some old ones and picked up some that are new.

In particular, I have gone back to playing music and learning some more tricks on the electric guitar. With all of the recent focus on space, with the Artemis program to get people back on the moon, I have also been following along with all of the rocket launches. By the end of the year there will have been 140+ launches, with a lot of new rockets making their debut. Once the Corona situation allows it, I hope to travel to witness a launch or two in person instead of only being able to watch them on You Tube.

Here are some useful sites that I support, for finding out about coming launches and getting general space news:

https://nextspaceflight.com/

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/

I have also started studying at the Open University again. By taking some science subjects, I am hoping to fill in some holes in my knowledge due to the fact that I focused on Engineering and IT subjects for my first degree. This has all helped to fill in time when Alexander is not staying with me, through all the different stages of Corona lock-down which severely curtails your social life!

Anyway, I am glad I can still log in to my WordPress account. Here is a picture of my Boxing Day walk around Farum yesterday. It was the first White Christmas in Copenhagen since I moved to Denmark, although it was only a light sprinkling here.

My Monthly Update for January 2017

It has been a quiet start to the year due to work keeping me very busy. Most of my spare time (when not sitting shattered on the sofa) was spent resurrecting my old website from backups. My son had plenty of visitors coming to visit as well, which prompted me to restart work on my model railway in the basement. Last year I received a whole heap of track, and also a tunnel formation from a friend at work. I managed to finish the supporting structure for the tunnel, and connect one end of it to the existing track layout. The next step (which will be a bit harder) is to connect the other end of the tunnel into the existing layout. The basement is one of the favourite things for me to keep my son and his friends occupied when there is a visit. The railway and music studio are very popular with the little guests.

Debian

• Packaged latest Gramps 4.2.5 release for Debian so that it will be part of the Stretch release.
• Package latest abcmidi release so it too would be part of Stretch. The upstream author had changed his website, so it took a while to locate a tarball.
• Tested my latest patches to convert Cree.py to Qt5, but found another Qt4 – Qt5 change to take into account (SIGNAL function). I ran out of time to fully investigate that one, before Creepy was booted out of testing again. I am seriously considering the removal of Cree.py from Debian, as the upstream maintainer does not seem very active any more, and I am a little tired of being upstream for a project that I don’t actually use myself. It was only because it was a reverse dependency of osm-gps-map that I originally got involved.
• Started preparing a Gramps 5.2.5 backport for Jessie, but found that the tests I enabled in unstable were failing in the Jessie build. I need to investigate this further.

Ubuntu

• Announced the Ubuntu Studio 16.02.2 point release date on the Ubuntu Studio mailing lists asking for testers. The date subsequently got put back to February the 9th.
• Upgraded my Ubuntu Studio machine from Wily to Xenial.

Other

• Resurrected my old Drupal Gammon One Name Study website. I used Drupal VM to get the site going again, before transferring it to the new webhost. It was originally a Drupal 7 site, and I did not have the required versions of Ansible & Vagrant on my Ubuntu Xenial machine, so the process was quite involved. I will blog about that separately, as it may be a useful lesson for others. As part of that, I started on a backport of vagrant, but found a bug which I need to follow up on.
• Also managed to extract my old WordPress blog posts from the same machine that had the failed Drupal instance, and import them into this blog. I also learnt some stuff in that process that I will blog about at some point.

Plan status from last month & update for next month

Debian

Before the 5th February 2017 Debian Stretch hard freeze I hope to:

• Convert Cree.py from QT4 to QT5 to allow it to re-enter Stretch. – Failed

For the Debian Stretch release:

• Keep an eye on the Release Critical bugs list, and see if I can help fix any.

Generally:

• Finish the Gramps 5.2.5 backport for Jessie.
• Package all the latest upstream versions of my Debian packages, and upload them to Experimental to keep them out of the way of the Stretch release.
• Begin working again on all the new stuff I want packaged in Debian.

Ubuntu

• Finish the ubuntustudio-lightdm-theme, ubuntustudio-default-settings transition including an update to the ubuntustudio-meta packages. – Still to do (actually started today)
• Reapply to become a Contributing Developer. – Still to do
• Start working on an Ubuntu Studio package tracker website so that we can keep an eye on the status of the packages we are interested in. – Started
• Start testing & bug triaging Ubuntu Studio packages. – Still to do
• Test Len’s work on ubuntustudio-controls – Still to do

Other

• Try and resurrect my old Gammon one-name study Drupal website from a backup and push it to the new GoONS Website project. – Done
  
• Give JMRI a good try out and look at what it would take to package it. – In progress
• Also look at OpenPLC for simulating the relay logic of real railway interlockings (i.e. a little bit of the day job at home involving free software – fun!).

What else have I done over the last year?

Continuing with my theme in the last couple of posts on Open Source Stuff, I thought I would now write about all the other stuff I did last year.

Easter 2015 was spent as most years are: in Neudorf, Germany.

In May we visited the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen and made a display from a dead beetle!

In June, Alexander went to his first summer scout camp. Then in July, we took off to Melbourne for a holiday in my home town of Melbourne, Australia. I must write a public thank you to Bec & Jeff (my little bro) for putting us up, and arranging for a couple of parties that enabled us to catch up with lots of family members that I hadn’t seen in years. This meant a lot for me. It was especially great to meet my new nephew (Jax) and be there for his first birthday party.

In August, Alexander and I went to the Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix for some V8 action.

We also went for a tip on the Lyngby Lakes on one lovely summers day.

We also went to the Arla Food Festival in Copenhagen, and Alexander went up on stage to help break the record for the longest sausage made by children in Denmark.

For Alexander’s October school holiday, we visited the southern islands of Denmark for the first time.

And Alexander got a new ukulele for Christmas!

Hopefully I will be more frequent with my posts in 2016!

My new Blog

I have finally got around to creating a new blog!

Although I have blogged about my genealogy efforts for a few years, this one should be about life in general, and in particular about my contributions to Debian and Ubuntu.

Debian Logo

Ubuntu Logo

Lets hope I find the time to post regularly.

1st Post on new Gammon ONS Blog

Hi. This is the first post on my new blog. It takes over from my old Google Blogger one (http://gammononenamestudy.blogspot.dk/). I hope that this one will be a bit more interactive, as I really want to get everyone with Gammon/Gamon/Gambon family connections involved in the study of the surname.

For the record, I am carrying out a One Name Study on the Gammon surname (which also covers the GAMMIN, GAMMAN, GAMMONS variations). So if you are researching your family history and you find one of these names (or one like it), then please get in touch and we can share what we know about that particular branch.

The study is being carried out according to the guidelines of the Guild of One Name Studies. You can read more about the Gammon study here (Guild Surname Profile Page), and also find out more about the guild.

As it is not always easy to find all of the documentary evidence to connect the various Gammon/Gamon/Gambon family trees together, I have also begun to use the latest scientific DNA tests. If you know of a living male with the Gammon/Gamon/Gambon or similar surname, then please encourage them to take a DNA test. It is painless and secure (or I wouldn’t have done it!). Please read more about the Gammon DNA Project here (FamilyTreeDNA Gammon Project).

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Okay – this was the day I started switching to my new WordPress blog. Previously I had two different Google Blogger blogs. I used a Bitnami WordPress stack installed into an Amazon AWS instance.

Eventually, this stopped working and I didn’t have the time or skills to sort it out. So, all the posts published there originally (and the ones at Google Blogger) have now been imported to this wordpress.com blog, and can be read here. I have also updated all of the out of date links up to this date where I could. I will try and take the Google Blogger sites down soon to avoid confusion. I also hope to blog about this resurrection process soon.

For now, I continue moving forward in my blogging history to try and tidy things up.