Fedora Weekly News Issue 57 Out Loud (en)Issue 57 of the Fedora Weekly News Out Loud podcast is now available. You can read the news here, or listen to it here. Even better, just subscribe to the RSS feed to receive it automatically in your favorite audio player or aggregator.
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C’mon, let’s get happy!Is there an Echo in here? Yessirreebob, that would be my Echo Audio Layla24, finally to be supported in the kernel! Drivers appeared in the 2.2 kernel, but then disappeared among the 2.4 upheaval process. According to this commit, I’ll soon be seeing them in the 2.6.18 kernel. I’m very excited about the prospect, and hopefully the laptop adapter will work as well (although I can live without that if not). I’ve made these drivers using ALSA CVS for a while, but it is always a painful and time-consuming process which really kills my creativity — so I avoided it in favor of using my old software. Now my dreams of leaving behind the last ties binding me to closed, proprietary solutions may finally be coming to fruition. O frabjous day! In other news, thanks to the encouragement of Thomases Canniot and Chung, I will be trying my hand at podcasting the Fedora Weekly News Out Loud (English version, mind you) this week. Yes, I get to make as much of an ass out of myself as in person, right in the comfort of your home, but without the risks to fragile knick-knacks. As always, I will depend on the gonad-crushing criticism of the community to tell me what rocks and what sucks rocks. |
Scholarships ahoy!Ethan is now at the stage where, between spates of screeching and spinning his head off his shoulders while fire shoots from his eyes and ears, he is taking quantum leaps of development, especially linguistic. At age 2-1/2 or so, he’s lagging only slightly behind where Evie was at his age in terms of verbal development, but I understand that’s normal for boys, especially when they can’t get a word in edgewise around their sisters. This morning not only did Ethan carry his cereal and fruit bowls to the counter, but proceeded to deliver a fairly complete oratory on his achievements, complete with prepositional phrases. “Mommy, I’m putting my breakfast dishes away in the kitchen!” Then he looked up at me on the other side in the counter and, fearing he hadn’t yet buttered all sides of his bread, cried out, “And I love you, Daddy!” Well, I guess we’ll see about the pony, then. In other news, I’ve been working this weekend as kind of an independent subcontractor for a friend from work who has a small computer business on the side. We are putting a Linux server in place to handle authentication, file and print services for his first “big” contract. This weekend I put myself on a crash Samba course — having only used it sporadically in the office — and not only did I get it working, but it quite handily provides roaming profiles and an easy path to our backup solution as well (once the SCSI HBA we ordered finally shows up). Plus I saved the customers somewhere around $900 in licensing costs, so it’s a win-win. |
The Amazing Randi meets his match.This McSweeney’s letter to the Amazing Randi contains no bad language or graphics, but may not be suitable for people of extremely sensitive dispositions. You’ve been warned, now click the damn link already. |
Guys’ night out.Just got home from carousing and carrying on with some very close, old, and good friends (In the best senses of all words concerned) tonight. We holed up at a neighborhood pub (or the closest facsimile that the US can provide — given that we’re in Virginia, that’s not too awfully off the mark) and conversed on all things meaningless and meaningful. Oh, the party goes with a swing A wonderful way to break up the weekend… with friends I’ve known for literally 20+ years. Important end-of-festivities prophylactic: B-vitamin and plenty of fresh water. That will let me rise early enough in the morning to take care of a flat tire I suffered at the hand of a jutting, jagged, rocky promontory also known as the curbside in front of my friend’s house in downtown Fredericksburg. |
Today’s 800lb (~360kg) elephant.Thank you, thank you Konstantin, for pointing this out. This has been annoying me for a while and I had just internalized the rage. Here’s some additions to the list. Anything that calls itself “gnome” is, IMHO, grist for the mill:
Oh yeah, and moving from the grievous to the great, thanks Diana, for the beautiful wallpaper and the shout. You’re the bee’s knees! |
Challenge and response.I am really enjoying the Python Challenge, a site to which Toshio sent me a link the other day on the #fedora-python channel. I’m at level 7 and — since this interrupted my reading of Dive Into Python — I’m now starting to bump against the limit of what I’ve learned so far. Plus my head exploded, so there’s that. I am also working on drafting a succession plan for the Board on the wiki. Thoughts from the community are definitely appreciated! I have some of the broad strokes down at this point, as noted in our previous meetings:
Last night Eleya and I watched Paul Greengrass’ second film about the events of Bloody Sunday. It’s shot in an extremely effective documentary style, with available light only and no typical movie parlor tricks. (I’m pretty sure a lot of the film was shot on Super-16 and then blown up for release, since one of the extras shows crew shooting with fairly small cameras — although it could have been DV, I don’t think many people were yet shooting that format in 2001.) The sense of currency is spellbinding, although the brogue is sometimes impenetrable, especially with the pervasive overlapping dialogue. Although we felt a little self-conscious about it, we turned on the subtitles so as not to miss any of what was being said on-screen. Recommended. |
Camper van Leech.If you’re a Fedoran who does Python, I invite you to camp on #fedora-python… mostly because I intend to sponge off you while I learn. |
WordPress and FC5.After moving my WP to my rejuvenated and software-RAIDed web server, I ran into what is apparently — owing to the googlejuice — a fairly common problem. WordPress would simply not connect to the MySQL database I have on a separate machine inside my firewall. I checked all the configuration files, even connected using the CLI client, but no dice. Then of course I fell back on the standard setenforce 0 test, which showed SELinux to be the culprit. I haven’t done a lot of work with SELinux, but I have from time to time used system-config-securitylevel, which is a nice, simple tool for people like me who don’t have a lot of free time to learn the ins and outs of policy tuning. However, this particular server doesn’t have the graphical s-c-sl installed, nor any GUI for that matter. (The TUI version has no SELinux tuning interface.) Thankfully, smooge helped me out by reminding me about setsebool, and in particular the boolean I needed: setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db=true I hate that so many people “solve” this problem by turning off SELinux, since it’s just so goldurned useful. |
