John's Blog

As indicated now in the title of Redhat Bugzilla 969648 the problem is the "data=writeback" parameter in /etc/fstab. Fedup and Fedora 19 have a problem with this particular setting.  I have two fedora machines - a desktop and a laptop. During the last upgrade cycle, Fedora 17-->18, the desktop upgraded without any problem whatsoever. On the laptop, I had managed to shoot myself in the foot due to basically having some parts of my kernel boot commandline that were present in grub.cfg but not in /etc/default/grub. (These were the parts that blacklisted nouveau so that the nvidia binary driver could run). At the end of the fedup procedure I had run     grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg as instructed and this wiped out the parts of my command line that were needed to run the nvidia driver and due to that I had all sorts of problems figuring out the problem. Of course once the problem was diagnosed the fix was relatively easy. This time around, in going from 1...

I've recently been writing some homegrown scripts to parse web pages and do something useful with the information using Python 2.7 and the BeautifulSoup library.  This involves printing the output to a terminal (e.g. Gnome Terminal) where the output is hopefully human readable but in some cases was not. The most common issue I ran into were various forms of "smart quotes" and similar html annoyances. If this is not properly handled you'll get output like John X s Blog (where X is the following 7 character group without the intervening spaces - hard to display it verbatim in the blogger environment!)  & # 8 2 1 7 ;  or even John X s Blog   (where X is some awkward block symbol that can't be adequately described or rendered here. This actually results from the MS quote being "decoded" as Latin-1 - so it's sort of a cascade of errors.) The first of these is known as an "HTML entity" and here is a list of them .  ...

Google recently rolled out a new version of their Google Maps web service. From what I can tell you can't retrieve a set of GPS coordinates from the new interface. I expect they will remedy that situation at some point.  But for now the workaround is to temporarily switch back to "Classic" Google maps and get the GPS coordinates from there. Here's what I did: Shift back to Classic maps (Gear in top right corner, choose Classic Maps, can say "Dismiss" to not make the switch permanent if desired). Right click on desired location and select "What's Here?" A green arrow will appear. Left Click on Green Arrow and  the  GPS   coordinates will appear in multiple locations.