Winter Break

Kind of boring / uneventful.

Here are some things I've done:

• I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10. For some reason the in-place update w/ the DVD meant for updating didn't seem to work (gave an error about a corrupt package, so could have been a corrupted {download | burn} I suppose), so I just did a fresh install. My laptop actually has /home mounted on a separate partition, which made the process pretty convenient. Unfortunately, my slow home connection (by my dorm room connection standards) made installing all the packages I use (who knew there would be so many?) kind of a pain. Some comments:
  
  
  
  
  • Plymouth is cool. I don't boot all that often, but it actually looks cool now (better than any other boot animation I've seen, IMO).
    
  • AMD/ATI needs to work on timely support. I have an x600 in my laptop, and though the open source radeon driver works pretty well, the proprietary driver is nice to have. I think it took something like four months for Fedora 9 support... hopefully it will be less than that.
    
  • Pulseaudio seems to work worse than it did in F9. I've played around with the settings a bunch and it works better now than at first install, but still not as good as F9. It seems to use a lot of CPU and it doesn't work well with Wesnoth (read, SDL) audio (though that may be because I compiled the development version of Wesnoth from source and missed some configure flag?)
    
  • Weird XFCE bug with scim (Smart Common Input Platform) that disables the use of the the XFCE Window Manager Settings and Window Manager Tweak dialogs... I think killing some processes fixed it, but I ended up removing scim altogether. Hopefully I won't need it.
    
  • Yay new Nautilus version with tabs w00t!
    
  • Supposedly PackageKit has improved? I think it has, it doesn't hang as often (though there was that dbus bug which stopped it from functioning). I still prefer using yum from the command line.
    
  • Overall, I thought it was a solid release, though perhaps not as solid as F9 (though I'll stick with it for updated software et al.)
    
  
  
  
• I've started playing around with mercurial a bit. I'm kind of hoping to use it for source control for a few classes next quarter (Why mercurial over git? I have to collaborate w/ Windows users, and mercurial has better windows support.) To get more used to mercurial and to kill some time, I've started writing a relatively unambitious 2-D top-down shooting game in python (using pygame). Maybe I'll finish it, maybe I won't... we'll see.
  
  
• My parents had a Christmas party (which, incidentally, just ended a few minutes ago), and they wanted to have karaoke. Now, we have this karaoke machine that plays CD+G's, but we've only the sample CD+G that came with it (which contains such smash hits as Take Me Out to the Ballgame and America the Beautiful). Clearly that would not do. Fortunately, it seems MP3+G's are readily available on the Internets. I found a python script cdg2bin (part of cdgtools) which was ridiculously useful for what I wanted to do. I just put the .mp3 and .cdg tracks I wanted to burn in a folder, ran cdg2bin.py *.cdg inside that folder and then used cdrdao to burn the generated bin/toc files. Easy as π
  
  
• Freenx is kind of cool, though I don't really usually want to forward over my entire desktop, so ssh -YC is more useful for me...
  
  
• I've offically read all of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Great comic, and it's inspired me to try out this comic-drawing thing again. Alas, I'm plagued by a lack of ideas that might appeal to most people:
  
  
  
  I guess most people don't make the same association between python and Duck Typing that I do. Oh well.
  
  
• I'm looking forward for a cessation of Christmas carols. Me no likey.
  

That is all for now
Except for some weird reason
I wrote a haiku