Canada for the Gold!!

So, I guess Shaun Majumder was right...

Booting multiple Fedora images from USB

Well, I've been trying to boot Fedora from ISO, but haven't exactly been successful. On the bug, you can see a possible fix, but it's a bit complicated and requires messing with the image from an existing install.

Instead, I figured out a way to do it that uses the extracted files. It's pretty simple. First, mount the ISO and extract three files:

1. the LiveOS image: squashfs.img and possibly osmin.img,
2. the compressed kernel: vmlinuz0, and;
3. the initial ramdisk initrd0.img

In case you were wondering, the copies in the EFI and isolinux directories are the same. You can then place all these files in a subdirectory on the drive. Then you add an entry to GRUB pointing to the files. In this case, I placed the files in /boot/F12-$arch and the drive's label is LiveLinux.

menuentry "Fedora 12 32bit" {
    linux /boot/F12-i686/vmlinuz0 root=live:LABEL=LiveLinux \
        live_dir=boot/F12-i686 rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet rhgb
    initrd /boot/F12-i686/initrd0.img
}

BBC Olympics Ad Spot

I really like this one...

It's all black & white and in that great sort of style like Samurai Jack (normally in colour, but sometimes there's a black&white sequence or whole episode). What's also great about the ad is that it tells a story, interweaving various winter sports into it.

I also like the music. I've been wondering where I heard it before, and it's actually from the beginning of Michael Bublé's version of Cry Me a River. I'm not actually sure how well it fits in with that song, but it's great in the ad.

XMPP, meet Facebook...

So, it seems the Facebook has finally added support for logging in to their Chat via XMPP. This is, of course, awesome so people stop asking about it, but also terrible since it took them so darn long. That meant a lot of horrible hacks just to get it working in the interim. (No offence Eion, I just mean the scraping, not the code.)

This announcement comes straight from the developer blog. You need to have set up a username (which you can check here). Casey's blog has all the screenshots you need to figure it out. The only downside is it doesn't use encrypted streams.

The biggest problem, though? Having to organize a few hundred buddies into their correct contacts.