Seems there are a lot of bugs in upgrading fedora, after my last post regarding the yum method I’ve become so accustomed to I thought I’d try preupgrade on another machine when it was released for F8, so I did… For the most part it seems fine then this happens;

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/share/preupgrade/preupgrade-cli.py”, line 153, in <module>
util = PreUpgradeCli()
File “/usr/share/preupgrade/preupgrade-cli.py”, line 40, in __init__
self.main()
File “/usr/share/preupgrade/preupgrade-cli.py”, line 145, in main
self.make_it_boot(extra_args)
File “/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/preupgrade/__init__.py”, line 532, in make_it_boot
keymap = getkeymap()
File “/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/preupgrade/__init__.py”, line 184, in getkeymap
keyboard = xf86config.getCoreKeyboard(xconfig)
File “/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xf86config.py”, line 173, in getCoreKeyboard
for i in xconfig.layout[0].inputs:
IndexError: index out-of-bounds

Seems to be something to do with a missing ServerLayout and CoreKeyboard option in xorg.conf which I might add, is NOT added by anaconda/whatever on install of F8! So if the installer doesn’t configure this section, and preupgrade requires this section… EPIC FAIL!

Update

When I choose to upgrade my system from the grub boot option added by preupgrade, I do not need to configure my timezone again, I do not need to specify my root password again (maybe enter it in order to perform the upgrade though), and last but by no means least, in fact I’d say MOSTLY, I DO NOT WANT ANACONDA TO REMOVE ALL MY PARTITIONS AND START AGAIN! Especially as all the packages used by anaconda are on one of the damn partitions it suggests I remove!

EPIC FAIL ^ 2

Amused by the article pointed out here, I’d like to add that the only people who still buy pop music are 13 yr old girls.

But don’t you think this is a little sick?

“Copyright is over, and musicians should make themselves as pretty as they can for big brand advertisers, says top music manager and label boss Terry McBride.”

Reminds me of a Bill Hicks bit, involving a naked lady, and snickers Or two double mint girls whichever floats your boat… I think it might have been entitled “what is pornography”… Essentially, no artistic merit, and causes sexual thoughts…

When I upgrade fedora I usually upgrade fedora-release-* manually then run a good ol’ yum update, and fix any minor niggles after the big event. This time cups throws an error, I investigate, try manually installing and…

[root@localhost UPDATE]# rpm -Uvh cups-* –nodeps
Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
package cups-libs-1.3.7-2.fc8.x86_64 (which is newer than cups-libs-1.3.7-1.fc9.x86_64) is already installed
package cups-libs-1.3.7-2.fc8.i386 (which is newer than cups-libs-1.3.7-1.fc9.x86_64) is already installed
package cups-libs-1.3.7-2.fc8.x86_64 (which is newer than cups-libs-1.3.7-1.fc9.i386) is already installed
package cups-libs-1.3.7-2.fc8.i386 (which is newer than cups-libs-1.3.7-1.fc9.i386) is already installed
package cups-1.3.7-2.fc8.x86_64 (which is newer than cups-1.3.7-1.fc9.x86_64) is already installed

Hmm… Epic fail fedora, at least bump up the package release so this doesn’t happen!

Update: Well after fixing that little problem, another small one hit, with radeonhd and gnome-applets, these weren’t so encumbered by dependencies so I removed the packages for the time being (not that I use radeonhd at the minute), after removing those and re-running yum update, guess what, the cups bug seems to be fixed.

Feel the power of planet gnome!

To some people, the opposite of increment is excrement.

That is all.

Let me please take a moment out of your day to direct your attention to this story on theregister does anyone else see this as a massive abuse of power? Now we’ve all been insulted online, sometimes people file bug reports about it. If I reported that I had been insulted to the police, would they care? Would they fine someone? NO! They’d throw the report in a dusty corner full of the sh*t they can’t be bothered to sort out.

However, when it happens to a police officer, they will find whatever trumped up charge they can squeeze past a public defender and use their powers in order to retaliate. This IS the thought police.

Today I shall shed a tear for the death of justice, rest in peace.

Funny, our patron saint is Turkish or something, and never even came to england…

On another note, I was going to be throughly screwed by O2, leaving the UK 7 months into an 18 month contract allegedly requires you to pay off the full contract. However, this is NOT actually the case. In the UK the provision for a contract made verbally or over the phone, is that for canceling the contract within the contract time can only be a maximum of 3 months payment. I have been told this a number of times from other companies when canceling various bills during my move. Including virgin media, which by the way, didn’t ask for 3 months payment, they simply canceled with effect on a specific date, which I thought was nice. So 370+ english pounds… when I am leaving the country… You’ve got to be joking! So I’ve cancelled the direct debit, and will be closing my bank account soon enough also. This is the great thing about the new direct debit rules, you now have the right to cancel a direct debit directly from your bank, rather than going through the company that set it up in the first place.

So O2, a simple f*ck you, you ain’t having my money! From a legal stand point I believe the status of this is, that now I’ve withdrawn payment, they cannot continue to charge me for a service that is not being provided, regardless of what their unsigned contract terms are. If they cut me off, they are not entitled to payment, so they aren’t getting it, and I don’t live in the UK, they don’t have my address in Finland so ner ner Anyone with any knowledge of UK law please fill out any details you think will be appropriate for me to know.

We now have two tentative patches for bug #507797 my patch isn’t complete but is only missing a few bits and pieces, Toby’s is almost the same, we’d of course like reviewers to check over the patches and select which one should be applied.

So we’ve worked around the bug, of course this solution is merely stop gap between now and when Cairo is faster on all hardware. I must of course apologise to everyone who has hit this bug, especially as it was branched with this bug and the distributions have pulled in a buggy app. It was very difficult for me to identify this bug but as Jorgen had the issue on his laptop I managed to actually see it for the first time. This was a big help as I didn’t actually understand the problem. Jorgen also did the majority of the work to fix the bug so thanks go out to him.

We’re hoping to make a point release soon for distros to pull in and fix the problem.

** UPDATE ** I have now combined the two patches into one. We just need a review and we’re ready to commit.

This bug has been identified by a few people with gnome system monitor in 2.24, it is concerned with the graph taking up too much CPU time. My testing has been done with the intel driver, the ati fglrx driver (haven’t tried RadeonHD yet as it doesn’t work well on my iMac) and on the nvidia driver (from when I was running a computer with a nvidia chip), while testing I have never been able to reproduce this bug, I have of course added tweaks here and there to the original design to improve things but still I cannot replicate this issue.

Now I no longer have a nvidia machine, mores the pity, apple use these Radeon 2600HD chips in the iMacs so I must endure ati until the RadeonHD driver is finished, continued testing on the intel driver works fine and on the fglrx driver some bugs are present in many apps where cairo is utilised (weird hue differences) but never because of the actual cairo code…

So what is it doing when the issue appears? I believe it is related to XXA rendering as I use EXA when available, EXA appears to work far more effectively but having said that XXA never produced a problem for me either, some say that the entire surface is being copied one pixel at a time when I paint it onto the scene, this would indeed be the cause but surely the drivers shouldn’t do that! From my reviewing of the system monitor code I can’t see anything that would be needless, and therefore provide a performance boost. There are some small niggles in the implementation however it wouldn’t be so difficult to remove them and even then the niggles are purely bling related (on configure redrawing the graph line buffer for instance).

I considered setting the clipping area around the vertical maximum/minimum points of the displayed graph line as per Jason Clinton’s recent post but as I’m not really doing any more drawing in the scene I don’t see why this would help in this case.

If anyone has any ideas, patches, rants or related issues then please put comments into the bug or on my blog where appropriate. **long stare across the gnome planet toward cworth**

I’m going to start this post with an apology. If you’ve been traceback spammed by me, or if you’ve endured other spammer related issues because of my blog I’m sorry.

I’d like to ask the Wordpress development community one simple question.

IS IT SO HARD TO PASS EVERY DAMNED STRING TO mysql_real_escape_string ?

Never in my years developing web sites with mysql have I left open the simplest of exploits, the SQL injection exploit, now wordpress isn’t that big a code base, and most of the commenting/posting is passed through the same scripts, but time and time again I’m getting hit with sql injection exploits. The last one, wiped out my previous post, reindexed pages as posts and dumped in hundreds of spam links. Now without proper internet access at the moment this is a serious problem, twice in the last week I’ve had a bot intrude into my personal web space, because of bad code in wordpress, I’ve updated it once, and now I’m told there’s another update. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could get their act together and stop making wordpress users vulnerable to the simplest exploit around!

For wordpress hackers some relevant documentation….

Micheal Ventnor’s blog:

“Did you ever stop and think about why a large portion of the open source community doesn’t trust you? Miguel, Miguel, Miguel….”

Did you ever stop and think that these kinds of heavily political posts on planet.gnome.org are a little rude, insulting and counter productive?

Miguel, I for one trust you have our best interests at heart, and in the face of zealotry and anti-microsoft culture we all need to wake up to the fact that they have a strong position in the market and through people like you, are changing their pattern of behavior…