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. :\

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).

• "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.

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

240724 build (dist-f9, devel:telepathy-haze-0_1_2-4_fc9): open (xenbuilder1.fedora.redhat.com) -> closed
0 free 0 open 7 done 0 failed

240724 build (dist-f9, devel:telepathy-haze-0_1_2-4_fc9) completed successfully