No Open Blockers

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but Fedora 11 (code named Leonidas) was released today. I spent most of the day watching Comcast spasm while the torrent ran downloading the i386 version (I’ll grab x86_64 tonight, I’m not screwing with ass slow Internet during work again), so by the time it was burnt and the upgrade finished, it’s now 10pm.

So far though, the upgrade has gone well. The calendar plugin for Thunderbird seems to have lost all of my calendars which pretty much bites my ass, but let’s be honest, my life really isn’t all that interesting that my calendar was packed. I still haven’t gotten the fingerprint authentication working yet, but to be fair I never had it working so that’s not a regression. Otherwise, I just have the general clean feeling you get from using updated software.

Grab the ISOs at Fedora’s project site. If you grab the Live CD, you don’t need to install anything to try it out, just put the CD in and boot from it. So at very least, you can quickly see what you’re missing before reverting back to whatever bad operating system decision you insist on making.

I ordered the replacement video card for my MythTV box–

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I could have ordered a cheap replacement card for the Myth box. All it really needs to do is output to DVI, nothing fancy. The alternative is to take my video card from my gaming rig and move that to the Myth box, providing a reason to upgrade my gaming rig. That’s way more expensive, but I was careful to just tell the wife “I ordered a replacement video card.” I never said if I was using a cost optimal solution.

Where was I… oh ya, so I ordered a new video card yesterday at lunch. It arrived today at lunch. For no extra charge. When science perfects instant teleportation of objects, Newegg is going to raise the bar by just guessing at what hardware you need and sending it before you realize you need it.

Last week I was catching up on some shows I recorded on my MythTV box (essentially a computer made into a home made Tivo) when the picture just disappeared. When I rebooted, it didn’t even show the BIOS, so I figured the video card died. I built the box back in 2004 and it’s always on, so it actually had a really good run.

While I’m waiting for the replacement card to arrive from newegg.com, I decided to take the existing card out, make sure the fan still spun, and reseat it back into the motherboard. It was worth a shot.

The inside of the box itself was a disaster. I try to air dust my desktops about once a month, but apparently I’m behind on this one. I tried to take a picture, but it doesn’t do it justice. I’ll simply point out that there is a dead spider inside.

Whenever I’m dealing with a piece of hardware that doesn’t work, I inevitably turn it around in my hands looking for… well, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not an engineer, so short of seeing smoke coming from a part, no amount of physical inspection has ever yielded results.

This time was a bit different. Take a look at the second column of cylinders on the card below. I don’t know what they are or what they do, but I’m pretty sure the tops aren’t supposed to be blown out like that. The one closest to the camera even had what looked like ash coming out of it.

Might be time to plug in some of the fans I disabled to make the box run quieter.

And as a public service announcement, airdust your computer. It will love you for it.

any joy on reproducing?

I sit in a number of non-Spacewalk/Satellite chat rooms at work. This was just seen in a conversation in one of those rooms discussing… well, to be honest, I don’t actually care what bug they were talking about. Taken out of context is way funnier.

...
// Now we filter out an 
List retval = new LinkedList();
...

Shit. Ok, so it’s not too much code after that to see what the filtering is doing, but the comment still left me hanging.

A coworker sent out the following link to the Spacewalk mailing list.

Vim Recipes

Don’t know what Vim is? Google it, I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it and Emacs yet. After you’ve googled it, install it. Yes, they have a Windows version.

Rather than being a straight user guide, it’s more of a guide on how to do useful shit in Vim. I took to Emacs keys much more easily (to the point that I remapped IntelliJ to use the common ones), but I’m really trying to force myself to get better with Vim. The recipes guide reads much better than any of the other tutorials I’ve looked into for Vim and has already shown me a number of useful tips.

For instance, the one thing that has always bothered me about Vim was how many steps it takes to save a file. I’m the kind of person who instinctively saves whatever I’m working on every time I stop to think. I’ve lost too much time by fat fingering something and closing the window without saving. In Emacs, that’s a very quick sequence:

Ctrl-x, Ctrl-s

It may look a little weird, but after using Emacs for 10 minutes, an easy key stroke to mindlessly use. In Vim, it takes a few more steps:

Esc  (to exit insert mode)
:w
i  (or a, to enter insert mode again so I can, ya know, actually type something)

That’s a lot of movement around the keyboard for something I do several times a minute (I stop to think a lot). Page one of that recipes guide already showed a useful way around that:

Use [Ctrl]+o in Insert mode to switch to Normal mode for one command, then return to Insert mode. For example, [Ctrl]+o gqas enters Normal mode, reformats the current sentence, then returns you to Insert mode.

In other words, it eliminates both the need to press escape as well as having to explicitly enter back into insert mode. So my mindless save now looks like:

Ctrl+o
:w

Much nicer. Even if that was all I picked up from the guide, it’d have been well worth it.

I won’t go into more specifics, but I was able to easily find information on repeating commands. I tend to use a lot of dividers in my text files, so being able to quickly generate 60 hyphens as a section header was a sore spot when learning Vim after Emacs. I’m also a big fan of temporary macros to repeat a sequence of changes, which I’m still figuring out how to do in Vim.

Eventually I want to write a bit more of a general introduction blog on Vim and Emacs (where I may explain the religious war between the two) in hopes I can convince my students to learn a real text editor (no, Wordpad doesn’t count and you ask for help while using Notepad, I’m docking your grade). I can’t stress enough that at some point in your career you will find yourself on some form of Linux/Unix/Solaris box where at least being able to navigate and edit text in Vi is pretty much required knowledge.

For a few reasons now, I’ve had ISOs (basically a one file archive of the contents of a CD; see wikipedia for more details.) on my machine that I wanted to use without burning them to a CD. For instance, I have a few versions of RHEL that I wanted to grab packages from or, more recently, the need to install the beta builds of Satellite 5.3.

The cool part is that it can be mounted the same way a local disk or a network share is. If you’re not familiar with the term, mounting is where you take a file source (local partition, shared network directory, or in this case an ISO file) and assign it a directory on your local machine. Whenever you access that directory, it will use the underlying file source you’ve specified. So rather than making a big distinction between the physical location of your files (for instance, C: v. D: v. Network Share or whatever it’s called), you can just work with files and directories and not really care where they are physically located.

The same mount executable is used for all of the above scenarios. The particular flags for mounting an ISO are as follows:

mount -o loop <file.iso> <mount-point>

The argument “file.iso” should be pretty self-explanatory, it’s simply the ISO you’re mounting. The mount point is a directory you’ve created ahead of time. So to mount the Satellite 5.3 beta image I brought home with me from Raleigh, it was as simple as:

mkdir /mnt/sat530
mount -o loop Satellite-5.3.0-re20090529.0-i386.iso /mnt/sat530

Once I hopped over to the /mnt/sat530 directory I was able to navigate around the files just like if they were normal files on my filesystem. Sweet.