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! :)

Recently, Fedora turned 5 years old; and Google turned 10! How I have missed such awesome passings until now is probably due to schoolwork and job-hunting. (Or it could be due to sheer laziness.) The numbers on the Red Hat news page are quite astonishing:

• "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.

Edit: Changed text referencing Statistics wiki page; was misinterpreted in the original post. (Thanks, simo!)

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. :)

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！

Just installed Fedora 8 yesterday and it's incredible. PulseAudio, simpler SELinux and firewall configuration, IcedTea Java stuff, CodecBuddy, to name but a few - simply amazing. Even the default background changes gradient depending on the time of day: from a blueish hue to a warm orange at nightfall. It's the little things like that which show the attention to detail and effort put into the distribution as a whole.

Absolutely outstanding. Sure, there's a minor EXA bug and some mono/multilib breakage...but then again, EXA is still deemed somewhat experimental by the X people, and multilib has always caused much pain; so I suppose these are to be expected.

A huge "Thank you!" to all the Fedora developers, infrastructure hackers, package maintainers, contributors, art/design people, translators - everyone. We've put out another fantastic release. :-D