Much to my disappointment, among for the naming criteria for Fedora 13, we did NOT have "it must not be a ruler or religious figure" so a lot of obscure kings or emperors were advanced, but a queen is much better than that, more so when we are talking about a queen of the fairies. So my vote for the F13 codename was Gloriana.
When sleeping 2-3 hours of sleep a night and very irregularly, you get loads of random naps throughout the day. Apologies if I fell asleep in your presence 
Made this up last night for the wife and boys. For the baby, I pureed some of it and mixed it with some overcooked Acini de Pepe pasta (teeny, tiny little pasta) that he could eat with his five teeth. The wife loved it and said it reminded her of when her dad would make a big casserole dish of chili mac and send the leftovers back to the dorm with her when she was in college. The oldest boy just quietly cleaned his plate.
1 jalapeno seeded & finely chopped
2 yellow onions diced
2 tbs bacon grease... See More
1 large carrot diced
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small bunch cilantro chopped
2 tbs ground coriander
2 tbs ground cumin
1 tbs caldo de res (beef bullion)
1 tbs smoked paprika
1 tsp oregano
3/4 tsp ground sage
2 tsp salt
1 tsp white pepper
2 tsp madras curry powder
1 tsp cinnamon
2 lbs ground beef
2 7 ounce cans diced green chiles
1 quart water
1 28 ounce can crushed tomato
1/2 cup sour cream
2 cups shredded cheddar
22 ounce bag macaroni
Start sauteeing the onions, carrots, and jalapeno in the bacon fat. After a couple of minutes, add the garlic and cilantro and sautee about a minute more.
Add in the spice mixture (second bunch of ingredients) and cook the spices with the veggies until fragrant. Add the water and bring to a boil.
Put in the ground beef and mash everything up with a potato masher to break up the meat. Add the tomatoes and chiles, bring back to a low boil, and simmer covered for 30-45 minutes.
In another pot, bring salted water to a boil and cook the macaroni just a little underdone. Reserve 6-8 ounces of the pasta water and drain.
Put the macaroni pot back on the stove. Put in 6-8 ounces of the chili broth and the reserved pasta water, pour the drained pasta back in and mix everything together for about a minute over medium heat. Add the chili to the pasta pot and cook everything together for about 5 minutes.
Stir in the sour cream and cheese, mix well, remove from heat, and let cool for about 10 minutes. Scoop into bowls and serve.
Enjoy!
Over at Overlap.org, I made a post about giving thanks. I give thanks to you too!
Even though the picture above is from Damascus, and I’m not in Saigon after speaking about Status.Net at Gnome.Asia, I’m chillaxin a bit before heading to FOSS.IN to speak about Status.Net on DEC 1-5, do a Creative Commons Salon India about CC and Status.Net, and then onto TEDxGuangzhou DEC 5, where I’m unveiling a new topic Shanzhai VS. Qi Inside.
I promise I’ll be back to USA for the holidays 
With that all being said, I am thankful for all my family and friends! So many new people I have met in the last few weeks that make me more alive. Time is a finite resource. Use it well!
A lot of people in the community are blogging about food making, Mo has a dedicated blog for that, but she's a slacker and don't keep it updated, tatica is a wimp, she tag the tasty stuff out of Planet, Charlie do awesome stuff but only on special occasions and so on. I guess is the time for me to join and since the winter is less than one week away, this is a season recipe: boiled wine (this is how we call it in Romania, you may call it mulled wine), something what will make a cold winter day pass easier. But I don't guarantee your programming skills will remain the same...
The pretty picture must say it all:
Even if this is pretty much a non-event for us, Fedora users who can make use of the development builds since before F11 (half a year ago), it is still a milestone and the developers deserve congratulation for releasing at last the new and feature packed Inkscape 0.47 (could you endure the wait?).
![[inkscape]](http://nicubunu.ro/pictures/inkscape047-released.png)
As more attention is given to the ARM ports of Linux, I’m hoping someone (maybe me if I learn a bunch) will be able to implement some upstream kernel features that are implemented only on x86 so far:
Stack is already randomized, it should be easy to do the rest! ;)
I’m planning to attend the Neoteny Singapore Launch, with 2 days of unconference including some of the most high quality people in Asia hashing out the future. Also, if coming (or not), don’t forget to order a copy of Joi and Christopher’s book, Freesouls. I’m going to order a couple of copies as gifts this year. Hey, I’m in the book and so many of our friends too!
From the website:
LIMITED OFFER: Attendees to the Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 can now order FREESOULS at a special workshop price. A limited number of books will be available at NSC1, and Joi Ito will be on hand to sign each book. You can reserve your copy now by completing the order form below.
MORE INFO: Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 will be held December 12–13 at SMU. This special offer is only available to attendees of the NSC1 workshop. [Register now]
FREESOULS: captured and Released by JOI ITO. 296 Portraits by Joi Ito. Essays by Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Liang, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao and Marko Ahtisaari. With a Foreword by Lawrence Lessig and a Special Interview with Joi Ito. 72 Crowd-sourced Definitions of What A Freesoul is. 36 Landscapes. 200 pages.
Limited Editions Only. Take a look inside »
The print version of Tavmjong's book "Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program, 3rd Edition" is now in stock at a number of on-line bookstores. The book had been updated to cover Inkscape release 0.47. It is also available as a PDF download and for free on the web. We also congratulate Tav on arrival of his second daughter in the family!
After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Yesterday due to some problems with the hosting provider, our local Fedora website went down completely. With a new hosting provided by RLUG/ProLinux and after some good late night hours spent by rpetre and ajoian, the website is up again and working better than ever.
Thanks guys, you absolutely rock!
Saigon is now a favorite city. Amazing place. Amazing people. You can see the network.
And by soon I mean sometime in 2010 when I finally update my weblog.
So much has happened and so little time to write about it all. I’ll see you all after the jump!
In a quest to make an eggless-dessert for Thanksgiving, I browsed around the dessert recipes at the Post Punk Kitchen. My eggless matzoh ball recipe started using their recipe and then modifying it to suit my tastes. Their brownies were no different. While it produced a light, moist brownie with decent chocolate flavor (and none of those funny aftertastes that some eggless baked goods seem to have), I wanted something heavier, denser, and with chocolate flavor that marched into your mouth like it owned the place.
Here is my altered version of Isa's Vegan Chocolate Brownies. Remember, I'm not vegan. I'm just avoiding egg.
Ingredients
Ingredient Group 1
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cold water
12 oz extra firm silken tofu (usually one box)
Ingredient Group 2
1 cup 60% Cacao bittersweet chocolate chips
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup oil
Ingredient Group 3
3/4 cup Hershey's Special Dark cocoa powder
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup high-gluten flour (for more chewiness)
1/4 whole wheat flour (for a denser brownie)
3/4 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
Directions
Start by setting your oven to 350 to preheat.
In a glass bowl, use an electric wand mixer to puree the tofu, flour, and water in ingredient group 1 until smooth. If you don't have a wand mixer, you can use a blender and then pour the ingredients into the bowl. Seat the bowl on top of a pan of boiling water (double-boiler) and periodically whisk until the mixture is hot and begins to thicken (about 10 minutes).
Whisk in the chocolate chips, sugar, vanilla, and salt. You can put the bowl in the refrigerator to cool, stirring occasionally, or if you're impatient, you can put the bowl in an ice bath and cool it down more quickly. When the mixture is cooled to a bit below room temperature, stir in the oil.
Sift together the ingredients in group three, and fold the tofu mixture in until everything is well combined. I like my brownies thin (more surface-to-frosting ratio), so I spread the mix in a large greased aluminum baking pan, though some like a 9x13 cake pan.
Cook at 350 farenheit for 30-45 minutes (less if you're using the large pan, more if you're using the smaller pan) until you can stick in a knife and have it come out clean. Let cool, cut and enjoy.
If you want to frost the brownies, their chocolate frosting recipe is a good place to start. Not being Vegan, I used Crisco shortening and whole milk. I also stirred a handful of dark chocolate chips into the melted shortening right after melting it (letting it melt them) and opted for no almond extract (because I hate the smell of almond extract). I added the sugar a little bit at a time and warmed the milk, because using cold milk or the whole 3 cups of sugar caused the frosting to sieze. In the end, because of the melted chocolate chips adding body about 2-2.25 cups of powdered sugar got me a wonderfully thick consistency and a little bit of gloss.
If you're in the mood to take it a step further, you can use this chocolate chip banana bread pudding recipe, substituting these brownies (unfrosted) for the bread. I used about 2 pounds of day-old brownies (the recipe makes about 2.5 pounds) instead of 1 pound of stale bread, whole milk instead of a vegan milk substitute, and tapioca flour as my thickener/binder. Serve it warm with some vanilla ice cream (most low-to-mid-price brands use gums and soy lecithin instead of eggs). It made my wife fall in love with me all over again.
Happy Eating!
So far, there's only one game on my Samsung Moment that I considered worth paying for. I paid $2.99 to get the full version of Lupis Labs' Robo Defense.
It's a tower defense game with lots of degrees of difficulty, different maps, and you can spend points earned in the games to buy upgrades like increasing the speed of fire of your rocket launchers or increasing the strength of your guns. You play again and again, gradually beefing up your strength so you can complete more and more difficult levels.
But what if you want to get your fire rates or bullet strength up to massive levels without having to spend all that time accumulating the necessary points? I Googled for cheat codes, but all I found were game sites saying they didn't have any yet.
I'm not an Android developer, but I had seen a file on my microSD card with the filename "robo_defense_full.bak". I decided to look at the guts to see if it could be used. Loading it up in a plain text editor showed some odd characters. I wasn't sure what it all meant. So I opened it up in a hex editor (using HexFiend for Mac).
Of course, the "Edit this file at your own risk!" at the beginning was fun, but I decided to poke around. as I did, I noticed that all of the upgrades were listed (as Rewards). On the line marked 456 on the screenshot above, you'll see an entry start: ADReward:Faster Antiair Reloadw.........t. But if you look at the hexadecimal information to the left, those dots are represented as 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 16. The number 16 in hexadecimal is 22 in decimal, which is the level my Faster Antiair Reload was at. As I went through the file, the pattern was the name of the reward, then the 8 dots represented by 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00, then a hex code with the level I was at.
I made a backup copy of the file, just in case I screwed things up, then I changed a number of my levels, randomly picking levels between 55 and 99. I saved the file and then uploaded it to my microSD card, replacing the original. I unmounted the card and ran the game. No dice.
I deleted the game and its internal data files, then downloaded it again from the Android store (using the "my downloads" option on the menu). No dice.
So I tried wiping the file from my SD card and deleting the game, then redownloading the game and seeing if I could get it to start from zero. That worked and it created a new robo_defense_full.bak file. I erased that and replaced it with my hacked version.
When I started the game again, I had bullets at level 154, explosives at 104, antiair reload at 119, etc. I could basically play level 80 with a couple of rocket launchers and a couple of antiair guns because I pretty much killed everything the moment it came on screen. Sadly, now that there was no challenge, the ability to win the game with a handful of towers got old fast. The game I'd spent hours and hours playing was now a bore.
So, if you're bound and determined to cheat, I've just told you how. But hopefully, you'll view this account as a cautionary tale and choose not to do it.
When Mo was enthusiastic about tablet improvements in Fedora 12, this made me dust-off my own device, but only a few days later when Kaio pointed to the small and awesome MyPaint I got hooked, liking a lot how it feels like real drawing/painting.
And my first drawing with it, my first digital painting ever, is something I think is not entirely bad:
I admit it, I'm a little jealous of the Fedora feature of being able to install signed packages without a password prompt. I set out to get close on Ubuntu. The way that you edit the PolicyKit practices towards package install is to edit the file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/. If you look at the action for "Install packages" you can change <allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> to <allow_active>yes</allow_active>. Then software center works as expected.
I know there is a famous quote saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity and one day after the release the news about PackageKit allowing unprivileged users to install packages without root permission made a larger number of [negative] comments than the release announcement itself on such sites as LWN or Slashdot, which I am not convinced is a good thing for publicity.
But surely I am glad I got to keep my public presentations about F12 in advance last week, so I didn't get laughed-out of the presentation for such a "feature", for which I wouldn't know how or care to defend.
Now I promise, my next post will be on a more positive note about the release!
Among the large number of new features in Fedora 12 there is Thusnelda, the new and improved version of the Theora encoder, which is supposed to bring either better-looking videos or smaller files at the same quality.
As the Theora videos I create are mostly screencasts made with gtk-RecordMyDesktop (image quality from Istanbul is unacceptably low), I have no idea how I can take advantage of any of those optimizations (probably one of them is active by default, without any control from me).
But what I can tell, is a decrease in quality: screencasts recorded now are jumpy, the image freezes for a bit, then jump forward, skipping some important frames. No ideea if this is caused by the aplication, libtheora, X.org, video drivers or something else.
Ideas?
After realizing I hadn't given my BootCamp partition enough room on my new humongo-drive (upgraded from 120gb 5400 RPM to 320gb 7200 RPM), I went looking for a way to add a few gigs to it. The solutions were wide and varied. Most had to do with cloning the partition's contents, killing the partition, making a new one with Boot Camp, stopping the Windows install, and then restoring the old Windows install.
That was a lot of work and a lot of hassle.
Then I found someone recommending CampTune. It's a free download and "pre-release" but it works fine. It's a working Linux ISO file you can download and burn to a CD-ROM with your favorite disc creator package (or Disk Utility).
Once it's burned, hop into System Settings, choose the "Startup Disk" option, and set your machine to boot from CD-ROM next time. Boot from the CD you burned and you'll go into CampTune, which has a very simple interface for changing the respective sizes of your Mac and BootCamp partitions.
When you're done, everything should work as normal, although if you created a VM in Parallels or VMWare to use your Bootcamp partition inside OS X, you may need to recreate the VM.
That's it. Pretty simple, huh?
Don't be scared off by the "pre-release" status. It's been that way for over a year now and I think Paragon just decided the market for people wanting to resize their BootCamp partition wasn't big enough to charge for it after all, so they just left a good release candidate up as the free download and moved on to other projects. It worked well for me.
As always, don't mess with the internal structure of your hard drive without having made backups first.
Good luck! Have fun!
Fedora 12, Beer, Today, 18:30, La Berbecu, Bucharest, reservation for "Adrian"... 'nuff said
Even if the release counter still says "Fedora 12 Constantine arriving in 2 days" (one day and a couple of hours by now), we already launched F12 in Romania, taking advantage by the invitations to speak at a couple of local events.
Now the photos are up in the gallery: those from the RLUG meet are a few and more serious, I was speaking and ave played more conservatively with my camera:
Anselm just posted what appears to be a random thought on twitter: Are you more generative than consumptive in your particular field? ... Create more than you consume? In open source, I often rephrase this question as "Are you a source, or a sink?" There are many people in the community who contribute ...
I use the logged_in_or_basicauth snippet for a lot of my work, and had had some problems with it since I started using mod_wsgi in place of mod_python. Thanks to this post, I now know why my basic auth under mod_wsgi isn't working: lack of WSGIPassAuthorization On in my Apache config. Thanks ...
PowerPoint is a way to make gibberish look important.-- my 12 year old daughter, Alicia
For a long time, I avoided MrSID like the plague. After trying to do *anything* useful with it, I finally gave up; the requirement for old versions of gcc, non-working on 64bit, etc. really gave me a negative impression of the SDK for MrSID reading. This was especially painful when ...
Yesterday, I got to sit down and do some real performance testing with the MapServer folks. After rebuilding a local copy of the Boston Freemap on my laptop, I was able to share it with Paul, who ran it through Shark to find out where the performance killers are. The ...
Day 2 of the code sprint seemed to be much more productive. With much of the planning done yesterday, today groups were able to sit down and get to work. Today, I accomplished two significant tasks: Setting up the new OSGeo Gallery, which is set to act as a repository for demos ...
I'm here at the OSGeo Code Sprint in Toronto, where more than 20 OSGeo hackers have gathered to work on all things OSGeo -- or at least MapServer, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. For those who might not know, a code sprint is an event designed to gather a number of people working ...
I was pointed out to Eaton County's GIS Data Prices last night, and all I can say is how disappointed I am that people can still feel that this is an appropriate way to fleece their taxpayers. The data is collected, reproduction costs for the data are probably in the ...
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