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So continuing with my issues in getting fedora core 3 installed on this server at work I decided it would be wise to try downloading the i386 dvd image to assist with the install. First I made the mistake of trying to let firefox download the image, apparetly firefox doesn’t like files over 2gb, it started counting negative sizes and negative rates, I guess there is an overflow in there somewhere.

So I decided to switch over and use a tried and true favorite, wget. So I downloaded it, burned it, and the burn failed. Startled I decided to check the md5sum’s on the iso image to ensure it was an uncorrupted image. Sure enough the image was corrupted, the md5sum didn’t match.

I fail to see why distributions like Fedora core are immensly popular. Fedora core and any corresponding system based on rpm and dependent on the anaconda installer all suffer from the same fatal flaw. If any single rpm fails to install, the entire install process is halted and must be restarted. It doesn’t pause and ask you for a different source for the rpm, in this day and age it could probaby even download the specified rpm online, let alone just wait for you to clean the install disk.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that as near as I can tell Fedora Core install disks are the most finicky disk images I have ever encountered. The only possible way I can even get a system installed is to install bare GUI desktop install.

Yet once the base system is installed the problems still continue. Apparently it’s only possible to manually select all the packages you didn’t get to install with yum. There is a gui for selecting additional packages but it suffers from the same problem the original install gui suffered from, ie a single failure kills the whole process. I don’t know if this is better here or worse, on the one hand at least you can try several different combinations without needing to walk back through the entire disk formatting procedure, but on the other it would definitely seem logical to allow the tool to download packages from a remote location if the cd fails.

I have another article that was not displayed. Perhaps if I add a new article it will invalidate the page cache.

Updated 3:44pm:

Well apparently it was merely broken because the editor I used to submit the post neglected to set the published attribute to 1. Or perhaps it’s just that that doesn’t work in general yet. Hopefully the updated admin interface will have checkboxes for published articles.

I was reading this forbes article and it made me curious about customer habit datamining. Customer habit datamining is of course the process of trying to identify what sort of customer a person is by there buying/reading/viewing habits. Specifically to determine what would be best products/services/information to provide for the customer. Amazon of course does it’s bayesian based book suggestions. They maximize the probability of next item to purchase from what you have purchased and viewed already with what everyone else using amazon has done. Tivo of course does the same thing. Google even does it for it’s adwords by maximizing the advertising market value of a keyword against the page it is on.

The concept of Google doing this type of targeted marketing across all of it’s services seems to terrify people however. Cries of 1984, Big Brother, and the ensuing multitude of corporate dystopian futures ring throughout the air. As well they should. That data is our informational identity in the modern world. A ghost psyche if you will. It falls back on the dangers inheritant in people knowing your true name in cultures that believed in some types of magic, of voodoo dolls, and photographs that steal a persons soul. A modern cause for an ancient superstition. Once aquired by someone it could be bought, sold, traded, used to impersonate, advertise to, convict, and a whole host of other worries and fears, both rational and superstitious.

Yet at the same time many of the potential services available from something else being able to predict your next action are useful. People around the world depend on eachother for many of these predictions. From common interests in books, topics for study, potential friends, and even significant others, people use these predictions from others all of the time. Really it’s a question of trust, of intended use, and how much privacy you personally want.

So I have been delaying publicly writing for a while now. I had various reasons that I procrastinated.

1. I wanted decent content on my site, ie something semi worthwhile
2. I needed a decent system to publish from
3. So I was going to write my own, but that required too much time
4. I needed something that I felt comfortable developing extensions, but that required the above reason
5. I needed a stable server to host it from
6. I wanted textile for my markup
7. I wanted an interesting first post

Some of these happened, some of these failed to happen, and hopefully some of them will happen. Anyway, the whole point of this is that after a while I simply determined I just needed to do it. Which in the long run is generally really all that actually needs to occur.

I’m hoping that my writing will improve. That needs will necessitate me fixing that which I dislike about typo or my layout or any other random problems that plague my satisfaction with this site. I make no promises on updates or content, or anything of else of like ilk. This is for my enjoyment and interest, and if it happens to agree with you then that will be an excellent bonus, but not the purpose of this site. Perhaps I will even let others know of the existance of the site, though one or two might have already guessed. Anyhow this is my first article, it’s pointless, it’s substandard, I don’t really particularly like it, but at least it’s a start.