Today, it’s (almost) all good news.

Geek stuff:

A while back I posted about a problem with Nautilus’ handling of audio CD copies. In today’s news, that looks to be fixed in the upcoming GNOME release, which should by all rights make it easily into Fedora 8.

More geek stuff:

Today also saw the arrival of my car kit for hooking up my iPod. Tonight saw me sweating buckets in the intense humidity of the garage while I removed the center dash assembly and stereo to install the adapter/modulator/thingie. All went swimmingly (bonus humidity joke) and now I can not only play the iPod through the car stereo, but I can also control it through the in-dash CD player. There’s added functionality for using the single CD player’s changer controls to further address up to five playlists, if you save them to the iPod under specific names, for convenience.

Family and miscellanea:

I finished reading Evie “Harry Potter 3, the Curse of the Bulbous Ear Trumpet,” or whatever that one was called. I decided that will be the last HP book for her for a little while, as they get increasingly dark — well, for a six-year-old — and concerned with issues that need not yet concern said six-year-old. We started “The Hobbit” instead, since she likes fantasies and fairy tales and such, and I’m quite enjoying getting back into providing voices for a cast of dozens.

As for myself, I finished HP 7 for myself on Sunday in a final 400-page sprint and decided it is easily the best of the whole lot, with moments where actual writing skill was wielded in creating clever juxtaposition of words. There was a world of difference from the third and previous books, to be certain.

Some additional geek stuff:

I got some additional work done on the Documentation Guide this weekend, and am still hoping we get enough translators on board to do a Fedora 7 fedora-release-notes package update. Of course, F8 test1 is due shortly and our real release notes push for F8 should be starting soon thereafter. We’ll send out additional shouts when the Beats pages are scrubbed and ready for all community members to pitch in content. And you WILL be pitching in content, won’t you? Yes, I thought so, good on ya mates!

And finally the bad news:

Ingmar Bergman is dead.

I’m in ur workstayshun upgradin ur bitz.

Last night I did a test with my iPod using a TRRS-to-3RCA cable (lifted from my Sony miniDV camcorder), and found that I could very handily do a slide presentation by patching into the composite video input on a projector or monitor. With audio inputs, I could have backing music too. The only drawback is that I have to individually convert each slide to JPG format in OpenOffice, and there’s currently no bulk option for that procedure. Usability––! But gpixpod sure makes moving the slides easy enough.

I think I remember something about this on Presentation Zen a while back, but I don’t have time to find the link right now. You should be reading the site already anyway. Yes, this means you, you over-bulleting snoremongers!

Upgraded “Bettie” to F7 tonight. Everything went smoothly except for the moment when I thought I had done something terrible to my MySQL partition and then realized it just wasn’t mounted.

Tomorrow morning first thing our LUG is holding an installfest. I’m trying to get last-minute work done tonight for that, making sure I don’t forget anything in the morning.

And the big tomato says, “Ketchup.”

It seems that all I’m doing these days is chasing the tail end of whatever I was supposed to get done the week before. Most of my busy time has come from my musical life. Leah has a final show coming up in a few weeks, and inexplicably we have to learn a bunch of material to accommodate a songwriter/guitarist who is sitting in with us for that gig, since Tom is away on tour with These United States most of the month. Beyond that, things have been kicking into gear with Laura, and we’ll be making a debut at IOTA in Arlington on the 18th.

Plus, my longtime musical partner Rich has whipped up a project specializing in what I like to refer to as “70s AM gold” music (think Ambrosia, Boz Scaggs, James Taylor, Doobie Brothers…). Yesterday we got most of the participants together for the first time, and things went well. Mostly we discovered that we want to get a little more rigorous on the arranging, and that pretty much everyone is going to have to sing. We even got Rich to croon “Shower the People” from his drum booth. Sweet!

I’ve decided to take up more of my Fedora time just working on writing, editing, and publishing. Last week was more productive there, since I had some evenings free — except for the night that Karsten and I decided we were going to try and hook up a joint podcast via Ekiga. We got about 80% of the way there — mostly the problem becomes one of recording, but I think that since I have a mixing console and a pro digital audio interface, we can make this happen via some creative signal routing. The problem is not talking to each other but rather recording both voices at one time, a task made only slightly more difficult thanks to Ekiga’s crappy routing constraints and the ALSA suite’s even crappier presentation of my DAW’s 8-in, 8-out hardware. However, I think I have the right idea for patching at the board to overcome the problems. We’ll probably try something this week as time allows.

Eleya and I watched a great movie on Thursday night called A Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror thriller that packed not only beautiful cinematography and an excellent, Hitchcockian pace, but a great dramatic story and a triple-take Fight Club twist ending. Not really gory, but actually scary. Wow, go figure, a scary horror film for a change. Maybe American cinema can learn something from this other than “Let’s remake that, only with Sarah Michelle Gellar.” Highly recommended.

Friday night some friends from my high school graduating class stopped by. Some of them were in town for vacation, visiting family, and/or attending the 20th class reunion. I didn’t really feel the need to go, since I’m still in touch, albeit sporadically at times, with most of the folks with whom I was close. But it seemed like a nice excuse to get together — dinner plans were usurped by the fact that we almost all have kids of our own, and trying to find an accommodating establishment that’s not a horrible megachain would likely have been doomed, so everyone converged at our house. The kids were great together and even though most of them stayed up past 11pm, nary a complaint nor a whine was heard.

Funniest moment: Connor, the five-year-old (?) son of friends Scott and Megan, told my daughter, 6, that they could meet at Costco for a hot dog sometime. His ladykilling antics were somewhat premature, though, because Evie looked at us with shrugged shoulders and exclaimed, “I’m dumbfounded!” Connor is probably working on a fresher pickup line as we speak.

UPDATE: Fixed the link for These United States — thanks Christopher!

Imagine ab crunches, but with a hernia.

I’ve developed an innate distrust of the phrase “left as an exercise for the reader” when used in technical documentation. This idiom is normally indicative of at least one of the following situations:

• The author is too lazy to cover the majority of use cases, and besides, there’s a Buffy marathon starting in fifteen minutes on the WB.
• The author is not well-informed about the subject matter, beyond what he could find on Google, and is afraid that fact might become obvious to a reader and thereby threaten his ability to keep publishing on OSDN sites.
• The author basically “lucked out” that a procedure worked for him and has no idea how it happened, much less how to explain how or why to a reader, although you can bet he’ll spend plenty of time in the forums and IRC doing so.

I imagine there is call for this phrase in academic works where the main use case for the documentation is theoretical and not practical. I distinctly remember seeing it in some of my university-level science texts. In practical technical documentation, however, I’ve found it more often to be evidence of a lazy or ignorant author.

Can you tell I’ve been doing some problem-solving today at work? Right, I thought so. Must… restrain… Fist of… Death….

How do I revector thee? Let me count the ways…

From a recent LUG meeting: One member described “wife” as “the best definition ever of a non-maskable interrupt.”

UPDATE: I hadn’t seen my Mugshot stacker, where Marvelous Mike had posted something today on gender issues, proving once again that he is always ahead of my game.

Just when you think we’re ahead…

We gave my daughter a small radio/CD player for her sixth birthday a while back, so she’s been excited to get copies of some of our CDs that she can play in her room. Yes, we still get the majority of our music the old-fashioned way, by buying CDs. So today Evie wanted a copy of a CD, so I dutifully inserted it in my F7-endowed laptop, right-clicked the Nautilus desktop icon for the CD, and chose “Copy disc.”

The outcome was… less than satisfactory. Although the nautilus-cd-burner program launches a readcd process (from the wodim package) to read the CD in a perfectly acceptable RAW mode, and extracts a correct table of contents (TOC), that’s where the fun stops. The write process runs cdrecord and writes the image as a single data track (in “cooked” mode, no less) to the disc. The resulting disc is obviously not playable.

I’m wondering why the Nautilus guys didn’t include a simple bit of logic that keeps the user from wasting time making a coaster when the source is an audio CD. If you know a feature doesn’t work, why mislead the user? Shouldn’t honesty be as important as simplicity?

The funny thing is, doing this right is very easy:

cdrdao write -n --device /dev/cdwriter /tmp/image.iso.FOO.toc

The point is, if I set this system down in front of my daughter (who’s already quite computer friendly) or my mother, they’d be frustrated at this particular result. I don’t even know if other operating systems allow you to do this easily, but I know Fedora should.

The voice of the inner chimp.

A couple days ago Mike McGrath posted a blurb about a question of morality posed on “This American Life,” a regular National Public Radio show. This question actually comes from an episode of RadioLab, a fascinating science show that comes to NPR courtesy of WNYC. You can listen to the show (MP3 format only, sorry) at the site, or subscribe your Rhythmbox (or other podcatching software) to the XML feed. All the episodes are quite fantastic, but I really like the “Space” episode from November 2006 (Season Two). I only wish there were more episodes available!

Pow, to the moon, Alice!

Nicu’s post on the artwork proposals shows what a great group of contributors is involved in that project. Mairin’s interest in the concept of infinity are fascinating, and I’m eager to see how she develops this idea. I also really like Mola’s Moon theme, although I’d like to see it simplified a bit:

• Lower the density of stars quite a bit
• Make sure the moon appears in front of the stars, rather than vice versa
• The squiggly reflection of the logo is too dominant and needs to be more broken up by the water, and more diffused

I know the moon appears as a non-dominant element in the current theme, but I kind of like this progression. In FC5 we had bubbles (albeit from a cartoon perspective), as in in water; in FC6 we had DNA seen underwater, like the formation of life; in F7 there was a culmination of life taking to the skies in balloons. I think having F8 be about a way station to something further out, like the moon, is fitting. Hopefully this would lead to an abstract about the cosmos or an amazing journey outside our knowledge/experience/comfort zone/solar system/what-have-you.

I wasn’t as keen on the “Thunder” idea because it seemed more like hazard warning, especially when combined with any thinking of progression from FC5 to F8 theming. (Note that clouds also appear in the F7 theme as a non-dominant element.)

Regardless, I do love the consistent theming in blue, along with natural elements to make that color seem less harsh and sterile. Kudos to the Artwork folks for their hard work and inventiveness! I can’t wait to see the next phase of the cycle…

Cooling off period.

There’s been a stifling mini-heat wave here in the mid-Atlantic states, with temperatures yesterday and today up around 100 F, with heat indexes closer to 110 F due to the humidity (or, as I like to refer to it, “soupy crotchness”). By the way, thanks Florida! Now I can thank you for something other than erroneously pluralizing the word “chad.” For all those saying, “Yeah, but it’s been 110 F in Las Vegas for a while, without humidity!”, I humbly offer that it’s a dry heat, man. I mean, you can take a little stroll in 110 F at 20% relative humidity and never feel a thing until you realize you’re a walking four-piece fried chicken dinner. Mmm, chicken.

I stayed in a hotel in Phoenix once, many years ago — called the Crescent at the time, it had something to do with the Keating Five, but I’ll leave that to you and Google to remember for me. It was a four-star place, but I have no recollection of receiving any illicit funds during my stay there, Senator. Anyway, it turned out there was a great music shop specializing in electric basses in Phoenix, so I figured I’d walk there, especially since it was only about 45 blocks away, according to the only map I could find. And although it was 98 F outside, it was partly cloudy, a bit breezy, and felt quite comfortable.

I hear you already: “I hope you brought your sunscreen with you.” Well, yes, I did, and by “yes” I mean “no.” So, since I hadn’t realized that in that part of Phoenix, “one block” apparently meant a distance just shy of a mile and a half, I got to the store about two and a half hours later with a REALLY good tan, the nice lobster-y red kind. But there were some really nice basses there, so I had that going for me. In all honesty, I didn’t really get burnt badly, but I was smart enough to catch a cab back to the hotel.

But it was a dry heat, man.

So in any case, here it’s been more of a moist heat, the kind that doesn’t remind you quite as much of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies as it does putrid vegetation and stagnant water. Plus there’s the bonus insect life for good measure… I’ll take West Nile Vectors for 500, Alex!

Today though, a little after lunch — and we scooted back into the building just in time — we had a set of hellacious thunderstorm cells plow through the area, bringing a 20-degree temperature plunge and some much needed precipitation. My air conditioner gives thanks and praise to the weather gods! Sleeping tonight should be good.

The heat has made it impossible to concentrate on work at home, so my wife and I cooled off last night by vegetating with a fine film, The Last King of Scotland, featuring an amazing (and Oscar-winning) performance from Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin. The Ugandan locations provided a nice frame of reference for our own weather, by which I mean it looked hot enough to make us feel cooler. Highly recommended, with appropriate caution about some gruesome violence.

Our bodies, our selves.

Probably everyone has read something about this exhibition, seeing as how it’s several years old, and has generated countless news stories, but you can’t have too many good anatomy exhibits in my opinion. I think we may try to see it this month. It’s also showing in a number of cities around the world (including Durham, for all you Fedora and Red Hat RDU’ers). Sweet!