I got this error in one of my Rails apps that I migrated to 2.2. It occurs when you try and send mail with ActionMailer, which makes it especially annoying because the exception notifications I normally receive when there is a problem weren't being sent! I wasn't able to track down the root cause of the problem - apparently something about an SSL certificate not being there or not being right, but here's the change that causes ActionMailer to fool around with SSL mail: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/732c724df61bc8b780dc42817625b25a321908e4 I was able to "correct" the problem (or at least get things working again) by commenting out this line of code:

smtp.enable_starttls_auto if smtp.respond_to?(:enable_starttls_auto)

Perhaps it should be a configuration option, or there should be better error detection with regards to the certificate. If anyone comes up with a nicer answer, leave a comment, but in the meantime, I thought I'd post my quick and dirty fix.

I came back from Thanksgiving in California to find my copy of Real World Haskell had arrived. I've spent the last several days making my way through it up through chapter 10. I'd read a few of the first chapters last year when I was struggling to learn Haskell, and posted enough comments that I'm amoung the (many many) people credited in the Preface. Amusing, since I still don't consider myself proficient in the language. Reading back through those and on through Chapter Nine has swapped back in the basics I learned last year, and built on them. I was able to get all the way to Chapter Ten before hitting real brain-melting stumbling blocks. That's progess! I can't help but feel that Chapter Ten should come later, perhaps after monads are covered. Only other quibbles so far are some typographical problems introduced in typesetting the book, and a few bugs and problems that were pointed out in comments on the web site, but not fixed in time for the first edition.

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Anyway, I know more than enough Haskell now to configure xmonad. While I'm still perfectly happy with awesome, xmonad has some cool things going for it. Playing with it this evening, I especially like:

• Being able to compile my xmonad.hs and rely on Haskell's type checking to make sure I wrote it correctly and it will work.
• Xmonad's integration with gnome. This was a nice suprise, and being able to just use the gnome panel in xmonad, rather than building my own panel, has made it a lot easier to get started with.

  gnome panel showing xmonad workspaces

• The power and beauty of xmonad's layouts. Start with the usual simple sorts of layouts like tiled, full screen and floating. These can be transformed in a myrid of ways (ie, rotated, decorations added), and can even be combined together to create more complex layouts. So I was quite easily able to configure it to alternate between a tabbed desktop layout that plays nicely with panels, and absolute unadorned full-screen mode:

  myLayout = desktop   noBorders Full
  where
    desktop = tabbed $ ewmhDesktopsLayout $ avoidStruts $ twoPane
    tabbed = addTabsAlways shrinkText myTheme
    twoPane = Tall 1 2/3 3/100
  

  (And it wasn't too hard to enhance this with a special-purpose grid layout for the workspace I run pidgin on.)
• That my xmonad.hs is small, easy to understand, and doesn't contain any boilerplate beyond main = xmonad $ gnomeConfig.
• It lets me muck about with doing something real with Haskell without having to commit to using it in some project of my own.
• It supports cycling all windows on screen so that each in turn moves into the main viewport, via XMonad.Actions.RotSlaves.rotAllUp. An action that has been on my window manager wish-list for ages. Implemented in an easy 3 lines of code.

My current set of gripes with xmonad is small:

• mod-shift-space is documented somewhere, but not where you need it.
• I applied addTabsAlways to a Tall layout, and got title-bar like "tabs". But how do I add multiple windows as tabs to a given frame, like in ion? Can't figure out how, or even if it's possible.
• Moving the mouse cursor over one of the above title-bar-like things doesn't focus its window. Very annoying!
• Mouse support is very lacking. I'd like to be able to drag tabs around the screen, and maybe drag a border between frames to resize, couldn't find modules implementing any of that.
• Theme configuration is only partly factored out, some of it is scattered in several different places.
• Reloading the config file takes ages. 1.9 mb executable has to be built and run.
• The lack of a dynamic language shows; there's no way to open a prompt and type Haskell into the window manager. I rarely speak lua to awesome or ion3, but it's nice to have the ability there. I think it should be possible to do this with Haskell (see ghci).

When moving here, we figured out that it would cost us around $5k(USD) to ship everything we owned, versus the idea of spending something in that neighbourhood to simply replace everything we owned with stuff worth having. Much of what we had we got in 2001 when, unemployed, diverted to a weird city, and stuck far away from home we scraped by to buy for our tiny one-room apartment in Toronto.

So today was the Sears trip - the day to buy living room furniture, dining room furniture, and kitchen appliances. We went to Sears and it was a bit chilly. We left Sears to apparently a -27C wind chill, dusted snow blowing across the parking lot and 50km/h wind gusts.

We were *almost* dressed well enough for it, too. =)

Anyhow, the furniture comes on Wednesday afternoon and sometime after that we'll start inviting people over. Y'know, somewhere after we have somewhere to sit.

I have not sat behind the helm of teaching for very long but I already have a few tricks up my sleeve. One of them is that I assign some of my favorite readings at the end of the semester so as to counter the downtrodden and tepid spirit and mood (not to mention attention) of my students, which drops precipitously with each passing day. Let’s face it post Thanksgiving, we are all a little tired and I try to find the readings, which uplift, intrigue, and challenge cherished assumptions about marriage and sex. So far it seems to pay off and I often can tell because the conversational pitch and excitement in class is high and the student writings are good, great, even exceptional, which, again, is hard to produce/induce this late in the semester. Readers of this blog would probably be most interested in one of these lively readings, Ben Nugent’s American Nerd (and it might be interesting to hear how the European Nerd story would diverge or converge with this one). One of my students, an audio geek and Free Culture President/Free Software junkie, by the name of John Randall produced a very nice little response (not research) paper on the Nugent reading as well as a short piece by Sarah Seltzer from Bitch Magazine
The(Girl) Geek Stands Alone (and thanks to Joe> for cluing me into this piece). Seltzer piece basically argues, in her own words, the following:

Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.
Awesome as it is, you’ll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly

So John’s whole response paper is here and here is the pdf. In the paper, he makes a number of excellent points but what I loved most about it was his very geeky move at the end of the paper to prove Sarah (somewhat wrong) by listing all the girl geeks that do and have appeared in mainstream (and not-so mainstream) entertainment venues/shows, etc. They are as follows and in his own words:

I will now showcase my own geekiness through my knowledge of geeky female characters. Why? Because I can. But also because I want to demonstrate that if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty. Moreover, if you pick the right ones, you can make them support your argument about gender relations, whatever that argument might be. Some of these charters and personalities are hardly gendered, some are hyper-sexual. Some are incredibly attractive but completely asexual. Some undergo a transformation into/out of geekiness, while others to not. Some are powerful, while some are powerless. Some (most?) celebrate their geekiness, others are tortured by it. They are all geeks take your pick: Aeon Flux, a sexy geek who’s technological gadgets give her super powers (Comic drawings then Charlize TheronAeon Flux) Wonder Woman, attractive pilot of an invisible plane Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones in short shorts, wielding guns and cracking computer codes (CGI and then Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider) She-Ra, who was way smarter than He-Man (Masters of the Universe cartoons) Gadget Hackwrench, beautiful chipmonk technician for Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers cartoon) Velma, featuring eyeglasses, awkwardness and brains (Scooby Doo), Hermonie Granger, a geek who is temporarily rejected because she is a geek, remains a geek, and finds love and happiness (Harry Potter) Barbarella, who, through comic strips and a 1968 film, helped introduce science fiction and sex to young women (Barbarella) La Femme Nikita, a skillful, savvy, and very feminine girl who doubles as a covert spy Kate Libby, aka ‘Acid Burn’, uber-sexualized hacker (played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers) Kathryn Janeway, smart and powerful captain of the USS Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), Dana Scully, FBI agent with encyclopedic media knowledge. The bizzare subtex of non-realized sexual tension was part of the magic The X-Files. Willow Rosenberg, geeky sidekick turned geeky supervillian (Alyson Hannigan in buffy the Vampire Slayer) Michelle Flaherty, hyper-sexual band geek (Alyson Hannigan in American Pie series) Dr Ellie Sattler, heroniene scientist (Jurrasic Park) Ellie, scientis hero (played by both Jenna Malone and Jodi Foster in Carl Sagan’s Contact) Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanson in Ghost World) just about every charater ever played by Jenna Malone (Donie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The United States of Leland, Saved!, etc) half of the charaters played within the last decade by Jodi Foster (Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Flightplan, The Addams Family half of the charaters played by Christina Ricci (Mermaids, The Addams Family, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ice Storm, Buffalo ‘66, Prozac Nation, Pumpkin, Speed Racer) half of the characters played by Natalie Portman (The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Star Wars, V for Vendette, The Darjeeling Limited, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Garden State) Molly Ringwald. characters played by Molly Ringwald. Rock musician Ani DiFranco and geeky Riot Grrls everywhere. Sarah Vowell, NPR commentator celebrating her geeky life. Voiceover for geeky cartoon characters. Rachel Maddow, for being Rachel Maddow.

First, awesome list, though he forgot a few (like one of my favorites, Bionic Woman and a more recent one, Juno) and it is nice to have it in one compact place. But, I have to say, I still agree to some degree with Sarah Setlzer, though I also agree with John. On the one hand there are representations and it is as important just to strut this stuff publicly as it is to claim that there is not enough female geeky representations in mainstream media. This is what John has done quite nicely. One the other hand, as he himself says ” if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty.” I think those words, “if you look hard enough” also speaks volumes of the continued disparity that does exist. One should not have to look “hard,” and the only blockbusters, so to speak, which feature a female geek, is Tomb Raider, which for being so hyper-sexualized is not so geeky to me, no matter how good she is with the gadgets. That said, what I find so important, and have emphasized in different contexts, is the need for what I think of simultaneous positive and negative form of critique, the former being about pointing to already exisitng examples to get people jazzed and excited and to put things in perspective. The later form of critique, negative critique, identifies a lack, a void to fill, just the type of excellent commentary in the Seltzer piece… But now for the most important question, who has John overlooked?

On the 26th of November 2008, there was a double blow. It had been raining almost all night in Chennai and we put on the TV to figure out what the weather was going to be like only to find out that there had been attacks with guns and bombs in multiple areas in Mumbai. The attacks in Mumbai and the rain in Tamil Nadu continued over the next 36 hours or so --- with disastrous effects all around. All this was more than a week ago and so it feels as if one can write about it with a modicum of objectivity. The cyclone that hit Tamil Nadu was not man-made, but many of its consequences were. The attacks in Mumbai were carried out by people who were human beings once upon a time, but they had their humanity stripped by those who run the camps which trained them. So to some extent it feels as if we have suffered from a natural disaster --- but one which could have been mitigated by humans. The Indian state and people seem to be returning back to "normal" and this is said be a sign of our resilience. On the other hand that may only be because we suffer a thousand cuts every day --- self-inflicted. Indeed, each one of us is a minor terrorist carrying out little acts of rebellion against the state; acts that also threaten the well-being of our fellow citizens. Some examples follow:

• we throw plastic bags and paper cups into the canals and drains around our cities.
• we evade taxes and even pride ourselves on reducing government power as a consequence.
• we throw lavish "rave" parties where drugs and alcohol flow freely.
• we destroy public roads and public spaces for our own private needs.

The list could go on and on ... All of these acts weaken our state and our people to the point where we cannot act swiftly in an emergency:

• garbage blocks the canals, which leads to floods during heavy rains.
• the lost taxes means reduced training and equipment for our police and other emergency forces.
• the drugs and alcohol that are distributed at the "rave" parties are bought from the same smugglers who also bring guns and RDX.
• public roads are in no shape to supply things required during emergencies.
• public spaces are not available for relief efforts since they are illegally occupied or damaged beyond use.
• our under-paid police force has its hands full dealing with the thousands of little violations that we commit.
• our police force is so used to looking the other way while our top brass and gold-laden classes are violating the rules that they can be forgiven if they cannot distinguish them from the "real" terrorists.

This is what makes us a "soft target for terror". If the Indian government were to indeed go after all those who are weakening it and terrorizing its people, then a good percentage of our citizenry and an even larger percentage of our well-off citizenry would find itself in the cross-hairs. To paraphrase what an assistant commissioner of police once said: If 100% of our citizens are 2% terrorists then it is very hard to catch the 2% of the citizens who are 100% terrorists.

No software is perfect, and most users happen to have some itches they would like to scratch on them. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t thought some day “why can’t that software do <some feature>”. But not everybody is able to scratch these itches. For a starter, most people aren’t developers, or aren’t able to modify source code to reach some known goal, be it fixing a bug or implementing a missing feature. But even when they are able to do so, most applications can’t be fixed or improved easily: most widespread applications are still proprietary software where access to the source code is either impossible or prohibitively expensive. That’s the good thing about open source and free software: you are able to itch these scratches yourself ; and as a free software user and developer, I often do so in the software I use. I must say it’s even frustrating when you are used to this possibility but end up on damn stupid bugs or limitations you can’t fix in proprietary software. I have quite a bunch of such examples, the most recent ones being with VMware ESX, but that’s another story. Mobile phones are everywhere nowadays. In some countries, there are even more mobile phones than people. A huge amount of people are using them daily. Or maybe should I say “endure”. When you go to shop for a laptop, digital camera, or digital portable music player, you can find demonstration models you can fiddle with, see what the user interface looks like, how it behaves, see if whatever feature you like on such devices is present and how easily you can do what you want. With a mobile phone, you don’t have all that (at least in France and Japan, where I experienced this). You’re lucky if one of the sellers owns the exact model you’d like to test and lends it to you for a minute. Most of the time, the “thing” to watch is a plastic model, not even remotely related to the real thing in colour, weight… and obviously, it has as much use as a brick (not even so, actually, as you can’t, for instance, break windows with it). And most of the time, you end up regretting the choice you made, because the UI is so unuseable, or so slow after a while, or so buggy, etc. More and more phones nowadays have multimedia as their main feature. While it can be nice, especially when you see how some are pretty good at it, and when you consider it avoids you to carry both a phone and a multimedia device. Sadly, they usually forget to be good phones, too. Sometimes even, multimedia(-related) features are crippled by the carriers. As an example, my phone, while able to read mp3 music, has been limited by the carrier to refuse to use them as ring tones, while, according to the maker and to various forums, the phone is perfectly able to do so. It’s even worse than that, because even converted as 3gp, which it otherwise allows as ring tones if you download them at a ridiculous price, it still doesn’t allow to put your music as a ring tone. You got it, features in phones are also limited for big money-making. Fortunately, there is a hole in my phone where I can set a 3gp as ring tone if I do it from the music player instead of the file browser. Most articles I read about Android, or the iPhone SDK, relate how they are great opportunities to enable developers to provide nice applications for users, using the provided frameworks. But the thing is : they’re only applications. An application is not the core of the phone. An application won’t take care of ring tones, or vibration types. And that’s what open source in mobile phones should also allow users to do. That’s what it all should be about. As a user and free-software developer, I would like to enhance my phone like I can enhance my laptop. For instance, my phone will only allow crappy polyphonic tones for SMS or e-mail reception. Digital music is only available when you receive a call. Why ? There is obviously nothing preventing digital musing when receiving SMS or e-mail, except a stupid software restriction that could be fixed if the firmware were open-source. Very few phones in France appear to allow japanese input, let alone proper display of japanese characters in e-mail or on the web. My previous phone was able to display japanese correctly. My current phone doesn’t. Neither of them is able to input japanese (which is not unexpected in France, actually). I know the iPhone does both. Anyways, these are informations very hard to get a hand on before buying a model, and something that open-source would allow me to fix. Even better, it would allow me to take the pieces from the asian version of the same (or similar) phone which probably has the functionality. The phone I had when I was living in Japan had a nice feature that I haven’t seen in any phone in France (but again, this kind of information is very hard to get): different vibration types. For example, you had a vibration type making short vibrations, another one long vibrations, yet another one 3 short vibrations, a short pause, then 3 short vibrations again, etc. This is very useful when you disable ring tones during a meeting or some other occasions where you don’t want to bother the people around you with your phone ringing: depending on how the phone vibrates, you know whether you have to take the call or can ignore it, or if it’s only an e-mail, without taking a look at the phone. Again, an open-source firmware would allow me to implement this. I’m sad so much of what open-source can bring to mobile phones is so badly publicized.

I've become a Facebook user. Caused by most of my dancing friends being there: Facebook is a convenient and easy way to keep some contact with all those people that aren't like your core friends, but still friends, and that are all around the world.I've also toyed around with the Facebook API, and actually written two small applications for it. From a technical point of view, I'm actually quite impressed by Facebook.Yes, Facebook seems to have quite some load trouble these days. Sometimes it's very slow. Sometimes it just malfunctions (with being kicked out and having to re-login being just the least). These days, messages were distorted every now and then, some app messages were always missing the last few words.What seriously does impress me is the architecture they use with third party applications. It's designed around cachability (so profile pages aren't slowed down by slow or broken third party applications) and they do jump some hoops to allow application writers do a lot of things while preventing them to disturb other applications or the core functionality.For all I know, Facebook is the first major thing to do CSS and JavaScript rewriting. Data produced by third party applications is fed through a very smart parser and rewriter that allows an impressively large subset of CSS and JavaScript to be used without the developers having to pay attention to not producing conflicts. In CSS, rules are prefixed with a selector to restrict them to their applications scope. In JavaScript, object references are uniquified, and the convenience functions you have for interacting and accessing nodes (including functions to do common things such as modify CSS class assignments) take care of all that. Access to the raw JavaScript methods is filtered, so you can't e.g. use parentNode to get access to objects outside of your scope. At least in theory.Much of this is for the benefit of users: applications are not allowed to do annoying animations unless the user has just interacted with them; apps also can't modify or disturb others, or read data from other applications via DOM.Well, of course there might be one or another security issue still there; some of these things might also be related to the performance issues of Facebook recently. And of course there are bugs. Lots. A couple of things still need to be thought through properly (e.g. aggregation of feed messages with multiple targets, localization functionality for applications, finer grained control of data access). But their CSS and JavaScript rewriting is really cool.

Here's a quick intro to what I'm hacking on at university. This is a new omnidirectional robot platform we got in the lab. It's controlled via CanOpen-over-EtherCAT (which is a realtime Ethernet protocol "extension", more or less). As we don't want to deal with any of the Windows software that's usually used for such stuff, we're employing the IGH EtherCAT Master (r1549) implementation (GPL/LGPL) on Linux and it works quite nicely. I hacked together a few shell scripts that invoke the ethercat command line tool with certain parameters to control the motor velocities "by hand", which then soon turned into a "dancing" demo of the robot ;-) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_vF4NK26fM for the YouTube video of the dancing bot. It's just a quick (hardcoded) hack for now, there's lots of room for improvements, of course (e.g. detect baselines of random music you throw at it). The demo in the background is the fantastic Masagin by Farbrausch. I've also hacked up a small Python script to control the robot with a Wiimote (using cwiid on Linux), which also works quite nicely. I further plan to make a small program for controlling it via a 3D mouse or the like in the future... The longer-term plan for the robot platform is that it'll get a "backbone" and two very nice robot arms for grabbing stuff etc.

I found the camera this morning, but I haven't taken pictures of the new place yet. I think that'll have to wait until this weekend.

I'm sitting in the corner of what will be the office space. Right now, it's got the cordless phone, the wifi router, the cable modem, and the Vonage (codec? modem? codec seems likely, how wonderfully archaic). Off to the side is a sewing table of some sort that the former owners left behind which has the power brick for our cell phones and Angie's laptop on it.

We're running laundry for the first time in the washing machine downstairs, and seasoning the new cast iron frying pan. Leif had a bath earlier and actually went down at about the normal time. He woke up at 05h30 this morning, probably due to the lack of curtains. It apparently starts to get bright early, and none of us are sleeping well with three of us in a double.

Our furniture is due to arrive somewhere between the 15th and the 18th. I phoned today and the moving company told us that the stuff hasn't left California yet. Ah well. We've purchased a toaster over and electric kettle so far. We bought the stove, washer and dryer from the former owner. There was a spare fridge downstairs that we're using, but mostly we're using the step outside the kitchen door. We're back in Quebec and it's cold enough to keep things out there. =)

This place is easily the largest place I've lived in since my parents split up when I was 8. Angie and I are really trying hard not to fill it with crap, but actually think through what we need.

I signed Angie and I up for gym memberships today after work. Yesterday was cell phones. Angie picked up some new pots and pans. Tomorrow will be towels and some dishes.

Anyone know if it's better to buy a fridge and dishwasher before Christmas or after? =)

The new home number, cell numbers and such will be in Facebook and Orkut in a moment.

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Finally, the long-awaited release (just alpha atm) of PHP with namespaces support is out, go, get it, and enjoy the sub\spaces\separator before you get\mad\with\it.

I just read on Slashdot a pointer to an article about GitTorrent and it made me wonder about these meta-distributed systems. Although I don t share the article s author enthusiasm, it s a really good idea. Anyways, browsing that article, I ended up on another one about Debtorrent. This I ve already read about and decided to keep an eye on for some time now It happens that one line on that article called my attention (and I quote):

At the last major upgrade of Debian/Stable, all the routers at the major International fibreoptic backbone sites across the world redlined for a week. (emphasis added)

Well that was a surprise. Of course I know of the size and importance of Debian, but I thought our systems were more efficient (or that our release-generated-traffic were not of that magnitude). I began googling for a pointer on that Anything: a quote, an URL, a list message anything that could make that claim verifiable: Guess what: I found none! Meanwhile, on Slashdot, other people started following the same subject... So, is it true? Does anyone have any pointers to that? It seems quite unlikely to me But hey! That s just me: maybe the Internet is not that big :-)

Opensync updates Some time ago, Opensync-0.38 got released, and it is now available in experimental. The evolution-data-server and the Opie plugins are now available again, as well as the new tomboy (in NEW) and a rewritten google-calendar/contacts plugin. The google plugin requires the new libgcal, which I have just uploaded to NEW. Unfortunately, kitchensync is still not ported to latest Opensync-0.3x (and got dropped for KDE4.2), so one still needs to use the command-line msynctool program. Also not ported are the (KDE3) kdepim and the currently under development Akonadi plugin. Other important plugins missing for 0.38 are the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm and IRMC plugins. I tried to suggest making 0.38.x point releases including more ported plugins, but it seems development is turning towards 0.39 already, and yet some more API changes were done, this time mostly removing unnecessary interfaces, which should be a good thing in the long term. Some other good news is that there are now weekly IRC meetings of the Opensync developers, so there should be steadier progress towards Opensync-0.40 from now on. Unfortunately, I was mostly absent during all of the three meetings so far. Along with Opensync-0.38, libsyncml saw a new major release 0.5.0 which should fix lots of bugs and provide better support for mobiles. However, lots of problems with syncml were due to bugs in the wbxml2 library. Michael Bell has hopefully found the most critical ones and I have uploaded a new wbxml2-0.9.2 to unstable today which I hope will get into lenny soon. The main problem with wbxml2 over the last year was a unresponsive/MIA upstream; however, recently wbxml2 maintainership got tranferred to the opensync project and moved to its Trac. Michael Bell has been fixing most of the outstanding issues and is currently preparing a 0.10.0 release, so this project should be back on track now.

Here's a quick HOWTO for using Wine to play Starcraft on a Linux machine.

  $ apt-get install wine (as root)
  $ winecfg

The winecfg (graphical) utility will setup some config file defaults in your ~/.wine directory. Click on Graphics and activate Allow DirectX apps to stop the mouse leaving their window. Also, click on Audio (a dialog will pop up, just click OK). This will autodect your soundcard and setup Wine to use it. Under Drives click Add (this will add D:) and change the path to /media/cdrom, so that Wine knows about your CD-ROM drive. Finally click OK to close winecfg and save the settings. The next step is to insert the Starcraft CD-ROM into the drive and start the installer using Wine:

  $ mount /media/cdrom (as root)
  $ wine /media/cdrom/setup.exe

Follow the instructions in the installer until the Starcraft install is finished (you'll need your CD key number), then exit the installer (don't start playing Starcraft right away). The next step is to get the latest patch and get rid of the need to insert the CD-ROM every time.

  $ wget http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/starcraft/patches/PC/SC-116.exe
  $ wine SC-116.exe

After the patch is installed click OK and Starcraft will be started (very annoying). Leave the game again. We'll get rid of the CD-ROM requirement now:

  $ cp /media/cdrom/install.exe ~/.wine/drive_c/Programme/Starcraft/StarCraft.mpq

That's a pretty big file, it may take a while. You might have to change "Programme" in the path (I have the German Starcraft version). That's it. You can now play Starcraft (without needing the CD-ROM) using:

  $ wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Programme/Starcraft/StarCraft.exe

A good thing is, it even works nice and fast with the open-source nv NVIDIA driver (no need to install the proprietary driver). I noticed one very annoying "bug" with the mouse behaviour at first. The mouse would sometimes just get stuck during the game (which is a total disaster of course, if you're in the middle of a fast-paced game). Left-clicking somewhere would "unstuck" the mouse, but it's still very bad. After many, many hours of reading bugreports and trying various patches I finally found out the root cause for the problem. It's somehow related to my window manager (IceWM); whenever you move the mouse to the bottom of the Starcraft screen (where the IceWM status bar is, even though it's not on top or even visible, and even though Wine/Starcraft runs in full-screen mode!), something funny happens with X11/IceWM and the mouse gets stuck. I haven't yet found out if/which IceWM option could fix this behavior, but I have a small work-around. Just start Wine directly on a second X11 server with Starcraft (without any window manager being involved):

  $ xinit -e '/usr/bin/wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Programme/Starcraft/StarCraft.exe' -- :1

No patches needed (stock Wine from Debian unstable works fine, that's version 1.0.1 right now). I hope this saves other people some debugging time...

A brief distraction from moving - I find it fascinating that people should vaguely think that a coalition appealing to the Governor General is undemocratic. As far as I can tell, this comes from watching too much American TV. As Canadians, we don't elect the government or the PM. We elect MPs to fill seats, and the GG chooses the government based on the available people who can form the most stable government.

This bit is important! The MP you voted for is *still* your MP. Now the people elected to run the country have to try and figure which group represents the best chance of running smooth government. For those of us not around to remember the last time this happened (1926, Lord Bynd as GG), it's perfectly reasonable for the GG to ask the opposition to try and form a working government.

By some measure, this is extraordinary, but I think of going for another election 7 weeks after the previous one to be the equivalent of seeking marriage counseling 7 weeks after starting dating someone. As in, it's perfectly okay to write it off and try the other available options.

Time to get some sleep for our first night in the new appartment. =)

The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com. The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on). I’m not sure I’d agree with Jim Jagielski when he claims that Sun has the “best and brightest business people in the world,” though. As I said in the article, and as I’ve said before, I have nothing but the highest respect for many of Sun’s engineers, especially those who work on Solaris. But their business people? I’m not so sure they have the best and brightest… in fact, I think that’s one of Sun’s greatest problems right now. Compare that with the job that Mark Hurd has done with HP, or with the work done by the executives at my employer (IBM), and I’m not so sure a strong case can be made for the excellence of Sun’s business folk. (I mean, how many people still believe that the $2 billion dollars which Sun spent to acquire Cobalt Networks, or the $4 billion dollars which Sun spent to acquire StorageTek, or the $1 billion dollars which Sun spent MySQL, were all good ideas? Sun is currently valued by the market at $2.4 billion dollars!) My bigger concern at the moment, however, is what happens if Sun gets purchased by a rival or by a corporate raider and gets broken up for parts? Since November 19th, when Sun’s stock price crashed through $3.27 (and has hit a low of $2.60 recently), it has been trading for less than its per-stock cash value. I say that not out of a sense of Schadenfreude, but out of concern about what happens if someone decides to buy the company, lay everyone off, and even after paying all of its debts, the resulting cash left over would be more than cost of completely buying the company — all of the real estate, the inventory, and the patent portfolio would all be pure profit. It’s the last I’m most concerned about; Sun has a very large patent portfolio! What if it fell into the hands of a patent troll? What damage could be done to not just Linux and the OSS comunity, but the software industry as a whole? Suppose Sun really does have patents that read upon many of NetApp’s products? If those patents fall into the hands of a patent troll, NetApp would no longer be able to negotiate a peace settlement based on its patents (if they survive the on-going patent re-examination process) that read on ZFS, since the patent troll would no longer be making any products based on ZFS. Maybe somewhere in Sun’s patent portfolio, there are patents that read on the GNOME and KDE desktops, but since Sun is trying to ship those with its Project Indiana/Open Solaris dekstop, it’s not bothering to assert them at this time? What if a patent troll, perhaps one funded by Microsoft, gets their hands on those patents? One final scary thought. Sun’s current market cap: $2.40 billion USD. Sun’s cash on hand: $2.63 billion USD. Microsoft’s current cash on hand: $19.71 billion USD. I can just imagine Steve Ballmer saying, “Chris, take it out of petty cash. I have an itsy-bitsy little acquistion I want to make…. Now I can embrace and extend Java all I want! And you know those term-limited, non-Open Source TCK licenses Sun gave to OpenJDK developers — not any more! They’re gone, within a year, the next time Red Hat needs to get the license renewed!” Could it happen? What do you think?

Hot on the heels of the announcement for Rcpp I just made, version 0.6.2 follows with a small but important fix for the default linker flag output by the helper function Rcpp:::RcppLdFlags(). I also added a download section to the Rcpp page here where you can find the new version. CRAN should start propagating it by tomorrow.

I just announced Rcpp 0.6.0 and 0.6.1 on the low-volume R-packages list. Rcpp provides C++ classes that greatly facilitate interfacing C or C++ code in R packages using the .Call() interface provided by R. Rcpp provides matching C++ classes for a large number of basic R data types. Hence, a package author can keep his data in normal R data structure without having to worry about translation or transfer to C++. At the same time, the data structures can be accessed as easily at the C++ level, and used in the normal manner. The mapping of data types works in both directions. It is as straightforward to pass data from R to C++, as it is it return data from C++ to R. Rcpp was initially written by Dominick Samperi to in the context of the RQuantLib package and later released on its own, but had not seen any releases in twenty-four months. I have substantially expanded the documentation, simplified the build structure yet made it easier to use Rcpp from other packages, and started to add some new classes (notably microsecond time types). Rcpp is supported on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (with special thanks to Simon for some extended help). More information for Rcpp can be found at the package homepage, the R-forge repository or the package CRAN page.

Games are probably the kind of software that needs more patching and maintenance. In some cases we even have to effectively act as upstreams ourselves. Currently every distro is doing that on their own, and we end up making n times similar patches to provide the same functionality (put files in the proper places, endianess and word size stuff, building with newer versions of gcc or free toolchains, etc). It makes a lot of sense to share among us all that stuff. Some of us, developers of different Linux distributions and BSD operative systems have started working together to reduce duplicated work, creating a distribution-agnostic mailing list in freedesktop servers as a first step. Debian Project News talks about this too. You can read more about our goals here. Wish us luck in this new quest, and join us if you’re interested too

I got an iPhone on the very first day it was available officially in my country. I have used it every day since then and am now ready to decide how good it really is. Summary: it is a great piece of technology and the only tradeback is the locked down platform. I have abandoned my Palm and am not looking back. Hardware: the hardware is just perfect. 4 buttons (Home, Power, Volume Up and Down) and 1 switch (Mute) are all very clear, easy to find and press and frankly are enough. The touchscreen is reasonably fast and very precise nicely corrected by software that guides your presses toward UI points of interest if such are within your finger. The casing is absolutely solid - there is no gaps, no wobble, nothing. All glossy surfaces attract fingerprints, but a couple passes with a microfiber cloth (included) clean it up easily. The loudspeaker is phenomenal - all sound comes from a single small hole, but it can easily fill a small room with music. Call sound quality is impeccable. You can plug in any headphones, but if you use the included headphones you get a microphone with a button that can pickup and hand up calls, start/pause music and skip to the next track. I also love that the only charger included is a very small power brick that provides a power-only USB port and a USB charging cable. That is a good way to reduce number of power bricks for gadgets. The iPhone 3G (that is what I have) also has a GPS build-in, but let us be clear - it is not good enough to replace a car GPS, the iPhone GPS is slow (takes several seconds to refresh the location and tens of seconds to find it first time) and the precision is measured in meters or even tens of meters. The WiFi is very good at getting a connection and doing it very fast. Oh and there is an acceptable camera. Out of the box software: the software included surely is better than on any other phone I have seen (including Palm). The UI widgets are nicely written specially for a touchscreen interface - the best example is having click wheels instead of drop down menus. It is much easier mentally to flick a wheel up or down then to click on a list, click to scroll the list and then click to select an entry. And the click wheel makes it much easier to correct off-by-one errors. Switches that look like regular physical switches instead of checkboxes is another very useful UI concept. I think a lot of this can be reused on the desktop as well. iTunes: and here comes the bad spot, the lock-in part. To get anywhere with the iPhone you need to associate it with an installation of iTunes. It fails to work in Wine or even in a virtual machine - apparently there are some errors related to avahi or something. Unfortunately, this means that you need wither Windows or MacOS to do nything with your iPhone. iTunes is the only way to backup, restore and upgrade your iPhone, it is the only way to get contacts and music on the iPhone (there is an iTunes Store app in the newest version that allows purchasing music over the air). Even after doing a jailbreak (see further) it is currently not possible to add music to the iPhone from any third party applications, because the iTunes database has a hashed checksum that the build-in iPhone music player (and iTunes) check before doing anything. If the checksum is wrong the only thing you can do is a full restore of the phone from backup. Crypto geeks - please help decrypt that hash, so that we can sync iPhones to amaroK. The iTunes itself is a bit weird - to get music onto the phone you need to create a playlist and then you can sync that playlist over. One of the playlist options is a smart playlist with a random feature and a limit on number of matches. That is the way to get random music from your collection onto the phone. I do dislike the fact that iTunes syncs all the contacts from Google to the phone and not only contacts for a certain group or only those that have a phone number, for example. Search and favorites do help here. Third party software (iTunes Store): it is very easy to install new software on the phone over the WiFi and there is plenty to choose from. You do need a Mac to develop this software which restricts the developer base a bit. The main bases that I needed (or did not know I needed) are covered: Last.fm player, TwitterFon, LockBox password storage, Stanza ebook reader, Shazam music identificator, Wordpress client, BigOven cookbook and lots of fun games. Have not used any paid-for apps due to the fact that iTunes store is not available in Latvia and the official documentation recommends registering with a fake address in UK or US. Most of the software is rather stable and useful, but there is also a lot of fluff. User reviews and ratings help a lot, can we have those for Debian packages? Jailbreak and third party software (Cydia): thanks to some anonymous hackers, we have the ability to break the software jail on the iPhone and install software that Apple did not approve. The process is made very simple, but again it does require you to boot into Windows or MacOS X. The main thing the jailbreak process does is install an installer on the phone. Currently the best one is Cydia which is built on top of … apt-get and dpkg! After that is done, you can install a terminal, a ssh server and BossPrefs advanced preferences. There are also other interesting programs there - a different dock, file manager, caching youtube player, quake, themed app launcher with categories and startup page (winterboard). Theoretically the ssh server allows you to manage your music over WiFi from any platform, but unfortunately until the iTuned database hash algorithm is decoded, we can only copy music from the phone to the PC and not back. It is possible to copy files over using ssh and then play them using third-party players, but those players are very crude and featureless. To summarize: an iPhone is a great phone and a decent application platform. To make using an iPhone with Linux easier we need to make iTunes run in Wine (and allow it to see the iPhone) and reverse engineer the iTunes database hashing algorithm so that we can get music on our phones with Linux tools. I also wish there was a way to develop iPhone apps in Linux, but that really is reaching for the stars.

I’m looking for people who are interested in testing the first release of gksu-polkit. I uploaded the first tarball to http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/gksu-polkit-0.0.1.tar.gz. There are also x86 packages available (built on a sid with a lot of experimental stuff, so if you have trouble installing please email me and I’ll have that fixed =P). For some history and discussion on the whys and hows do take a look at the README which exists inside the tarball (or git repo), and on the small page I wrote about it. For those who want to fiddle with the code, and perhaps help me finding bugs and fixing them, here’s my public git tree: git://git.debian.org/~kov/gksu-polkit.git