Colin Charles Agenda

• I tried to bake a chocolate banana cake on Sunday. Twice. Both were failures. First was mush, second was hard as a rock. Butter related failures, I think. Todays two durian cakes turned out okay, with the tops being a little burnt.
• 10 weeks of Alpha is over, and I graduated from that, quite gladly. In my little testimonial, I mentioned how crazy the last ten weeks of life have been, but how I’m still having an inkling to not lose faith, which is surprising seeing the crap that’s landed on me. I wished everyone else attending the next session to hopefully, have a better time.
• Sent mom off yesterday. End of the month of parents being around. I actually feel sad. Oh well, departure halls tend to do that to you, maybe.
• mpackage.org has been setup. Now all we need is a team. Pix has done all the legwork of sorting out the web/mail/lists. Dexter Ang is the hero that registered the domain. It seems to be sensible that we have: build system, svn/cvs (some form of revision control) and less repositories, so talking to Anvil (okay, Dams) and it’d seem that we should have an “mpackage team”, but still get heavy lifting distributed. mock looks like what we need to use for a distributed build system. I’ve started asking folk at #mono if anyone’s into Fedora packaging, next to target the mono lists… Want to make it clear this is all for Fedora first - I’m hoping for more contributors, etc. to crop up for RHEL/Centos/etc… if possible. Seems a time/contributor issue is what keeps livna only building for Fedora as well.
• Fedora Marketing next. Its not low hanging fruit anymore. Its happening, and its real. Now to define it a lot further. Ideas appreciated, and we do have a list - fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com. We really ought to work hard for the next 6 days, as Debian and Fedora get released on the same day. Whoote!
• MyOSS Magazine Edition 2 is out. I’m really pleased with how Ow has taken on the task, pretty much by himself, to make this a great mag. So go read it. mag.my-opensource.org
• Rawhide’s kernel from today still hates the Mac mini framebuffer. And parted still doesn’t like my disk on the iBook G3. For future reference, ./pdisk -l /dev/hda will give you useful output. FWIW, I think we need to package pdisk (as fdisk on ppc is not of any use).

Groan. The 20050526 rawhide PPC tree is misbehaving. iBook g3 doesn’t seem to want to get installed - parted keeps on whinging at me (#159047). Which really seems to have been the 2nd time such an issue appeared - dkl encountered one about two weeks back too. On the Mac mini, I’m faced with the screen just going blank a little after yaboot gets kernel parameters (#159050. Coming so close to release time, I’m worried… Paul’s taken a stab at the inclusion for PPC release notes - all looking good.

So, Trinity College dumped Debian for a bunch of G5’s and Tiger. And the part that saddens me is that they won’t be using OpenOffice.org on OS X.

I have taken an affinity to financial software, and Linux offerings. Xinvest will not compile with GCC4 (it could do with some cleanups). Currency_Converter is a useful shell script, that needs to be patched to remove annoying IRC relation, and it becomes a nice console app afterward. Couldn’t get getquotes to work as Finance::YahooQuote seemed to fail a test with my rawhide snapshot. phpfin and essential budget seem like candidates for review; next up is mastering GNUCash.

So here’s my dilemma. I’m downloaded the DVD image for OS X Tiger (because my mailing still hasn’t arrived). I do not have a DVD burner. Anywhere. Now, how can I install this over the network? Target disk mode will not be useful for me, but NetRestore might help, except I need a generic OS X installation around somewhere (it seems to suggest 10.4, Tiger, which I don’t have!). If this was Fedora, I could just burn the boot.iso, and loopback mount the image! Any Mac heads know a solution? I don’t mind an ugly OF based solution either; except I can’t boot the dmg via tftpboot? Update: The mailing arrived. Of course, I decided to do a nice clean reinstallation, so I repartitioned. Guess what? No sight of 10.3 on disk means 10.4 won’t install. Urgh, nowhere on the DVD does it say “upgrade”.

Looked at some Extras failures, after Jeremy kicked off a rebuild. Most of the PPC related ones have attached logs to them now, and some made it to a post-it note as “solving hopefuls”. Low hanging fruit might best be ExclusiveArch’ed. Also noticing a lot of PPC related inquiries going to fedora-test-list, rather than fedora-ppc list - this needs to change! In other news, I’m playing around with the wiki for Supported Power PCs - i.e. whatever we support well, or we don’t support, should be listed here on a colloborative wiki page.

Was looking into buying a PDA - either a Tungsten E2 or some other offering from Palm. Now it looks like I’ll just wait, save up, and buy the Nokia 770, and get on with maemo. Its so nice to make sure you have something that always “just works” - not to say that Familiar isn’t just working at the moment (the upgrade from 0.72 was so welcome).

Bought a firewire cable today - the iBook G3 got Tiger installed via Firewire target disk mode. X11 can get installed that way too, but XCode2 wouldn’t. Weirdness. Got nice e-mail from the asiasource folk, and there’s the AsiaSource booklet, written by Frederick Noronha thats a worthy read as well.

• Some shell magic (courtesy of mkj, a while ago): sed ’s/[^,]//g’ matrix - that counts all the commas in a line to see if they match up. Real useful for matrices in Mathlab.
• I can understand davej’s issues with heat in the room… mine’s no better, and its almost approaching winter; pray tell what I do during summer!
• Let’s all support our man Rex, in saying that not publishing a SPEC file is a GPL violation. The thread for reference.
• Apple looking at Intel chips? Now that’s absolute crack. I hope this isn’t the crap they announce at WWDC2005. What else will I run Linux/ppc on, anymore? Big iron IBM hardware? Pfft.
• Eugene came down from Brisbane last night (Monday). Ended up meeting up with Mark, Dylan, Chu, Anne, having some good nasi lemak and some wonderful Max Brenner chocolate later. As always, its fun to have a chit-chat with the rest of #bangsar, even if its only the Melbourne chapter that managed to meet up :P
• Dinner. Very awkward, very silent, what joy. *must stop torturing self*
• I’m going to be writing the FC-4 article thing, similar to what we did for FC-3. Anything pressing, now would be a good time to e-mail suggestions down my way. I know the docs team already sent a semi-snippet of what’s important for the next article.

Something caught my eye when reading Paul Graham’s Undergraduation: Don’t be put off if they say no. Rejection is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. Just move on to the next. (This applies to dating too.) Want to break a wireless network? TomsNetworking has a guide, thats almost step-by-step; definitely a good resource to keep around.

Been looking at Fedora on the Mac mini, and varying bugs that might plague it according to Bugzilla. If more Macs are going to come like this, with varying displays and what not, its going to be a fun bug-hunt (CLOSED->WORKSFORME). Clock losing ticks seems to be a real issue, as the probed data from OF is probably wrong. Sound works, but s-c-soundcard is still broken. I have to start fiddling with the modem at some stage (seeing if Linuxant provides something useful), and maybe think about Airport Extreme a little more - see how far wmealing made it the last time… Ubuntuforum post about it thats particularly interesting. Fan control doesn’t work (no therm_adt746x, therm_windtunnel or therm_pm72) - the temperature monitor is a max6642 on the i2c bus of the PMU; benh shall try to see if its diggable outta OF soon.

Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini is the article thats out this month in Red Hat Magazine. Go read it! Yay, that was some sweat from last week ;-)

In other news, been slowly getting the Macs in the lab up to scratch with a modern version of Fedora. Doing 1.5GB of yum updates seem to take the better part of the day. Gotten to a stage of getting the one testbox up and running with all sorts of esoteric Windows goodies. Office 2003 files seem to be well read by OOo 2 (snapshot, m100), and VirtualPC is something I want to give a go to. Services for UNIX is a joke, really.

Update (16/08/2005): To reiterate on what Paul Graham said, Barrybar also comments about taking no for an answer and getting used to it, in terms of photography. The important thing is to learn to take no for an answer. It happens all the time … no for a job, no for a date, no for a loan. It’s normal.

Life
New resolution to IRC less. I have dropped off many channels, and am only on the important ones. E-mail is probably the best. Visited the shrink, who says that maybe this was all a nice big sign that being caught up in “work” is a bad idea. Hmm. Had a hair cut next, my shortest yet. Dinner went surprisingly well, got a few nice things, and came home to a surprise (really, I didn’t expect it) party. Nice. Lye Ling rocked up to sign songs for a bit… then hit a night club and had lots to drink. Don’t remember much of it, slept all day today, and just had spicy Thai for dinner…

Mono
Okay, Pix has mentioned we can host a jpackage equivalent (mpackage?) at his server (where freeworld/Livna lives). Now, does anyone want to donate some money to registering mpackage.org ? Or do we just keep things at Livna? Doing that encourages only one freeworld repository to add, but doing the mpackage.org thing gives us a better chance at building a community of core Mono heads (like jpackage has). Spoke to Anvil earlier, gtk# has been accepted, and here’s bug #330… Sure, it needs to be updated soon, to 1.1.7, too.

A little visit at the Microsoft office got me all these…

Fedora
How do you rip a CD and make an MP3 out of it? Sound Juicer doesn’t do it. Neither does Grip in Extras. The magic seems to have come from installing abcde and id3v2. Then abcde -o mp3 will give me MP3’s that the iPod will like.

Now, the Mono issue. Havoc writes that Mono is a can’t rather than a won’t and he’s right. We’ve been fighting for it to no end, and its just not happening. The little reasoning that I know thru emails, irc, that meeting, and what not shows that we’re not going to see Mono, period. This is however, in my opinon, working negatively towards RH - as more and more “cool” tools get written in Mono (beagle, tomboy, etc…)

However, how about a jpackage equivalent? Let’s call it mpackage.org, and provide high-quality, Mono packages. Anyone interested? E-mail me.

Life
Bought yet more bike accessories. Lamps (so I can ride at night), bike computer, a new tube; coffee maker made its way into the whole purchase list it seems. Mother’s day was Sunday, and I got to see both my parents! Saw The Amityville Horror, which kept me at the edge of my seat at several times. San Remo Pizza & Pasta (the usual pizza parlour I walk to), is bike friendly.

I finally became 21. So I can drink legally, in America now. And get my license converted to a Victorian one, without P’s. And get a load of this: the complete love of my life, is now going out with someone. Couldn’t give us a chance (conceiving it was awkward), but every other Tom, Dick, and Harry does right? Great to find out on my birthday! Fuck. More interesting will be dinner with the families a little later…

When oh, when, will GAIM support MSN7 better? All those swanky emoticons, and the like… From a few weeks back, this seemed rather appropriate.

01:32 < @nosnilmot> drbyte: cool, that'd be helpful, although I do worry that you have too many MSN7 using friends
01:32 < drbyte> nosnilmot: yes, that is the way people are moving
01:32 < @nosnilmot> why aren't they moving to a decent OS ?
01:33 < drbyte> nosnilmot: well, Windows XP is decent enough for them. and some software has no linux equivalent
01:34 < @nosnilmot> *exclusive* drbyte defends proprietary crap ;-)

Of interesting bits, Nautilus will no longer have Open Terminal when you right click on the desktop any longer. So like OS X behaves, I have to now go searching for it, and then adding a shortcut to it on a convenient place with new installs… But this is also progress - it means that an average end-user will require to not use the command line now, will she? Everything can be done using magical points-n-clicks.

Fedora Core 4 Test 3 was loaded on the Mac Mini today. It seems to be a lot faster than my snapshot of the 20050504 tree, so I’m guessing (because I have had no time to debug) something was very wrong earlier. 256MB of RAM makes GNOME usable again. Installer doesn’t detect X resolution properly, but did earlier - weird.

Retail therapy always helps right? So today, I went out and bought a bike. And a helmet. And a pump. Need to find a water bottle holder thing, and a mount for my GPS (I have one about 8000km away from here!), but took the thing for a spin today for a couple of hours. Came back because of a flat tire… C’est la vie.