Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch). Here are some links about John McCain: Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1]. The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000. Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination. The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him. Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture - I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“. Here are some links about Sarah Palin: Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades - I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known. There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities - including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4]. Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports. The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell. The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9]. Update: Corrected URL [6].

• [1] http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-is-Your-Nation-on-Whi-by-Tim-Wise-080916-307.html


• [2] http://www.keatingeconomics.com/


• [3] http://www.truthout.org/article/palin-can-launch-us-back-time


• [4] http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/news/the-book-of-sarah/


• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ex=1239681600&en=b38b2d4387d4e3c4&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1


• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=palin%20patriotism&st=cse&oref=slogin


• [7] http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2024&Itemid=1


• [8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html


• [9] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4692408.ece


• [10] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

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I finally catched up with Gammu backlog from holidays and now it is time to move it a bit further. Automatic testing During this week I set up CDash instance for acquiring results of automatic nightly checks of Gammu. Each night Gammu is build on several hosts (currently Debian x86_64, Debian x86, SUSE x86_64 and crosscompilation for Windows on Debian) and results are posted to the dashboard. If you have some other architecture which could participate in testing, you are welcome to contribute! It is simple - just checkout svn, create build directory and configure there Gammu using cmake. You can enable coverage tests (-DCOVERAGE=ON). Then just run every night make Nightly for regular testing or make NightlyMemoryCheck to do dynamic allocation analysis. There is more detailed documentation in sources (INSTALL file). Thanks to this, I can hopefully sooner spot regressions and possible problems on different architectures. Roadmap With upgrade of Mantis, new feature called roadmaps arrived. I started to use it for planning features in future Gammu releases, so you can see what bugs should be fixed in future releases in Gammu roadmap. Currently there are not much things planned, because till now I had to focus only on bug fixing, but I think with 1.21.0 we have reached much better quality than in past releases and now is time to do some important changes in the core. Nokia phone required As you can already see in roadmap, I plan some bigger changes to Gammu core. I currently have on Sony-Ericsson phone and I would not be able to properly test how these changes will affect Nokia drivers. So for start I will need at least Nokia Series 40 3rd edition phone. Nokia 6233 (or 6234) currently looks as a reasonable choice, but if you have any hints for cheaper one with similar features, just drop me an email. Perfect would be if somebody would have half broken phone (I do not intend to use it for anything else than Gammu development, so broken camera, speaker, microphone or display does not really matter) and will be willing to donate it to me. If this will not work out, I'll have to buy used one and I will try to collect funds for this. If you want to contribute, check my donations page for possibilities.

Wow this Joe the Plumber phenomenon really seems to have Democrats spooked as they are now scrambling to find any possible dirt on the guy who dared to question Dear Leader. One might think people with a solid 6-10% lead wouldn't need to be so desperate but Adam is probably well aware of the Democratic partys penchant of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A lot of these progressive types are still nursing resentment for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry and wary that it will happen again so todays strategy is pre-emptive douchebaggery before Karl Roves evil minions can sully the pristine reputation of their fair candidate. What they don't realize is that calling Kerry an America hating traitor worked because there was reasonable evidence that he threw his medals away, and made speeches denouncing his country which are typical of acts people associate in their minds with America hating traitors. The 527s exaggerated but the exaggeration would not have worked if there was not an element of truth behind it. Now no one is disputing that Obama actually did make the "share the wealth" remark. Whether the person he said it to is a republican plant or some other sort of nogoodnik is immaterial. Obama is a redistributionist and that is precisely the reason why liberals want to him to be president. And how pathetic is the "dirt"? He owes backtaxes? Gee I wonder why someone who already owes money would be apprehensive about having to pay more? A lot of people owe money at one time or another and even have liens placed as a result. Perhaps it is relevant to mention that for someone in public office (like oh, say, Charles Rangel who I'm sure Adam will discuss in his next post.) but for a private citizen? Isn't that one of the "chilling effects on free speech" we were going to be subjected to in Bush's America? The other one one was how is not a real plumber. Apparently he is not licensed but, sit down for this one, it is actually possible to do work without a piece of paper from the government. Really! I've seen it happen. Is it always a good idea to ignore licensing regulations? Well they often serve to protect the public from malpractice but then again they often prop up cartels. Here in the NY/NJ area plenty of people of all political persuasions seem to be willing to take the risk of hiring unlicensed plumbers and other tradesmen because at the end of the day, it's the, you know plumbing, that makes you a plumber nothing else. And none of this has any bearing on Obamas policies or what they mean for America. So if you like socialism and think its what America needs, feel free to make the case to the voters and perhaps they will agree with you or perhaps not. But stop with with the ad hominems against people who point that out.

I haven’t been blogging this election at all recently — there are enough folks out there saying just about everything that should be said (and lots that shouldn’t), but I couldn’t let this little tidbit slip by without mention.Via the TaxProf blog:

• Politico and Bloomberg report that the State of Ohio has a $1,182.92 tax lien against Joe the Plumber for back income taxes.
• The Associated Press reports that Joe the Plumber lacks a plumbing license.

Also, the Trademark Blog notes the flurry of related domain name registrations. Technorati Tags: Joe the Plumber, Obama, McCain, Politics, Election

I have released fourth beta of Adept today. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE: it lets you install, remove, upgrade software and such your Debian and Kubuntu boxes (and maybe on some other Debian derivatives, too). Changes since Beta 2 Since I have done beta 3 somewhat in a hurry, I have regressed the installer component badly — to point of complete unusability. However un-sound software engineering practice, the deep freeze for Kubuntu Intrepid hits today, so I have released beta 4 in rapid succession. Other than the regression fix, I have mostly reworked the paging implementation in the installer — however, the report of complete installer rewrite (hi Jonathan) is somewhat exaggerated. Sadly, the KPageWidget we have been using before turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job, so a quick rewrite probably fixed more issues than it caused (and this seems to be confirmed by early testing feedback). Moreover, this beta got a bunch of improvements to the search, including package name hits, a set of cosmetic improvements (button icons, nicer sidebar, etc.) and a button to run software-properties-kde from the Sources tab (works on Intrepid, but sadly breaks on Debian for now… will fix later. Need time, need sleep.) Where to get I have prepared binary packages. These should be now part of Debian Sid (unstable) and also of Kubuntu Intrepid. You should be able to get the new version from your distribution:

apt-get install adept

Again, as with beta 2, there is no Hardy backport, since my time is tight. If anyone is willing to do a backport please drop me a note: I will gladly publish installation instructions. Heroes of Beta 4

• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna) — quite a bit of stuff (and bug sorting, arr!)
• Jonathan Riddell — another bunch of bits
• Harald Sitter (apachelogger) — improved icon choices
• Michael Casadevall — for manpage, which accidentally didn’t get included in the package, only in the source — I’ll try to remember to fix that for beta 5

Jobs for Beta 5, RC and Final Mostly just testing and reporting bugs. I currently plan a beta 5 with a few fixes that have started accumulating since beta 4 already (mostly one-liner fixes with minimal risk of regressions). After that, an RC is in order and a final release (finally…). Notifier is not included. Kubuntu has an independent sort of notifier now, I believe. Maybe I’ll find time to reconcile it in 3.1 or so. Moreover, I assume that a beta 4 or a very minorly patched beta 4 will become part of Kubuntu Intrepid — there should be no major roadblocks left, so I hope everything will bode well for Intrepid. I assume that whatever becomes 3.0 final will be eventually included in Intrepid updates. And then, plans should be set forth for 3.1… Known issues The about dialog still says beta 2. Bummer. Please try to note in your reports that this is actually a beta 4 that you are using. I’ll make sure beta 5 fixes that — but it might be another week till then, or so. The Intrepid version should have that fixed, thanks to Jonathan Thomas (again).

One of the many interesting ideas in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn series [1] is that of Combat Wasps. These are robots used in space combat which may be armed with some combination of projectile weapons, MASERs, thermo-nuclear and anti-matter weapons. In a lot of science fiction the space combat is limited to capital ships, a large source of this problem is technological issues such as the Star Trek process of making models of ships - it’s too expensive and time consuming to make lots of small models. Shows such as Babylon 5 [2] have fighters which make more sense. Sustaining life in space is difficult at the best of times and it seems likely for battles in space to have few if any survivors. So sending out fighters allows the capital ships to have a chance to survive. I suspect that a major motivating factor in the space battles in Babylon 5 was making it fit on a TV screen. Dramatic TV portrayal of small groups of fighters engaging in a battle is an art that has been perfected over the course of 80+ years. It’s about individuals being shown, whether it’s riders on horseback, pilots of biplanes, or space pilots, it’s much the same. But a reasonable analysis of the facts suggests that without some strange religious motive adopted by all parties in a war (as used in Dune [3]) the trend in warfare is to ever greater mechanisation. So while a medium size starship might be able to carry dozens or even hundreds of fighter craft, if using small robotic craft then thousands of fighters could be carried. So the issue is how to effectively use such robots. It seems likely that an effective strategy would involve large numbers of robots performing different tasks, some would detonate thermo-nuclear weapons to remove enemies from an area while others would prepare to advance into the breach. The result would be a battle lasting seconds that involves large numbers of robots (too many to focus on in a group) while each robot matters to little that there’s no interest in following one. Therefore it just wouldn’t work on TV and in a book it’s given a couple of sentences to describe what would have been an epic battle if humans had done anything other than press the launch buttons. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time would be to write a Combat Wasp simulator. There are already quite a number of computer games based on the idea of writing a program to control a robot and then having the robots do battle. This would be another variation on the theme but based in space. In a comment on my previous post about programming and games for children [4], Don Marti suggests that a RTS game could allow programming the units. It seems to me that the current common settings for controlling units in RTS games (attack particular enemies, attach whichever enemies get in range, patrol, move to location, retreat, and defend other units or strategic positions) are about as complex as you can get without getting to the full programming language stage. Then of course if you have any real programming language for a unit then changing it takes more time than an RTS game allows, and if the programming is good then there won’t be much for a human to do during the game anyway. So I can’t imagine much potential for anything between RTS and fully programmed games. There is some interesting research being conducted by the US military in simulating large numbers of people in combat situations. I think that the techniques in question could be more productively used in determining which of the various science fiction ideas for space combat could be most effectively implemented.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night’s_dawn


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_universe


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/16/programming-games-children/

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It looks like the jack reporting API for ALSA which just got merged into the mainline kernel for inclusion in 2.6.28 already has its first user - code from Matthew Ranostay supporting the jack detection in Sigmatel HDA codecs was just queued for merge in the next merge window. Admittedly, the jack reporting API has been available in ALSA git since July but it does look like it is just impressively fast adoption after the mainline merge. Still, a long way to go before user space can start to rely on knowing if things are plugged in or not.

When I first got a digital SLR camera a few years ago, I spent some time evaluating photo printing options. I sent a set of test prints to several different companies, and wound up deciding to use Shutterfly for my photo printing.

It's been some time since then, so I figured it was about time to re-evaluate options.

There are three main things to consider when obtaining prints of photos: cost of prints, quality of prints at delivery, and longevity of prints. Many people look only at cost, and those that look past cost rarely look past quality at longevity. Longevity (or permanence) is, in my opinion, the most important factor to consider. But let's look at all of them.

Longevity

All color photo print technologies fade or otherwise degrade over time. There are several main things that can cause this: exposure to light, exposure to gases (especially ozone), and exposure to humidity. The impact of these different items varies by print technology, paper, and process.

Longevity: Traditional Photo Paper

Most services such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Ofoto, as well as retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Walgreens print on traditional photo paper.

Historically, traditional photo paper has had terrible fading characteristics. Typically, old photos exposed to light -- for instance, hanging on a wall underneath a light bulb or in the sun -- will exhibit severe fade towards yellow or magenta. Modern papers are much better, but you will still not want to leave them directly in the sun or under lights.

Over at TPR, you can find several papers analyzing this. Perhaps the most interesting are test of digital prints and image permanence: comparing the technologies.

To attempt to summarize, what you see is that of the two common consumer-grade photo papers, Kodak Royal and Fuji Crystal Archive, the Fuji paper has better permanence. However, the pro-quality Kodak Professional Supra Endura is better than either of them by a significant margin. The photo papers didn't really have a problem with humidity, and not much of a problem with ozone.

Longevity: Inkjet

So what about inkjets and laser processes? The main thing I learned from my research is that there is a tremendous amount of variance here. When looking solely at top-quality inkjet papers and inks, they ranged everywhere from having little bits of them flake off after a few months to doing better than any of the photo papers. This variance occurred even with similar papers from the same manufacturer.

As far as light exposure is concerned, every inkjet paper tested by TPR did better than Kodak Royal. Some fared about the same as Fuji Crystal Archive. And some even beat out Kodak Supra Endura.

But look at the ozone exposure test and you see a far different picture. All of the photo papers did really well, though suprisingly Supra Endura was the worst of them (though the scale is so small here that the difference is pretty minimal).

Not one of the inkjet papers came even close to that, and some faded so fast that they couldn't even make it halfway through the test.

As far as humidity is concerned, it barely impacted the photo paper prints at all. Inkjet impacts were still mostly small, but also were mostly more impacted than the photo paper.

Longevity: Laser

And finally, how about laser prints. There was huge variety here. An HP printer they tested faded so fast it couldn't complete the light exposure test, while a Konica-Minolta fared better than Kodak Supra Endura in one test. In another light exposure test, they performed about the same as the photo papers. Ozone had little effect on the laser papers, except for the Dell test, which faded so fast they had to abort the test early. Humidity also had little effect on the laser prints.

Longevity: Other Examples

Brett Wilson did some interesting experiments with photos hung in front of a window as well. Wilhelm Imaging also has done some research in this area, though they are done using fluorescent lights only, which is prejudicial in favor of inkjet papers and against photo papers.

For the ultimate in longevity, true black and white photo paper is well-regarded.

TPR also has a report covering different lacquer and other finishes often applied to prints to improve their longevity.

Longevity: Conclusions

With the exact right combination of inkjet paper and ink, you can get a print that will last exceptionally long. Some inkjet paper and ink combinations have really poor longevity characteristics, however, as do the laser papers.

Photo papers, especially Kodak Supra Endura, but even Fuji Crystal Archive, will last quite awhile as well, and are probably the best storage if kept in dark conditions such as an album.

Print Quality

When looking at print quality, I'm concerned with correct color balance, saturation, cropping, consistency, sharpness, contract, and detail in both dark and light areas -- the typical things you'd look for.

Printing inkjet prints at home leaves all this up to your printer, inks, papers, and you, so we can't really compare meaningfully.

Back when I looked at it, Shutterfly and Ofoto did the best. Walmart, Walgreens, dotPhoto, and many of the other online sites were really too poor to even bother with. Ofoto had a bit of a yellow tint to it, while Shutterfly did pretty well.

Most of the reviews of the major sites I've seen lately rank Shutterfly or Snapfish at the top in terms of quality. Many also rank Ofoto/Kodak near the top.

Walmart and Walgreens produce consistently bad results, and I only use them if all that matters is speed. If you ever read a review where somebody says that they get good results from one of those places, find a review where somebody has a better idea what they're talking about.

Besides your mass-market sites like Shutterfly and Ofoto, there are also some slightly more expensive sites. The two best-known are mpix.com and adorama.com. Mpix is a division of Miller's Professional Imaging, a pro lab. Mpix is basically a website where you can submit photos in the way you would to one of these other sites, and they can do their thing. Their standard rate includes human color correction on every print, but they offer a cheaper rate if you don't need that. Their standard paper is Kodak Pro Supra Endura (the one that ranked highest in longevity tests), and the options go up from there. They also offer printing on true black and white paper, as well as wrap-around canvas and other such options.

I've sent some work their way and have been exceptionally happy with the result. Everything from the color of the prints down to the packaging shows extreme care and attention to detail. Among the reviews that cover mpix -- many don't -- it almost always comes out at the top of the pack, easily beating out Shutterfly and Snapfish. It can be more pricy (though sometimes actually cheaper, since shipping is flat-rate with them), though not significantly.

Adorama is also sometimes mentioned. Most people seem to prefer mpix over adorama, but some prefer adorama. It's a bit cheaper when you don't need color correction for some prints, but sometimes -- right now, for instance -- closes for weeks at a time to observe Jewish holidays. It didn't seem to be enough for me to bother.

Cost

Perhaps the easiest to figure out is cost, since websites typically list it right there for you.

High-quality inkjet prints are by far the most expensive option. I looked at 4x6 prints. Using the high-quality paper/ink combinations that did well in the TPR tests, and when buying supplies in bulk to get the best possible discount, it's still 25 cents or more for a single 4x6 print. That's with doing all the color work yourself, and not even figuring in the cost of the inevitable experimenting with getting the software set up right and the wasted prints when ink gets low. It also doesn't figure in the cost of the printer.

At mpix, if you do your own color correction, it's 19 cents per print, plus shipping. Prints are on Kodak Professional Supra Endura Shipping is a flat rate of $3 for 50 or fewer 4x6 or smaller prints, or a flat rate of $5.95 for USPS Priority Mail for anything else. They offer FedEx at an additional cost, which maxes out at a flat rate of $12.75 for overnight shipping. Some items such as framed canvas prints are more expensive.

Other options at an additional cost include color correction by a human, metallic paper, Ilford B&W paper, etc. There are also some more typical pro-lab options: red-eye removal by a human, custom retouching, etc.

At Shutterfly, a 4x6 print goes for 15 cents. You can get them as low as 10 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 600 prints for $60. Shipping varies based on the number of prints, starting at $1.79 for up to 10 prints, ranging up to $21 for 500 prints, with 3 cents per print after that. Priority and express mail is available at an additional charge. Shutterfly's standard paper is Fuji Crystal Archive.

At Snapfish, a 4x6 print goes for 9 cents. You can get them as low as 8 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 250 prints. Shipping at Snapfish follows a complicated formula, but is generally approximately the same as Shutterfly. Though if you print more than 595 prints, watch out for the 10 cents per print overage fee. They don't state what paper they use. Recent reports seem to suggest that it's Fuji Crystal Archive, but some reports claim it's Kodak Royal.

My Conclusions

I'm planning to switch most of my prints to mpix -- their higher quality and cheaper shipping offset their higher per-print cost for me. Also, I plan to try out Snapfish and see what sort of quality I get from them for things where quality isn't really that critical.

The design of levels for computer games is a form of programming, particularly for games with deterministic NPCs. It seems to me that for a large portion of the modern computer user-base the design of games levels will be their first experience of programming computers, the people who don’t start programming by creating games levels would be writing spread-sheets. Probably a few people start programming by writing “batch files” and shell scripts, but I expect that they form a minute portion of the user-base. I believe that learning some type of programming is becoming increasingly important, not just for it’s own sake (most people can get through their life quite well without doing any form of programming) but because of the sense of empowerment it gives. A computer is not a mysterious magic box that sometimes does things you want and sometimes doesn’t! It’s a complex machine that you can control. Knowing that you can control it gives you more options even if you don’t want to program it yourself, little things like knowing that you have an option of using a different choice of software or paying someone to write new software open significant possibilities to computer use in business environments. Games which involve strategic or tactical thought seem to have some educational benefit (which may or may not outweigh the negative aspects of games). To empower children and take full advantage of the educational possibilities I think that there are some features that are needed in games. Firstly levels that are created by the user need to be first class objects in the game. Having a game menu provide the option of playing predefined levels or user-defined levels clearly shows to the user that their work is somehow less important than that of the game designer. While the game designer’s work will tend to be of a higher quality (by objective measures), by the subjective opinion of the user their own work is usually the most important thing. So when starting a game the user should be given a choice of levels (and/or campaigns) to play with their levels being listed beside the levels of the game creator. Having the users levels displayed at the top of the list (before the levels from the game designer) is also a good thing. Games that support campaigns should allow the user to create their own campaigns. The KDE game kgoldrunner [1] is the best example I’ve seen of this being implemented correctly (there may be better examples but I don’t recall seeing them). In kgoldrunner when you start a game the game(s) that you created are at the bottom of the list. While I believe that it would be better to have my own games at the top of the list, having them in the same list is adequate. When a user is playing the game they should be able to jump immediately from playing a level to editing it. For example in kgoldrunner you can use the Edit Any Level menu option at any time while playing and it will default to allowing you to edit the level you are playing (and give you a hint that you have to save it to your own level). This is a tremendous encouragement for editing levels, any time you play a level and find it too hard, too easy, or not aesthetically pleasing you can change it with a single menu selection! When editing a level every option should have a description. There should be no guessing as to what an item does - it should not be assumed that the user has played the game enough to fully understand how each primary object works. Kgoldrunner provides hover text to describe the building blocks. Operations that seem likely to be performed reasonably often should have menu options. While it is possible to move a level by loading it and saving it, having a Move Level menu option (as kgoldrunner does) is a really good feature. Kgoldrunner’s Edit Next Level menu option is also a good feature. Finally a game should support sharing levels with friends. While kgoldrunner is great it falls down badly in this area. While it’s OK for a game to use multiple files for a campaign underneath the directory it uses for all it’s configuration, but it should be able to export a campaign to a single file for sharing. Being able to hook in to a MUA to enable sending a campaign as a file attached to an email as a single operation would also be a good feature. I have filed Debian bug #502372 [2] requesting this feature.

• [1] http://games.kde.org/game.php?game=kgoldrunner


• [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=502372

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The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!). I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that

“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”

Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play. Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.

So Facebook pretty much missed the German market. There is StudiVZ which has about 10 times as many users in Germany than Facebook has, and which is sometimes called "red facebook" because of the similarities. Then there is "green facebook", Lokalisten, which had started quite regional (and invitation-only), but expanded since, and also is like 2-3 times the size of german Facebook.So apaprently Facebook now decided they need to compete more in the German market, and started a marketing campaign. As part of this campaign, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, gave a talk in Berlin and Munich. The marketing company uses a strategy where they try to push these two cities to compete for having the largest fb userbase in Germany.The talk was okay, I would have wished for more entrepreneural chat; but only a few of the questions were along these lines (e.g.: "when did you know you had something big?"), instead some usual feature requests came up ("Why can't I prevent others from tagging me on photos?")But the largest kudos I have to give to facebook is for actually finding so many "ambassadors" that will do advertisement for them for free. Well, they got a T-Shirt (that does a word play on "blue" and "taking a day off", although it should probably say "I'm doing free promotion for fb and all I got is this T-Shirt")It probably only works because Facebook on one hand has always been free, is a "hip web2.0 thing", and they're trying to play "good guys" just like Google does ("don't be evil"). Many people don't understand how despite the privacy functions in Facebook people can still get their data with just some old-style social engineering very easily (so no actual data manipulation or abuse required, but when you do it the right way, just about everybody on facebook will just give you his data voluntarily).Sometimes all this Web2.0 fanboying can be quite scary, but I figure that is just the way people and societies work.

My wife has a laptop running Vista because she wanted to try out the operating system before having to decide on using it at work.

I called her various names because of it, but that didn't help :-).

So we have this setup with an SMC wireless router/AP talking to a Cisco 837 router that does the internet part. Upstairs we have a 'server' that is connected via Powerline IP-over-power, downstairs we have the Dreambox that is connected via a normal Cat5 connection.

In the last few days my wife complained that it was very slow to download media from Frost. Working at TAC having a network problem at home is almost a personal offence :-) so I decide to take a look and I find using iperf the following speeds:

frost (debian) --cat5--> sharrow (debian): 35 Mbit/sec
frost (debian) ---WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) --cat5---> frost (debian): 35 Mbit/sec
frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 0.2 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 12 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 6 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL--> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec
martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec

This made no sense at all. The speed halved going from a WL->WL to a WL->cat5 connection but only in one direction!

So having isolated the problem to the Vista machine I started looking round and I found a note saying that running netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled in an 'Administrator' cmd window will fix the problem.

Now I'm very weary of changing the TCP/IP options of the operating system. In most cases the 'tips' you see flying round the internet have no meaning at all and sometimes make the situation worse rather then better.

However I did find this on a Microsoft Technet site.... Hmm

So in the end I try it and modify the setting, disconnect and reconnect to the wireless and:

frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec
sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec

Aah, finally I could tune Vista so that it has the same speed as an untuned Debian machine. I only took me 2 evenings worth of work...

I'm getting to the point that I fear driving in North Carolina, because an exceptional percentage of car breakdowns happen to me there. The most recent one actually didn't happen in state, I'd just passed the TN border and was coming down the exceedingly twisty road to Shady Valley when I lost the engine on Mom's car. About the time I gave up on letting it cool down and trying things, a white convertable pulled up and I got a lift down to Shady. Since this was a beautiful Sunday, the country store there had at least 500 motorcycles out front. I borrowed one of the bikers' cell phones, called a tow, and sat in a rocker on the porch and watched the insanity for an hour. The good thing about driving old cars that sometimes break down is that you do get used to dealing with it. I actually enjoyed 95% of the incident. Oddly, the car started without problems the next morning. Curse indeed.

Today, I tried to switch one of my personal repositories for debian-related scripts from bzr to git, just like I've done for pmount. The trick was that this time, I wanted to only move a part of the repository, not the full repository. I had only been working before with CVS and SVN who have the idea of modules, which is not the case for bzr or git. So I made the mistake of using a single bzr for several projects, which I realize now is not a very good idea... In any case, I managed to drop some parts and here is how I did it; the trick was precisely to use SVN as an intermediate storage medium, using the following configurations files. First, bzr2svn.conf

[DEFAULT]
verbose = True
patch-name-format = ""
[project]
source = bzr:source
target = svn:target
start-revision = INITIAL
state-file = tailor.state
[bzr:source]
repository = /home/vincent/debian-devel/bzr/scripts
[svn:target]
repository = file:///tmp/testtai
module = biniou

and svn2git.conf:

[DEFAULT]
verbose = True
patch-name-format = ""
[project]
source = svn:source
target = git:target
start-revision = INITIAL
root-directory = /home/vincent/tmp/debian-mr-copyright-mode
state-file = tailor.state
[svn:source]
repository = file:///tmp/testtai
module = biniou/debian-mr-copyright-mode
[git:target]
git-command=/usr/bin/git

Then, all that is left to do is to run tailor on the resulting configuration files:

~ tailor -D -c bzr2svn.conf
~ tailor -D -c svn2git.conf

flymake and read-only directories. I have (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook) in my .emacs, but that makes flymake enabled for every file it can support. That is annoying when it tries to start flymake and write to a read-only directory, and fail every time. I added a (not buffer-read-only) check to flymake-find-file-hook, and I feel more comfortable now. Sent to BTS.

Today my 5 years old laptop gave me some filesystem problem after running apt-get update, which resulted in some corrupted packages, among them libc6, with the result of my system becoming non-functional. So I needed a recovery CD to be able to mount read-only root partition. I had around an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS, so I used it to run its included LiveCD and recover from there. At the same time I was curious about it, as I hadn’t had chance to test it before. One of the things that surprised me most was that Compiz was enabled by default. After a second thinking that this was going to be a problem, making the system unusable (remember, a 5 years old laptop, and I had checked myself compiz some time ago with a catastrophic result), I started to meve windoes, jump from one virtual desktop to other, and minimiza and maximize windows without a problem. The work that had been made amazed me! So, some fsck and apt-get commands after, I managed to reboot on my Debian system, and I installed compiz. The result: my system goes faster using compiz, with a bunch of effects enabled than running plain metacity window manager. I have a also installed some compiz fusion plugins, and they are running without a glitch and with an incredible speed. Obviously, I have not chosen full quality, but it is enough to show effects in an efficient way. I have improved my user experience and system speed at the same time… Once again Linux shows that it can get the best of old hardware. Good work, guys!

ObRandom:

Any blog post, comment thread, question, or email which starts "Hi guys" is bad, wrong, and probably not worth reading.

ObTitle: Dawn of the dead - the original and best version - 1978

Procmail This will be the last time I talk about this, but here's my anti-rubbish procmail filter. It correctly copes with:

• Foreign character sets that I can't read.
• Bounces from joe-jobs.
• Malformed emails.

Obviously edit to suit your tastes. Especially with regard to character sets - it is a wide brush which is tarring a group unfairly. That said in practise it works for me. If you want real antispam filtering then you should probably be looking at externalising it, or having a layered approach.

• Procmail snippets

ObQuote: Citizen Kane

Some brief highlights of the last three months of Debian Eee PC development. Thermal and ACPI breakage resolved in 2.6.26-7 We’re pleased to see that in the upload to Sid of linux-image-2.6.26-1-686 version 2.6.26-7, the pair of 2.6.26 bugs we’ve been tracking that have made it difficult for Eee users to upgrade their systems have been resolved. Since then 2.6.26-8 has been uploaded and is expected to enter Lenny this week due to a freeze exception. Once the new kernel has migrated we will move quickly to build and release a new installer that includes it. Ath5k wifi works on Eee PC in Linux 2.6.27 Jean-Christophe reports that ath5k works in Linux 2.6.27 on the Eee PC 701, and just needs a small patch to work with our eeepc-acpi-scripts package. This is good news for those of us with models 701, 900, 900A and 1000HD who have been wanting to get off of the non-free Madwifi drivers and onto DFSG free drivers. New Eee PC model 701SD wifi support in the works Users of the new Eee PC Model 701SD have just started showing up looking for support in mainstream Linux distros. Martin Filtenborg confirmed using our Eee PC Live image with the GPL’d rtl8187se driver from Realtek that we can at least use it to connect to an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other hosts. Of course, it is one thing to have a working vendor-supplied driver and quite another to have mainstream support. We’ll make do with what we have now, but will be seeking a mainstream solution as soon as possible. We’re seeking more testers and developers to work on this. To date, an ITP has not been filed, as it is not yet clear who is going to carry this work forward. Chasing the 5 second boot An interesting discussion on Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok’s work to get an Eee 901 to boot in 5 seconds took place this month. While the Debian Eee PC team is not making work on this a priority, we’ll keep an eye on it to see if Debian can incorporate some or all of the techniques they used so that our users can benefit without making radical changes to their systems. Working towards mainstream support for rt2860 Our filing of an ITP for rt2860 (the wifi driver for models 901, 1000 and 1000H) was followed by discussion about how to separate out the GPL’d driver from the embedded non-free firmware so that it can at least go into contrib. Glenn Saberton has been working on rewriting the build system around kbuild and separating out the firmware. Numerous improvements to ACPI scripts Since my last progress report, there have been numerous improvements to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package to deal with all of the various models we now support and make the scripts more robust and flexible. Check out the changelog for details.