failing like never before

15Jan/110

Fedora 14 64-bit Flash Problems

Its rather old news, but rather new to me. There is a known bug with the 64-bit Flash plugin when used in Fedora 14. When playing back certain Flash videos, the bug produces regular high-pitched beeping noises, as though there is some odd clipping issue. The culprit of the bug is a recent upgrade in glibc's memcpy(). I'm seeing a few hacks and patches being thrown around in the bug report, but for now, I'll probably just stick to running 32-bit Flash in a wrapper.

And again, here's the bug report.

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7Jan/112

Mirror, Mirror, Who’s the Oldest of Them All?

I'll admit, that my Arch updates haven't exactly been occuring with religous regularity, but I never allowed more then a month at most to pass between full system updates on my Arch machines". But today, when I decided to do a full update I was surprised to find that all my packages were already update. Especially since I remember seeing the same message on the last update. Some digging through my log files revealed that the last time one of my system updates actually updated something, was in August of last year. Which means that four months have passed without my system actually being updated. Oh sure, I issued a system update command pretty regularly every few weeks, but no packages were ever updated.

This is Not Good.

Some more digging was required, and it was revealed that the mirror I've been using, mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/ArchLinux, hasn't been synced to the Arch repository in a very (very) long time. This is also Not Good. But perhaps even more worrying then Virgina Tech's laxness, is my laxness and unawareness. How could I have not notice that various programs on my laptop were several versions old, or that my system upgrades were never doing anything!

So I am doing a massively huge upgrade right now, and I fully expect it to wreck serious hell on my system. But at least that's better then walking around completely oblivious to the various known security holes on my laptop.

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