It’s almost done installing. I’ve stayed up too long to go to sleep now. Although, I doubt I’ll stay up past one. I might have to finish it off tomorrow. Anyway…it looks like they’ve eliminated the time left to install. That’s probably a good thing as for the past 3+ years it’s always been horribly inaccurate. Instead they still you how many packages out of how many total packages have been installed. I’m down to the last 100 packages. Who knows how much longer is left? I’ll give it 15 more minutes.

I usually wait a while to install new Fedora releases, but a few things made me decide to give a whirl today. First of all, my torrent finished at a reasonable time. Second, Freshrpms is actually already ready for the upgrade. Finally, I read online that it’s a pretty stable release that doesn’t rock the boat too much. So here goes….

A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using Banshee. But I find it extremely slow, less featured than Rhythmbox, and without Podcast support. I hate iTunes, so my podcast support has been coming from Songbird. However, they have a really annoying bug that makes using it for podcasting horrible. (I’ve filed a bug report, but no fixes yet) Here’s an example of what the podcasting interface looks like: (click the image to see it full size)

I thought I’d have to wait for Fedora 7 to experience Pidgin (what gaim got renamed to due to their legal battles with AOL - as I previously blogged), but they provided it for Fedora Core 6.

The interface has changed a little. Here are some screenshots showing my first impressions on the differences:

The main difference I noticed is that everyone is represented by a green dot if they are available instead of an icon representing their chat service. In other words, AOL contacts are no longer displayed as the AOL running man and MSN is no longer the chubby green guy.

And it’s called Moonshine. I like the name better than Zod, Fedora Core 6’s name.

Here’s the announcement from the Red Hat Mailing List:

\* From: The Fedora Project \* To: fedora-announce-list redhat com \* Subject: Announcing Fedora 7 (Moonshine) \* Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:28:41 -0700

Howdy, cousins! Welcome to our little Fedora hollow, where we’ve brewed up some mighty, mighty Fedora 7 Moonshine for your enjoyment. Here, I’ll help you pour that … and some for me … *cough, cough* Smoooooth … sure does taste good. It’s been sitting here in the jug for almost a whole month now! Go ahead and help yourself to some more:

…is a lot of fun. I love pulverizing (and being pulverized) in the mini games.

Can be found here. However, there is profanity involved, so don’t go there if that offends you. Otherwise hilarious. That’s all I have to say today, spent my time out of work watching disc 4 of “The Office” and pre-ordering Mario Party 8.

This guy wrote software to control music loop software with a Wiimote. Unfortunately, I think it’s only for macs.

Wii Loop Machine Demo from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo

Thanks to the helpful users over at blenderartists.org, I was able to solve the problem of the water turning black upon landing on the table in my fluid simulations. Apparently, I needed to turn on TraShadows (transparent shadows). You may want to save this for your last step because it causes the renders to take a LOT longer. I put the cup, table, and water with TraShadows on and you can see the results. (Click for full size)

I was the photographer for a wedding this weekend (that’s the reason behind the lack of any posts recently). Here are some of my favorite shots so far.