2008-05-29

Relicensing work... Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When I first started this blog, I put a Creative Commons License on it, but scared of what I should licence it.. I put that people could not make money off of what I post. After reading through Karsten's and other comments I realized that I really didn't need to put the non-commercial.. its not like I am Cory Doctorow swimming in money from my work already :). So I am hear by re-licensing all my blog contents as "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License".

2008-05-27

Autism, children, and Survivor...

As a person with autism like symptoms and a father of a child with autism.. stories about children being 'mistreated' because of their autism... hits me in the gut. Having spent most of my youth being the painful butt of jokes for being different and not understanding why they occurred, I can say I understand the fear and sadness this child is going through. I can also feel blessed with the professionals and teachers that have helped us the last 5 years. I just wish there were more of them so that so many parents did not have to go through that Hell. [And I realize there are 2 sides to every story.. with usually the teacher being the one getting the short end of the story. I just hope that the teacher and the school learn something from this to come up with better ways to handle students with autism.]

  • http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/may/23/st-lucie-teacher-has-class-vote-whether-5-year-old/
  • http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/6319

Grumpy Old Man Post: F-9

So this weekend, I moved my laptop from CentOS 5.1 to Fedora-9 so I could use the 'encrypt' partition rules on LVM since I will be doing a lot of travel in the next month. And so far its been a long day of "huh why doesn't that work". Most of it is the stuff that comes from jumping from Fedora-5.9 to Fedora-9 should entail.

  1. Pulseaudio does not start up when I log in. This causes some apps to leave nasty-grams in .xsession-errors and such. Changing gconf did not seem to help things... so I went old school and rm'd .gconf, .gnome, .mcop, .i-have-no-idea and anything else that I figured migth set up a session. And went through and reset up my 'account'.
  2. Wrestling with the fluendo site to get the updated drivers I paid for a while back. The Fedora codeina doesn't talk to the new website, and the codeina in SVN at fluendo doesn't 'deal' with Firefox-3.0x very well. Lots of bug-buddy dumps on my screen as I tried and failed to get that working.
  3. I use CNTRL a lot.. between emacs, screen, and other things it is probably the most used key on my keyboard. Having it in the lower left really caused my RSI to flair up.. so I have usually gone with the 'Sun' layout with swapping my Caps lock and Control. Well for some reason F-9 lights up the caps lock LED everytime I tap the remapped Control key. It never did this before.. so I am trying to figure out what I screwed up.
  4. I completely failed the google apps treasure hunt this weekend. I forgot binomial theorum, my scripts came up with the wrong numbers to 'add/multiply' together.. and I felt like a complete idjut by the end.
  5. I need more bran I think.
On the good news..
  1. my fonts look nicer in F-9
  2. my laptop is now encrypted so I won't be a bad news story if it gets ripped off from me while I am on travel this year.
  3. my laptop can now do 3d effects!
  4. I am going to FudCon!

2008-05-18

Fedora 9: Take 2.

Well I ran into a bug in the preupgrade with the unison package.. I am not sure exactly what happened but anaconda said it couldn't update the pacakge and could not continue the upgrade.. but then when I rebooted into rescue mode on the system... the two unison packages had been upgraded to F9 versions. Since there was a lot of half-cleaned up packages... so I figured a good old reinstall would let me build some encrypted partitions and everything.

Fedora 9 has been pretty fun so far... my only complaint is that packagekit doesnt seem to allow for multiple packages at once... so I am off to use yum for a bit until I figure out that.

2008-05-16

Why the OPEC can't increase production...

One of the big issues going around everywhere is the high price of Oil and why doesn't OPEC increase production... and this will drop oil prices. The sad fact is that it doesn't work that way:
  1. Most of the Opec countries are at near-maximum capacity currently. They can increase production in small amounts but at the expense of downtimes etc for facilities... without those small downtimes.. the oil producers end up with bigger problems.
  2. Many of the mid-east OPEC companies do not sell the crude US refineries like. US refineries like 'sweet' crude that Texas, Mexico and Venezuela produce. This is the oil that is at ~125.00 per barrel. The price for the oil that Saudia Arabia, Iran, etc sell is mostly sour which takes longer to process and clean. The standard 'Sour' grade is around 100.00 per barrel with some lower Sour's not selling at 80.00. [The cost of removing the sulfur and other deposits seems to be over $40.00/barrel for these 'grades'.]
  3. Refineries have been rebuilt over the last couple of decades to run 'cleaner' and want the lighter stuff. They are running near capacity in the US and would need down time to change to heavier crude oils. [This is also one of the reasons for higher diesel prices.. more of the refineries are being used to make 3 grades of gasoline and less for diesel.]
  4. One of the things that goes against oil tapping in the Alaskan refuge is that the oil there looks to be mostly heavy sour oil like other parts of the north slope. This oil even if it were as large as the Saudi fields would not help the price of the oil that is most used.
Actually one of the things that would cut gas prices was to remove the need for mid-grade gasoline. Most cars run well on lowtest or on high-test. The mid-test supposedly takes up 1/5 of refining capacity which could be converted to low-test. This would boost domestic gas production or diesel production which would lower prices. I expect that in the case of gas prices going north of US$4.00-$4.50 that this will go through congress and states will push for 55 mph speed limits as that would reduce consumption enough to lower prices to $4.00 stage.

Anyway... this is what happens when you give me a napkin, a pen, and a meeting I didn't need to be in :).

2008-05-15

Keeping things in perspective

I was catching up with my OLPC emails and trying to make heads and tails of who to work with or help these days... when I looked down at the Starbucks cup in front of me..


All children need a laptop. Not a computer, a human laptop. Moms, dads, grannies, and grandpas, aunts, uncles -- someone to hold them, read to them, reach them. Loved ones who will embrace them and pass on the experience, rituals, and knowledge of a hundred previous generations. Loved ones who will pass to the next generations their expectations of them, their hopes, their dreams.
General Colin L Powell

Odd what shows up in places when you don't expect them.

2008-05-14

Fedora 9: Impressions

Well I am currently still downloading at home using preupgrade... I expect it will be ready by this weekend. [xDSL is not that fast where I live... though if I switch all my phones to Qwest I can get fiber-optics for $100.00/month or some such thing.... which at a University salary ain't happening anytime soon.]

I was able to torrent at work the live cdrom image and the DVD... I don't know exactly what Nemoy's problems were... I couldn't duplicate them on the downloads. The USB key was created and I am going to be installing hardware this week using the persistent image on some networks without DHCP/PXE. [Install key, install live image, install RHEL-5 for the server.]

2008-05-12

Ketchup: Aleph -Aleph-Null

Well I have fallen behind in doing my EPEL chores and about everything... so am spending today recovering from stomach bug to try and ketchup again.

1. Went to see Speed Racer Was better than I was expecting... it was not camp and did keep to the silliness of the original series without going overboard (well ok my wife didn't think so.. but this is definately a boys movie.) Of course coming out of the movie I felt like everything was going toooooo slow. I am not sure if that helped the stomach bug to come on or it was coincidental.. but boy did I feel a wreck on Sunday. [I have come to hate camp... it was ok for the Brady Bunch movies... but when every 1960's/70's remake is a camp extravaganza it gets old.. I am really upset in seeing that Land of the Lost is going to end up as a Will Ferrel beast.]

2. Allergies have been pretty bad this year. I wasn't allergic to much until I moved to Illinois in 1995.. and since then its been a slide downhill. [Of course I am getting old...] So its a constant haze of benedryl and itchy noses.

3. EPEL is moving along in spite of me... I will have the reports up soon.