From a CNN news alert in my e-mail:
 

Obama said he was ordering changes that will end the bulk collection of metadata "as it currently exists, and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata."

In other words, we're still listening, but we want to outsource our data retention costs back to the phone companies.

I was asked by a not very technical friend, who was asked by another, to help them track where their son is going on the Internet. They are not technical at all, but they suspect their son may be visiting inappropriate websites, and if so, they want to talk to him, but first they want to capture the urls surreptitiously to see if their concerns are valid.

Well, truthfully, i do not know what to suggest. I searched and found OpenDNS which seems to have some services that allow URL monitoring (no timestamp thopugh). What would you suggest?

http://cdn.rall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/12-13-13.jpg

Now, we see the fruit that was borne by that tree.

"Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

"I thought I'd never understand ObamaCare until I read these eleven words from a Washington Post columnist"

http://www.correntewire.com/i_thought_id_never_understand_obamacare_until_i_read_these_eleven_words_from_a_washington_post

WHY IS SHE SO ANTI-SEMITIC!

Doesn't she KNOW that her actions are SUBVERTING the only DEMOCRACY in the Middle East (TM)?

In 2009 I Told You!

It was TOO DUMB! And? The frickin' conul staff helping our boy get ON THE PLANE... WITHOUT a boarding pass.

Almost all the coding I've done in the last couple years or so was in Python.

I finished my first homework assignment for my Android class and started the second. The first required zero programming and the only files I edited were xml. For the second assignment I'm doing something a little more ambitious and actually writing a little Java. Stinking semicolons. I keep forgetting those little buggers.

I mentioned the IDE thing - holy cow have they gotten more useful. When I want to use some library I just start typing in what I want in the code and a quick keystroke automagically adds the import. Good gravy. The UI editor - if I add a hard coded string - a couple mouse clicks and it generates the necessary entry in the strings.xml file for me. I don't even have to go look at it. It's weird. It takes me back to my old VB 6.0 days.

On the up side with the semicolon - at least I use a US keyboard. On the Hungarian keyboard it requires using ctrl+alt along with another key.

I wrote yesterday about my issues with Android Studio and that I was using Eclipse instead. I wrote too quickly.

Apparently there are some bugs with Eclplise, ADT and Fedora 20 maybe KDE is a part of it too. Anyway I can't keep it going and Eclipse crashes regularly and quickly. This made me go back and look at my issue with Android Studio. An error in the text I used for a text box on one of my layouts was the issue behind it locking up. I had to run the app from the console to figure this out and then fixed the text with Kate and I'm back in gear.

I started the class late so I've been playing catchup. So I don't have time to dig any deeper right now on the Eclipse issues. I've got the first little app mostly done and now I'm working on the second. They are due in five days. After that if I have time I'll keep poking at Eclipse to see if I can find the issue.

Android Studio is still in beta and obviously not a finished product. This should not be news to anyone. I am currently participating in the Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps course at Coursera. I'm really enjoying it. Professor Angrave does a great job with the lectures and it is completely practical. I've taken a few jabs at getting started with creating something for Android but I believe this will get me further than any of those false starts.
 
He uses Eclipse in the lectures but I figured I would use Android Studio. They are close enough that I was able to keep up just fine. But today, trying to complete the first homework assignment, I ran into so much trouble that I switched over to Eclipse myself. The IDE kept hanging up and wouldn't come unstuck. I killed it and restarted it. No joy. I killed it, logged out, logged back in and restarted it - still stuck. I've got to get a couple little things done by the twelfth and that was it.
 
Plus, as I watched the lectures it was apparent that the Eclipse environment is just a lot further along in a lot of respects. This makes sense. I'll keep checking in on Android Studio over time and if Google puts any effort into it at all I think it will become the best tool for Android development but right now it's too bumpy.
 
I've got some ideas for stuff that I plan to make. If I get anywhere with any of it - I'll post about it here of course.

I've mentioned it in conversation. I've been going back and forth in my mind on what I would do. I need a new laptop. My old travelling laptop, an Acer, still runs fine but it is incredibly slow and takes forever to start. At the time I purchased it, this was not a big deal. There were a few primary concerns back then. One was battery life and the other was size. I was on long flights a lot and I wanted something that would let me make better use of that time. The Acer was perfect and the fact that it was very inexpensive was a huge bonus. I knew it would be slow but that really didn't matter. Most of those trips were to conferences that I was putting on. I'd boot up every morning and be plugged in and running all day. I ran presentations from it and handled email, google docs, etc.
 
Now my work style has changed a bit. When I'm home I don't really use my laptop much at all. It takes too long to start when I'm doing something quickly and now my phone and tablet handle most things I want to do briefly anyway. I stream a lot more video now but the little Acer can't do that well at all. When I am traveling I'm not at conferences. I'm working in national or team offices in our various countries. I'm checking networks, assisting in admin stuff for software, all kinds of things and I'm usually moving about - working with different people. The Acer just doesn't handle all that too well and my last trips to Albania and Russia I got really tired of telling people, "Just give me a few more minutes. I'm still getting my machine started."
 
I have had the Acer for over 4 years now so I think I got a great return on what I spent for it. And it still works, it just doesn't fit my current needs. I will probably set it up for one of my kids. It will be fine for them to use in doing homework and stuff. But what will I get to replace it? Well here is where I'm a little torn. At the same time I need a Mac. I want to be able to do some mobile development and our staff use a mix of Android and iOS phones. I can develop for Android on Linux or Windows but the iOS stuff requires an Apple machine. In my perfect world we'd just use Android but that's not reality. The reality is we have a lot of people that use a lot of Apple products.
 
I don't know why. I do - but I mean personally I don't get it. I don't like Apple products for the most part. My admittedly limited experiences with OSX have been unpleasant. I think it is not easy to use and the interface is rather poor and limiting. I'd much rather be using Linux. So it has not made me happy to see more and more of our staff move to Mac. As a nonprofit I hate to see us paying a premium to use what I don't think is a superior platform. And once many of our high level leaders made the jump I saw more and more people follow. So this long explanation is so that I can say - in a lot of ways it makes sense for me to get a Mac laptop. I can do the iOS work on it, I'll learn more about the Apple ecosystem so I can support others, and I'll have a machine that fits my current work better once I learn how to use it. The one thing holding me back is that I'll become another leader that leans people toward Apple.
 
I guess I just need to get over it. But I got wound up about it again today when I read this HN post. What this guy went through to fix his power button behavior - all the software and fixes people recommend in the HN comments to fix functionality- and yet people give me crap about Linux being too difficult. Unreal.
 
On an unrelated note, we had friends over for a little get together last week. One couple is Hungarian and the other Albanian. We decided to play a game. Someone (not us) suggested Pictionary. We got it out and started playing. It was horrible. We quit pretty quickly. As the only native English speakers my wife and I had a huge advantage. I've played that game many times and until this time never realized how much culture fits into it. Both other couple speak English very well but there were so many phrases and other things that made it hard for them. We switched to ticket to ride - the European version. It was a lot of fun. And now we were the ones with a very slight disadvantage. We played with each couple as a team. The other couples could each speak openly in their native languages about what they wanted to do but my wife and I could not. It was a lot of fun.
 
So it seems so stinking obvious but it is wild to really see it right in front of you - how much language and culture are all tied together. It would have been really interesting if we'd had someone from the UK.

Deal with it.

leto:/stuff% mkdir mp3
mkdir: cannot create directory `mp3': No space left on device
leto:/stuff% mkdir qwe
leto:/stuff% mv qwe mp3
leto:/stuff% ls -ld mp3
drwxrwxr-x. 2 tet tet 4096 Dec 22 20:53 mp3
leto:/stuff% df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/leto-stuff 30G 9.9G 19G 35% /stuff
leto:/stuff% df -hi .
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/leto-stuff 1.9M 322 1.9M 1% /stuff

This appears to be 100% repeatable behaviour.

I decided today was a good day to upgrade my Fedora 19 desktop machine to Fedora 20. I wasn't too worried about doing it as I finally gave up on using my Nvidia card in that box. On the intel chips everything is smooth.

The preferred method for upgrading is to use the fedup tool and there is a nice set of instructions for using fedup.

They say to read the bug report but I didn't. So that ended up costing me a little time.

I followed their instructions for installing fedup but that got me an older version not the latest. I didn't realize that and ran the thing and it worked up until it rebooted to do the actual update and then nothing happened and I was left with 19 still in place. I finally found the explanation of the problem with using fedup 0.7 and I tried following their instructions to get 0.8 but no matter what I did, yum wouldn't grab the newer version. Finally I just found the fedup package, downloaded it and installed it with rpm. Fortunately I just had to move all the files I'd already downloaded and then the process ran properly.
 
I'm not sure why yum wouldn't update to the newer version. I'm glad I figured it out. Once it ran the update did take a while as there were quite a few packages that needed updating. The instructions say to sync to the repos after it is done, I've tried to do that but it doesn't work. There is some issue with libre office and a spell checker. The sync wants to downgrade lots of packages, which I don't really understand at all. So for right now I'm just going to let it ride and see what happens.
 
It says I also need to uninstall and reinstall chrome. But chrome is working fine - so I'm not sure that I want to do that.
 
All in all it was a pretty painless experience. It took me a few minutes why the upgrade wasn't working - but if I had followed the instructions I would have seen my issue clearly listed and wouldn't have wasted the five minutes of searching that it took me to figure it out. So I'm pleased overall with the process. I can remember when upgrading was much more painful and I just did clean installs rather than dealing with it.