I’m torrenting Fedora 8 now, which apparently does not come broken-up into CD-sized ISOs anymore. I was afraid that I would need to get a DVD drive at last, but on second thought, perhaps I can get by with an existing external hard drive.
Seen in the promoted by today:
I have become convinced that this “principle of least privilege”
is fundamentally wrong. Minimizing privilege might
reduce the damage done by some security holes but almost
never fixes the holes. Minimizing privilege is not the same
as minimizing the amount of trusted code, does not have the
same benefits as minimizing the amount of trusted code, and
does not move us any closer to a secure computer system.
He is taking a jab at SElinux here, isn’t he?
I was unable to find the original author of this joke, which I received from my friend Sergey working in Electronic Arts.
From my experience of outsourcing work to emerging markets: Chinese: Me: do X, Y and Z Them: ok Me, week later: how goes it? Them: did you mean X is Z and Y is not? Me: what?! Indian: Me: do X, Y, Z Them: thank you Sir and have a wonderful day Me, week later: how goes it? Them: beautiful Me: did you finish X? Them: we are analyzing it Russian: Me: do X, Y, Z Them: why do X, when you can do N? Me: customer wants it that way Them: tell the customer he is stupid; here, take N
Sergey commented that it was “very life-like”.
Lennert made a splash today with with the mixed-language feed. I am only surprised that it took him so long. Fedora Planet from my reading when the first French invasion happened in the beginning of 2006.
In reply to Lennert, my friend Máirín the obvious argument, “if you don’t like it, don’t read it”. Fair enough, this is what is going to happen to Fedora Planet then.
Seen at :
A brainstorming meeting between NASA, the contractor RS&H, and Disney concluded with a new design to the coaster, approved ahead of the start of construction next year.
I can see a new attraction at DisneyWorld in Florida now: you start at the top of the structure and have 3 seconds to jump into your seat and strap in (if the coaster departs without you, you die), then you ride it down and out through life-threatening clouds of escaping UDMH, while the whole thing is about to explode into a big-ass fireball at any second. It’s going to be awesome, if only Disney’s Legal approves.
Looking at , I tried to recall what my first Linux was, but I really cannot. It was too long ago. I copied the distro from , and I think it was an SLS of some variety, with 0.99pl12 kernel. The distro installed by booting from a 3.5″ boot/root set, then untarring from a small stack of floppies. I vaguely recall struggling with a 5.25″ floppy, which was somewhat smaller (1.2MB vs. 1.44MB). There was no X. The only purpose it could serve was a mail gateway with uucp connections.
As a reader, Google Reader has nothing on Liferea. So, it looks that its key advantage is how it allows to create , hosted at Google. But even then I fail to see the point. shares any kind of link, but Google Reader shares only blog postings. Ergo, Mugshot > Greader. Right? So, what were the vaunted PhDs at Google trying to do? They could’ve cloned Mugshot, but didn’t. Integration with Orkut is nil too. Very odd.
After I figured that HAL is setting permissions now in Rawhide (a subject of a separate blog entry maybe), the volume slider started working, but all other audio applications still fail. Oh, that’s right: we drove the stake through the black heart of EsounD. Bravo! No, wait…
[zaitcev@niphredil ~]$ strace aplay arc/morse/uk3dba.au
open(”/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p”, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)
[root@niphredil zaitcev]# lsof | grep pcm
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev mem CHR 116,6 2903 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev mem CHR 116,7 2908 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev 20u CHR 116,6 2903 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev 30u CHR 116,7 2908 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
[root@niphredil zaitcev]#
I understand the desire to replace EsounD with something better, but at least EsounD did not hog the audio device. Why is PulseAudio hogging it? My Intel soundcard with ALSA is perfectly capable of playing several streams at once. My message to PulseAudio: stop hogging my sound card.
Now I have to figure out how GNOME starts the blasted thing. Nothing obvious jumps out of gconf-editor so far. The next step is to look at pulseaudio’s RPM scriptlets, they must be registering it somewhere. Meh, it feels like Windows.
UPDATE: OMG. I killed it and it disappeared (not starting on next login). Probably our break-up was too unnerving for the poor daemon. I would be comforted if not for a sneaking suspicion that it is plotting my demise while hiding in the depth of GNOME somewhere.
If one posts something to Mugshot and then looks at server logs, two things become apparent:
- A very low proportion of users react immediately (90% is outside of 3 hours, or other made-up number like that). It seems to indicate that Mugshot is used as a web service like Myspace, and nearly nobody uses its client.
- Mugshot severily undercounts visits, several times at least.
I wasn’t there to laugh this year, but a friend worked as a paramedic and he responded to the hung guy. Wire services reported that the guy’s friends let him hung for two hours thinking that he was doing an art piece. My friend says that the story is untrue. The dead burner had no friends in the camp, nobody knew him. He hung through a Yoga class; the instructor and students thought that he was a mannekin. I suppose that the kind of clueless people who can think something like that too. Who else would buy a ticket to Burning Man?