I've installed Fedora 17 on my laptop. I'm getting things dialed in, copying back over files I backed up and getting it all comfortable. The install went real well, though I did things differently than I've done in the past.
 
Going to the way back (for me) I had done full installs and just used the stock deal - choosing both gnome and kde things - then flipping everything to default to kde. That worked fine and I've been very happy. Though as I was getting ready to do this - I decided to go a different route. Fedora now has all these 'spins' and so I installed from the KDE spin. I downloaded the disc image, burned it and then booted to it. It is a live cd that has the option to install the image to the hard drive. I did so and got things installed. Then I just used the package management system to install all the other stuff I want. This approach was quite a bit easier as I didn't have to undo all the gnome stuff. I think when I am doing a full install in the future, this is the route I will take.
 
Normally I usually only run even versions. Skipping every other version has worked well for me with Fedora and their schedule. They usually do a good job of getting much of the best stuff back in the previous version anyway - so it's not a killer. But I just felt like kicking over to this one. Not sure why to be honest, just seemed like it would be fun to do.
 
I like to keep my desktop and laptop in sync somewhat - so I'll probably move the desktop to 17 within the next week. I'll probably go the upgrade path on that one.

Limited to 25 posts/day? When did that happen. Lame.

Just ordered my Raspberry Pi. I got the email from Allied Electronics & RS Components, telling me that I could order, last week. I've just been crazy busy so it had to wait. It was nice though, because I had been getting emails that always said something like, "We got a bunch more boards and told the people who get to order them - your turn will be coming." I was getting tired of that. My turn finally rolled around.
 
The email included a promo code that allowed me to log into a page just for the Raspberry Pi and I could add the board to my cart and then they had a set of accessories. They are very reasonably priced so I threw in a power supply and hdmi cable. (I've got plenty of rca/composite stuff laying around - and I think I have one of those little hdmi cables but I wasn't 100% sure.) They also had other cables like ethernet and usb as well as flash cards. Though the CF cards with the OS already on them were listed as out of stock. How does that happen? Can they not create them faster than they can ship them? That's really odd. No matter - I'll enjoy setting it up myself anyway.
 
I think I will build a case out of lego for starters while I think of a better approach. If I had the time and motivation, I'd see if I could get something fabricated for cheap and sell them. But I don't, so I wont.
 
They said they expect it to ship in 3 weeks. So a little more waiting, but that is o.k. Gives me more time to think about ways I may try to use it. If I can come up with some good ideas that work well, when they become more generally available I'll get more.
 
My total - with the computer, hdmi cable, power supply and shipping was $66. That's with VAT and it being shipped to Hungary. Pretty amazing. It cost my parents more than that just to mail us a small care package from the states.

It started all of a sudden last night, upon awakening the computer. My PC is right around 3 years old.

I'm pretty sure it's the fan on my video card. I don't play video games anymore [altho I couldn't resist checking out that online Wolfenstein thing and playing that for a while one night] so this one is just the mid to low end of nVidia's "business graphics" line of cards. (So maybe I don't even need the fan?)

I vacuumed it out as best as I could with what I've got (large extension on a huge Hoover), but no change. It wouldn't be so aggravating it if was at least constant in its new loudness.

Anyone reading this know if this can be fixed? Should I go buy some compressed air and try it? Or is it probably just some (cheap) bearing(s) going out? I had a new fan noise in my computer about a year ago, but it was just a dust bunny in the CPU fan I think, and it stopped making noise once I sucked it out.

Is there a way to re-lube these things (that's not going to end up dripping oil on the rest of my system/scattering graphite dust when in place!)? I could take the card out and take it into the Geek Squad or something, if the labor charged was not near what a new card costed.

Found out today I'm going to Turkey in September. I realize that's a little bit off - but should be sweet. Gonna be in Izmir. From the pics it looks pretty darn nice. Where we will be staying is like a 20 minute drive from the ruins of Ephesus. Yay travelling to new places. But even better - the last 3 times I did these meetings they were in Thailand. I love Thailand but it's a lot of travel, even from here. Now that I'm in Hungary, Turkey is close. I'll only be 1 time zone over and my travel time should be around 5 or 6 hours - as compared to 24+ when I was going from Orlando to Chiang Mai. Woot.

I was driving in to work the other day and heard a song by Korpiklaani. I really like their music quite a bit. The song I heard was Tequila which is pretty fun, though PÃÃt Pois Tai Hirteen is one of my more favorite songs so far. They have that acoustic stringed instrument at the start and the way it is played sounds just like how the word "hirteen" sounds with the rolling of the r. Very cool.
 
I know that Finnish and Hungarian share some roots way, way back - though I don't think they have much in common now in terms of words or anything. But I do find it's pretty easy to follow what I hear as I read the lyrics as far as the way things sound making some sense. (Finnish and Hungarian are related to one another like German and English are related to one another. It's not a real close thing.) Regardless - I like the music a lot. It goes well with this little folk painting I bought in Slovenia.
 
I've talked about this a lot - probably too much - but here we go. I would love it if Slashdot had built in Journal exporting functionality. To my knowledge it never has. A while back LeoP created a Python program that would go out and grab journals. It's still out there - you can download it right here. Unfortunately it is broken. I am guessing (I haven't spent the time finding out for sure) that the regular expressions it uses no longer match the pages. All the URLs still work but I think the layout has changed too much. In a post I made about it Pudge posted his own archiver in the comments. It's a Perl script that depends on a SOAP interface with Slashdot. I can't get that to work either which may be due to my inexperience with Perl or some change in Slashdot.
 
So I've been working on something similar to what Leo made. I'm moving along pretty well - mostly because the old pl journal page is still working. ( I had posted that the old journal list was no longer working but it is now.) That's key because I have no idea how I'd go about doing it with the new javascript, self loading way - and even doing it manually I haven't been able to get it to scroll back anywhere close to the start of my JEs.
 
As I was working on my approach I found myself wanting to do some regex stuff - but that's something I've never learned very well. Looking for help I stumbled across a nice tool, Kodos - The Python Regular Expression Debugger. I'ts really helpful. It also uses some older QT stuff and doesn't seem to have been worked on actively for a while. So I emailed the author to verify that it wasn't under active development and asked about moving it to PySide. I'll see what he says if I hear back from him. I'll probably try to do it for fun either way - but it would be cool if he let me contribute that and have it be a part of the project.

More here.

As a bonus , I'll probably soon reveal the unbelievable story of how I acquired my legal knowledge - by doing something nobody else ever has, and which, until now, would be considered pretty much impossible.

I'd rather not, because there is some danger involved, but it's necessary to achieve my goals in an open and transperent fashion.

Advice and help sought and welcome.

got an update to chrome on the 64 bit linux box today - had to fix selinux after update so it would start. Got that command quick to grab in the history now.

while I work I listen to Pandora. Usually in Chrome, but not any more. Yesterday (maybe day before) it started to have this popping intermittently throughout music. I'm not even close to an audiophile. Between the time on the aircraft carrier and all the bird hunting I've done without hearing protection my ears are sub-par at best. But this makes me want to stab myself in the eye. No problem on Firefox - though usually I just use a browser as my player. Oh - I should try Opera. I don't use it much anyways.

I've been putting together some pretty good playlists in Amarok, but Pandora helps keep things mixed up and I find out about new (at least to me) music there.

My little python* project is coming along. I've started writing my code in komodo edit. I'm not sure if I'll stick with that or go back to Kate. Komodo Edit doesn't do some stuff Kate does (some of that gap is covered by their IDE, which is not free in either sense). But it does autocomplete (intellisense) pretty well and I like to work that way. It keeps all the files for my project handy and has some nice editing tools. As I work, I try to refer back to the Google Style Guide for Python. I figure those recommendations can't be bad.

So I'm working on learning Python. I've had starts in the past but never stuck with it. I think this project will keep me busy for a while and I may start taking a stab at some web stuff too. I really do like the language a lot.

And I set up a repo on Github so I could get at my code from any of my machines. That's helping me to learn git. It's pretty cool. Right now I've got the repo there and one on my desktop. I can commit changes and push those back up. Today I'm going to set the environment up on my little travel machine. When I have that going I should be able to get a good feel for setting up git on windows and linux.

I'm also playing (just playing so far) with the thought of getting an apple machine this year. I don't really want to, but they are becoming incredibly common in our organization and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep ignoring them. Though from what I've read on-line I'd be able to emulate a lot of my work flows from Linux, which would be o.k.

Oh - and I've made up my mind. I'm not going to try to get fluent in Hungarian. I'm going to try to learn Russian instead. There are 20 countries in our area and the one with the largest number of speakers is Russian. It's also useful in a number of other countries too. So I'll be starting that up soon.

*My Little Python - that would be a good web-comic.

On weather.com tonite:

"Got Kids? -> Find Delicious Lunch Recipes"

* No, but I have some ham that I could use some ideas for.

* The other "other white meat"?

* "It's a cookbook!!!"

p.s. Too swamped with work to write any kind of substantial JE right now. Been taking work home nights and both days on the weekends for the last 3 weeks, and I'm getting a little burnt, but for the positives, 1) this week should be the last/this next weekend should be my first free one, and 2) it sure beats the flying crap out of having too little. I'm one of the lucky ones in America right now, and I'm oh so grateful. I stressed way more when I *didn't* have a job.

OK - I'm not going to talk about sports all the time, but this week-end I started watching the Everton/Manchester United match. I'm an Everton fan. When I had to time to check it out, the second half had just started and it was 1-1. I was pleasantly surprised. But within just a few minutes Man U scored twice and it was 3-1. I really didn't feel like watching Everton get crushed and I had other stuff I ought to be doing anyway, so I shut it off and went and did the other stuff. Last night I was checking scores from throughout the day and that match ended in a 4-4 draw. Should have watched it, but you just never know. (And the super-bonus, didn't expect it awesome news was that Liverpool lost to West Brom and Everton actually gained a point on them. Woot!)
 
Now to pull this around to something less sport-y. I'm learning git and it's pretty cool. That is all.