| How many LEDs are illuminated in your immediate vicinity |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|08:42 am] |
Because what you do in a shell is not an adequate measure of your geekiness, we need to devolve to counting the number of LEDs illuminated in your immediate vicinity. This can include laptop LEDs (including backlight if your's is that fancy), switches, whatever.
My total across the home office: 44
(Yes, I was very bored when I counted last night. No, I don't really expect you to count all of yours.) |
|
|
| F10 Naming |
[Apr. 9th, 2008|09:03 pm] |
You asked for it. You blogged about it. You got it.
As the official name process, er, guy I am officially decreeing that we are going to start the naming process earlier for F10. How early? Really damn early. We're going to start collecting names for F10 the week after F9 is released. I've spoken to Máirín and that should be plenty early for the Art team to come up with some awesome themed art.
So start thinking, and remember to follow the rules for naming. But I swear, don't send me a single name suggestion until I post the official kickoff announcement or I'll... probably just queue it for when we do start. I'm such a wimp. |
|
|
| I hate today |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|07:41 am] |
Today is April Fool's Day. Don't believe anything you read on the internet. Ironically, I received my bank statement via email this morning. I don't believe that either.
The world's tinfoil supply will be exhausted today. I think I'll crawl up in my small hole and wait for it to be tomorrow. But I don't trust the clocks today either so I'm not sure how I'll know when to come out... |
|
|
| Not one for all |
[Mar. 30th, 2008|09:46 am] |
David, Please don't mistake the proposal of one or two people for something that is generally accepted as the "way" for Fedora. If you read most of the kernel-libre threads, you'll find that there are very few people that actually agree with the suggested implementation of a kernel-libre package, and instead prefer it to be done in a way that won't cripple user's machines and is contained within the kernel proper.
It's sort of important as Fedora continues to grow to remember that a vocal few do not speak for all of Fedora. I generally agree that many of the Free Software purists I've read from come across as... passionate. And I also agree that at times their positions are entirely counter-productive and not pragmatic at all. However I try to ignore the propaganda and focus on the end goal they are trying to achieve. Many times they are willing to compromise to a degree as long as the end goal is the same. Other times they are not.
The cool thing about Fedora is that we have so many different views on aspects such as that, but at the core there seems to be a commonality in believing that Open Source software (I avoid the use of the word Free here on purpose) is the right solution in the end. I hope that as we grow as a community, we continue to keep that in mind. It's the only way we'll continue to be productive.
As for the zealots, and there are some on all sides, I find that if you smile and nod they tend to think they've brainwashed you enough to leave you alone. :)
Note: I realize I only focused on the kernel-libre part of David's post, but that's simply because I didn't follow the Codina issue personally. |
|
|
| What's in a name |
[Mar. 27th, 2008|08:15 pm] |
We had quite the debate today in FESCo regarding a proposal to only allow ASCII characters in RPM names. I'll refrain from rehashing that particular pain, but I had an interesting revelation from the whole ordeal. I'm sure this will not be new because hardly anything I write is new, but I found it quite interesting that the passion people have for various things both enables and cripples them at the same time. If you think about it for a second, the same passion that causes a developer to spend hours tweaking and reviewing code to make it the best possible is also responsible for them debating the most trivial details in a 200 email long thread on coding style.
Unless of course, they're simply being paid to do that. I wonder if I could get paid to just do email. But I digress.
Parental tip #27
Do not let your 10 month old son chase after the broom while you sweep. He will grab it right as you are bending down to get the dustpan, thereby causing the handle to jab into your eye with great force. He will then think this is hilarious as you walk around for 10 minutes looking like a pirate because you can't open your eye or stop it from watering. |
|
|
| quilt fail |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|08:47 am] |
So I suck. Apparently when I switched email addresses, gmail decided that anything remotely involving quilt was to be flagged as spam and ignored. Looking in bugzilla, I see I have a handful of quilt bugs that have been open for a while now. *sigh*.
So for those of you who filed quilt bugs, I'll try to get around to fixing them soon. In the meantime, I think I have the spam filter thingy figure out. |
|
|
| I am a nerd, yes |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|03:15 pm] |
Ursula,
I have been told by my wife that you found this blog and said it was "super geeky". This should not surprise you. The fact that I get paid to be even more of a nerd doesn't really help things. I tend not to blog about my non-nerd stuff because, well, people expect me to be nerdy ;).
Oh, and HI! |
|
|
| Because it's there... |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|02:45 pm] |
I keep getting asked "Why do you use Fedora?" or, in another variation, "Why don't you use Ubuntu?". The answer is really quite simple, lacking any kind of whiz bang OMGWTFBBQ pizazz completely. I use Fedora because I've never had a reason to use something else.
That might not sound like it means much, but if you think about it a bit it's actually a fairly good statement on the distribution as a whole. I'm sure there are exceptions of other people that have computing interests that are more varied than mine which require something Fedora doesn't or can't do. Even my wife uses a different operating system. But for my daily computer use, I have nothing wanting or lacking from Fedora. Even running rawhide on my laptop at home, it mostly "just works".
I have tried other distros. I have a CentOS install somewhere that is running something or other on it. I tried using Gentoo for about 4 months several years ago. I played with Ubuntu a bit when I first got my Dell n-Series box. I think I even had installed Mandrake at one point. I wasn't as comfortable with any of them as I am with Fedora.
And that really shouldn't come as much of a surprise. My first real Linux install was Red Hat Linux 7.1, and I've used some form of RHL/Fedora ever since then. Then there's the fact that since around the Fedora Extras 3 time frame (sounds so weird to say Extras now!), I've actually been involved with Fedora as more than just a consumer. So I have a lot invested in Fedora, and switching to something different because it's new and shiny seems like a waste of time.
Fedora certainly isn't for everyone. At times it's ideals, or politics if you prefer to call them that, can conflict with end user's desires. And there are things that Fedora just isn't suited for. But as a daily, general purpose/development OS, I think it holds it's own.
So there is my very boring answer. I'm actually more interested in why other people use Fedora. Or more importantly, if they tried Fedora for any extended period of time and switched to something else, why was that? (Please avoid replying if the answer is "media codecs out of the box because I'm not so interested in something that cannot be fixed within the ideals of Fedora.) |
|
|
| The Board |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|06:59 am] |
Karsten, it's not so much that I don't understand the purpose of the Board. I do. What I don't understand is what they actually do, or maybe just how they function.
As you quoted, if the Board were to say "Fedora on Cell phones!", it would be a high level direction setting objective for Fedora (an absurd example, but you see what I mean). Lately, I haven't seen anything that I would consider as a set of goals or objectives for the Fedora project as a whole. And that may be just fine, because personally I think Fedora is quite busy enough as it is.
So don't take my mini-rant as discontent or confusion of purpose. Like I said, I'm fairly happy with the Board. Rather look at it as a question on whether there are things the Board is doing that people just don't hear about. Some would call it "transparency". Reading various board member's thoughts on issues as they pop up is good, but not everyone has time to follow all the lists and it's often difficult to decipher from it whether it's a topic the Board is interested in, or just that member.
I'm not entirely sure I could explain what I'm really looking for, but I think it would be akin to a forward looking State of the Union from the Board or something. And if that boils down to "keep doing what you're doing", that's cool too. |
|
|
| Holy rapid development, Batman! |
[Jan. 27th, 2008|08:03 pm] |
Today I had to tell someone that the 2.6.24 kernel was fairly old. It was released 3 days ago. That might sound completely ridiculous, but in this case it's very much the truth.
With the ongoing arch/ppc->arch/powerpc ports for embedded boards, running anything less than the current git trees means you're missing out on quite a bit of functionality. Case in point, .24 doesn't have PCI support for 4xx at all whereas .25 does.
I expect this trend to end in not too many more releases. There are only so many subsystems and boards to port over, and some of them will inevitably be left behind as there is no interest. Perhaps then we can look at optimization and cleanup. |
|
|
| The name game |
[Jan. 26th, 2008|12:28 pm] |
Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail asks why the name has already been announced.
The timing was totally different this time around so that the Art team could have more time to create artwork for the release. Also, there's no real reason to keep it secret until the last minute. We tried this for this release to see if it made a difference anywhere. If it doesn't produce something that most people view as good we can always change back.
As for the style of vote, I think you are mistaken Mohd. The F9 and F8 votes were setup identically, by the same people even. The votes for names have traditionally been select only one. Perhaps you are confusing the name vote (select one), with the FESCo/Fedora Board votes (approval voting). |
|
|
| F9 codenames |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|07:49 pm] |
Juan recently commented on the list of names for Fedora 9 and some of the perhaps more tasteless choices that are there. I was responsible for doing the name collection. While I might not particularly like some of the names that wound up on the final list, I didn't feel it was my place to arbitrarily filter the list. Legal trims the list quite a bit already, the names fit the criteria, and we wanted to be sure we were left with more than two names.
That being said, there are some possible names on the list that aren't all that horrible. Bathysphere seems to be quite popular for reasons I don't fully understand. Woodwose or Kingsport Town seem ok as well. Alas, the one I was going to vote for was pruned at the last minute. Such is life. |
|
|
| Boston is toasty |
[Jan. 20th, 2008|10:22 pm] |
davej whines about it being -7C (19F) in Boston. When I woke up at 3:30 am today to go unblock the frost covering my furnace intake, it was -27C (-16F) and the high temperature today was a balmy -17C (0F).
I think I should go to Boston to warm up. |
|
|
| To repair or replace |
[Jan. 13th, 2008|07:12 pm] |
The backlight (or something to do with the LCD) in my wife's Inspiron 6000 just died tonight. The laptop is about 3 or 4 years old, and I was getting a bit nervous as to when something would go wrong with it. Alas, seems I was right.
So now the question is whether to repair it or replace it. The warranty has long expired, but Dell could repair it for starting at $159 plus whatever other fees an LCD repair costs. I did some looking online and found a new replacement LCD for $295. Then I went looking on Dell's site and noticed you can get a brand new Inspiron or Vostro (spelling?) for $450-$500 with equal or better system specs. I haven't looked for a cheaper laptop yet, but I would be surprised if I found one from a vendor that I trust. Lenovo was fairly close, coming in at $550 but you get less machine for the money.
Hmm. What do to?
(For now my nefarious plan is to let her borrow my laptop and force her to use Linux) |
|
|
| alpine |
[Dec. 29th, 2007|01:03 pm] |
UW recently release alpine, a free version of the Pine email program. Having used pine for most of my college career, I installed alpine on my laptop to play around with it and it brought back some fond memories. Then I decided to see if I could get it built for the n800.
Aside from having to setup scratchbox again, the build went fairly smoothly on the x86 target. It seemed to work ok, so I switched over to the armel target and tried it there. It consistently makes QEMU crap out at one point during the build, where it generates a help_context.c file from a helper binary that is built. This didn't seem overly important, so I just copied the file that was generated from the x86 build (since it's source code after all), and ran make again and I had a nice armel binary to try on the n800 itself. A quick scp over, and I had it up and running.
This is actually pretty cool. It's fairly responsive, processes the folders quickly, and with mouse emulation turned on, I don't even have to use the keyboard when I'm just reading mail. The only issue I have is that it seems to not like gmail's SSL certificate, and I can't get my inbox to be displayed. All the other folders work though. Oh well, I rarely get anything in my actual inbox that can't wait until I check email on a normal computer.
I might try hacking it a bit to add a way to flag messages as Read without actually reading them. I use this a lot in other clients, and I can't seem to figure out how to do it in alpine out of the box. Aside from that, everything works as-is.
For those interested in using the maemo stuff on a Fedora based distro, you'll need to disable the vDSO by doing:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled
as root. For some reason, the scratchbox installation craps out with rtdl errors if the vDSO is enabled. I blame scratchbox, but I don't really have the energy to go figure out why and fix it.
Edit: It seems that you can do "Not New" for marked as Read in Alpine with no additional patches. Thanks to Seth Vidal for pointing that out. My mail reading habits have changed a lot since college and I never thought to try that :) |
|
|
| n800 goodness |
[Dec. 26th, 2007|10:28 pm] |
And more n800 goodness. OS2008 came out a couple weeks ago and I really like it so far. Feels faster, looks nicer, and overall seems to be a good improvement. And then today I got an iGO bluetooth keyboard to go with it. Rock on! So far I have no real want for an n810 at the moment. I even got x-chat working now, and this seems to be a great replacement for late evening browsing. My ownly gripe is that claws-mail refuses to register when I press the space key. Makes replying to all those emails I have piling up a bit hard to do. |
|
|
| Holiday TODO list |
[Dec. 24th, 2007|10:52 am] |
1) Play Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga on the Wii
2) Install Rawhide on the PS3
3) Finish getting the 4xx tree in decent shape for the upcoming merge window
4) Eat copious amounts of food that I would otherwise avoid
5) Avoid freezing my arse off
Since we're actually staying home rather than doing the annual trip to Michigan this year, I might be able to complete at least part of that list. Item number 1 will likely hinder the rest though.
I leave you with some Holiday cuteness.
 |
|
|
| F8 on the PS3 |
[Dec. 16th, 2007|01:11 pm] |
I have a PS3 now. I will never purchase any games for it though. No, instead I will use it for what any true geek would. Installing Fedora!
There was a last minute regression on the PS3 for the F8 installer that causes a traceback in anaconda when looking for the video driver. This is worked around by specifying "xdriver=fbdev" on the command line. After that, it booted the F8 DVD just fine, and is currently installing in text mode on my standard definition TV. (Gah, that looks like crap.)
TODO:
- Spin up a rawhide boot.iso and install that instead
- Find some way of hooking it to my monitor
- Get it close enough to actually plug in the ethernet
- More stuff I think of later |
|
|
| What Do You Have To Say? - In Cold Weather... |
[Dec. 14th, 2007|03:50 pm] |
I live in Minnesota. This is a really stupid question to ask anyone who lives in Minnesota. It's cold here. We deal with it. |
|
|
| n800 goodness |
[Feb. 6th, 2007|01:02 pm] |
Yes, I got one too. Yes, it friggin rocks. I've already gotten a 2GiB SD card for it, put ssh, xchat, and an xterm on there, and generally use it everyday. My only gripe is that the email client can't really be used because it doesn't support reading from anything other than the Inbox. I'm looking into getting pine on there, but right now I can just use ssh+mutt on the remote machine.
The hostside development platform seems fairly nice. It uses scratchbox as a base and Xephyr for display on x86. Oddly though, you have to turn vdso support off in your kernel to make scratchbox work. This is somewhat frustrating but not a showstopper by any means.
I have no data plan with my cellphone (yet), so I haven't tried using that as the internet connection, but supposedly it works just fine. The wireless on it is superb, picking up access points none of my other machines can even see. Hopefully I'll be able to find a small bluetooth fold-up keyboard to use with it. |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jwboyer's journal