Patrick's Blog(2)

Recently Linus commented on the problems kernel developers have when they branch master at some random point:

To get cleaner history, people should try to keep their tree clean.
Not add random patches to random branches, and not start random
branches at random points in time that aren’t necessarily stable.

Git is extremely powerful and with great power comes great responsibility to not mess things up. Anyone who ever had the “pleasure” of bisecting a branch that was rebased when it should not have been will probably nod in agreement and either will follow or is already following Linus’ best practice.

Fearless Fedora Project leader Jared Smith has announced the election results for FAmSCo, FESCo and seats on the Fedora Board.  Congratulations to Joerg Simon and Jaroslav Reznik for being elected to the Board, Christoph Wickert, Adam Jackson, Matthew Garrett and Marcela Maslanova for being elected to FESCo and to Neville A. Cross, Larry Cafiero, Rahul Sundaram, Gerard Braad, Igor Soares, Pierros Papadeas and Caius Chance for being elected to FAmSCo.

The new PR 1.2 firmware release for the N900 was just released and it’s time to upgrade. Then you bump into your first challenge: how to backup your SMS messages on the N900? Nokia’s PC Suite only backs up Contacts etc. but not your SMS messages. And Ovi Suite still does not support the N900 (what’s up with that Nokia?!).

So how do you backup your SMS messages (and Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Bookmarks and Settings)?

Here is how:

1) make sure your N900 has a full battery or is plugged into the charger

2) on your N900 start the Backup application

3) select “New Backup”, fill in a name like N900_Backup_<date> and press “Proceed”

4) in the next screen make your selection or leave all enabled and press “Select”. Make sure at least “Communication and Calendar” is selected as that one contains your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes and SMS messages

5) wait for the Backup to finish after which you are returned to the main Backup screen where you see your shiny new backup

6) copy the backup (directory + contents) from your N900 to your PC

7) upgrade the N900 to PR 1.2

8) copy the backup (directory + contents) on your PC to your N900. The location on the N900 is /home/user/MyDocs/backups

9) start the Backup application. yuo should now see your backup listed

10) press “Restore”, select your backup and voila all your data should be restored

Disclaimer: no guarantees, this is how it worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

The New York Times has an excellent article showing an overview of all (current) Facebook privacy settings. To protect your privacy you should use a setting of “Only Friends” or “Only Me” (via Custom) and disable pretty much every kind of sharing. If you do not understand what a setting means and you value your privacy then be sensible and disable the setting.

The last and quite important one in the right side in the picture called ” Facebook Ads Page” can be found (when already logged into Facebook) by clicking on Account then Account Settings and then select the tab on the right side called Facebook Ads and set *both* options (at the top and bottom) to “No one”. You have to do that separately for each one. So select “No one” in the top option and click “Save Changes” and then do it again for the bottom one.

Or you could just delete your Facebook account by clicking on Account then Account Settings and then select Deactivate Account. Once you have done that, do *not* log in to Facebook for at least 14 days or else Facebook will magically reactivate your account.  The Facebook help page on this subject can be found here.

Remember, Facebook’s business is your information so the more information they have, the more money they can make.

If you need to blow of a little steam then Enemy Territory is the perfect game. Here are some  tips to make the sound working on Fedora 13 x86_64.

Assumptions:

• Fedora 13 x86_64 is installed and updated with yum update
• et-linux-2.60.x86.run is installed
• the et-2.60b.zip patch is installed
• kmod-catalyst is installed from rpmfusion.org

There are two parts to make this work: Graphics and Sound

Graphics:

• get xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i686 rpm from rpmfusion.org (note the .i686 extension. It must be the same version as the x86_64 one you previously installed)

Sound:

You need to add a couple of lines to /etc/rc.local to make sure sound works properly:

/sbin/modprobe snd_seq_oss
/sbin/modprobe snd_mixer_oss
/sbin/modprobe snd_pcm_oss
echo "et.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
echo "et.x86 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss

Alternatively you could use et-sdl-sound.

Other solutions or improvement are most welcome in the comments.