Since I had to reinstall Fedora 28 (though I got to keep my files), I'm still setting things up.

Among those things I'm still setting up is Dropbox. Since the Dropbox service itself is not free software, you won't find a Dropbox package in the main Fedora repository.

You can get an RPM package directly from Fedora, but I don't recommend it. Why? Because I just installed it, and dnf was having issues with the Dropbox repo.

So I removed that package, removed the repo from /etc/yum.repos.d, and added the RPM Fusion repositories with the links on the configuration page. Make sure you get both the free and nonfree repos.

Then install Dropbox from the command line:

$ sudo dnf install dropbox

Note on RPM Fusion: You can certainly run Fedora without RPM Fusion, but I wouldn't.

Dropbox update: The Nautilus integration with Dropbox -- at least when it comes to those little icons that tell you if a particular folder or file is synced, syncing or not synced -- is broken. I can't tell if it's me, Dropbox, or GNOME Files that is messing up. I tried completely deleting my Dropbox dot files/folders, and that didn't make a difference, except for a long operation to re-sync everything.

The only reason I'm revisiting this topic is that a failed Fedora 27-to-28 upgrade forced me to reinstall Fedora 28, and I just had to get Ruby and a few gems installed and working.

It wasn't easy, and it makes me want to recommend Ubuntu and Debian over Fedora because I strongly suspect that those distros make it easier.

My first recommendation for Linux in general is to use the Ruby that your distro ships with. I know there are ways to get exactly the Ruby you want, and there are developers who need to do that, but I'm not in that particular boat, so I use what the distro ships.

In keeping with the distro-approved Ruby, I also try to use the local Linux package manager to install as many gems as are available. Linux package management makes everything easier and less prone to breakage, so I try to use it wherever possible.

I needed the nokogiri gem, and that was available as a package.

Not so for the twitter gem. I needed to use gem install, and right away I ran into a problem. Before I could install (and build) the gem, I needed to install a few things in Fedora. Luckily I found this web page that told me exactly what to do:

$ sudo dnf install ruby-devel
$ sudo dnf group install "C Development Tools and Libraries"
$ sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config

Only then could I use gem install to get the twitter gem:

$ gem install twitter

I'm pretty sure that both Debian and Ubuntu package the twitter gem, making all of this unnecessary.

Here are three excellent podcasts (each with a transcript) about Clojure from the CaSE (Conversations about Software Engineering) Podcast, all with Joy Clark as host:

• Clojure with Alex Miller (Aug. 3, 2017)
• ClojureScript with David Nolen (Nov. 9, 2017)
• Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey (May 3, 2018)

Rob Reed, creator of the Ode blogging system has released a new theme for Ode that you can see at his site.

I have a lot "invested" in the current Ode theme, but this looks so good that I really should deploy it on my site.

It's never a good idea to upgrade a Fedora system in the first couple of weeks. Also, my particular Fedora installation is, for lack of a better word, crufty. I can't remember which version of Fedora it started out with, but I've been running Fedora on it since 2012.

That's a lot of Fedoras.

I don't use that laptop very much these days, but I decided to do the upgrade anyway. The F28 upgrade wouldn't proceed due to various conflicts in the packages. I did a sudo dnf autoremove, then I manually removed the rest of the offending packages, none of which looked so critical that they would break the installation.

But break it did. The Fedora partition wouldn't boot. I didn't even get dumped into GRUB. I couldn't get past the MOK screen -- something I've never even seen before. I tried one of the "rescue" ISOs, and that didn't work. The laptop's complaint was about keys being trusted, and the fact that I had Secure Boot turned off didn't seem to matter. I "enrolled" all the keys/hashes I could find. Still nothing.

Like I said, the system was crufty. I had a pretty good backup of the files, so whatever happened wouldn't really hurt my data.

I decided to reinstall but keep the same partition layout and preserve the /home partition/directory.

I didn't mention that I use encrypted LVM (both in Fedora and Debian). Even so I could have pulled the drive, dropped it into a USB plug-in holder and gotten the files off that way. But I wanted to see if I could resurrect the Fedora system.

I put F28 on a USB thumb drive and started the installation using manual partitioning. I kept all of my Fedora partitions, root (aka /), /boot, /home, and /swap. It was fairly easy to do this. The only "stopper" was the root partition. It wouldn't "go into" the "Fedora is going to use this" part of the installer. Eventually I figured out that it was because I had to check the "erase this partition" box. Then it skipped over with the rest of the partitions. I started my Fedora install -- I opted for the standard Fedora Workstation with GNOME -- and soon enough I had a new, mostly cruft-less Fedora system. I had to re-create my user account and set the password, but all of my files and most of my configuration was still there. I'm missing a lot of packages, but I had a thicket of desktop environments, useless (to me) applications, programming languages and other things that I could either do without or easily build back up.

All the files were there.

tl;dr: I would have preferred to perform a successful "rescue" operation on my broken Fedora boot system, but that didn't happen, so I did the next best thing, which was to reinstall Fedora and restore my system to bootable status that way.

I've been using the Windows command line's copy command to create empty files, but there's another easy way to do the same thing using Git for Windows.

Once you install Git in Windows, every time you're in a folder, a right-click of the mouse gives you the choices Git GUI here and Git Bash here.

If you then left-click on Git Bash here, a Linux/Unix-like terminal will open at the path of your folder, and you can use any number of Bash commands.

To create a file, use the Unix/Linux stalwart touch:

$ touch filename

This will give you a file named filename. Substitute the file name you really want.

Then close the terminal. That's all there is to it.

The Windows file manager lets you create all kinds of new, empty files as long as they either have a .txt extension or are of a Microsoft file type.

I just wanted to create empty files with no extension that I can later open in Gvim.

Basically I want the Windows equivalent of the Unix/Linux command touch.

There's a complicated Stack Overflow page on this topic, and the easiest method by far is this one that uses the Windows command line:

C:\Users\name\your\path> copy nul filename

Substitute the filename you want for filename, and you're good to go.

I've seen ways of turning this into a batch file and then somehow right-clicking to invoke it, but for now I'll just open the Windows terminal and use it that way.

I'm aiming to learn more Java, and in preparation decided to replace Java 8 with Java 10 on my Windows 10 laptop.

The first time through the installer, I only got the JRE and not the full JDK. Then I removed my old JDK installations via Windows' add-and-remove-programs utility and re-installed the JDK software via Oracle's bundle.

The second time I got the full JDK, but a check of java and javac on the Windows command line showed java working but javac not.

A quick Googling brought up a Stack Overflow question (and answer) that told me I had to add the JDK to my Windows path.

Once I did that, javac worked. Since the JDK comes from Oracle with a GUI installer, even if I somehow missed the checkbox where the installer modifies my system's path, having to Google and then do this manually is a messy ending to installing the JDK. If I'm installing the JDK, I want it in my path, and that should be the default.

It's an unnecessary hurdle for new programmers or people who aren't the best amateur sysadmin.

While I will still be starting most of my microblogging-style (i.e. social-media-style) posts on this site, I will be moving them to my updates site so this site will be a lot less cluttered and feature "full" entries only, for the most part.

Also, the social updates will not be on both sites, also for the most part.

Every couple of days or so, I will move the new social posts from this site to the updates site.

At some point, I will modify my current scripts to post directly to the updates site, and Frugal Technology, Simple Living and Guerrilla Large Appliance Repair will not be flooded with those short entries, which will have a permanent home at Steven Rosenberg's Microblog of Short Posts..

Miles Davis - Miles In The Sky (1968) full album - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6eZHnIA__A

This is one of Miles Davis' early proto-fusion efforts, and the players are all legends (Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums).

"Miles in the Sky" is the kind of fusion record that really appeals to me right now. It's a "quiet" record anchored by electric piano, which is the same thing that draws me to Chick Corea's first Return to Forever album. It's more jazz than r&b, and not really rock at all, given the lack of electric bass and guitar.

What you really have in "Miles in the Sky," besides a slightly funky Miles who you can really hear with this instrumentation, is a showcase for the grooves of Hancock, Carter and Williams, and a showcase for Wayne Shorter.

Then on the second track, the Wayne Shorter composition "Paraphernalia," guitarist George Benson appears, yet the track has more of a traditional jazz vibe than the last, featuring an acoustic piano instead of the electric. Benson folows the stunning Shorter solo (which is quite long, in case you were wondering) with a literally shorter solo that sits firmly within the groove of the record, leading into Hancock on the piano with the rest of the group dropping out entirely as he works the form of the composition.

Miles always worked with the best players. He was never about raw technique and obviously wasn't intimidated by those who were the strongest players out there.