Well, it’s now officially Halloween night, and I have a steady stream of little (and not so little) ones coming at my door as we speak… Whoops, doorbell… [pause] Here, another few seconds before the… [pause] next ones arrive. I staid back on candy duty, as my wife brought our kiddos trick or treating. So have fun! We sure will.
I took the pictures below without flash. It just fits the atmosphere better. :)
Pumpkin carving fun with the kids. Messy!
Boo! Can you tell my spouse is into Halloween?
Digg.com led me (1, 2) to a short article on what could prove to be a promising technology: a vehicle powered by compressed air, also available as dual energy hybrid engine.
Being a syndicated article formatted for print and broadcast, there were no links to further references, so I researched the subject a bit deeper and found a slew of information on this clever French-built innovation (though the concept isn’t new).
Here are a few of the links I found interesting:
The reasons and challenges involved are obvious, but I hope MDI finds an effective way to muffle the vehicle’s rather loud audible output. Zero or reduced emissions are definitely a very respectable and timely achievement, but noise/sound pollution can also be quite a scourge, particularly in urban areas.
All in all, I can picture a great future for this technology, especially in the Third-World in the short term, which has so far been more opened than wealthier countries to fossil fuel alternatives.
My wife received and forwarded me a chain email last week detailing how to make this insanely realistic Halloween cake.
Just take a peek at the pictures below for our take on it, and you’ll see what I mean… Click on the pict’ for a larger view.
Cake ingredients:
Serving dishes and utensils
From the email:
1) Prepare and bake cake mixes, according to directions, in any size pan. Prepare pudding and chill. Crumble cookies in small batches in blender or food processor. Add a few drops of green food coloring to 1 cup of cookie crumbs. Mix with a fork or shake in a jar. Set aside.
2) When cakes are at room temperature, crumble them into a large bowl. Toss with half of the remaining cookie crumbs and enough pudding to make the mixture moist but not soggy. Place liner in litter box and pour in mixture.
3) Unwrap 3 Tootsie Rolls and heat in a microwave until soft and pliable. Shapethe blunt ends into slightly curved points. Repeat with three more rolls. Bury the rolls decoratively in the cake mixture. Sprinkle remaining white cookie crumbs over the mixture, then scatter green crumbs lightly over top.
4) Heat 5 more Tootsie Rolls until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with crumbs from the litter box. Heat the remaining Tootsie Roll until pliable and hang it over the edge of the box. Place box on a sheet of newspaper and serve with scooper. Enjoy!
We’ve modified the recipe slightly with our own ingredients, but that sure is going to make one big surprise at the Halloween party tonight! I wonder how people with cat allergies will react?!? ;)
Update: It was heavy, as expected, but very good.
JibJab, if you’re not familiar with this web-based comedy outlet, really reached a wide and mainstream audience with the now classic political satire This Land during the 2004 US presidential election campain. Not that they haven’t created a whole slew of priceless original pieces since then, but I truly find 2-0-5 to be a pure gem.
Their latest venture brought them with comedy legend director Jonh Landis, of The Blues Brothers and Animal House fame among many others, to launch The Great Sketch Experiment, an independent comedy contest for which I have attached a video description by the JibJab founders below.
What a great concept and opportunity!
But enough said, just go to the site, watch the 6 qualified entries, and vote away! I think the one I’m leaning toward is Small World, though I also really enjoyed Tall Cop, Short Cop and So You Want to be a Cop. But Tom and Tina was pretty clever too, and Shawshank in a Minute had a definite SNL feel to it.
Hmmm, decisions, decisions…
As previously hinted at, my second encounter with Zod (this one, not that one) was to upgrade my home file/media/LAMP server, an older HP tower running a P4, with 1.5 GB of RAM, two rather large ATA drives and a CD/DVD drive.
This post really focuses on the fact that I hereby did something that I, and others, rarely feel comfortable doing under GNU/Linux: following the distribution’s major release upgrade path. I usually tend to re-install the system from scratch instead, while preserving my home directories and re-applying my customizations where needed, usually through custom scripts.
Well, I’m happy to say that despite my concerns, since my family and I rely quite heavily on this home server, I did upgrade from Core 5 to Core 6 and live to tell the tale. It was in fact as easy as, say, an OS X upgrade, which in itself says quite a bit, assuming you did not add oodles of custom built software outside of the distribution’s package management architecture (ie: custom compiled kernels and software).
I once again chose to use a network (http) install using a regional mirror. You can find a list of the latter to match your geographic location on the Fedora Wiki.
Having chosen to upgrade, the Anaconda installer skipped over all of the configuration steps, only prompting me to confirm the partition holding the system I wished to upgrade. Having only one on that machine, hitting enter sent me well on my way to completing the install with barely any further user input.
And that really is it for the upgrade itself… Now, was that painless or what? But wait, if you’re anything like me, you probably do have quite a few software add-ons that you got used to, and will now have to deal with.
In my context, this box was not highly customized. Having full hardware support out of the box for the past few Fedora Core releases (3 and up) for this computer, my add-ons really boiled down to 3 components:
I could have also included the nVidia video drivers, but being a headless server, I do not personally need them. Here is a good article on how to install the nVidia or ATI drivers on FC6 via Livna, should you need them.
Livna being an add-on, I knew that I’d have to upgrade its RPM manually through yum, but what I was not expecting was for the yum-fastestmirror plugin to bring yum to its knees, rendering it useless right off the bat…
So I rolled back to the good old /bin/rpm utility, and simply deleted the yum-fastest mirror RPM, as root.
rpm -e yum-fastestmirror
I then uninstalled the previous version of the Livna repository, since it is release-based and is not upgradable. I did so through /usr/bin/yum, now fully functional again. I also proceeded to install the adequate Livna version and check for system updates with the mother ship.
yum remove livna-release-5
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm
yum update
Compiling a clean copy of mt-daapd was as painless as could be, provided I had installed sql-lite in FC5, which had of course been cleanly upgraded in FC6.
And that was that! I’d estimate the whole thing took me around an hour and a half, and so far, Fedora has exceeded my expectations, especially considering I was kind of going against the community’s best advice on this one.
To conclude, and regardless of the operating system you use, I strongly advise anyone considering following an upgrade path, upon major releases, to always research what it will mean to them and their hardware in advance. A few minutes spent running simple web queries are always easier than fuming for hours over your lost data or unsupported hardware once the deed is done!
Now, let’s play! :)
Well, it seems that a lot of people are interested in upgrading from Fedora 5 to 6, if I’m to believe my site stats.
So as an encouraging update note, I just wanted to say that I’m still running the same upgraded copy of FC6, and more than a month later, all is well under the sun.
tekArtist 