codergeek42

With the recent clamour over Nautilus' default spatial-paradigm navigation mode as the default in Fedora, I decided to take a page from the book of David Nielsen and force myself to use spatial mode for a few solid days (at least). Having been a "Browser" user mostly of habit since I first started with Linux in 2003, I want to know first-hand why this decision is making so many people upset.

I'll report back soon with my findings! :)

One of the simple reasons I love F/OSS so much is that - in general- It Just F***ing Works(tm). Today, for the first time in as long as I can remember using it, this has failed me quite miserably.

Part of my gift this year to all of my friends this year is an audio CD - a custom compilation of various holiday-themed music. One thing I'd love to be able to do is add CD-Text to the tracks, so that their players (if capable) as well as their computer - should they choose to import it so - will easily have the metadata already in-place, and the tedium of having to enter that information manually from the decoratively printed track-list is substantially eliminated.

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!

I just spent slightly over 200 USD in the online purchases of various gifts for family and friends, and in the process consumed nearly the entirety of my coffee fund for the next couple of months. Aww, well - I'm going to have a nice stash of Christmas presents for people this year, along with some home-made stuff (since I really didn't do anything last year in terms of gift-giving); so it will be well worth it. :)

So, over the weekend my parents and I decided to head out of town for a bit, mostly on a whim. We came back to find that only about a fifth of our house's electricity worked: random outlets around the house gave us just enough for essentials: refrigerator/freezer, microwave, stove, some lights, one TV, and a couple of extra outlets for plugging in our mobile phones and other rechargeable portable electronics - and this was after being clever with the use of some extension cords. Apparently, one of the two main bus fuses to our house had literally cracked open due to the weather and the natural wear and tear of its nearly 20 years of loyal service to my family.

We were soon able to get the city's electric company to fix it all up nicely (and replace some of our outdated power cabling in the process); but this is such an antiquated part that it needed to be special-ordered. We ended up spending the past half-week or so just living on what we could power, and that amounted trying to stay out of the house much: dining at local restaurants and going out shopping or to the library, etc. It did give me much reading time though, so I finally finished Deathly Hallows. (!) When we were at home, there wasn't much to be done other than talk and read, or play Sūdoku on our phones, et al. (While I enjoy this abounding of quality family time, it just goes to show how much we've vested technology into the very fabric of our lives.)

Anyway, now that I'm back online, I see I've got a whole slew of updates to bake for my various Fedora packages. I promise I'll get to those soon but I'm going through them as quickly as I can (and this Midori build failure is still driving me nuts...) - please be patient! I should have them all bumped and building by the weekend, assuming no other show-stoppers.

I've also got a solid 2300 new emails to sift through too. Evolution's filters help significantly, but it's still a mess sometimes. :( It eems that no matter how much I love it, technology and I just can't seem to get along quite right most of the time. Sadness...

(Oh, and L'arc~en~Ciel's new single album, "Nexus 4 / Shine" is AWESOME. Let it be so known!)

Thanks to Colin Walters, Empathy should now automagically take care of the MC profile renaming upon startup.

Well, it will...once Koji is back up. The changes are tagged in CVS and simply need to be built. :)

Posted this to the development mailing list; but the more I post it the more people will see it... :)

Hi, all.

The Mission Control profiles in the telepathy-haze-mission-control package were originally created manually based on the Jabber/XMPP profile to allow Telepathy-using applications to support the basics of libpurple's more common protocols: AIM/ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! IM.

However, these are getting rather stale and upstream Empathy already has nicely-working profiles for Haze (with more protocol support than the old subpackage). So, in an effort to more closely track upstream's code and profiles (therefore slightly reducing the package maintenance work), I have committed and am now building new telepathy-haze and empathy
packages that use Empathy's profiles instead of manually-created ones.

These should hit tomorrow's rawhide but unfortunately it means that the profiles have been renamed. I have included a script named "upgrade-haze-profiles.sh" (installed as documentation) with Empathy that automagically fixes this on a per-user basis; but this script needs to be run manually.

(Come to think of it, we may need to add this as a minor upgrade-related fix in the Release Notes...)

Thanks, and happy hacking.

So my brother and I recently splurged on some new toys, and they have since been reason for my general lack of availability over the past week or so...




Along with Wii Sports, they've kept us pretty busy. 8)

I'm shamelessly stealing this sciathan_file...

Send me about with my camera!

Ask me to take a picture of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about - it can be anything from the house I live in to my favorite books, etc. Leave your choice here as a comment, and I will reciprocate by taking the pictures and posting them as an LJ entry. That way you get to know a little bit about my life. =]

As many around me have probably noted, I've been extremely busy with my new job and get-togethers with friends/family over the past week or so; and I've thus not had much time recently to devote to Fedora hacking. There have been prior times too where I've just up and vanished from the 'Net for several days at a time.

However, the comaintainers of my packages have gladly kept my various packages updated and working nicely in my stead. I'd like to give special recognition, then, to the following couple of maintainers who've been of great personal help in this regard:

Brian Pepple, aside from the awesome work he does on his own for the Fedora Project in many ways, has kept Empathy and other aspects of the Telepathy stack updated when I am otherwise preoccupied. Thanks very much!

Mamoru Tasaka, who consistently helps me squash nasty bugs in the WebKit stuff and in keeping it up-to-date. どうもありがとうございます！

Hmm. I had been tweaking my mail server's junk filter recently and inadvertently made it too strict, it seems. Unfortunately I have it set to auto-delete anything older than a few days and only rarely do I check it for false positives.

I believe it is now fixed. So if you sent me an email within the past week or so and were expecting a reply but never received one, please re-send it. Thanks!

Ya acabo de ver la película «Big Buck Bunny», y ¡me gustó tanto!

Esta película habla de un conejito gigante (y guapo) que acaba de despertarse de una siesta. Después, ve una bella mariposa volando cerca de él. Pero él no sabe que un ratón y sus compañeros le darán mucha pena. Ellos la matan y sus acciones le dan al conejito ganas de vengarla. (No diré más...para que ¡la vean y se sorprendan! :)

La película no es larga (más bien es un poco corta), pero me importa porque es completamente de Contenido Abierto. Con toda la película se permite modificar y compartir (para ganar dinero, si quiere) con la única condición que tendrá que incluir los créditos en la manera apropriada. (Hagan el favor de leerla en su página web.)

Ahora tengo tantas ganas de abrazarlo (al conejito). ¡Que lindo es!

(Editado para corregir algunas cositas. ¡Gracias al usuario anónimo!)

File dialogs do not automatically update to reflect new drives, such as inserted USB thumbdrives and similar. Fail, Microsoft. Epically.

So, we finally got a couple of digital converter boxes for our TVs, with intent to get a big-screen HD setup in our living room, and that means getting cable soon too. (Sweet!) Even without that cable, the digital picture is so much nicer quality. Sure, there's the second or two of pause when changing channels to buffer, but the superb (SD only, but still quite excellent) picture clarity, electronic channel guide, and increased programming variety make up for that entirely.

Also, AT&T have notified us that our DSL line speed - both directions - should double by Tuesday night. So it will be a full 3 Mbit/sec downstream and 768 Kbit/sec upstream. This will definitely help with the watching of copious anime (...and of course, package-maintenance with large data files, such as Tremulous).

My secondary hard drive - which I was using for backups (queue the irony) and general storage - died on me over the past couple of days. Unfortunately, that was also the drive on which I kept my Virt Manager images. So until I get a replacement, I'm afraid I'll be unable to triage any F-9/rawhide bugs (since my machine is running F-8).

I'm also going to be gone for the next week (on the other side of the country) so I won't be able to replace that until about the weekend after I get back.

I apologize for any inconvience this may cause but hardware has a way of disagreeing with me at the most inopportune times. =(

Oh well, C'est la vie...See you all in a week!

I recently noticed this little gem post on Planet GNOME.

This is outstanding news. Congratulations to the WebKit developers on their hard work and continued accomplishments!

Eric Christensen asks, "What [new] language should I learn?" I’ll throw in my two cents...or in this case, my two foreign languages. :)

As a good half of my family (maternal side) are of Spanish descent, it was only practical that I [formally] studied it for four years of high school. Actually, Spanish was my first language; but then I started going to school for more than a a decade in English-only and the Spanish stuff apparently bitrotted into the back of my brain somewhere. I spent the first semester of high school basically remembering instead of learning new material, which started soon thereafter.

Then again, the simple fact that I did have so much available practice outside of school is certainly responsible, if at least indirectly, for why I was able to learn so much of it relatively quickly.

Now, though, I’m extremely comfortable with it and aside from some regional-/cultural-specific vocabulary quirks, I can (and do) happily hold verbal and written conversations with those for whom it is their native - or sometimes - only language.

Spanish is an extremely practical language to learn if you do a lot of international traveling, as well. According to Wikipedia’s entry, Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, the second most widely used language in the United States, and the third most common language worldwide (both on the Internet and by speaking population). Granted, there are a variety of dialects to it, as there are most (all?) other languages; but their differences tend to be minor, with the same essential grammar and phonetic usage, usually just differing in some specific vocabulary.

Thanks to its Latin-based etymological roots as a romance language, it becomes significantly simpler to learn to communicate in other similar languages (such as French, Italian, et al.) once you master the essentials of Spanish.

The writing system is all phonetic, too; and is not very difficult to learn since it is essentially a superset of the Latin/Roman alphabet: some vowels get the acute accent diacritic (´), and there is the ñ ("eñe") character. That’s about it. ;-)

(Okay, okay...technically there are also the "ch" and "ll" digraphs; but those are treated as letter pairs for collation and other purposes.)

If you’re wanting to learn a language just for the fun and interest of it, however, I recommend you stretch your mind of its comfort zone. Try Japanese! I’m currently taking an introductory course and while I can’t honestly say that it is easy, I can promise that I am enjoying it greatly. Its writing system (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji) and grammar (with which culture is intertwined quite heavily) are so vastly different from English and other Romance/European languages that it forces one to think more abstractly and not just translating words and grammar; but translating the raw intention or meaning of it.

The two sets of Kana (entirely phonetic) are rather simple, actually. It just takes a lot of patience and even more practice. The Kanji, on the other hand, often have complex stroke patterns and - more often than not - many possible pronunciations (so-called "readings"). Even these are not difficult with diligent study, however! (I find flash-cards for these to be INCREDIBLY helpful.) Normally these readings are based upon usage of the Kanji.

For example, the character 人 is pronounced ひと ("hito") when simply being used as “person;” but is read as じん ("jin") when being used to describe nationality, and as にん ("nin") when being used as a counter for numbers of people.

• あの人（ひと）…
  (Romaji: "ano hito...")
  That person...


• 私はアメリカ人（じん）です。
  (Romaji: "watashi wa amerika-jin desu.")
  I am an American.


• そこに三人（さんにん）がいます。
  (Romaji: "soko ni san-nin ga imasu.")
  Three people are there (lit., exist in that place).

Also, Japanese grammar is, as far as we’ve learned, extremely regular. One does not need to be concerned with gender- or subject-based conjugation as with other languages; and there are essentially three categories of verb conjugation: "-ru" （〜る）verbs, "-u"（〜う）verbs, and "-suru" （〜する）verbs. Then there is 来る ("kuru," to come [towards]) which is otherwise the only irregular verb in the entire language. Quite pragmatic.

It’s definitely a bit odd at first that there are specific conjugations and inflections for cultural aspects (e.g., polite/formal vs. plain form), and there are some exceptions to most things (for example, 二人 is read ふたり, "futari" instead of ににん, "ni-nin") but they tend to be few and far between, and all-in-all (from what I’ve learned so far) it’s quite an interesting language!

I suppose Mandarin Chinese, with its similar writing system and tone colors in pronunciation would also be an interesting venture; but I think Japanese is more practical because then one can watch anime and read manga more readily.

I now will retire to my email-checking. I bid you adieux...

[This is not Fedora-related in ANY way...]

As you may know, my good friend sciathan_file has begun holding writing challenges. (They're fun!) So, without further ado, I present my first submission!

Challenge: The Inanimate Object Speaks!
Deadline: February 3rd, 2008
Length: 376
Fandom: None...but it's a bit nerdy.
[PDF] Download: Sentience

I wrote it in the span of about two days over the past week or so, but since then it hasn't changed much. (That is, my first draft became my final draft, minus some wording fixes here and there.) I think it's a bit too short, to be honest, but after that it seemed like anything extra would be more "fluff" than actual content.

Also, the formatting seemed essential for parts of it, so I kept it as a PDF since my HTML-fu is really not what it used to be. (Just for ease, I'll probably do similar with other submissions.) Also, knowing my name (Peter) will help you...well I don't give away too much. Go read it! ^_^