Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you furrowing your brows and sighing.
Eric Bana earns a commission on each horizontal advertisement displayed online.
Thank you.
Given the now defunct Red Hat Linux was the first GNU/Linux distribution I ever used (I bought a boxed version of it from Challenger in Funan Centre!), it was a bit of a nostalgia trip to see the Bluecurve icons in the Anaconda installer… I was using Red Hat Linux before Mac and FreeBSD! To save myself burning another CD I created a bootable USB key from a LiveCD following the easy instructions on the Fedora wiki.
I personally prefer the FreeBSD and Debian text installers, particularly when it comes to partitioning drives, but that probably has more to do with what I'm used to.
In keeping with the Red Hat tradition I remembered, Fedora ships with Gnome by default. I tend to switch between Gnome and Xfce on different machines, but for notebooks I find the flexible and easy to use Gnome networking tools put it ahead.
Debian and FreeBSD implement Gnome in a fairly vanilla way, but Fedora does things a bit differently which caught me off guard. Fortunately it didn't take long to rearrange the desktop to resemble what I was used to :).
I'm so thoroughly out of practise with RPM having got so used to pkgsrc, FreeBSD ports and Debian's apt-get that I took the easy way out and used gpk-application to install my apps. Curiously, Fedora 11 didn't install the Gnome Configuration Editor which I would have considered to be a core application, nor did it come with Gnome Games so I couldn't get my Python Sudoku and Tetravex freak on, but gpk-application made it easy to get them installed.
I haven't ever felt the need to use the infrared or Bluetooth with this ThinkPad X40 so I can't vouch for whether they work or not. What I can say though is the SD card slot recognised my data card, xorg mostly worked without problems (see below) and the Intel wireless card was detected and connected to a WPA network sooner than I could say our gibberish 64 character password.
Disappointingly, Fedora does have a small quirk that neither Debian or FreeBSD had. Whenever I bring the machine out of standby, the backlight refuses to come on. I can just make out the screen enough to fire up a Terminal and initiate a shutdown so it'll restart and the backlight will come back on, but it's a pain. This ThinkWiki page details a few kernel parameters to define in the grub configuration, but that only seemed to solve the problem for me sometimes.
Also, for some reason taking screenshots results in the same garbled mess as shown at the beginning of the post. This is probably an xorg problem, but it's also one that fresh installs of Debian and FreeBSD didn't have.
Aside from the standby issue, so far so good. I've got the OpenSolaris Nimbus theme installed for a change (look at that, my ThinkPad looks like the computers at uni!) and am finding it to be a productive environment to work in.
From my experience I reckon Fedora and Slackware with the Slackbook are the the closest any Linux distribution has come to the FreeBSD Handbook. Fedora's online documentation is excellent, and their wiki contains a ton of useful information.
I'm counting down the days until Fedora 12, here's hoping it irons out some of these bugs. I've got too much work and studying to do to chase them down myself!
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
The Aussie government seems to be going ahead with their plans for their MySchool website that will publish school marks and rankings. In an interview on Lateline I just watched, Julia Gillard assured us all league tables would not be generated. Unfortunately, she's wrong.
I think what she meant to say was the Australian Government would not be generating league tables. As Alex and I discussed on Twitter, put enough statistics and information online and someone will come along and make a mashup of it. As soon as this MySchool site goes online, it won't be a question of if league tables are generated with the published data by third parties, but when.
I really wonder sometimes if politicians in governments such as Australia's have any idea of the implications of their policies. Sometimes their actions make me wonder!
UPDATE: I’ve got this working, so despite this post being a day old it should be considered hysterical. I mean, historical. Freudian slip.
I’ll post in more detail as soon as I’m finished.
After staying back with FreeBSD 6.x on my ThinkPad X40 because of a [reported] problem with hardware acceleration in 7.0, I decided to throw in the towel today and try getting it running. Alas, there’s a quirk in the secondary IDE controller in some ThinkPad hardware that causes FreeBSD to hang on booting, and I still haven’t figured out a way around it!
ACHTUNG: don’t read this post if you’re not a boring nerd with spare time!
According to various newsgroups, the workaround is to disable the secondary IDE controller in the ThinkPad BIOS. This supposedly has no practical impact because there’s only one drive bay internally and external optical drives rely on a different controller. No worries.
Here’s the rub though: at the time IBM classified such tinkering as too advanced and removed access to it from the BIOS configuration screen. The only way you can change such settings is by running PS2.EXE which is their Configuration Utility (referred to as the CU from now on) from a crusty DOS boot disk.
So here’s what I did: I went to the Lenovo website and downloaded the CU. Rather than just giving me the required files in a simple archive, they were contained in a nasty DOS self extracting executable called UTTPFDOS.EXE. To make matters worse, you can’t just extract the files into a folder, you must provide the extractor with a blank floppy disk for it to use.
Neither my ThinkPad or my MacBook Pro have a floppy drive, so I booted Windows 2000 in VMware Fusion on my Mac, created a virtual blank floppy disk image for it to use and ran the self extracting executable thingy. I then copied the files from the virtual drive A: to a WinImage disk, then created a bootable ISO.
After burning the bootable ISO I attempted to boot the ThinkPad with it, but it completely ignored the disc after spinning for a few seconds. I burned another CD-R just to make sure, but got the same result.
I got to thinking: perhaps this CU wasn’t itself bootable but needs to be run from a bootable DOS disk. So I downloaded a copy of the excellent FreeDOS OS, edited the ISO to include the config utility and burned another CD-R. FreeDOS started booting off the disk on the ThinkPad, but hung before it finished booting. D’oh!
Never fear though! Back in 2002 I got a copy of Connectix Virtual PC which came with a fully licenced ISO copy of IBM’s PC DOS 2000 which to this day I’ve been using to get various things working. So I opened the ISO and added the CU to it, then burned another CD-R.
This disc booted beautifully on the ThinkPad and I was presented with a DOS prompt. Not only that, I was able to see the CU on the disc and run it, which I did. Schweet, right?
This application cannot be run on this system
At this point it was 3am, I had a stack of useless coasters and was no closer to disabling the secondary IDE controller on this ThinkPad. I have studying to do and family matters to take care of, and I already wasted 20 minutes typing up this blog post in angst, but I'm not giving up!
Anyone have ThinkPad hardware and have been able to successfully run the PS2.EXE file from the UTTPFDOS.EXE archive?
Trying out this version of the Configuration Utility. Will let you know how it goes.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…
Spammers often add random sentences to their messages to fool filters, some of which end up being oddly amusing and almost poetic in a bizarre sort of way.
This message was sent to my primary rubenerd.com address and I can't make head nor tales of it:
You said I was no archer, said Robin Hood
In boat or in horsecart
That's all there was. No images, file attachments, links to products for sale or sites serving up malicious code. I thought perhaps the spam filters cleaned it, but if it arrived in my inbox it wasn't considered spam then, right? Perhaps the senders have their server configured to request a reciept which they then use to confirm the email address is legitimate.
In any case, if this is the barrier to entry perhaps I should start writing such messages. Here are some I whipped up while waiting on the phone (and waiting, and waiting) to a medical insurance company.
You said I was no vocalist, said Akiyama Mio
In an embarassing cable tripping disaster
We agreed you weren’t as Irish as me, said Neal O’Carrol
Swimming in a grilled cheese sandwich
"For all those whose cares have been our concern,
the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives
and the dream shall never die."~ Edward M. Kennedy
With the passing of the current heathcare bill in the American House of Representatives, I thought it was fitting to share. You were an inspiration to the world Mr Kennedy, here's hoping one day your vision will actually come to pass in the United States without any lame exceptions, opt outs and half arsed support.
When I had my recent flu here in Australia, I made my way down to my local GP here in Mawson Lakes, presented my universal healthcare Medicare card, left without paying anything, and when I got the bill for my blood test I went to Medicare in the city and claimed a refund with almost no questions asked. And then there's the government run Medibank Private. Neither are perfect, but I suppose their existence makes Australia an un(free, patriotic, Christian) super evil red Communist dictatorship.
Despite living in Singapore most of my life I'm not sure how their universal healthcare plan works, but according to the World Health Organization it has the lowest infant mortality rate in the world (equalled only by Iceland) and among the highest life expectancies from birth.
"Woooooo… you will be the lead singer! Wooooo…"
So after all this preparation spanned over the course of five K-On episodes the light music club feel as though they're ready to perform at the school festival thingy. With this series I'm now up to where I was when my anime blog was wiped!
First of all I have to say right off the bat or other athletic instrument (hah, pun) that Yui's ability to learn guitar and play it smashingly having started that same year when she couldn't even read music is nothing short of miraculous. People seem to have this impression online that Yui is a few modules short of a kernel (Aussie FreeBSD joke), but learning that quick would take skill! If I could learn keyboards and drums that quickly I'd go ahead and do it.
"I am the pride of Japan! Ha! National sport! Ha!"
One of the things I never quite understood with Japanese school festivals is if most of the people attending are also the people putting all the cafes and plays and other events on, who's left to actually go to the events themselves? Turns out (and it's obvious really!) people aren't attending to their own stalls and whatnot the whole time, they attend in shifts. Makes sense, my keyboard has two shifts. Feel free to laugh at that joke.
So in this episode the girls are all off taking care of various different events much to the dismay of Her Mioness who wants to… oh I don't know… practise before they perform! Yui is cooking and still hasn't got her voice back and Ritsu and Tsumugi are taking care of a spook house. Yes, a spook house, with a character like Mio it seems the writers didn't have a choice in the matter ;). Squeak, duck, shudder, cry, aaaaa!
Before their first performance in front of a Live Studio Audience though, their supervisor and former super rock star pops out from out of nowhere with cute outfits she made for them that (surprise!) Mio is also terrified of and even Ritsu even questions. Of course Tsumugi thinks they're fabulous (she things everything is fabulous!) and Yui's face lights up like a lit up face (sorry I got to bed really late last night, best I could do), even if her costume is somewhat surreal compared to the others.
Of course they also have that they have to carry all the instruments to the stage which Yui has nothing but trouble with and Tsumigi comically does with ease. That's what I love about K-On, the timing and sound effects in these hilarious scenes are hilarious. And hilarious!
Eventually with much trepidation and Mio trembling they finally assemble on stage and perform their bubbly marshmallow song complete with a whimsical music video. When the song is over the crowd erupts into applause and the girls smile knowing that nothing bad or embarrassing had happened as they feared it'd happen beforehand.
Then of course Mio has her fanclub catalyst moment when she turns around to walk off stage and trips on a speaker cable, you know, the one that revealed she was in the same league as Shigure Asa from Shuffle, Francesca Lucchini from Strike Witches and Hatuse Miku in a certain way. A particular class of people were expecting to be presented slightly different version in the Blu Ray release, but having watched the Blu Ray release I can say I saw a 1080p image of a certain shima-rice bowl. Speaking of which I saw such a thing at Ikea recently and couldn't stop laughing :).
When I watched K-On the first time, this was the episode I got up to before my first anime blog was wiped so next episode I'll be seeing stuff I've never seen before. If I didn't have any self control I'd put aside all my studying and current family troubles and watch all of them in an afternoon. It's happened before.
