Selling out, or selling up? Yes, I'm Enabling Ads

When I first started trying to write and post regularly I found it difficult to do so.  Part of my difficulty was trying to publish content that wasn't just a whiny rundown of my regular activities -- since my life is pretty boring, that kind of rundown really isn't very interesting either.  The other difficulty I had was finding the will to regularly post.  Two years later I think I'm starting to get the hang of the writing part and since I need to keep doing it in order to get better I'm looking for some extra motivation.

Love, happiness, and a sense of safety and well-being are all great motivators; but the Blogger "Monetize" tab looked much easier and quicker.  So, I'm going to try serving some ads along with content in order to see if having a positive financial impact will spur me into posting more regularly.  To keep my karma levels even I will apply the first $75 of revenue to a Kiva loan.  Judging by the (lack of) traffic I get that will take a while to happen.  Also, since my traffic levels are so low I'm not even going to worry about planning past that first $75.  My goal is to post and write, so I'm really less concerned about money and more concerned about just producing something worthwhile.  As things progress, I will post updates on the effectiveness of this scheme and link to whatever Kiva loans that are made as a result.  Hey, look!  It's already working, I have more stuff to write about!

Since I just enabled ads my request hasn't been fully processed yet.  So in a wonderful twist of irony, this post to my blog about enabling ads on my blog will go live with, you got it, no ads.

Fedora 12: Usage review

With Fedora 13 Alphas being released it seems like as good a time as any to plonk down some of my thoughts on Fedora 12.

• Gnome Shell preview is really awesome.  I like it, it works, and I'm excited to see what else might be in store.  Hopefully a few keyboard shortcuts for flipping desktops.
• NetworkManager continues to make the user networking experience good.  At this point it's about as reliable and useful as my Mac.
• Video/Media codec support still sucks.  This is not Fedora's fault, it sucks on Mac too.  Codecs just plain suck.  Point in case?  I installed mythfrontend during a demo at MilwaukeeLUG and it broke Totem's ability to play an Ogg file.  After a few logouts and some more installs is started to work.  Then broke again.  Folks, this is why Flash video is successful.  HTML5 video may standardize on a few codecs but I'm not terribly sure that will help.  This has been a problem for close to a decade and I'm sometimes shocked it's still an issue. 
• Firefox is still slower than Firefox on my Mac.
• For the most part, things just work.

A big thinks to the Fedora developers and community for making great stuff.

ldap time to perl time()

This might save 30 seconds for someone else who wrongly thought that DateTime::Format:ISO8601 would parse an LDAP timestamp.

# Takes an ISO8601ish LDAP timestamp datatype and converts it into a perl time()
# compatible structure.  Requires Time::Local.
sub ldap2time
{
    my $ldap_ts = shift;
    return unless $ldap_ts =~ /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})Z/;
    my ($year, $mon, $day, $hour, $min, $sec) = ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6);
    return timegm($sec, $min, $hour, $day, ($mon-1), $year);
}