Archive for March, 2004

I’m addicted to the Pepsi / iTunes Promotion

Pepsi / iTunes Promotion Winning CapIt’s getting out of hand at this point. It’s gotten to the point where I will walk into our cafeteria, open the door to the fridge full of soda and proceed to tilt individual bottles of Sierra Mist and/or Pepsi just to make sure I’ll win a free iTunes song. I’m up to 19 free songs right now. Ironically, I don’t usually drink this much soda at work, but I just can’t stop myself. It’s like the caps keep calling out my name…

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Mr. Bazerghi goes to Morton’s

Morton's Double-Cut Filet - AfterMorton's Double-Cut Filet - BeforeHere’s a BEFORE and AFTER view of my delicious Double Cut filet mignon I consumed for lunch today at Morton’s. Since the whole project team at work was able to make it to 7 consecutive staff meetings without being late (a GREAT feat for us, believe me), our client treated us to lunch at Morton’s Steakhouse.

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Unreal Tournament 2004 – Productivity’s Worst Enemy

Unreal Tournament 2004 BoxI recently got my hands on the Limited Edition “Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD Special Edition” at Best Buy for only $29.99. It’s a box full of goodness! The multiplayer game is insane! I’ve been playing a few minutes here and there 😉 and all I can say is *WOW*. I’m slowly getting better, but my coworkers still have fun yelling at me when I’m driving a tank in the wrong direction…

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Incredible file compression using rzip

While reading through some newsfeeds today, I came across a small comment by someone trying to compress a 700Mb mbox file full of spam emails. He said he was able to compress it down to 70Mb using a small utility called “rzip”. That’s quite a nice compression ratio, even beating out “bzip” which I thought was an awesome compressor. This is from the “rzip” site:

rzip is a compression program, similar in functionality to gzip or bzip2, but able to take advantage long distance redundencies in files, which can sometimes allow rzip to produce much better compression ratios than other programs. The original idea behind rzip is described in my PhD thesis (see http://samba.org/~tridge/), but the implementation in this version is considerably improved from the original implementation. The new version is much faster and also produces a better compression ratio.

The utility can be found at http://rzip.samba.org/

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Creating a bootable Fedora DVD from CD ISOs

Since Fedora Core 2 will now be a 4-CD set, I decided to look into creating a DVD out of the CD’s in order to avoid having to carry around 4 CD’s in my laptop bag. Found my answer on the Fedora-Test_list today. A small script called “mkdvd” written by Chris Adams. His script can be found at http://www.iruntheinter.net/files/misc/

*Update* Another possible solution, while not as elegant, can be found at ftp://people.redhat.com/ckloiber/mkdvdiso.sh

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