Lazy Hacker Babble

Another app I’ve been waiting for has been released. WordPress for Android is now available. Each day takes me further from the iPhone.

The latest dev channel build of Google Chrome now have a basic bookmark manager and cookie manager.

With a bookmark manager, even though it is very basic, Chrome for OS X has the basic set of features that I feel makes up a browser and might can make Chrome my default browser on OS X soon.

For those who has been asking for the 2.1 SDK since the Nexus One launch, the new SDK can be downloaded here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.1.html

“Eat your own dog food” is not an uncommon term in Silicon Valley. It means for a company to use the product they built themselves. If a company offers an email product to customers then they should also be using that same email product. It’s not always easy to eat one’s own dog food especially when that dog food provide a critical business functionality or is fairly new. Email, for example, has become vital for companies and they depend on it to be scalable, stable and reliable, but if you’re eating your own dog food you might be using the pre-production version which might not be 100% stable or it’s missing some functionality and which you need to build yourself. Because of this, even though many tech company talk about eating their own dog food, but don’t really pull it off.

I find Google to be very serious about eating their own dog food. Everything released to the public is also used internally and this includes their APIs. Often companies release APIs but don’t use them internally because they have direct access to the underlying technologies. Google does use their own APIs and during my first two months here, I’ve been learning a lot of the APIs in order to do my work. There are some amazing stuff out there and they are all listed at code.google.com.

Specifically, I’ve been learning the Google Data APIs. There is an amazing amount of access to APIs to allow developers to build sophisticated applications so I encourage everyone to try them out!

10 years ago my wife and I took a vacation to Japan where we found one of the best tasting ice creams we ever had. It was the Haagen-Dazs green tea ice cream. When we came back to the States, we tried looking for it, but it seems that it wasn’t a flavor that Haagen-Dazs sold in the US. We tried other brands’ green tea flavors, but nothing really matched what we had in Japan.

Today, after 10 years of searching, we found this at our local grocery store:

Yay!!!

Looking back on my computer usage this past year, I realized that I’ve stopped using Windows. For the first time, I don’t even have a Windows computer at work. Having mostly used DOS/Windows (usually along side a linux server) for so long I didn’t expect that my usage to stop so quickly, but before I knew it I was doing everything I needed to do on another OS. One of the key changes that I made that contributed to being able to stop using Windows is that I stopped PC gaming. However, I would have expected that OSX would have been the primary OS following Windows (especially since I replaced my main Windows machines with a MBP), but the work horse OS that I used the most turned out to be Linux. Where consumer apps on Linux used to lag behind Windows and OSX, developers are now building them for Linux including media players (VLC) and programs like Picasa and Handbrake with the arcane interfaces that are often associated with the Unix world. I believe having these types of user accessible applications will drive Linux more then just having windows/osx-like window managers.

Did 10 years really just went by?!? I still remember when we were gearing up to tackle Y2K and we’re now approaching the end of the first decade of the millennium.

By default there is nothing that prevents an user from accidentally removing both yum and rpm from a Fedora system and once removed it is very painful to try to put them back. If only yum was removed it would be a little easier to restore. Yum can be reinstalled through rpm using the yum-*.rpm package downloaded from Fedora or the install disc. Without RPM, it’s like a chicken-and-the-egg problem. The packages from Fedora and install discs (including the rpm package itself) are .rpm files and needs rpm to install.

Today I found myself in the situation where both YUM and RPM got removed by accident. I was following Fedora’s instructions on finding and removing orphaned packages after upgrading and had yum remove some Fedora 11 packages that was left over. Being distracted by other things at the time, I noticed too late that removing those F11 orphaned packages also led yum to remove a bunch of F12 packages including rpm and yum.

So, what does one do in this situation besides “backup and reinstall? which I wanted to avoid if at all possible. It took me awhile to figure out but I was get rpm back on my system and restore it to its earlier state. Here are the steps I took.

My first inclination was to try to compile RPM. However, this was a FAIL since it required additional packages that I didn’t have installed and I didn’t have a package management system… Instead, I downloaded the rpm-*.rpm package from Fedora and was hoping to extract the files so I can use them to reinstall rpm and yum. To extract files out of an RPM package requires… rpm! Oh, the irony. There is a rpm2cpio program that will do that but that is available in . . . the rpm-build-*.rpm package! Fortunately, there are a lot of scripts available that will do it including some shell scripts. The Fedora RPM docs included some scripts and I downloaded the bash script version but it didn’t work. After a little more digging, I found out that Fedora changed the compression scheme it uses in F12 from gzip to xz, so I modified the shell script as follows:

With this script, I extracted the rpm (rpm, rpm-build, rpm-libs, rpm-devel, rpm-python) files to a temp directory and install the files manually:

This installs the files onto the system but doesn’t update the rpm databases, so I did a ‘rpm -ivh rpm*.rpm’ in addition to the dependent packages they needed.

With RPM installed, I was able to install YUM . I had kept a list of all the files that got removed earlier so I had yum reinstall all those packages and my system is now restored.

It took awhile but Fedora upgraded itself and booted in to the GUI without a hitch. Everything seems to be running even with both the LCD TV and monitor hooked up (past upgrades would forget which was the primary display). Then I noticed that there was no audio. My first thought was that somehow Fedora 12 didn’t configure the audio correctly (uh oh) which wouldn’t be the first time that a piece of hardware worked in a previous version but not the upgraded version. Fortunately, I thought to just double check the volume setting and noticed that the upgrade set the audio-out to MUTE for some reason. Unchecking that re-enabled the sound.

I decided to take the time off from the holidays to upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12. My past few upgrades of Fedora have all hit some sort of snag some of which I felt were real obstacles that the typical computer user would find it very difficult to overcome.

For this upgrade, I was ambitious and decided to try the live upgrade feature that was introduced in Fedora 10. By running “preupgrade”, Fedora will download all the packages needed to upgrade to the new version in the background so the system can still be used. When everything is downloaded, the system will reboot, install the packages and then the system will be updated. That’s the theory at least. This method of upgrading should be faster since it only downloads the packages needed instead of every package. Given my complaint from the last post where I downloaded the entire DVD iso then having to download nearly another DVD worth of packages on the first ‘yum update’, this method would address that since it will bypass the first part.

The instructions for using using Preupgrade is on the Fedora wiki. Essentially, it is suppose to just be running the command ‘preupgrade’ and everything else is taken care of automatically. That was kind of accurate. I ran the command and immediately ran into the most common bug with F12 upgrade. I used method 1 to work around it, but I didn’t have any extra kernels so it was the tunefs that got me the extra space I needed. Seriously does the Fedora team really think that consumers would be comfortable having to do this in order to upgrade an OS? What Fedora did very well is that it warned me about the problem and none of it effected the current OS and as it promised, I was able to continue to use the system.

Okay, with that out of the way, it completed the download and it was now time to reboot. This is the stage where the system is not able to be used as it install the downloaded packages. However, at reboot, the system just hanged with the monitor showing “GRUB” and a blinking cursor… The upgrade corrupted GRUB and in order to fix it would require re-installing GRUB. The existing linux system is still there unharmed, the boot process just never made it that far. The irony of this bug is that “preupgrade” was meant to avoid having to create a bootable Fedora disc, but a bootable disc is needed to reinstall GRUB. I dug out my Fedora 11 install disc and booted into rescue mode. The following will install GRUB back to the system:

Rebooting after this, the system booted back into Fedora 11…?!? I guess I was able to confirm that so far my F11 instance is still completed unharmed, but this is suppose to be an automated upgrade to F12. I looked at the grub.conf file and it was suppose to give me the option to do a F12 Upgrade. So I rebooted again and made sure that I selected that option in GRUB before it booted back to F11.

Now the system is installing the package so let’s see how it goes. I took a bigger chance this time by keeping both my LCD TV and USB drive connected. In the past, I already had to disconnection in order to upgrade successfully, so let’s see what happen this time.