Confusing hallways...

Have you ever been in a building and just got totally confused? Like where in the world am I going through this hallway?

I don't mean that it's a little weird. Sure, Bahen is a bit weird, but only because it's basically a building on top of another one. It's not really all that confusing. MedSci's also a bit weird, with that extra lecture hall (that we had ECE253 in) in a separate half for some reason.

No, what I'm talking about is the Benson building. We just had an exam in there a couple days ago. I don't really get that building. If you've ever had an exam there, you'll know what I mean.

There are two sets of doors, but you can only enter (for an exam) through the ones closer to the intersection. When you get in, there are stairs on the left, just in front of you. But if you go forward just a little, there are more stairs to the right in a nearby hallway. Eventually you can get upstairs after going through several floors and half-floors and what not.

Finding a washroom isn't all that easy either. On the third floor, the women's washroom is about halfway down the hall from the gym, but the men's is hidden. You go all the way to the end of the hallway and there's some sort of cafeteria in front of you. Immediately to the left of the hallway are more stairs (that go in the opposite direction). The men's washroom is in the little nook just a bit farther left between the end of the building and the stairs. It's confusing just trying to describe it. Anyway, I missed it once as I thought that was where the elevator would be (but apparently there isn't one). So I went down the stairs instead and all that was there was the second set of doors. And apparently, all you can do is exit!

Yep, I just don't get it.

Bye Bye Thesis!

Soo, I guess Thesis is finally done!

Last Friday I handed it in to the EngSci Office to get put in the "special" envelope, and today I dropped it off to my professor. Here it is in its wrapped-up glory (which is, in all honesty, not that exciting.)

Silly me, though, I didn't take a picture of the final blue-cover version. It must have been the relief of getting it printed and bound with 5 minutes to go. Maybe I can get some 1T1 to borrow it from the library some time.

Now, I guess I'd have to say, in all honesty, it probably doesn't say much, really. Sure, I managed some results, but they definitely could have been better. However, one thing that I do know, is that it looks awesome thanks to LaTeX. Just check out this lovely (inside) title page and first chapter (fonts are slightly off since I used convert to make these PNGs):

Iron Ring!

Just got it yesterday!

Just a few more months until graduation; isn't that amazing...

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.