You know, thinking about MJ dying does make me sad. But the real tragedy isn’t his death, it was his life. All these people saying “we should remember him as the great entertainer he was” would be better off trying to learn a lesson from his life. What is that lesson? I don’t know, but I guess it has something to do with the trappings of fame and wealth, and the dangers of not looking inward.

Fedora 11 is out, so it’s time to update my notes on configuring my fedora install. In the examples I will use a default Fedora install (with development tools selected), on my 64 bit Sony vgn-s2750N laptop, which I will henceforth refer to as Sunny.

Here’s what I have to do to get Fedora 11 running like I want it:

1. Fix the DNS lookup bug. On all the machines I administer, this manifests itself as massive dns lookup failures, with the effect that although you can ping an address, you don’t have any internet access (no web browser, no yum…).  This answers the question:  I have an internet connection, but I can’t use the web, WTF?
2. Access to fusion
3. Add MP3 support/get Amarok working.
4. Get Flash working (people need their youtube).
5. Graphics acceleration
6. Make FAT partitions writeable by users, and add ntfs support.
7. Disable physical file folders.
8. Enable Ctl-Alt-Backspace

echo 'prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;' >  /etc/dhclient-wlan0.conf
service dnsmasq start
chkconfig dnsmasq on
service NetworkManager restart

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

yum -y install amarok lame* gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-freeworld

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
yum install nspluginwrapper.{i586,x86_64} alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i586
yum -y install flash-plugin

yum -y install ntfs-config.noarch

I’ve recently begun using emacs org-mode, and I quite like it.  I do a lot of my writing, some of which might finally end up here on my blog, in org-mode these days.  For a lot of my applications it’s a perfect overlay on plain text documents.  I can export what I’ve written as html or latex, which is fantastic.

What’s less fantastic, is when I want to cut and paste the html output here to my WordPress blog.  Unfortunately org-mode puts in linefeeds between paragraph elements, and for some reason wordpress maintains these, resulting in incorrect word wrapping.  So I want a way to remove the the linefeeds between paragraph elements.

This was just a little bit beyond my capabilities with SED, and I’m often telling myself self, you should really learn how to use sed and regex terms better . So I thought bugger it, let’s figure out how to do this. So I whipped out the excellent book “sed&awk” from O’Reilly.

As someone who has only used sed for banal substitutions, I had to learn the following:

• “:whatever” can be used to create a label.  There are two commands that allow you to utilize these lables: “b” creates a branch, while “t” jumps to a label if a successful substitution has been made on the currently addressed line.
• “N” is needed to join two lines, since sed normally works on a one-line-at-a-time fashion.

With these two tidbits, and a basic understanding of how sed operates, we can construct the desired script.

:top
/
/
{:loop
  N
  s/\n/ /
  /<\/p>/{P;D;btop}
  bloop}

In one line the command looks like this:

 sed ':top;/<p>/{:loop;N;s/\n/ /;/<\/p>/{P;D;btop};bloop}'

If you’re like me, it’s not immediately clear what’s going on here, so let’s break it down:

• First we create a label with “:top”.
• “/<p>/” tells sed to look for the paragraph block tag.  The next ‘line’ of the script will be called after this tag is found.
• The curly braces “{}” group a set of commands, so upon encountering the paragraph tag, it executes the contents of these brackets.   In the brackets:
  • Create a new label “:loop”.
  • “N” creates a multiline pattern space by reading the next line of input, and appending it to the contents of the pattern space.
  • “s/\n/ /”: substitute a space for the line feed.
  • “/<\/p>/{P;D;btop}”:  If sed encounters an end of paragraph tag, it executes “P;D;btop”, which (P) prints the contents of the multiline pattern space, (D) deletes it, and (btop) creates a branch(b) and goes to the label(top).   It’s a little like “if (<p>) goto top”.
  • “bloop” (b) branch and goto label(loop).

So as long as no closing tag (</p>) is found, we have a loop that keeps adding new lines to the multiline pattern buffer, and substituting spaces for linefeeds.  When the closing tag (</p>) is found, the loop goes back up to the “top” label.  That loop makes sure all of the  paragraph sections get handled.

So that’s it.  If anyone knows a more elegant solution to this, I’d be glad to here about it.