Today I took the laptop to P’Chai’s house and networked it with a crossover cable. I spent a couple of hours comparing various locale-related settings, the MD5sums of various libraries and strace outputs etc, trying to figure out why my laptop gdm page comes up in Thai, but P’Chai’s computer, with identical everything does not. The straces showed that for some reason, P’Chais libc (right?) wasn’t checking the /usr/share/locale-langpack shared data area, so wasn’t finding the ’th’ (Thai) translations. I still have no idea why, as all the configurations, environment settings, libs MD5sums etc tally up. I’ll have to investigate the language-pack mechanism in Ubuntu a bit more and/or file a bug report about it. Here’s a picture of me, hard at work today.

Anyway, I did manage to get some useful work done in the form of a couple of requirements specs, one for a customer, one for an internal job. I also went to a nice restaurant on the beach with P’Chai, where the owner bought us a few drinks. We sat and drank and watched the fishing boats and chatted for a while (mostly about an upcoming job P’Chai will be doing for the owner of the bar). A nice break from the norm.