i’m not sure exactly why sudo is trying to do something with your hosts file, but i just installed fedora core 11 and i tried running sudo and it was painfully slow.
this thread at fedoraforum.org discusses a solution that worked for me. apparently, having a bad /etc/hosts file will require sudo to timeout on the DNS it is trying to do before the command will run.
general ramblings | wilco | 
September 28, 2009 4:03 pm | 
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general ramblings | wilco | 12:00 am | Comments (1)
so it turns out that my sister and my wife are in pretty regular contact and my sister’s enthusiasm has been downright blatant. today, while talking to christi, my sister had somehow gotten it in her head that christi was going to deliver the baby…like now.
she then decides to IM my brother and tell him that something exciting is going to happen sooner than they had expected, but she can’t say what. and then she logged off.
then my brother is IM’ing me asking me what’s going on and if the baby is coming out now. i tell him that i have no idea what he is talking about and he tells me that our lovely sister has told him the baby is coming.
i check online to see that christi isn’t online and that moment of what if creeps in. she said that she might make an unplanned visit to the doctor just to make sure everything was ok because something was different and i hadn’t heard from her about how that went.
so i get in touch with her after all of this hoopla to find out that she had just left the doctor’s office and everything is fine and normal and there’s no new status. my sister’s enthusiasm has led to all of this excitement for naught.
i started to panic that christi and i haven’t packed ours or koda’s hospital bags yet and there’d be a rush of things to do. turns out that there’s no immediate urgency, but i think that i will pack some bags tonight.
general ramblings | wilco | September 25, 2009 4:09 pm | Comments (0)
i’m trying to install a 64-bit guest OS (fedora core 11) in a 32-bit host OS in vmware server and the fedora kernel kept complaining that the CPU was not 64-bit capable. vmware documentation says that 64-bit guests will install just fine on 32-bit hosts.
it turns out that after a BIOS upgrade, an option for virtualization was exposed. once the virtualization option was enabled, i was able to install fedora just fine.
general ramblings | wilco | September 24, 2009 3:08 pm | Comments (0)
seeing kristin chenoweth win best supporting actress for a show that is no longer on the air was pretty amazing. i think she did a great job on the show so that was great to see.
i still don’t get why everyone thinks that 30 rock is so fantastic, but seeing just how many awards they were nominated for, there must be something that everyone else sees that i don’t.
general ramblings | wilco | 2:33 pm | Comments (0)
general ramblings | wilco | September 21, 2009 12:00 am | Comments (0)
i had the opportunity to check out the tomtom iphone app firsthand and i have to say that at first glance the iphone app looked really good, but upon further inspection there were some glaring omissions.
the good
the GPS app itself works reasonably well. the interface is very similar like their dedicated devices. it’s reasonably easy to use and after some use, quite intuitive. the menus actually feel a little simpler to use that the dedicated devices.
the update of the map while driving is actually not bad when you are on the move. when you are slow, though, the weaknesses of the iphone’s GPS are painfully obvious. the update doesn’t really register movement well when you are moving less than 10-15mph.
the bad
1GB of storage space is required to install the app.
no text to speech functionality!
POI appear to only be looked up in DB, no inet updates.
so after all is said and done is it worth the $100 for the app? well, functionally, the iphone app gives similar functionality as the low end tomtom units with text to speech, so it’s a nice consolidation of devices.
it’s unfortunate that tomtom didn’t include the text to speech functionality. one would think that the iphone would be able to handle it. still, if i had the app, i’d be tempted not to bring along my tomtom unit when travelling.
general ramblings | wilco | September 19, 2009 9:44 pm | Comments (0)
WPtouch detects if the browser is an iphone/ipod touch and loads a mobile friendly theme optimized for the iphone. all this is done in a plugin so you won’t have to mess with themes it’s all detected and run at run-time.
the interface is nice and clean and the ajax calls makes the blog viewing seem more application-like.
the only thing i don’t like about it is that you have to click a title to read any blog. the first blog isn’t show by default. i guess it’s a design design, but that’s an extra click (touch 
) before you can start reading anything. form over function? i think it’s worth it.
general ramblings | wilco | September 15, 2009 1:01 pm | Comments (0)
stream torrent is a p2p tv streaming app. stream quality isn’t fantastic, but it is certainly watchable and better than nothing.
buffering takes noticeably longer than standard streaming and the quality of the streams seems to sit at around 400kbit which makes windowed viewing ok, but full screen viewing is pretty pixelated.
this technology, i would imagine is pretty cpu-intensive and so i think it is unfortunately limited to computers, but just think about the possibilities here. a decentralized streaming source where, if you have a large enough network, you could sustain much higher bit rates.
this technology seems to be pretty popular for chinese programming, but there are a few US channels that are broadcast that are of particular interest. how will cable channels like the NFL network and ESPN stop this kind of broadcasting?
what’s even cooler is that i was running stream torrent in a windows 7 VM and it was working just fine. it’s a shame that there’s no native mac client for this sort of stuff.
general ramblings | wilco | 1:22 am | Comments (0)
i’m running vmware on my laptop. the laptop has two network interfaces: an ethernet port and a wireless card. i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that it had two NICs until now, but whatever.
i have installed two VMs on this laptop. one is actually a boot camp partition that is running windows 7. i love the fact that vmware will boot up a boot camp partition and reuse hard drive space to run a VM. this saves me tons of valuable hard drive space on this laptop. i installed a windows partition on this laptop because it also happens to be my primary gaming machine and i needed to make sure that i could natively run games. i don’t play games often, but i like having the option of being able to do so. additionally, there are a handful of apps that only run on windows that i really want access to. there’s just no other way around it, unfortunately.
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techie | wilco | 1:07 am | Comments (1)