Critical Exponent

During this vacation, I upgraded to Fedora 8. Here are some gotchas and caveats I encountered:

• Make sure you check the install image checksum. If first downloaded the installation DVD using BitTorrent. It took over a day and the file wound up corrupt. I had to download the image directly, which took only a couple of hours and worked fine. I’ve only tried to use BitTorrent for these Fedora updates, so I’m not sure whether it is inherently slow or I have it badly misconfigured; I do know it’s supposed to checksum the files to prevent corruption.

• The Anaconda installer would not run off the DVD on the laptop. I read that the fix is to append the following to the kernel boot line:

  floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm

• When attempting to initiate the install on my desktop (which I tackled before the laptop, so as to have one computer operational during the process), which has migrated over the years from customized RedHat through various incarnations of Fedora, I got an error saying that filesystems “should be specified by label, not by device name”. The fix is to rename, in fstab, /dev/hd... to /dev/sd...

• When Anaconda was trying to resolve package dependencies, it would hang at 26%. Switching to tty3, I saw the message “No package matched to remove”. It turns out this is a bug in yum. The fix is to append the following to the kernel boot line:

  updates=http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img

• I installed the Suspend2 (now TuxOnIce) kernel. I could not get it from mhensler’s repository, so I installed it from the livna repository instead. Hibernation works fine, but suspend-to-RAM is no longer working (I can’t resume, and often it seems as though the kernel is fine but the display does not turn on on resume). I am playing around with the sleep quirks to see wheter there’s some incantation that will resolve the problem, but no luck thus far. It’s a shame, too; it’s really useful to suspend at the touch of a button as I could with F7.

• The official recommendation from Fedora is not to install the proprietary nVidia video driver, as it does not play well with the rest of the system in case you need to uninstall it later. Packaged drivers are available from livna, but they are compiled against the vanilla kernel and not the TuxOnIce kernel. I tried briefly to compile the proprietary nVidia driver against the TuxOnIce kernel, but the installer had problems finding the kernel sources. I suspect this is a book-keeping problem in yum or the repos (since the sources and headers are marked as installed), but I haven’t tracked this down yet.

• At the application level, as always, I refer as needed to mjmwired for the installation of useful packages.

While the suspend-to-RAM issue is big demerit, the rest of the distribution is looking pretty good in use. I got updates of packages I use all the time, and a few things are more polished (such as the mail notification on the panel and the new gdm greeter).

This year, I “celebrated” Christmas for the first time. No, none of the baby Jesus stuff; just a lot of good cheer and a little of the crass materialism.

Knox and I put up a Christmas tree. More of a shrub, really, since we wanted a live tree that we could plant in our garden afterwards. When we went to the store to get lights and ornaments, I felt so, so,… goy. It was alien to me, participating in customs of which I’d only been an observer.

The presents we got, we put under the tree. The lit menorah and the model train set rounded out the Noël tableau. The anticipation built with a handful of holiday parties, dinners with friends, and gift-giving of our own—and of course, the obligatory yuletide soundtrack.

Christmas Day arrived and we rushed downstairs, giddy like children in our bathrobes and hot chocolate. The presents were a delight! We called our family and then partook in that most central ritual of Christmas, dim-sum.

And then it snowed!

We had some friends over for dinner tonight. They told us about a friend of their son’s (they are both in eighth grade) who come out to him recently, by SMS. The son texted back: “Congratulations! That’s awesome.”

It’s a whole new world.

You can look up studies on the genetics of homosexuality using the OMIM website. What jumps out of this collection of studies is that, for males, the genetic link appears to come through the mother (X chromosome) and that boys with older siblings are more likely to be gay. Interesting.

I learned about this through the NY Times Tierney lab. As seems to be the case every time I bother to look (is it sampling bias?), reader comments on newspaper blogs degenerate into the tangential, irrelevant, and specious. Sigh.

From xkcd.

A recurring ideal in our house is sustainability. We want to have as small a foot print as possible on the natural world, and indeed to leave our physical and social environment better than we found it. Our decisions are very deliberate (can we keep our buying to a minimum? can we resist the urge to drive when alternatives exist?). By the standards of our society, we’re doing well, though we harbor no illusion that we are either trailblazers or paragons of consistency. We are still more dinky guppies than granola hippies, and the tension between the two is at times exhausting (must we process again?). Such is the price we pay for conscious living.

We have big plans to make our new house more green: edible garden, native plants, solar panels…. We took the first step this weekend, when we set up our very own vermiculture system. Yes, that’s right, we purchased (there’s that consumerism!) a worm factory. Red wiggler worms, it turns out, excel at digesting many kitchen and yard scraps into castings that make a very valuable compost and a nutritious “tea” for garden plants. We’ve set up the wigglers in their new home and fed them. Now we just have to wait, see, and fine-tune.

We also started work on our back yard. We planted a big lilac tree (obtained free on craigslist) and a winter currant bush (obtained cheaply from the arboretum). We moved some of the shrubs from the front garden to the back, and we topped it all off with fresh wood chips from the neighborhood tree recycling program (they delivered a whole steaming pile of them to our door!).

L’chaim!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali asks in The New York Times where Islam’s moderates are. A better question, I think, is “what are progressives and moderates doing to prevent extremists of all stripes from hijacking social discourse?”

Right-wing Christians in the US bemoan a supposed assault on Christianity, since anything less than a state religion will not do. A presidential candidate needs to placate the religious right, reciting revised history in the process. Another candidate attributes his success to god alone. In American society at large, it matters much more that one invoke the name of the proper deity in the proper way than that one have sensible, concrete ideas to put ethical principles into action.

Do these folks not realize that conspicuous piety in fact speaks very poorly of their character, ethics, and value system?

U.S. Ambassador resigns over discrimination.

Soup Swap was featured in USA Today! Mark you calendars for Jan. 23!

Some NYU students would.

Sigh.

Tip of the hat to Jeff