Author Archives: Ian

Trackback Spam

I foolishly had left trackbacks on by default on this blog. I just noticed that some of the articles had hundreds of trackbacks on them. I doubt this blog is that popular. I think I would have noticed if I got on slashdot. They all looked like link spam. Unfortunately, Typo does not have any […]

SVK on Fedora Extras

Over the weekend, I got the [SVK](http://svk.elixus.org/) version control system included in [Fedora Extras](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras). It is in the perl-SVK package. I also packaged up a bunch of its required Perl modules. I actually used svk for the spec files for the packages. It was very handy for synchronizing and merging changes between home and work […]

Booting Fedora Installer from Disk

If you already have Linux installed, it is possible to boot the Fedora installer to do installs or upgrades without a boot CD. In the [images/pxeboot](http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/images/pxeboot) directory of the [distribution repository](http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/), there is vmlinuz kernel and initrd.img ramdisk image. Download those and put them in /boot. Then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add the following entry: title […]

Perfectly Good Airplane

Yesterday, I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. A coworker’s, Mike, birthday was yesterday and to celebrate, we went skydiving. It was Mike, me, two other coworkers, Aaron and Michael, and a friend of Mike’s. Aaron’s wife and later another coworker came to watch. We went to [Skydive Oregon](http://www.skydiveoregon.com) in Molalla, which is thirty […]

Fedora Caching Proxy

I already have a mirror of [Fedora Core](http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/) current release and updates to make updates and installing packages faster. I have been doing more development recently which means installing Extras and Rawhide package. I wanted to have a mirror of those but didn’t want to have a complete mirror and do the large rsync updates […]

Trains, Boats, and Bridges

I went for a bike ride today which turned out to be more interesting than normal. I took the same route I usually do, north on the Springwater Trail along the river to downtown. There are train tracks next to the trail and I encountered a steam train. I had seen this locomotive before; the […]

Grand Floral Parade

Yesterday, I went to the Grand Floral Parade for the first time since I have been in Portland. I met up with a coworker, Tim, and his wife Nariyo. We found a place downtown near the end of the parade where a coworker’s wife had gotten up early to get a spot to sit. We […]

Pledge

I really need to post more often to this thing. In the last month, I went to Hawaii, Astoria, and took lots of pictures. My new resolution is to post something every day. Most of them will be retrospective, links to elsewhere, computer-releated, and boring.

Poker Bot

Today, I won a (small) tournament of poker bots against coworkers. The bots played one-card poker. One coworker wrote the server in [Ocaml](http://caml.inria.fr/). We had the tournament/party has my coworker Aaron’s house. I wrote a client in [Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org/) which could be used to make bots with different strategies. I came up with four acceptable strategies. […]

32-bit Firefox on Fedora

One complaint I hear about [Fedora](http://fedora.redhat.com) on x86_64 is that Flash and Java plugins can’t be used with the 64-bit Firefox because they only are available as 32-bit. I don’t normally need those plugins at home but I can see how people would want them. I discovered that the easiest way to install 32-bit Firefox […]