Colin Charles Agenda

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.

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.

OpenOffice.org
Well, from the MiniConf at LCA, there are pictures of all the speakers thanks to Jonathon Coombes. He seemed to have everyone but himself! Of interest from Cybersite, would be the OpenOffice.org Knowledge Base. Now if this becomes a central resource for all things OOo, I’d be really happy. The one thing people like Microsoft and Apple got right, was the idea of knowledge banks. All OSS projects need this, otherwise, users find it far too fragmented to get information. And by users, I mean your Average Joe, who want things to “Just Work” (and if it doesn’t, head of to one support site).

Fedora
Fedora runs on my Mac Mini now. Yes, I picked one up last week for a little work, and boy is Rawhide dog slow with 256MB of RAM (from gdm login to it being usable, about 4:30, seems rather inane). OS X actually seemed a bit more usable. GNOME or KDE runs horribly on such a machine, but it seems mighty usable over SSH. Otherwise, everything just worked. A more comprehensive report will be around soon.

Ubuntu
Turns out that I got to work alongside Simon Sharwood, a tech journalist type-fellow. So he wrote a couple of articles: Ubuntu plans desktop raid and Ubuntu Linux backer tackles colloboration. Caveat emptor is with multi-arch support now, though I’m told all this is getting fixed, the right way.

Life
Spending time recovering for the crazyness that’s been my life for a while. With a semi-flu, and just the complete feeling of being tired, the doctor has recommended Alertonic Elixir. Keeping in mind I hardly have prescription drugs, this is about the first I’ve had in years. A lot of time being spent with S., and her family (make that extended family), and boy is the Hakka passing around not going down well with me; half the time, I’m lost in conversation.

Gave a talk at LUV titled: The Last Two Weeks of My Life. Just a general summary of lca, and UbuntuDownUnder for the folk that couldn’t go. This surprisingly went on for a little over fourty-five minutes, and I was a little shocked (seeing that I wrote the talk on the train ride there). Paul Sladen was a guest of honor, so to speak - he rocked up by surprise; I hope he got accomodation somewhere that night.

Sladen, eating ice-cream with chop sticks

Your Rights Online
Michael Geist writes about the great firewall of China. Having spent enough time there with a crazy firewall, you learn interesting tricks. Always have a SOCKS5 proxy available for web browsing, at a foreign server. It helps if your server is colo’ed in Hong Kong, because China’s Internet links to there are usually good. Having your box hosted where the tracerts will suck, will be painful at best.

And if you think I had a happy Easter, I didn’t. It sucked. In short, I’m a free man now. Really, really free. I guess its supposedly nice to have just a female best friend around. I finished Season One of One Tree Hill as well. Guess I now know what it feels like to be despondent. And after the few days of fasting, celibacy is looking brighter and brighter.

Fedora/ppc
Seth has always been a good man, and now there are even more PPC packages available. Please look at the build logs of failures. So this has really been an exercise in expanding my BASH shell scripting skills… Come test2, I’ll do a mass rebuild with mach and the “actual buildsystem”, so that we can wade thru possibly weird issues. Also wanting to do things over NFS, as the build box needs more space… (bigmac not so big after all!).

OOo
OOo2 and its java dependencies seem to be a hot topic at newsforge. Where he got the idea that I lead, I don’t know. A more useful article is on the reinvention of Progeny - an OSS company, startup even, that survived the .com crash. Nice read, with common business sense information sitting there. And rather unrelated, but How to start a start up is a great read.

Firefox search plugins
Mozilla search plugins are cool. I’ve always just used the Google one, but I guess I felt the need to change it to use Google Australia by default now. The eBay one works well for eBay Australia too. Added the IMDB, CDDB, Wikipedia (somewhat broken), and the Bible (NIV). On Fedora Core, you’ll run into add engines not working (RHBZ#134701).

Anyways, I tried to access the search rhbz via google and it didn’t work (site not accessible), so I ended up writing my own. RHBZ Firefox search plugin is now available for download, as is the source. It was only later that thl pointed me to this - all the RH Bugzilla stuff you need. Gah.

/etc/motd
“When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” –Maurice Maeterlinck
Does anyone know of an intelligent random signature generator that will pipe well for Evolution to use? Or is writing one my only hope?

So it was nice to see Coastguard from Cybersource. Using IceWM, Knoppix, and Firefox for all its functionality, which involves Internet banking. FWIW, I bank with several banks (ING, ANZ, Commonwealth), and they all seem to work well on my Linux box running Firefox. Granted I have the Java plugin, I’ll have to try it at some stage with the Java integrated stuff in Fedora to see if it’ll just work.

Fedora/ppc
So, more things are entering Extras. Take a look at what Repoview has to show you. General slow-down is that packages with dependencies need to have their dependencies met, so that takes some manual massaging. We’re down to about 70 unbuilt packages because of dependencies, and about 93 failing builds on ppc (which is the reason we have unbuilt packages, mostly).

Package maintainers, take a look at the failed build-logs, fix your packages, and lets get ‘em rebuilding (might be worthwhile to check and see if i386 fails as well first before beating your head).

For all Mac Mini fans, the Installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Mac Mini guide is a pretty good one. IIRC, sound still doesn’t work, so play OFPong instead :)

Stuff
Otherwise, while surfing the web, I noticed the Clemson Linux Initiative. Its got nice howto’s for laptop’s, and getting them to work with FC3. The Fedora HCL could definitely get a boost with links to interesting things like this, IMHO.

Now, to go get debauched for the weekend.

I’ve been sick with splitting, massive headaches, for the past couple of days. So I spent most of yesterday in bed. And today, I’ve taken on watching One Tree Hill, and am down 6 16 episodes. Sorry Warren, I haven’t started on Battlestar Galactica. I finally also finished reading Cryptonomicon, after several months of carrying it around with me. Yesterday, we caught Hating Alison Ashely; it was quite bad, so do skip it.

Malaysia
In Microsoft’s monthly offering of “Why Windows is better than Linux for the enterprise”, they’ve got more FUD about Milinux Networks expanding their market reach by using commercial software. So, it seems that commercial success can only be gotten with Microsoft, and they even cite Red Hat changing its business model. And they say that RHL has no more bugfixes, security updates, etc… that they need to provide it - well, howdy ho, lots of RHL users migrated to RHEL, wasn’t that good enough? Read the thread at myoss.

IBM sees Malaysia as the fastest growing Linux adopter in the ASEAN region.

And for a little bit more alarming news, it seems the government of Malaysia might only be standardising on Novell SuSE Linux now. pclow explains a bit about it, and I’d like to chase it up with folks at Bytecraft, Asix (c’mon Ditesh!), and the rest of the companies…. that were once standing behind RH, but now ditched it for Novell/SLES.

Fedora Extras/ppc
With great help from Seth on IRC, and his useful post, mach now runs on ppc, and Extras ppc32 is building now for FC4 test1 (albeit with dwmw2’s scripts). I haven’t gotten around to getting the build scripts that Seth has working well and automated for me just yet. To set mach up, follow Seth’s instructions (rebuild mach on your arch), then add your user to the mach group. And the history dump should be all you need to see if mach works. Don’t forget to have fedora-development-ppc in /etc/mach/dist.d as well.

So I present to you, extras/development/ppc. They are unsigned, because I lack a signing key, they’re semi-incomplete, because of packages that have deps that didn’t build, but the aims are to get them fixed soon. I’m now your ppc human buildsystem (or should that be bigmac, which goes on chugging away).

ICDL
I proposed getting the International Computer Driving License Linux-ified a while back. Linux-aus, education officer and what not. It seems that Canonical finally came through, and the Learn Linux people should be getting such work done. Nice.

FC4/ppc test1
Waah. Fedora Core 4 test1 has been baked on PPC, and will be installable for all of you. *grin* I should update the notes, because the boot.iso method is still required, but this time iirc, the eject stuff should work (ala you don’t require a pin). And there’s no more breaking into a console and running stuff. X generally works, but if you see issues with anaconda not detecting the proper X config during startup, try the resolution=1024×768 for example to see if things magically work.

RHEL 4 launch
Thursday was the RHEL4 launch in Melbourne. I don’t know why I go, but I can say the breakfast at least, was good. Oh wait, I remember, I go there as the Fedora spy. I like the way RHEL4 has been described: “Shared base technology, all open source, matured by the Fedora Project”. That was on the official RH slides, afaik. However, what was said is always another question.

“The 2.6 kernel was chosen some 6 months ago by competitors, and in my view it was a grave mistake because we didn’t think the 2.6 line was ready - 2.6.9 was what worked for us,” stated the chief of engineering in Brisbane. Really? I don’t think a lot of the kernel people would agree; I always thought that you couldn’t push a 2.6 kernel to RHEL3, and by default, you waited to launch RHEL4 (and you didn’t want to do that before FC-3 came out).

“Fedora is a testing bed for RHEL,” he continues. Next he goes on to mention that ever 3-4 months there’s a release (I think we’ve been pretty consistient at a 6-month release, awaiting gnome/ooo/other-major-apps releases), its a roll-forward project that guarantees to break backward compatibility (really?), and is good for R&D only, never for deployment.

I know I’ve got the fedora traffic stuff on my plate for the week, but if there’s one thing I’ll try to do before the next FESCO meeting (i.e. throughout the week), I am going to kickstart Fedora Marketing. I’ve said this before, but was travelling and too drained of energy, but its going to happen. Really.

Life
Bought a pink-colored iPod Mini. With its sweet 18-hour battery life, its an amazing little toy. Plugged it in, loaded songs to it, and then realised that it was a hfs-based partition. *groan* Normally I’d have no problem with that (my iPod is hfs based), but this is for the girl, so vfat seemed more appropriate; so a format and conversion later, its time to re-load songs on. Why doesn’t Apple just ship these things with vfat?

For future knowledge, if making a milk bath, and google’ing for recipes, don’t bother. 1KG of full cream milk powder, running hot water, and about 4 cans of whipped cream is all you need. Though if you spread the cream on the water, it tends to look a little dirty - so make sure its on the sides of the tub or something. Caught Saved! which I could recommend if you weren’t too overwhelmed by the entire religion thing.

Oh and if you ever get to see Paul singing karaoke, its really good. That song is one he does really, really, really, well! Though I always thought it went, “oh pretty dears” when he sang it, but I could’ve heard wrongly.

• Touched a bit of MorphOS and finding it rather amazing, speed-wise. Very unlike Linux, there’s no terminal, etc.. But its fast. Pity there are around 2,000 users or so.
• Kicked off a Fedora/ppc install. Graphical display still doesn’t come up on the iMac, so its still linux text for me. Think I fixed some gtk warnings in anaconda (we’ll see if pjones commits them). Yesterday’s install failed since it lacked libgcc-4. Today’s install went a lot better - everything got installed, it took the iMac some hours to get there. No requirement to run the magic mkofboot at the end, or even yabootconfig - the installation is pretty much plug & play. And there’s pretty Eclipse and OOo 1.9 in Rawhide now as well, so I’d encourage you all to give it a go. Interested OOo testers should find Fedora/rawhide or even Core 4 test1 something viable to poke around with - very upstream OOo style, hasn’t been Bluecurve’d yet.
• Had a good dinner two nights ago at an amazing Chinese restaurant - lobster noodles, pork, fish, scallops, prawns. Yeah. Studies have started, and thats normal classes and so on - of interest is Computer Graphics where I’m doing some OpenGL stuff, and another where I’d be writing lots of parsers. There’s also going to be financial modelling, which has always fascinated me. Looks like a heavy C-based semester.