My Fedora machine has finished upgrading to 11. I didn’t time it exactly but it looks like it took roughly 4 hours. That’s primarily due to the fact that it’s an older and slower machine. No errors or issues at this point – the login page doesn’t have the blue sun with solar flares any more. The new one looks cool but I really liked that sun. Have to see if there is a way to get it back.
First thing I did was start up my synergy server – because using a full size keyboard is where it is at.
I’m pleased that things looked to have gone well. For a bleeding edge distro Fedora is pretty smooth. There are bumps of course, that’s part of being out front – finding and marking them but all in all I’m impressed with just how usable it is as a desktop OS.
The upgrade will take a little longer. It finished all the prep, rebooted and shows it is now on 141 of 2207 packages to be updated. It is moving along rather nicely – if nothing gets broken I expect to have Fedora 11 running this afternoon. Woohoo.
While I’m here – how about that match between US and Spain in Confed cup? That was a shocker. Nice to see as a big Tim Howard fan. He had a number of clean sheets with Everton this year, nice to see it happen for the US. The big question was were the terrible matches prior the aberration or was this match?
My Fedora system just told me it wants to upgrade to 11. I haven’t done a Fedora upgrade in years. They used to always blow up on me so I got into the habit of backing up what I needed and doing a fresh install. They roll out new versions pretty rapidly so I also got into the habit of skipping every other version. I did break that pattern though when KDE 4 came out because I wanted to move forward as rapidly as possible as they fixed the pretty sever issues it had.
So we’ll see if things are any different now. The package manager software just popped up and so I told it to go ahead. Now it says it has 5 steps to preparing:
Download release info
Download installer images
Determine which packages to download
Download packages
Prepare and test upgrade
It says I can just keep working away while it does it’s thing but I think I’ll try to stay off that box to some extent so it can get done as quickly as possible.
Last night we were all hanging out at home. There was a thunderstorm. Some of us were upstairs, some down stairs. Lightning struck, out front I think, and it made a huge ‘crack’ or ’snap’ sound. In fact – the sound I’ve heard when smaller stuff arced – but much louder. The kids screamed – I went around and checked that everything was o.k. The GFI was triggered on an outlet in back but I have no idea if it was related. Pretty crazy. Apparently the Orlando area had 5,000 lightning strikes in a single hour during the storm. 3,000 the hour after that. Wow. That is the closest I’ve ever been to a lightning strike in my life.
Just finished reading about human flesh hunting via slashdot. It is about large groups of people that use the internet to track down and punish individuals that upset them. I’ve seen this stuff over at reddit – and via the /b folks but I did not know it was so wide spread in China. In fact, the article seems to indicate that this wasn’t such a big deal outside China until recently which I think is a mistaken assumption. But it’s a well written article that goes beyond merely reporting on events and taking it further with some interesting observations. What really stood out was the final sentence that includes this, “…because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.” That may sound like hyperbole, but I think it’s possibly an understatement.
A Google blog post yesterday announces their new Google Translator Toolkit. The blog post does a great job of explaining how it works – with a very nice diagram and video thrown in. But if you want a little more info to decide if it is worth the jump or not, here is a little cut and paste from the post.
At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.
For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit’s bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system “learns” from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world’s Internet population.
