Archive for April, 2006

I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 4 to 5. After downloading the ISO and burning it to DVD, I made a full backup and booted the DVD to upgrade.

Most of the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The only real nuisance was that Fedora Core 5 includes version 8.1.3 of the PostgresQL databse, which can’t read the database format used by PostgreSQL 8.0.7 in Fedora Core 4.

The Fedora release notes do mention this, although they can be interpreted to imply that you can convert your data after you upgrade. This isn’t the case, so I installed PostgresQL 8.0.7 from source, exported the data, reinstalled 8.1.3 and imported the data.

That sorted everything out.

Philipp Lenssen (of Google Blogoscoped) says that the following banner ad (which I presume he designed) is one that he would click on, and I’m happy to oblige:

This short-and-sweet PDF e-Book, God’s Debris by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, is absolutely free for personal use, and without Digital Restrictions Management or other strings attached. From his synopsis:

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.