Advogato blog for Zaitcev

Unforgivable - June 21, 2008

Here's what new pulseaudio does after update in Rawhide today: VLC media player 0.8.6h Janus E: core-util.c: Failed to state home directory qzaitcev.pulse: No such file or directory E: core-util.c: Assertion 'fn' failed at pulsecorecore-util.c:1086, function pa_lock_lockfile(). Aborting. Aborted Talkative library functions are bad enough, but aborting and taking down whole application! How amateurish.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=426

Jim's strategy - June 21, 2008

Jeremy posted a shorthand of a meeting with Jim, our CEO. I think it's pretty interesting, although it's not very new for me, because it's consistent with his internal message and I've met with him before. Jim talks about the need to involve companies (and their member individuals) into the Open Source in general. I quite agree, although in my like of work I see it in a very narrow way. I interact with all kinds of customers. Some are used to the old, "black box" way. If a test round is needed,.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=424

Go Seth! - June 21, 2008

I cancelled a yum update because I suddenly remembered that it's Friday and I had to download Tower of Druaga finale. It seems like only yesterday doing so involved a-c and kill -9, but today two c were sufficient. Yay.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=425

Whitelist your cookies - June 12, 2008

I followed the suggestion at DaveJ's comments as an experiment, because I visit way too many forums and other identity driven sites, but so far it worked very well. There was not a single case of website failing to work with explicit permissions to set cookies, and the work required to add permissions was not too onerous. It would be even better if Firefox threw up a dialog or something, to let me whitelist a website on the fly, without opening the preferences dialog with its tabs.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=423

I will never fly - June 10, 2008

I took a glider ride at Moriarty, NM on Sunday. It was pretty incredible. Also, I suck as a pilot so much, it's incredible too. I don't think I had the string centered for more than 3 seconds at a time, if at all. We took a tow to about 1800 AGL or 8k and from there climbed above 15k, where we caught the mountain wave. My pilot, Dave, said that on a good day people fly from Moriarty to Colorado and back, by hopping from a cloud to cloud. One unexpected thing is just how loud the wind noise is...
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=422

Firefox and CPU - June 3, 2008

On my main laptop, running Rawhide, Firefox burns CPU when idle (firefox-3.0-0.65.cvs20080416.fc10). It's not much, top shows 5..7%, but it's persistent. Bram asked about tools to debug this just recently, and Jeff Daly replied that Mozilla is working on it. Apparently there is an add-on for it already.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=421

Games... I remember those - June 3, 2008

I did not play any games in years and years, and the last on I played was Myth. But a couple of days ago someone threw together a game where I was the main character (ok, my alter ego inspired the main character). I just had to try it. Doing so quickly reminded me just why I'm not a gamer. First, I had to find and attach a mouse to my laptop. The game is based on the RenPy, but mostly consists of 3 shooting galleries and a couple of puzzles. So, to pass with a touchpad is next to impossible....
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=420

Attack of Sqlite - June 1, 2008

Recently it became fashionable to link Sqlite everywhere (for example, yum uses it). The awsum workout that Firefox gives to your kjournald is also Sqlite. But now I see a little problem. What if anything happens to the database XML was bad enough, but it is repairable, if with a bigger difficulty than plain text. When GNOME eliminated battstat-applet, and started to throw an funny dialog, I was able to fix it by removing a few files and directories in my .gconf (Thank you, Federico). Now my...
http://www.advogato.org/person/Zaitcev/diary.html?start=419