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Favorite Songs of 2007

I’m involved in a CD swap, so I thought I would put a compilation together of some of my favorite songs released in 2007. I had to pare my initial list down from about 35 to 21 to get it to fit on one CD, so some good ones got left off.

(In order of how they live on the CD, not popularity. Artist / Song / Album. Minneapolis artists in italics)

  1. Arcade Fire / Intervention / Neon Bible.

  2. Bruce Springsteen / Radio Nowhere / Magic

  3. Bloc Party / I still Remember / A Weekend in the City

4. Brother Ali / Truth Is / The Undisputed Truth

  1. Spoon / The Underdog / Ga Ga ga Ga Ga

  2. Dolores O’Riordan / Loser / Are You Listening?

  3. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club / Not What You Wanted / Baby 81

  4. The New Pornographers / All the Old Showstoppers / Challengers

  5. Feist / 1234 / The Reminder

10. Dan Wilson / Breathless / Free Life

  1. Ryan Adams / Halloween Head / Easy Tiger

  2. Linkin Park / What I’ve Done / Minutes to Midnight

  3. The Shins / Phantom Limb / Wincing the Night Away

14. Cloud Cult / Pretty Voice / The Meaning of 8

  1. Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings / Let Them Knock / 100 Days, 100 Nights

  2. Tegan & Sara / Nineteen / The Con

  3. The Donnas / Save Me / Bitchin’

  4. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists / Who Do You Love / Living With the Living

  5. Lily Allen / Friday Night / Alright, Still

  6. The View / Same Jeans / Hats Off to the Buskers

  7. Rilo Kiley / Give a Little Love / Under the Blacklight

A few of the artists who came close, but didn’t make the final cut:

  • Chris Cornell
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • Modest Mouse
  • Joseph Arthur & the Lonely Astronaugts
  • LCD Soundsystem
  • Arctic Monkeys
  • Tori Amos
  • Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

See you in Raleigh

The first Foresight Conference has been announced! From the announcement email:

We are tentatively scheduling the conference for the last weekend in March, March 29th and 30th in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. (This is the weekend following the Easter holiday).

The conference will consist of scheduled sessions, a number of unscheduled / BoF (Birds of a Feather) talks similar to a Barcamp or unconference, planning for the future, as well as social time.

In addition to Foresight users and developers, we would like to cordially other Linux users who would like to attend, including upstream maintainers and users and developers of other distributions.

More details to come soon!

I’ll see you there, and if you’re coming, add your name on the wiki!

Blu-Ray goes for the knockout blow

The news is everywhere: Warner, the last remaining major studio to support both high def video formats in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has announced that as of May they will support Blu-Ray exclusively.

Toshiba, owner of the HD-DVD patent? Suprised. And even better, Warner, unlike Universal when they went HD-DVD exclusive, didn’t take a dime.

Even though both formats are burdened with DRM, I have to say I love my Blu-Ray player – it’s amazing the difference in HD. I’m glad I made the right call. Thanks Warner!

Writing Foresight Docs: Part Six

It’s been a while since I’ve written (or written about) Foresight Documentation.

Work has resumed on getting the Userguide to 1.0, with commits happening on almost a nightly basis (except last night, as I reinstalled the Foresight alpha on my laptop, but I did work on screenshots).

The main focus is removing all mentions of the (now deprecated) Foresight System Manager and replacing them with information on how to use PackageKit.

The secondary goal is to close all outstanding bugs and tasks against the userguide. Once all bugs are complete, I will call the Userguide 1.0 and start work on 2.0. Unfortunately, I had always hoped to add more pages to the userguide, such as expanding how to burn an ISO and pages on X-Chat and Liferea, but those will probably only be in 2.0.

Userguide 2.0 will be created in a new Mercurial repository, and be set up to provide documentation for all editions, including GNOME, KDE and XFCE. (Alphabetical, not in order of personal preference, really!) In addition to the new pages mentioned above, I hope to have more timely updates, as well making it easy for people to add content, and maybe a whole section just devoted to development. Yup, it’s time to take it to the next level!

Docs can’t be a one person show, so help me make documentation on Foresight a thing of beauty. I’ve created a mailing list at Google Groups to discuss docs – I’d love to hear any thoughts anyone has on what documentation should be included, and would also love some more volunteers to truly make documentation something that lives and breathes with frequent updates.

Sign up today!

Subscribe to Foresight Linux Documentation [Visit this group][2]

Blog updates

I’m in the process of changing servers at my current host, and the last website I had to do was this one. Over the course of last weekend, I decided to finish it, and did a mysqldump of my WordPress database, in addition to updating to the latest version to avoid a security flaw. I about had a heart attack when I saw my database (not gzipped) was 3.3 gigabytes. Sure, I’ve been blogging for 5 years (more on that later this month), but 3.3GB? My wife explained to me how it was possible, but I was still a bit stunned.

I’ve had a database plugin, WP-DBManager, installed for some time to automate my database backup. It adds a Database tab to your WordPress admin panel. In addition to backing up your database, it can optimize, repair or drop tables. The default page it pulls up is a list of all tables in your database, with columns showing records, data usage, index usage, and overhead.

Sure enough, an old plugin I haven’t used in a long time, EZ Scrobbler for managing my Last.fm feed, had it’s cache table in the database taking up 2.9GB. I used WP-DBManager’s tab to empty the table, and my database is down to a more manageable 300 MB. I’m glad I now use Last.fm’s widget to show recent tracks played.

I just wish I had remembered to check that before I spent 10 hours this weekend watching 3 gigs transfer over the ‘net.