codergeek42

For various reasons I am again moving my blog and whatnot, but this time to a far more permanent solution: my own domain name (which I've had for quite some time, but have used almost entirely for email only).

I intend to keep my LJ account active, but mainly for the purposes of staying updated on various friends-only postings and being able to comment/etc.

You should go check it out!

Well, this is proving to be far more difficult than I thought it would be. Rhythmbox, my favorite music player, currently just does not support this functionality, though it is under development. I've also tried Banshee, which uses Brasero for its CD-burning functionality, and that also fails quite epically. Next up in my attempts was K3b, which correctly burned the CD, did not add the CD-Text as I wanted it to. (It would not display any metadata in Rhythmbox on my Fedora desktop, and also failed on both my stand-alone CD player and my mom's Windows XP machine with both iTunes and WMP.) Lastly, I searched on Google and found a way to do it with cdrdao, but that attempt also went quite unsatisfactorily:

Writing lead-in and gap...
ERROR: Write data failed.
ERROR: Writing failed.

Oh Great Lazyweb, is there a straightforward way to accomplish this feat? Or am I doomed to copy the songs to my dad's PC and burn them with Nero (which I really don't want to need to do...)? For the record, my burner is a Pioneer DVR-110D.

Thanks!

...You are awesome!

You made my Evolution filtering work properly again, which is a huge necessity for my being productive. You are hereby added, again, to the list of people to whom I owe both a gigantic hug and a drink of their choice, at the very least, should we ever meet in person. Thanks for making my life a little simpler and a lot more readily organized!

Regards,
A Grateful Peter
 

Apparently much of southern California was once again ablaze today, but this time it seemed almost as if the end of the world was nigh for a while. All of the ash and smoke from the flames turned our beautiful blue sky into an ugly orange-ish red hue for several hours earlier. We even had our A/C turned on full-blast for much of the day, solely to help keep out the pungent stench that we inevitably inhaled upon opening any of our doors or windows. Our cars had just been washed too, and now they're all covered in a fine gray blanket of ash and particulate.

Reports from friends say it came pretty darn close to us, too: there was especially quite a lot of traffic around the CSU, Fullerton area as people got out of Brea and Yorba Linda. :O

The following images were taken without altering my phone's camera settings in any manner; I merely pressed "Take Picture." This is truly how bleak it seemed. The first one is looking almost straight upward, and the second is looking to the east of my street - both only a few feet outside my front door.

On the Fedora side, a recent kernel update seemed to completely make Grub go ker-splat; but booting from the trusty LiveCD and running the grub-install script manually seems to have fixed it. Just to be sure (and to kill a bit of time instead of watching news about the fire earlier), I reinstalled Fedora 9 entirely and updated to today's builds, and the error does not persist.

That means it was a one-time fluke, or so it seems. Those are the worst sorts of bugs. :\

Soon thereafter, the two candidates were asked why their running mates would be the better president, should something unforeseen happen to either of these senators as president. Mr. McCain, when you were expounding on Governor Sarah Palin's good traits, you mentioned that she "resigned when she saw corruption." How is this a good thing? Running away from a problem is not the proper way to fix it.

While I don't feel that Obama's plan is entirely right (I'm in agreement with James Cape on this one), I do feel that he has much of it in the right direction: especially the aspects of it that encourage higher pay for better-performing teachers and requiring oft recertifications, with additional and updated training for those who fail these.

This contrasted well with Obama's Kennedy-like behavior: he presented himself as very confident and very prepared, with well-thought out plans of action and many statistical, anecdotal, and other reasons for why he believes his views to be correct. He held our eye-contact through his talking. When watching it, I just felt like Obama was almost talking to me directly; while on the other hand, McCain seemed to be talking only to the audience of that university hall.

If McCain wins this election, the American People will lose, and quite drastically. As Forrest Gump would say: "That's all I have to say about that."
 

[1] This is according to the population pyramid from the 2000 US Census, assuming a significant majority of those in the "20-24" group and above are eligible and registered to vote. \

[2] The CIA World Factbook 2008 gave 2007 estimates of about 78.1 years for life expectancy at birth, with males having it reduced slightly to about 75.3 years. The United Nations also put out a list average for the 2005-2010 expected period, with numbers in approximate agreement: 78.2 years at birth, reduced to 75.6 years for males.

As those who know me may know, my phone has been quite telephony-incapable for nearly the past week; but I finally got my replacement from Verizon earlier today and have finshed resetting my preferences and reloading some of my frequently used "Get It Now" apps (such as VZNavigator). I can actually stay in communication again!

Also, my battery seems to be slowing dying (getting quite warm, and barely holding a full-day charge, even in "standalone" mode), so I've taken the liberty of ordering an extended battery (and corresponding battery door replacement) from Amazon to replace it, which should be here by early next week. (I could have had it shipped and to me by Friday or before, but that would have been nearly an additional 26 USD in cost - more than half of the cost of the battery and door....so, yeah. Not wanting to do that.)

So, if you need to get in touch with me, I'm available by phone! 

Also, I've recently submitted Haze 0.2.1 for the Fedora 9-testing repository, after which it'll go stable in about a week or so. I've had this in Rawhide for quite a long time, and completely forgot to back-sync the version updates to prior distributions. (Alas, Haze 0.2.0+ has a lot of newer dependencies down the Telepathy stack, so Fedora 8 will probably stay at 0.1.4 until it goes EOL.)

I'm going to try to be more prudent with WebKit updates too, especially now that GIMP's help stuff (among others) are starting to use it quite heavily. I will make a strong effort to bump the packages in Rawhide every weekend or so (major/crasher bugs aside, of course).

At my college this morning there was a table near the student center building with a bunch of young Proposition 8 supporters attempting to rally passing students into voting yes. Thankfully, nearly all of the students that were asked are vehemently opposed to the proposition; and to make the experience even more fun, we (as a group) we're debating the proposition with the advocates until they got stumped on facts, multiple times. Of the main supporting advocates in attendance, two young men correctly identified the issue as one of Civil Rights. They then went on trying to equate it to slavery (!!) and - as you can imagine - it all went downhill from there.

Along the side of the table were taped signs that proclaimed things such as "Protect Marriage!" "Prop 8 = Free Speech" and "Prop 8 = Less Government." For one, how does restricting marriage (especially that between two people who deeply love each other) protect it? Secondly, what the FUCK does Free Speech have anything to with this? The proposed amendment reads as follows:

"Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Nowhere in this is Free Speech mentioned. Nowhere. Not once. Cluestick, anyone? Last, but not least, is the "Prop 8 = Less Government" spiel. Someone please explain something to me about that. Prop 8, if passed, would add (keyword!) government restrictions to marriage. How does adding to it make it less?!

In conclusion, HOW DAFT ARE YOU PEOPLE, SERIOUSLY?!

The pen may be "mightier than the sword," as is said; but the trained mind is far sharper.

• "More than 13,500 Fedora Account System members [...],"
• "About 6,500 total source packages in Fedora with more than 10,000 binary packages in the development branch," and
• "Over 550 volunteer representatives in Fedora’s global Ambassadors program."

I am excited to see the Fedora community so strong, and continuing to grow steadily. In fact, the Statistics wiki page shows many strong metrics figures. With Fedora 10 set to be released in November (and the Beta of which is slated for release tomorrow!), I am so thrilled to see so many people - not only using it - but contributing back to it and helping ensure that for each of their contributions, Fedora is that much improved. Keep up the great work, everyone!

On the Google side of things, It delights me to read about Google's official position on California Prop. 8:

"[...] While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love." (Emphasis mine.)

I am hopeful that, with such extensive support as theirs, along with that of Senators Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (among many others), this stupid proposition will fail miserably, and the State Supreme Court's prior ruling in In re Marriage Cases will be upheld. This would mean that same-sex couples in California who would like to marry have ample opportunity to do so without such daft and staunchly conservative-religious beliefs precluding them from it.

To whom it may concern:

Your attempted usage of "was like," "is like," and similar phrases consisting of a copular conjugation prepended to the word "like" is not a proper verbum dicendi. English has a myriad of ways to introduce a quotative clause, especially (though not limited to) transitive and ditransitive verbs involving speech such as (also not hereto limited) "to say," "to speak," "to tell," "to inform," and others. The english language is filled with different ways to express that someone said (or says, et al.) something: each with their appropriate and inherent variation in exact meaning or method by which that something is, was, or would be said.The language is there to more fully express oneself and more clearly define verbal actions. I suggest it be used as such.

Thank you.

I have the following as a reference for myself; but since it may be helpful to others, I've decided to post it here. This is a how-to based on the official F@H FAQ, but giving it its own user account for a bit tighter security.

Become the superuser ("root"):

$ su -

Add the user, and switch to its ID:

# useradd -d /opt/folding -c "Folding@Home user" -m --user-group foldinguser
# su - foldinguser

Download and unpack the F@H client stuff:

$ wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.02-Linux.tgz
$ tar xvzf FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Configure it, as necessary:

Switch back to root:

$ exit

Create the startup script

# echo "# chkconfig: 345 93 14" > /etc/init.d/folding
# echo "# description: will start FAH client as a service" >> /etc/init.d/folding
# echo "su - foldinguser -c \"cd /opt/folding; ./fah6 -smp -verbosity 9 </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &\"" >> /etc/init.d/folding
# chmod +x /etc/init.d/folding

Enable the startup-script and begin folding!

# chkconfig --add folding
# service folding start