Colin Charles Agenda

In continuing good food tradition, I had some Beijing duck last night with Lisa, Adam and Ken. (while Jef had old Chinese food).

Been fiddling lots with LDAP, writing schemas and appropriate LDIFs. Contemplating building Open-Xchange here - not that we have to, but it might be a useful competency to have around.

Today, Lalo Martins has come to join us, so after he arrived and while he slept, Bjorn, Ken, Mike and me headed out to a little bar for lunch and sat there talking all day about life. Fun stuff. Later, Ivana, and Wei, and Lalo joined us for some hot pot and massage. Went to some Chinese Rock joint later, and left not long after, because the music was just not me. So, week 1 in Beijing has approached, and its just been completely fun

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu, but the Fedora Core 3 vs Ubuntu Warty Warthog was filled with some FUD.

Red Hat Magazine really doesn’t get printed anymore, so you don’t get a copy of FC3 from there. What users are complaining of kernel panics? Media file problems are normal - Ubuntu can’t support MP3’s either. Networking woes? Fedora never claims to support anything more than ext2/ext3, it just so happens if the reviewer had a clue, he’d have realised that booting with linux xfs or linux reiserfs is what is used to get those options enabled. Besides which, Reiser and SELinux don’t play nice, so it really isn’t recommended.

Come to first booting, and the icon placements and nice desktop integration on Ubuntu. That’s not upstream GNOME (if Red Hat pulled something like this, goodness, the bad press). Fedora’s OpenOffice.org does not crash the system when you try to use the spell-checker - you installed all the languages so it takes time to read it in. Thats OpenOffice.org in general. Does junk mail filtering work in Ubuntu?

Surely the media support on Ubuntu and Fedora is the same. There is no MP3 support or other proprietary codecs - its all ogg and open stuff, damnit. I’d agree that the Synaptic integration on Ubuntu is good - we need that for YUM, hopefully FC4 will see system-config-packages and yum more integrated.

Urgh, why do I bother. If at all to jive up Fedora Marketing.

Beijing is still lots of fun. Food is wonderful. And cheap. I still speak no Mandarin, which sucks. Went out to get myself an iPod cable thing (now sporting dual interfaces), because they don’t sell Mac-to-PC firewire converters. Guess what? Bloody iPod doesn’t charge off USB2, so I’m still screwed. Playing music off the USB2 connection is one great power sucker as well. gtkpod is cool, allows you to remove files off the iPod and other goodness - highly recommended over iTunes and whatever iPodRip that they’d charge you for.

Built packages for gtkpod, and Asterisk, some of which have entered various Bugzilla’s already. And now, there are pictures from The Forbidden City, Tianamen Square, and thats about it.

Spot was right, China does rock. Arrived in the morning, had a large Western breakfast, went to the office to suck mail, hung out till lunch. Szechuan lunch, then off to The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and Commercial Road. Good guide in Lisa I’ve had, landed in the office for a while before heading off for some “hot pot” dinner, and the bosses party thing at a bar. Late night, didn’t get any mail reading/work done even when I got home. Today, had some Shinjang food, with meat skewers, naan bread and the like. Got to sort out the phone so I can start making phone calls cheaply again.

Been building and playing with Gaphor and diacanvas, its quite nice - on FC3, you want to make sure that diacanvas installs its stuff to /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/diacanvas, rather than into /usr/local/lib. One interesting feature (well, Emacs has this too, save for the nice UML diagram stuff) is that you can “reverse engineer” Python files by importing it and getting a UML diagram for it. Sweet, no?

Seems Excel has a known problem of not being able to have more than 7 Nested IFs, and the only workaround is to use named ranges. Sure, thats one way - the other way is to go ahead and use OpenOffice.org Calc. But this doesn’t allow spreadsheet exchange between OOo/Excel, because Excel users will suffer. Caveat emptor.

Safely in Beijing now. No LiveJournal or Blogspot it would seem, but everything else rocks. Quick roundup: Red Hat Magazine launched, my (and Warren’s) Meet Fedora Core 3 article is out and it hit /. Otherwise, Linux Magazine also has something about FC3 that hit the marketing list… And I’m on blug-tech/blug-general from the Beijing Linux Users Group now too…

So Microsoft is giving away free IT Curricula. Damnit, I’ve been doing that for a while, and there’s a local Malaysian school that was doing it too (a lone teacher).

Not been productive, well, it helps that I’m “holidaying”. Caught The Grudge, which wasn’t so scary since I saw Ju-On a few weeks back, though I spent most of my time behind the girls hair ;-) The Incredibles was well worth the long cinema ticket queue, I’d say.

Michael Tiemann is down in Melbourne, giving a talk tonight. Go see him (read about the interesting bloke at linuxquestions). Faye’s What’s New in Fedora Core 3 SE Linux is a nice read, especially since SELinux is a “big thing”, in active, targeted mode in Fedora Core 3 by default.

While Seth gets an X40, I mosey’ed over to grab an R51. Its huge, but its well-spec’ed out now. Fedora Core 3 promptly went on it, after I failed to pacify the silly Windows XP to dual-boot, and give me a sane amount of space back (17GB for Windows is far too much). Everything works (I installed it in stages in my sleep), except ACPI sleep (time to boot with acpi=off to see if it works), the wireless (I’ve installed ipw2100 stuff, and need that udev update I think), the modem (slmodem seems to fail?), but otherwise, it seems to work well.

In Kuala Lumpur now, its warm, and I’ve been stuck in nothing but traffic jams. There were Deepavali celebrations, and now there are Hari Raya celebrations, so things are all supposed to be quieter, but they’re not. Caught Shark Tale - cinema packed with kids, but fun outcome overall. Good show, I’d recommend it.