Archive for April, 2006
Watching the Sails
Thursday, April 13th, 2006A Lover’s Kiss
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
Boston Bridge
Monday, April 10th, 2006
Waiting For The Summer
Monday, April 10th, 2006
Airports suck
Saturday, April 8th, 2006Airports suck. Big time. I’ve been sitting at the airport for about 4 hours now. First it seems like every flight is delayed. OK, that happens, bad day. Fine. So I waited the extra 30 minutes before boarding. Then the extra 30 minutes when it took them that long to bring a wheelchair for a disabled passenger. Guess where the wheelchair was? About 3 minutes away, slow walking. Then we boarded the plain and commenced to wait another 30 minutes after being told we will depart shortly. After waiting the pilot announced that apparently there was a problem with the oxygen system on the plane and it’ll take another 2 hours to diagnose it. Diagnose it?! And then what? Another 48 hours to fix it?
Over all of that the wifi connection in the airport isn’t free. OK, it’s $8, I’d pay that to be able to spend these 4 hours productively. Guess what? With 3 tries to pay the goddamn provider, I still could do it. Every time I submit my credit card details the connection times out after 5 minutes of waiting. I just hope to god that they didn’t triple charge me for half an hour of frustration and nothing more. How do these guys still stay in business?
I need a way to sue them or something.
</rant>
FUDCon Boston
Saturday, April 8th, 2006This Friday I presented at FUDCon Boston about Eclipse in Fedora. My presentation was first thing in the morning, so I barely made it on time. Also the highest resolution I managed to get on the projector was 640 by 480, felt like I was back in ’92 or something. The presentation went pretty well I think, had a bunch of good question. And one person came over and told me about a particular problem he had with Webtools with our Eclipse, for which he apparently filed a bug, so now we have to look at that one 
. Unfortunately I didn’t get to do a demo, because at that resolution you could barely see anything in Eclipse. I also didn’t manage to make a screencast the night before, all the screencast tools died on me. Wink didn’t work with libstdc++.6.so. Istanbul took 100% CPU when recoding, which is something that’s reserved to Eclipse, so no go.
The conference itself was great. I got to meet a whole lot of people, some of whom I sort of met on IRC before. A lot of redhatters, a lot of other fedora-folk. It was very impressive to see so many people at once who are passionate about open source and about Fedora in particular. Very inspiring.
The presentations were interesting. One session with Jeremey Katz was about FC6. Everyone brainstormed about what should be included, the length of the development cycle, and when test releases should be. Cool. Another session talked about sound in Linux. Apparently Red Hat hired the speaker (whose name I can’t remember unfortunately) to make the situation with sound better. Frankly I didn’t know it was really bad, but I’m not a sound guy anyway. The guy seemed to be very knowledgeable and was a very entertaining presenter. Unfortunately I missed most of the presentation that Seth Vidal gave about Yum, but that got compensated by a great presentation by Ann Margulies, executive director of MIT’s OpenCourseware program. This presentation was really inspiring, not least because many universities from around the world are starting to join MIT in this program, opening up their lecture materials for everyone to see. I think this is a great initiative and I’m going to see if there’s any way we can start something like this at U of T. Why should we be the only ones that suck?
The last presentation was the State of Fedora adress by Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg. This wasn’t as much a presentation as a discussion with audience participation about the future of Fedora, and who are the people who are going to make it happen. There was some inevitable discussion of the Fedora Foundation Affair, but that went more smoothly than I thought it would. This was a pretty interesting session overall. I think the Fedora community is growing larger and stronger bit by bit, and it’s always a pleasant feeling to be part of something that’s growing, and that looks like it’s going the right way.
Go Fedora!
Fedora on the Mac Book Pro
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006Having had a Mac Book Pro for about 2 weeks, I’ve been trying to get Fedora on it. Initially the reasoning was to get a live cd working (using Kadischi) and then hack anaconda to be able to install on to the Intel Macs. The biggest problem we had was to compile the Fedora kernel with the patches from the mactel-linux project.
Now that’s no longer needed. Today Apple released a firmware update that emulates BIOS in order to support their Windows install helper, Boot Camp. My first reaction was: OMG!
Right after that I tried to stick the Fedora Core 5 i386 install DVD and rebooted. The DVD got recognized as ‘Windows’ in the graphical boot menu, it then proceeded to boot the kernel, and start up anaconda. I had to quit it when it wanted to erase my hard drive because it was partitioned with GPT (GUID Partition Table). But now we have something much easier to work with.
Hurray!
Phishing sucker
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006Today for the first time I fell for a phishing attack. I now realize how vulnerable everybody actually is to phishing. I always considered that only suckers and very naive people fall for these things, I mean they are pretty obvious, aren’t they?
Yes and no. Although I’m semi-paranoid about my personal details and the security of my information, I managed to fall for one of these things. And it wasn’t even that amazingly done. So what happened? I’ve had a very stressful few days. Between work, getting ready for FUDCon on friday, an exam, and an assignment for the course I’m taking I haven’t gotten that much sleep. I’m pretty much going on automatic for a day or two. Something needs to be done, I do it. Things get thrown on the stack and I take them one by one and try to do them as quickly as possible. Great. How is this related?
This evening I got home from work and was planning on working on my presentation for FUDCon. I’ve already got some preliminary templates and some stuff planned out. I’ve also been planning to buy a computer-USB-cellphone cable to synch my phone contacts with my computer/email contacts. I’ve been looking on ebay and sending a whole bunch of messages to seller asking for answers. This evening I decided to look in my Junk folder to see if any of the replies went there because I didn’t get any. To my surprise some did. Great I read them and moved on. Then I briefly flipped through my other junk mail. I saw another email from an ebay member. Huh? The email was claiming that the member sent me the product and was waiting for my money.
Full stop.
What?
Since the past few days were really hectic I thought to myself did I accidentaly click Buy It Now somewhere? Quickly I clicked on the ebay link and typed in my password. Weird, why didn’t camino remember my password today? Bang, error page. Weird. Why didn’t ebay accept my password? I open up another browser window and go to www.ebay.com, type in the password. Smooth sailing.
Suddenly reality sets in. Crap. I went back to the first window and saw that they didn’t even mask the address bar with some JavaScript trick. That’s right. The address bar had a clearly non-ebay address. I’m glad that 2 or 3 weird events in a row made me realize my mistake and that I was able to login and change my password within 5 seconds of realizing it. Phew. Most people wont.