Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Year: 2009

  • devotion

    Some time ago I went on a quest to find an RSS feed for the NASB translation of the Bible that went straight through in a year, and contained the text within the actual RSS (no external links necessary). I was unable to find anything, so I began work on a script that would create such a feed every day. The Lockman Foundation has graciously given me permission to publish this project for all to use.

    I finished a while back, but I’ve been testing it for a while to make sure all the kinks were worked out before I published it. You can find the feed here.

    I eventually hope to do similar feeds for the NLT, NIV, and NKJV translations and have submitted requests for permission to do so. If you think I should investigate doing another translation, feel free to let me know via the comments, and I’ll see what I can accomplish.

  • shameful

    Microsoft launched a campaign that promises to provide 8 meals to starving Americans for every time someone downloads their new browser, Internet Explorer 8. Sounds great, on the face of things. So how much is that exactly? $1.15. This is in America, right? Let’s do the math here. They donate the money to Feed America, which commits to spend 98% of that money on actually feeding people. Then we divide the remainder by 8. That’s simply amazing. They can feed a person one meal for $0.14. What in the world are the rest of us doing wrong. I’m a pretty frugal person, raised well by my German mother, and I can’t even come close to that. I’m pretty sure even my Grandma couldn’t manage that one. The fine print also states that there is a cap of $1 million dollars on the donation they will make. So much for me writing a script that will download IE8 every 5 minutes…

    Regardless, let’s say that $1.15 does equate to providing 8 meals. They’re using charitable giving to try and get people to upgrade their browser. It’s apparently not enough to just be a better browser, they have to try and bribe people with the promise of giving money to charity to get their product to be downloaded.  And as I already mentioned, if they get too many downloads, they’ll just cap it at $1 million, so it could end up being fifty cents per download, or 10, or 1… Bleh, I’m disgusted, Microsoft, disgusted.

    At any rate, go download it anyway, and make sure you do it through www.browserforthebetter.com (otherwise, it doesn’t count). Not because Microsoft is being so generous, but to at least make them pay the $1 million dollars to charity. I’d recommend deleting the file after you download it also, then go download a real browser, like Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

  • hat trick

    A couple days ago, the Fedora project released their latest effort, Fedora 11. The IT guy from the high school had been giving me a hard time about not trying harder to like Fedora. I had been hearing good things about Fedora 11, so I figured I’d give it a try. I should mention first that I’m doing this on an older laptop, so I won’t be too concerned with speed, except as it relates to performance of other linux distributions on this same laptop.

    After letting the Live CD load up (not sure why you can’t have a ‘just install it for me’ option like Ubuntu), I started the installer. I wasn’t interested in playing around with a Live CD on this old laptop. It’s just too painful, and I was getting kernel failures like mad. Once I started the installer, things were going well, it even detected the computer name from the previous Ubuntu install. Then we got to the partitioning step. This is the place where we tell the installer how we want to use our hard drive (or let it do it’s own thing).

    Being the optimist that I am, I let it do it’s own thing. It failed. The best part about this is, if the partitioner fails, it exits setup, and you have to start the installer again. That’s not quite as painful as it sounds, but still frustrating. I tried it again. Fail. Ok, I’ll do it myself. I created a swap partition, and then went to do my root partition. Hmm, no reiserfs, so I’ll stick with tried and true ext3. Fail. The install image on the CD was created from an ext4 filesystem, and somehow it’s impossible to use anything but ext4 on your root partition. Ok, whatever, I’m trying to give this a serious try, so I won’t let that stop me. Recreate the partition with ext4. Fail. You can’t boot from an ext4 formatted partition. From other reading, this is ridiculous, since Ubuntu (released a couple months ago) can boot from ext4 file systems just fine. Ok, so we’ll create a small ext2 formatted partition for /boot. Oddly enough, it recommended ext3, which is stupid, since the journal will eat up a good portion of your partition, and waste precious disk space. Some other fun things I noticed along the way. If you press the escape key while creating a partition, it actually creates the partition, instead of cancelling like it should. The arrow keys also cycle through the partition size options backwards as well. Finally, let’s do this install thingy. And it worked. One other item of note that I liked (because I’m an ntp nerd and run two of my own servers), is that it let you setup network clock synchronization during the installation process.

    After completing the install, the display resolution on my laptop was not right, so I started trying to figure out how to fix that. I found a way, and had to install system-config-display. And then I remembered why I disliked Fedora before (and Red Hat, and Suse). RPM’s are the devil. After all that fun, what I really wanted to know, was how the speed compared to Ubuntu and Xubuntu on this laptop. So naturally, I have to go back and install them too. I timed the Fedora boot time: 1 minute and 20 seconds. It’s a far cry from the 20 seconds they mention as their target for this release, but I’m on slow hardware, and 1:20 is actually pretty good. I installed Xubuntu, and remembered that it wasn’t just Fedora that had issues with my display. In Ubuntu (and thus Xubuntu), I have to create the config file that sets the refresh rate for my monitor, and then it works at the right resolution. I timed Xubuntu. Ouch. It came in at over 1 minute and 45 seconds. My Ubuntu CD was apparently busted, so I burned a new one at work the next day. I had heard rumours that Xubuntu was kind of inefficient, but this just confirmed it. It seemed a tiny bit faster on loading menus and other trivial tasks, but nothing that would convince me to stick with it. I installed Ubuntu the next day, expecting something above 2 minutes for a boot time, and was pleasantly surprised. It booted almost identical to Fedora. So, thought I, I’ll go back to Fedora and just try living with it for a while to see how I like it (other than the RPMs).

    Then the nightmare began. I had thought all the partitioning errors were behind me, but the Fedora installer was just getting started. I tried the same partitioning setup as before, and it went all the way to the end of copying the install image to the hard drive. Fail. It claimed it couldn’t load my /boot partition. I tried again, and it wouldn’t even load the partitioner. Then I got it to load if I told it I wanted a custom layout. It went all the way to the end again, and failed. After several more failures, of different types, I went to Google. It turns out that the partitioner for Anaconda (the Fedora installer) had been completely rewritten for this release. It was also completely in a broken state, and some people recommended using fdisk to partition your disks, instead of the installer. Hmm, yup, that’s going to be a great option for people that want to try out Linux. For the record, it does work, although I actually recommend cfdisk instead of fdisk.

    Anyway, it’s installed now, and the fun will ensue shortly. I’ll have another post about that in a month or so.

  • helpful

    Last night, my dad said something inspiring. He was helping me pick rocks out of our flower garden, and as he went to leave, I thanked him again. And he said, “You’re welcome. I just want to try and be helpful like my dad (my grandpa).” As most people in our church know, my grandpa never passes up an opportunity to help. He’s had a quadruple bypass surgery, and has every right to take it easy, and relax. He’s just not wired that way. God has given him a servant’s heart, and to sit idly by and watch others do the work just doesn’t do it for him. Our pastor is moving in a few days, and I mentioned to his brother that I would probably come and help load up. He said, “Don’t feel like you have to. If you don’t, your grandpa will.”

    My dad is always helping me around the house, and it seems he enjoys helping me more than going home and doing his own yardwork sometimes. Even when it’s just picking rocks out of the garden. I want to be like my dad (and my grandpa): helpful.

  • phonic

    A while back, Ubuntu released their latest update, Jaunty Jackalope. Yes, a Jackalope… Anyway, I usually wait a while to update my home computer because our internet connection is slower there (than at work). A couple nights ago, I decided the time was right, so I started the download and let it run overnight. The next day, I finished the upgrade, and rebooted. While I was at work, I got a call from my wife. We had no sound on the computer. Nothing was muted, and the speaker volume was fine. Great…

    When I got home, I started troubleshooting, trying various audio settings, and changing volume levels on pretty much everything. I finally had some success when I switched the audio engine to OSS. I’ve been using Linux long enough to know that it wasn’t the solution I wanted. OSS is an old, deprecated sound system that is only kept around because some applications haven’t been updated in ages.

    This at least gave me a starting point in my search on the Ubuntu forums, which are always super helpful. But audio issues on Linux are a dime a dozen, so it took me a while before I stumbled upon this post. I tried a couple of the things they mentioned, but nothing was working. Finally, there was mention of another post, which includes some information from one of the lead PulseAudio developers. As it turns out, the original implementation of PulseAudio by Ubuntu was very poorly done, and if you were upgrading, you still had all those broken settings lying around now that they’ve fixed things in Jaunty Jackalope. I followed the instructions for removing all the broken stuff, and tada, I had sound again. I celebrated by watching Hancock, and cranking the volume.