Raphael Geissert: And lenny is out!
Yay!!
$ TZ=US/Samoa date +%d/%m/%y
14/02/09
Yay!!
$ TZ=US/Samoa date +%d/%m/%y
14/02/09
Yay!!
$ TZ=US/Samoa date +%d/%m/%y
14/02/09
So in 2009 I've started using Social Media Accounts alot more like Facebook, Twitter,Wordpress ( self hosted ), and plan to use more as time goes on and I discover new services and new services are introduced.
<rant>
One of the issues I've noticed is most "tweet flows" want you to update your status across multiple services, like your IM status would be the same as your Twitter status and again the same as your Facebook status and so on. See the problem with this is not all "status" messages on Social Media sites are used for the same purpose , e.g. the Facebook status allows comments and the Tweet allows replies and RT's ( Re-Tweets ) and IM status doesn't allow any feedback at all, at least not publicly. An posting to both identi.ca and twitter causes replies and such to be checked on both.
Where is our "Digital Convergence" / Digital Universe for Social Media ?
How do any of you keep all the different forms of social media updated ( an relevant ) to the media its self, e.g. not posting the wrong status to the wrong service and not using 100000(.5) web interfaces constantly.
</rant>
Option "DontZap" "off"Another one is the background during X startup. Say goodbye to the old well-known grey background. Now you get a black background by default. To revert to the old behavior, pass -retro on the server command line (for instance in /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc). Note that this option also reenables Ctrl-Alt-Backspace killing the server. Finally, you might also see glxgears reporting very low frame rates (60) on some hardware. Well, please remember that it is not a benchmark, the output basically means nothing. This is why some distros even removed the fps output by default. The thing is that recent DRM stacks will just synchronize frame rendering on vertical blanks (can anybody here see 1000fps with human eye?). So if you have a 60Hz refresh rate, glxgears will report 60fps, that's it. But it has nothing to do with DRI or 3D being slow. Please try some relevant 3D programs or benchmarks before complaining :)
I first played World of Goo on the Wii. I loved it. Great stuff, reminded me a little of Lemmings, but way way better. Today I found out it s also available for Linux, and I immediately downloaded it. I was pleased to see a .deb available and thought I d dig into the binary a little to see how it was put together.
I m hugely excited to see that it looks like the game was built on Ubuntu Intrepid for both the .deb and .tar.gz packages:
$ strings -a WorldOfGoo.bin grep -i gcc
...
GCC: (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu12) 4.3.2
$ strings -a libs/libogg.so.0 grep -i gcc
...
GCC: (GNU) 4.2.3 (Gentoo 4.2.3 p1.0)
$ strings -a WorldOfGoo
...
GCC: (GNU) 4.2.3 (Gentoo 4.2.3 p1.0)
_x86_AES_encrypt
...
$ objdump -CR WorldOfGoo.bin grep _chk
...
084043f0 R_386_JUMP_SLOT __memcpy_chk
$ strings -a WorldOfGoo.bin grep openssl
OPENSSLDIR: "/home/maks/Projects/wog/libs/openssl-0.9.8j-linux-i386/ssl"
...
libpam-krb5_3.11-4_armel.deb, you must know we were this >< close to
doing precisely that, thanks to a debatable behavior of the britney
implementation in use and some rather unfortunate circumstances. (You
can read this #debian-release backlog
if you re interested in the details.)
If we noticed it, it was thanks to the britney2 implementation by Fabio
Tranchitella. We ve been running an instance of it in a separate server
for some time, to see if it was ready for production by comparing
results between the two britneys. Truth be told, I ve ignored all those
mails since about the freeze started, and today after the last britney
run for Lenny I thought: hey, let s see what britney2 thinks .
And that s what happened.
Sound Juicer "I Call Out To You And You Don't Save Me?" 2.25.3 has been
released. Tarballs are
available on
burtonini.com, or from
the GNOME
FTP servers. I actually did some coding this time!
From tomorrow, if you start seeing bugs or getting email about your packages where the version string ends in em[0-9], or where dependencies mentioned by reportbug include such a version suffix, the user is running one of the two Emdebian distributions to be released alongside lenny (and based on lenny packages). You might also see Emdebian in the output of 'apt-cache policy' if your bug reports request or supply such data.Emdebian Grip 1.0 (lenny)
A small Debian-compatible Emdebian installation
Full release title:
Emdebian GNU/Linux Grip 1.0 (based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "lenny").
Short release name:
Emdebian Grip 1.0 (lenny)
Common release names:
Emdebian Grip or Grip (lenny)
Architectures: i386, amd64, powerpc, arm, armel, mips and mipsel
Emdebian Crush 1.0 (lenny)
The smallest Emdebian installation - cross-built from Debian sources.
Full release title:
Emdebian GNU/Linux Crush 1.0 (based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "lenny").
Short release name:
Emdebian Crush 1.0 (lenny)
Common release names:
Emdebian Crush or Crush (lenny)
Architectures: arm only
A few days ago, I started a new project called
RInside
by uploading a few files to a new SVN repo at
R-Forge.
RInside
makes it easy to embed R into your own
C++ application by hiding the nitty gritty of initializing an R interpreter
behind a simple abstraction. More information is at a (currently pretty simple)
RInside page,
and you may want to look at the related
Rcpp and possibly
littler
projects. The former is helpful for data exchange, and the latter provided my
first real use of R embedding which in some ways also lead to
RInside.
In the Openmoko community, a lot of programs are written in python and use services provided over D-Bus. But I m under the impression that not enough programmers consider that D-Bus is a remote protocol, and the other side might fail to respond any time. The code then works find if nothing goes wrong, but does not handle problems well. Understandably, it is hard to get this error checking right if you can t really test it, as usually the D-Bus services do not fail. This is particularly annoying on a phone, because it might just be the program responsible for popping up the on screen keyboard that just failed.Therefore I started to write a little python module called python_test.py that replaces some D-Bus functions in the python bindings (SystemBus.get_object and Connection.call_blocking at the moment) and makes them fail with a certain probability. You can add "import dbus_test" to your program (and adjust $PYTHON_PATH) and run it a few times, to see which error conditions are caught and which cause your problem to fail. If you come across failures that the script does not yet generate, they can easily be added.Not sure yet if I am going to extend and maintain this, but I m open to suggestions and additions. Maybe this (or something similar) should be provided by python-dbus directly.
I was listening to Tech Nation today on the treadmill -- the episode from Jan 13 2009 with Darrell Rhea of Cheskin Added Value. He made a great point: that when people give money to charity, they feel good about themselves. But when they pay their taxes, they feel really bad -- even though their taxes go for schools, hospitals, fire departments, and other important societal services. And that made me think about a few things.
One reason for this discrepancy is probably a feeling of control. When I make a charitable donation, I choose the charity. With taxes, I don't have much of a choice where the money goes. Well, I kind of do, but it's a really circuitous level of control: I vote for representatives who express certain values (pro-education, anti-waste) during the election cycle and hopefully defend those values when the time comes to make a budget. That's a pretty loose connection.
So I had an idea: what if, when you're paying your taxes, you got to specify a suggested earmarks for using your dollars? You could pick from a list of (say) 20-30 high-level programs (like "Education", "Health care", "Foreign aid") and make some allocations. "20% education, 10% education, 10% defense, 2% foreign aid, the rest for whatever." Entirely voluntary, no obligation on the part of taxpayers. Obviously these would be different for different levels of government -- cities might have "Police", "Parks", "Roads" as their programs.
The tax agencies could publish the numbers on these mini-budgets, and citizens could compare what they collectively set up as priorities versus what their representatives actually allocate money for.
Sure, there'll be some natural discrepancies -- no one is going to like allocations for boring stuff like servicing debt or administrative costs. And there are some costs involved, although I think they'd be pretty low if you're already collecting tax return forms and generating statistics. And there'd be lots of people who'd write-in their pet projects ("100% UFO research") which would skew things significantly.
But I think the general idea would be really helpful. People would see tax time as a time to use their voice, and politicians would have a clear idea what people want their money spent on, and in what amount. Most of all, it's closing the loop on paying taxes and making budgets, and I think that's a good thing for democracy.
tags: democracy taxes budget idea
I recently received an email from Sigma Xi with various
news items. One of them mentioned a Hawking quote:
Now, Sigma Xi is generally a pretty reputable organization, but I wondered: is a scientific organization really encouraging fear of the future? Mind, I think a certain degree of concern about the future is healthy, both individually and societally, and there is a long tradition in science fiction of writing novels about terrifying futures. But Sigma Xi is usually upbeat about the wonders of science and technological progress. Besides, there's a real dissonance in that quote between becoming more creating and imaginative, and becoming more afraid of the future. Maybe it was intentional, but it seems very out-of-place. So, I started to wonder whether this was really what Hawking said. Typing a few key words into Google, I looked at where else this quote showed up. According to the NSF, Sigma Xi's quote is correct.Science fiction is useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future.-- Stephen Hawking?
According to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, "science fiction is useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future." Interest in science fiction may affect the way people think about or relate to science...ERIC, which is some sort of database of internal government reports, agrees:
According to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, "science fiction is useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future." Indeed, several studies suggest that using science fiction movies as a teaching aid can improve both motivation and achievement.So, maybe Hawking really does encourage being afraid of the future? Well, here was the third and final reference to this quote that I found, from (of all places) an unofficial transcript of a Larry King Live interview:
HAWKING:So, it looks like this quote comes from a live TV interview. I don't know whether the different interpretations come from different transcripts (this is the only one I can find);I think science fiction is useful, both for stimulating the imagination and for defusing fear of the future. But science fact can be even more amazing. Science fiction never suggested anything as strange as black holes.
defusedand
diffusedare similar enough that it would be easy for either one to be reasonable -- and IIRC, he speaks through some sort of speech-generating machine, which would just make it easier to misunderstand him. But given that Hawking is a crazy-science-guy, I suspect that he would rather defuse fear of the future than spread it around (even if it became more diffuse as it was spread), and that the transcript above is what he meant to say. In which case, I wonder about the versions of the quote that I found everywhere else. Didn't anyone do a double-take when they were typing up those papers, Web pages and news items? Of course, there is a third possibility, which I rather like: the quote could be a play on words, a sort of
slant pun(a phrase that I just invented, which is the funnier cousin of a slant rhyme). What's particularly cool about this particular ambiguity is that (a) both sentences are sensible, (b) they have related but opposite meanings, and (c) somewhat oddly, I agree with both of them: science fiction is good at defusing unwarranted fear of the future, while also diffusing fear where it's entirely warranted. I doubt Hawking was going for the double meaning, but it's a nice thought.
Verbdefuse:
- (transitive) To spread over or through as in air, water, or other matter, especially by fluid motion or passive means.
- (intransitive) To be spread over or through as in air, water, or other matter, especially by fluid motion or passive means.
Verb
- To remove the fuse from a bomb, etc.
- To make something less dangerous, tense, or hostile.
I have been trying to make a script that should put my laptop into hibernate, run automatically from cron, so it forces me to get to sleep. WordPress 2.7.1 was released and I upgraded this blog right away ( along with some other client installs that were already running 2.7 )
Let me know if you notice anything funky about the upgrade, from a cursory look everything seems to be working as it should.
On that note, I've also added a place in the comment section where you can input your Twitter ID and eventually I will publish this information along with the users gravatar and name.
Since several month, awesome users have reported a bug with OpenOffice.org. When using OOo and clicking on a menu, or using the mouse wheel to read a document, the currently selected tag (desktop) will change automagically to another one.
I've digged into awesome and found that awesome received a _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP request. As defined by EWMH, this kind of request are sent by a pager to change the active desktop.
That was weird. Nobody is using a pager here. So, I just kicked my gdb out, attached it to OOo, breaking on XSendEvent call. And I got it:
Breakpoint 1, XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70) at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46 (gdb) bt #0 XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70) at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46 #1 0x00007f8c0ab4193f in vcl_sal::WMAdaptor::switchToWorkArea () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #2 0x00007f8c0aafdbd8 in X11SalFrame::Show () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #3 0x00007f8c1378623c in Window::Show () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #4 0x00007f8c13785f40 in Window::Show () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #5 0x00007f8c1372cb54 in FloatingWindow::StartPopupMode () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #6 0x00007f8c1373c877 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #7 0x00007f8c1373ccf2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #8 0x00007f8c1373ce84 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #9 0x00007f8c13795e7f in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #10 0x00007f8c13797e74 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #11 0x00007f8c13796748 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #12 0x00007f8c0aafe6f8 in X11SalFrame::HandleMouseEvent () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #13 0x00007f8c0ab040c2 in X11SalFrame::Dispatch () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #14 0x00007f8c0ab31625 in SalX11Display::Yield () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #15 0x00007f8c0ab356f3 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #16 0x00007f8c0ab2df1f in SalXLib::Yield () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so #17 0x00007f8c135b050e in Application::Yield () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #18 0x00007f8c135b0587 in Application::Execute () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #19 0x00007f8c17517e80 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so #20 0x00007f8c135b4b24 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #21 0x00007f8c135b4bc5 in SVMain () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so #22 0x00007f8c1754ca6c in soffice_main () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so #23 0x000000000040105b in main ()I started digging more into the code, and this is what I finally found in salframe.cxx:
// #i45160# switch to desktop where a dialog with parent will appear
if( mpParent && mpParent->m_nWorkArea != m_nWorkArea )
GetDisplay()->getWMAdaptor()->switchToWorkArea( mpParent->m_nWorkArea );
Beautiful! It even has a comment with a IssueZilla bug number. Let's go and see where it comes from.
After 10 minutes of research to find that fucking IZ, I finally found the link to the issue #45160. The bug is IMHO not related to OOo but to a window manager doing poor job.
I've found that an awesome user already reported an bug err, wait, I mean an issue as issue #96684 (remember there's no bug in OOo, only issues) and I commented about it.
UPDATE: It seems OOo developers have agreed to fix that bug eventually.
It's been announced at quite a few places, so you probably already heard about it: Miro 2.0, the new major release of the cross-platform Internet RSS audio/video aggregator and player has been released.
Miro is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, the new release on Linux now features a "native" GTK+ widgets UI (instead of the Mozilla-based HTML widgets of earlier versions) and supports both a xine, as well as gstreamer renderer (for audio and video).
I won't even attempt to list all the improvements and new features, please check the release notes and the feature list for details. Overall more than 670 issues have been fixed since the last 1.2.x series release.
You can also watch this video (Ogg Theora, 10 MB) for a short introduction in Miro 2.0.
Together with the software release, the getmiro.com website, as well as the online Miro Guide have been competely rewritten and are a lot more usable and better-looking than before.
Finally, I have uploaded a new Miro 2.0 Debian package to unstable yesterday, by now it should be available from most mirrors. For Debian we're defaulting to xine at the moment, but please consult README.Debian if you want to switch to the gstreamer backend.
Please test the new release extensively so the few remaining issues (if any) can be ironed out soon...
On Monday, I was informed that my server (a xen instance hosted at Brainfood was chewing up a lot of bandwidth by giving out long DNS responses at the rate of several per second. According to Peter Palfrader, it was most likely due to this DoS attack.
Apparently I was contributing to the problem because my name server (running bind9 ) was accepting queries from anywhere on the Internet. You can test this via an online tool from SANS or by issuing the following command from a machine which is not on your network.
dig -t ns @your.name.serverallow-query localhost; ;allow-query any; ;Next.