Colin Charles Agenda

• Caught Madagascar at La Premiere in Hoyts. I can heartily say that Gold Class at Village is heaps better. On DVD, got to see Farenheit 9/11, which makes me wonder about Bush, and all.
• Walked the 1,000 steps. It was surprisingly nice. Been up to Mt. Dandenong a lot, but never ever went on this trail. Napped, and then karaoke later with a bunch of friends - boozie took over.
• Because I tried hard to put off any writing for the MyOSS Magazine, I ended up doing some Fedora package stuff. Sorted out gaim-guifications, MagicPoint. Trying to include xwrits. My livna foo is sorted, gtkpod is updated.
• Spent most of today lazing around in her house. All was fine, till dinner time when I felt like punching his face. The gall. My stupidity for going, I guess.
• I got my Tungsten C back. Its a nice, brand new unit, with everything “just working”. I’m impressed with Palm’s customer service, being the first time I’ve had to use them, ever. FileZ is useful to beam your old DatebookDB/AddressBookDB/MemoDB over to the new unit. pssh is an SSH client worth checking out. One annoyance is that when the Writing Area is enabled (grafitti all over the screen), the NotePad doesn’t work - is there some way to disable the writing area just on a per-application basis?
• Wah, Base is now component-ized. (iz#46898) So its now an optional install, and OpenOffice.org requires no JRE. I can imagine this pleasing Windows users somewhat, but all sane free Linuxes are probably going to include the gcj stack, and get things going, right?

I refuse to have my Xorg run at 16-bit depth, so, here’s a better way of running Maemo, rather than the prescribed Xnest method. Install vncviewer and vnc-server, then:

1. Xvnc -geometry 800×480 -dpi 72 -ac :2 -depth 16 -rfbauth ~/.vnc/passwd & - this creates an Xvnc server with size 800×480 (to fit Maemo), with a DPI of 72 (you may want 96, but it seems rather large). This creates it on display :2 with a 16-bit depth, and the password file to be read is in ~/.vnc/passwd.
2. Create a VNC password, by using vncpasswd
3. Then, type vncviewer :2, enter the password, and you’ll have a window appear. Now in scratchbox, just type af-sb-init.sh start. Make sure you already ran export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:2 in scratchbox as well.

On Fedora Core 4, remember, you want to echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/vdso as well, to ensure scratchbox will even start. The tutorial is incorrect in terms of telling you where to get maemopad - grab it from http://repository.maemo.org/stable/1.0/applications/maemopad/.

Maemo on FC-4; changing the input method

Interesting reading is the interview with Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. Debian’s packaging format was the only thing chosen, as the kernels come from upstream kernel.org. Last little Maemo tip is that if you don’t want to use the keyboard, better switch input methods to the X input method, and this will allow you to actually type text in (rather than tapping on the online keyboard).

• So m-commerce must’ve really taken off. Today, I made a purchase from a WAP site on my mobile, using my credit card details, and then having an item I ordered delivered. All without a computer, mind you.
• I started jhbuilding GNOME again. On a fairly standard FC-4 system (workstation install), you need: docbook-utils-pdf, howl-devel. It has a spiffy notification area icon now. audiofile wouldn’t get installed (host not found) - so manual fixing. mozilla wouldn’t build. The jhbuild dependencies is a mighty useful page - if time permits, maybe something like the comprehensive jhbuildonubuntu ought to be written for Fedora.
• Spent some time with the FUDCon II folk, aka, the FESCO meeting #2. SkypeOut seems to have served well for the three hours, because I got to do these things handsfree. And it didn’t cost a bomb. While sitting on it, I decided we needed to communicate (well, this was a goal from FESCO physical meeting #1), so I present Extras Steering Committee. We have meeting minutes that are public there now. And its been announced. Good talk about how package process works (the arch stuff came up, and more stringent ExclusiveArch goodness and Bugzilla tying ins). What we can package/ship also came up, and I’m sure the minutes and stuff that comes out of it will be interesting.
• < |Jef|> he clearly doesnt understand that Red Hat is the catholic church of distributions… every year its congregation splinters in yet another reformation - how true. You can splinter, but you can never leave us.

• So my server ran out of space, so it’s been NFS mounting more disk from another box. IP address of said box changed, and look: 7:12am up 35 days, 7:28, 2 users, load average: 70.90, 69.24, 65.59.
• The F1 in the US, was horrible with only 6 cars running. Big wow Ferrari, hollow the victory was.
• My hair is really gone. For all those that asked if it was Photoshopped (really, GIMPed), it wasn’t. I removed it all, completely. This is in lieu of me entering the States again within the next 3 weeks (okay, thats a joke. I just needed a change). This time last year, I straightened my hair.
• I purchased a Tungsten C to get organised and stuff. I love the color screen. Too bad the digitizer and the WiFi radio module seem hoarked. Called Palm Support and they seem to be wanting to send me a new unit out (after I send mine in, of course).
• Caught The Longest Yard - I don’t like football, but it was definitely funny.
• Finally cleared (Fedora) mail. Ever found a package name you completely hated? jonathan-core seems to get on my nerves. Okay, weird.
• Want to dual-boot FreeBSD and Fedora? Well, install FreeBSD first (I think it doesn’t matter if you do it later either), and when it comes to installing the bootloader, don’t use BootMgr, but the second option which is not to touch the MBR. Fun with LVM when /dev/hda2 and /dev/sda2 have names VolGroup00, making it oh so hard to get my data off the USB disk.

• Meet Fedora Core 4 - Red Hat Magazine article. Go read more about our amazing FC-4. Which incidentally released earlier this week
• So I spoke to a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while, and Malcolm is no longer free software/Apple hippie, but Microsoft employee working on Transactional NTFS that we’ll see in Longhorn. Well, at least he had finished installing FC-4 when he spoke to me.
• Caught The Dreamers. It was, well, truly not something for kiddies. Finished all my One Tree Hill, Season 2 bits.
• Been having the usual troubles sleeping, and Ditesh found me the best path to sleep. I guess those Slashdot gems really do exist.
• S3 sleep on my R51 does drain power - about 12% of the battery went away during a 24 hour period. It was nice to reboot into FC-4 today (having only gamin, and the kernel change).
• Dinesh was here on Friday. Well, he was here all week, just so happens that it was a good time for all of us to have a binging session, at Crown. Saw Gopi, and Tirath after ages as well. Good discussion, and good Hoegaarden’s.
• domU images for Xen are useful raw disk images. Pity they lack FreeBSD ones…. 5.3 setup of Xen notes.
• 
  To live up to changing my hair-style everytime I enter the States.
• So my scratchbox on Fedora issues? Solved not by turning of /proc/sys/kernel/exec_shield, but by going after /proc/sys/kernel/vdso.

• Unfazed, IBM pumps Power chip program.
• I hope I don’t become boozie (yes, watch One Tree Hill and you’ll understand that term). Ticked off and coffee tumbler became well, a tumbler.
• I kickstarted Fedora Marketing. Brain dump. Mailing list. Greg re-jigged Fedora LiveCD - lets try for something before FC-5.
• I can understand jwz’s switch. OS X is truly beautiful. And jbj promises RPM too. Sure I like Evolution for mail, but most of everything else simply just works on the Mac.
• Mac mini for Fedora Core 4 warning - you need to use linux video=ofonly during bootup. Using radeon (the default) will blow up in your face. This also means, for the xorg.conf, you want to use “fbdev” rather than “radeon”. Everything else, the Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini article still apply.
• Caught Hitch and The Pacifier. Both were actually quite hilarious.
• Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso’ failed! - thats what I get when trying to run scratchbox. So no Maemo on FC-4 for me, yet.

I was reading Wil Shipley’s blog on being crazy. And a lot of it just seemed to make sense to me. From further conversation, it was revealed that his software, Delicous Library made $54,000 in sales on the first day, without advertising. Now that’s sweet, considering this software costs $40/piece.

Apple Campus Beer Bash. The Wallflowers played on. Nice! I even got a drinking tag, as opposed to last time. And an iTunes voucher to get their new “The Beautiful Side of Somewhere” song. Then I went a little crazy and bought a bunch of iPod accessories - iTalk and an iTrip. If that wasn’t enough, on impulse, I grabbed an iSight too. Then a battery pack from Griffin for the iPod (now I can get about 20 extra hours for tunes). Yay. I can’t seem to find Penguin Mints anywhere (CompUSA either), and Fry’s is too far away.

• Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
• Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches - useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
• Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
• Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
• Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed - jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
• Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
• Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.