benl.co.uk tc1415's little corner of t'internet

I discovered the watch command yesterday! One thing about Linux (and UNIX) that never ceases to surprise me is the way that whenever I'm thinking that I need to write some arcane shell script to do what I want, it turns out that a command already exists.

Rather than try and write a summary of what the command does, here's a quote from the man page:
watch - execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen

Three things I learned yesterday (well and the day before a little bit):

1. Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, run fsck without at least mounting the partition read-only.
2. Always keep a rescue CD/DVD knocking about
3. Always write down somewhere the changes I make to the system configuration or back up the files

I just upgraded dominus to Fedora 10, and to be honest, I'm marginally impressed with everything, except the much vaunted kernel-based modesetting. I know, I know, its experimental! However, it really shouldn't firstly force the graphics card into PCI mode, and then, when I resolve this by way of a radeon.agpmode=4 (this is an AGP 2.0 system) it still runs brutally slow. So nomodeset it is for me now :(

In other news, I will be in Durham (at University College no less) on Wednesday and Thursday (thats 2008-11-26 and 2008-11-27) so I will be very away from keyboard for that time - still no laptop :(

See my previous post for why I need a new scanner.

Now, this particular scanner was really good with sane and worked really well and I need a new one fairly promptly. Therefore, I'm throwing this open to the Fedora Planet readers:

What sane supported, USB, flat-bed scanner would you recommend?

Final preparations are under way and I will very shortly (round about 2008-08-04T00:00:00Z) be in transit to Sorrento. Writing this though has made /me ask the question again: why do we insist, in a global world, on timing our Fedora releases based on local time in the eastern United States, with all the vagarities that daylight saving time brings.

Mythbusters: nil; tc1415: 1

Yes, that picture says it all, I just had an ordinary CD, with no visibly damage whatsoever shatter in my ordinary DVD±RW drive. Even the Mythbusters couldn't do that without ramping the speed up to > 56x speed.

Quick description of what happened:

• /me decides he wants to reformat and reinstall Windows on destroyer so the sister can stop whining about The Sims
• /me finds install CD and decides that it is looking a tad scratched so /me will make a copy (in spite of what the warnings on the disk say) just in case it becomes unreadable
• About 5 seconds into a dd if=/dev/sr0 of=XPCD.iso results in an almightly bang and some awful noises from the DVD drive
• /me uses screwdriver to force drive open and is presented with the sight above

[Caution to the bandwidth impaired: there are quite a few images to follow]

Error: Missing Dependency: tcl = 1:8.5.1 is needed by package 1:tk-8.5.1-4.fc9.i386 (installed)

This should never happen in the stable repositories of any system. Not ever. In fact - not for any reason whatsoever.

In my (humble) opinion, it is always a failure when any error which the average user is unlikely to understand is presented to them. When I saw this using PackageKit I though, hmm... maybe something from one of the third party repositories I am using has acted strangely, so I checked. The average user will not. They will just think that this "Linux" thing is too unstable/confusing and wont use it.

So, I've downloaded Firefox 3, and contributed to the world record attempt. What I am wondering is is this a sensible kind of "record" to be recorded. I am sure no one disagrees with major sporting achievements, but it always seems a bit silly when you read of things like David Blaine's latest stunt, or the most pickled onions eaten in an hour (not sure if that one is real, but if it isn't it probably should remain that way). This is not to say that what Mozilla are doing isn't good, just that I don't believe that World Records should have become like this; but, anyway, I don't have much of a say in this, and I am sure that there is a market for knowing the person who balanced the most books on their head (again, not sure if this is real). Even Mozilla acknowledge some odd records - largest Irish dance ?!?!?

Now, here's to hoping that the annoying fsync() bug has been fixed :)

Right, until about Friday/Saturday time I'm taking a brief hiatus from the world for two reasons (of differing importance and fun level):

1. I'm going to see the grandparents whilst the mother is on a short break of her own [Importance Level: -1, Fun Level: +1]
2. I need to do A-Level revision [Importance Level: +10, Fun Level: -1×10¹⁰⁰]

See you all whenever!

I have been using Fedora 9 now since the Preview version was released, and I have to say I am very pleased with the results so far, everything seems far better than (and is constantly improving) the Beta version I tried some time ago.

All went smoothly using Jigdo to turn my Beta image into a Preview install DVD and, for the first time, Anaconda didn't bail out with a Python exception when I was repartitioning my hard disk. The install seemed faster too, not sure if that was me or some improvements in RPM or Anaconda.