So all this talk of the credit crunch and recession, I'd try liven' it up with a few bits of good news.

Webconverger Limited is in healthy shape and this year since my savings account interest rate is so dismal, I might attempt to invest to grow the company. I have been avoiding some accountancy work, though I am sure we'll get there.

In February I am planning a long holiday in South Africa, however there should be someone to cover when I will be away from the Internet suffering withdrawal symptoms. Hopefully I'll convert a few backpacker hostels over to sanity that is Webconverger along the way.

Last week has been productive. I have been looking into the mystical compose key after being prompted by Pierre on the webc-users list.

It's been an interesting adventure looking into i18n issues like this. I'm very interested in learning about how Ubuntu implements the Shift+Ctrl+U unicode key. Very cool Ubuntu, despite my rants of late.

I think I have fixed that 'essid space' bug with the help of Freenode #bash with the wireless settings. I can't remember who reported that to me. So a wlan=BONDI codefest,0123456789 might work. I must say I regret adding wireless support. Builds seem to take twice as long and the image has grown a third. Not cool.

I finally tested Jordi's xvideomode patch and xvideomode=1024x768 works in my 4.3beta build! This needs to be in trunk live-initramfs.

In not so good news, my Thinkpad X40 from my time at Hannux (a Korean linux distribution which peaked in 2005) in Korea has finally died. First it was the hard drive (er.. three times), then the USB subsystem and now it's a paper weight. That X40 unbelievably was the machine Webconverger was first built with Debian Live help and a crazy bad Cornish Internet connection (at the time).

The good news is that I have a new test rig running ArchLinux (quite a nice distro btw!) which is much faster and of course powerful hetty is always there for us too. Despite the growing cost thanks to a weak GBP. That's good news for you btw. Purchasing and supporting Webconverger is really cheap right now at 100GBP and pricing will increase soon!

In other news, besides those 2009 goals, there will be work into getting Webconverger support on touch screen devices. Yeah, get worried Microsoft! =) I also wonder how badly that CrunchPad will suck if they don't use Webconverger. ;)

So a new release of 4.3 is being prepared. I just want to test it a little more over the week. Try a beta in the meantime for testing.