Hi Yesterday I did a new install of my notebook because I had LUKS and for a reason my laptop began to hang totally (with all installed kernels) after several seconds. This was also my first installation with compiz, I really like it even if it’s just eyecandy - it’s cool. _BUT_, then I installed the sun-java-* packages and also the netbeans package which is waiting in the NEW-queue, I can start it, but there’s no content inside the window? So i tested some other java programs and there exactly the same. Finally I found out that when you run compiz all java applications don’t have a content inside of the javax.swing.JFrame objects. Iceweasel seems also not to work (I’m still searching why), because when invoking on the console I don’t get any line of output - just no reaction. But I can blog - thanks to “drivel” which is also a very nice program in my opinion. Yeah, enough talking bad now - in general I’m very happy and it’s a very good system (compared to other days with unstable ), I think etch will become a really good distribution when I look at my notebook, it’s very simple to use, enough eyecandy, most hardware works out of the box. Special thanks for this to the GNOME-Team who did a really god job in the last months! Wish you a nice Sunday and have fun at work tomorrow (I have holidays )

mpbeventd v0.9 is out featuring audio support, based on code contributed by Romain BEAUXIS. Starting with this version, the initial backlight level setting is optional (see config file). I’m opening a DBus branch based on this version; the goal is to have graphical clients reacting to the events sent through DBus, and eventually integrate with standard tools (HAL and gnome-power-manager have been mentionned). If you have on opinion on that and want to help (ie, you are an mbpeventd user), feel free to contact me. If enough people are interested, I’ll move mbpeventd on Alioth.

The last few days I attended a Debian QA meeting in Badajoz in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I worked on a number of QA tasks, like cleaning out bug reports for removed packages and tidying up some WNPP bugs. I also started another compilation run of the archive using GCC 4.2. In general, I worked on a number of TODO items I had, such as updating my Debian on Cobalt pages for etch, and responded to some email. My inbox is actually empty right now and there are few specific things I need to do, even though there's a lot in general, just like always. Tomorrow I'll head back to Madrid to meet up with some friends. Apparently we'll go bowling. On Monday I'll briefly visit the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos where I stayed for three months earlier this year before catching a flight to Austria where I'll spend New Year.

Once you’ve had a taste of EVDO (presently offered only by Verizon and Sprint), it’s hard to imagine not having it. Like cell service, you quickly forget what it was like not to be online always everywhere. (It’s a great example of our rising “baseline” standard of living). Recently, I switched to an embedded EVDO card on a new laptop (running Windows for reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry). It worked for a couple of days, and then I started getting mysterious “error 913” messages when trying to connect. After trying all the solutions that seemed obvious to me, I contacted Verizon Wireless Tech Support as suggested by the error message, which otherwise provided no information about error 913. Perhaps surprisingly, Verizon Wireless Tech Support didn’t really know what error 913 was either. After a few minutes, I was escalated to second level tech support. They had me reboot. Then they had me reinstall the card controller software. The second-level tech support person put me on hold to speak with whatever higher level tech support she had access to. Then they had me delete the EVDO connection from the dial-up networking control panel and re-create it. None of these things worked. So she said I should just return the laptop to the store and get a new one. It was perhaps the best example of the three “R’s” of Windows Tech Support I had ever experienced: reboot, reinstall, replace. This may perhaps be the only cost effective way of providing such support. I persisted, though, as I was pretty sure there wasn’t a hardware issue given that all the diagnostics were coming up without error. I would rather not return a perfectly good laptop just because we couldn’t figure it out. I was also suspicious because I had seen several instances of precisely this problem popping up in message boards, and the tech support person herself told me that she had recently been unable to solve the same problem with another customer. It just didn’t have the symptomology of broken hardware. After a few more minutes of speculating about why this might happen, the tech support person said she had an idea, and asked me to try to reconnect. Since then, it has worked perfectly. As I understand the problem, my account was enabled for unlimited “roaming” EVDO access, but did not actually have authorization for “non-roaming” (i.e., within the network) access. Thus the connection was rejected. There are several things wrong with this picture. Why didn’t the EVDO access manager software provide an error message that actually indicated that the connection was refused for lack of authorization? Why didn’t anyone at Verizon know what error 913 was? Shouldn’t Verizon have a checklist for such issues that includes “check to see if the subscriber is properly signed up”? (For that matter, why did my account spontaneously lose non-roaming access?) These are just a few questions that come to mind. I hate to beat on Verizon, since I’ve done it three times before, but it’s almost like they’re just asking for it. Maybe it’s time they rethink their organizational strategy.

Postr 0.3 is out. A few typo fixes in my code, and an update to the latest flickrapi.py to fix uploads after the Flickr servers decided to be more pedantic. This was proof that I am the only user of Postr, as it didn't work for a good week or so.

• Update flickrapi.py to version 10
• Fix references to the token

You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.3 tarball.

I'm pretty happy to note that I've been invited to speak at South by Southwest Interactive in March on the subject of wikis and commercialization. I'm pretty psyched about the subject, as I think a rich and varied ecosphere of wikis -- from personal to informal clusters to formalized non-profits to formalized commercial ventures -- is a necessary step to the development of a read-write Web. OK, so, it wasn't like they invited me out of the blue -- I submitted an idea for a wiki panel a few months ago, and it got morphed into a one-person presentation instead. Which will be fun, since I'll be able to pontificate at length on this interesting subject. Maj booked us our hotel rooms in November -- I wanted to stay at the Austin Motel, but they have some kind of one-time callin system for the week of SxSW, and their rooms sell-out in an hour or so. We missed the callin time, which was no big deal. tags: austin wiki sxsw austin motel sxsw2007

Recidivista Bad Vista is a clumsy and confusing name. Who's running the Wordplay Department over at the FSF nowadays? I hope it's some wily Germans, and that "Bad Vista" is some sort of elaborate spa joke. But for some reason I doubt it. Offer to the FSF: I just registered recidivista.org today. It's an awesome name. It is yours for free if you promise to use it well and be funny instead of shrill. Deal? tags: fsf bad vista vista recidivista

Maptastic I'm pretty happy to note that I got around to developing a new MediaWiki plug-in that uses the Mapstraction library to switch between well-known-but-proprietary mapping services like Google Maps and unknown-but-open-and-cool services like OpenStreetMap. Each page on Wikitravel that's had some geo-data RDF magic added to it gets a link to the Mapstraction page, which will focus on that destination. Eventually it will have icons for each museum, restaurant, bar, hotel, or other feature of the city, and you could move them around or even edit their information through the map interface. But, for now, I'm starting small. More map-centrism will come with time. You can check out Montreal for an example of a mapped-up page right now. tags: mapstraction geohacking wikitravel RDF wiki maps

C-List So, I like this Are you an A-list Bloglebrity? tool on kineda.com. A simple re-packaging of some publicly-available data from Technorati, ranking blogs into lists by authority. Excellent hit-mongering. I'm sad to say that I'm still in the C-list on the blogging front, but that's really just dependent on longevity. I've only been doing this since last May -- errr, Flor al -- which is just 7 months (that's 49 months in blog years). If the A-list gets the Lear jets and the red-carpets, I don't know what kind of perks come along with the C-list. Free refills on your orange soda? tags: blogs c-list technorati

Parenthood One of the things that parents often notice is that they have a hard time relating to their non-parent friends. And, of course, single non-parents have a hard time relating to their friends who've bred. Why is it so hard for these two kinds of people to connect with each other? I think there are some superficial reasons, like having different schedules, different imperatives, different needs. But I also think there's something more fundamental about the split. Organisms who've survived long enough to successfully reproduce have realised one goal in life -- if you listen to Charles Darwin, the only goal in life. If you have children, you have found a purpose for yourself -- an answer to all those questions about who you are and what you're supposed to do with your time on earth. If you survive to breed, you have won the game. Now, it's not the only way of winning, and it's not really the most interesting game in town. But I know at least for myself, and for other parents I've talked to, there is an existential satisfaction in finding yourself almost accidentally filling this purpose. Having never felt before that I had a definite purpose, it's been a strange sensation. Non-parents don't get the same sensation -- or, at least, they don't get it in the same way. So they're still looking, thinking, questing, trying to find some answers. And that gives them a vibrant edge that fulfillment dulls. I doubt there are many non-parents who would be satisfied with the Darwinian answer to their questions -- spawning like crayfish isn't a very lofty goal in life. Or at least it doesn't seem so from the outside. I'm not sure how to tell my friends how my life's changed since we had a daughter -- how when I'm reflecting and summing up my life, I don't feel the same panic as I did before. It's a good feeling, though. tags: parents parenthood survival reproduction crayfish

Iraqi taxi This blog post with a graphic illustration of the process for a build-your-own Iraqi taxi cracked me up. It was also nice for giving me a link to Wrecked Exotics. No, it's not about drunk strippers, nor orchids that went unfed; it's crashed cars. tags: iraq blog wikitravel wreckedexotics

With policyd-weight you are able to reject mails before the body is received by your MTA, here postfix. No bounce mails, less wasted bandwidth and cpu time. policyd-weight scores characteristics of the mail positive or negative, is a defined value reached, it got rejected. The scores are currently:

- DNSBLs/RHSBLs
- HELO argument
- MAIL FROM: argument
- Client IP address
- DNS client/HELO/FROM entries (A/16 A/24 A/32), PTR/FQDN and Parent Domains (MX/16 MX/24 MX/32) for their correctness respectively whether they match.

It’s available in etch and bpo, installation is really easy:

aptitude install [-t sarge-backports] policyd-weight

Remove unnecessary reject_rbl_client and reject_rhsbl_client checks from main.cf and insert the check_policy_service:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
        permit_mynetworks,
        ...
        reject_unauth_destination,
        check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:12525
        ...

You can create a “/etc/policyd-weight.conf” if you would like to adjusting scores or other policyd-weight parameters. You can get the defaults with “policyd-weight defaults”. For more informations have a look at “/usr/share/doc/policyd-weight/documentation.txt.gz” or http://policyd-weight.org. A normal day on a backup MX with ~500 domain:

backup:~# zgrep -e "postfix.*: connect from" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
29936
backup:~# zgrep -e "policyd-weight.*decided action=5" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
22738
backup:~# zgrep -e "postfix.*status=sent" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
5570

backports, bpo, Debian, planet, policyd weight, Postfix, spam

On a mailing list some questions were asked about disk encryption, I decided to blog the answer for the benefit of others:

What type of encryption would be the strongest? the uncrackable if you will? im not interested in DES as this is a US govt recommendation - IDEA seems good but what kernel module implements this?

The US government (which incidentally employs some of the best cryptologists in the world) recommends encryption methods for data that is important to US interests (US military and banking operations for starters). Why wouldn't you want to follow those recommendations? Do you think that they are putting back-doors in their own systems?

If they were putting in back-doors do you think that they would use them (and potentially reveal their methods) for something as unimportant as your data?

I think that if the US military wanted to apply a serious effort to breaking the encryption on your data then you would have an assortment of other things to worry about, most of which would be more important to you than the integrity of your data.

I've read some good things about keeping a usb key for system boot so that anything on the computer itself is unreadable without the key - but thats simply just a physical object - I'd like both the system to ask for the passphrase for the key as well as needing the usb key

I believe that can be done with LUKS, however it seemed broken last time I experimented with it so I've stuck with the older operation of cryptsetup.

What kind of overheads does something like this entangle? - will my system crawl because of the constant IO load of the disk?

My laptop has a Pentium-M 1.7GHz and a typical laptop drive. The ratio of CPU power to hard drive speed is reasonable. For most operations I don't notice the overhead of encryption, the only problem is when performing CPU intensive IO operations (such as bzip compression of large files). When an application and the kernel both want to use a lot of CPU time then things can get slow.

More recent machines have a much higher ratio of CPU power to disk IO as CPU technology has been advancing much faster than disk technology. A high-end desktop system might have 2-3x the IO capacity
of my machine, but a single core would have 2-3x the computer power of the CPU in my laptop and for any system you might desire nowadays 2 cores is the minimum. Single-core machines are still on sale and still work well for many people - I am still deploying Pentium-3 machines in new installations, but for machines that make people drool it's all dual-core in laptops and one or two dual-core CPUs in desktop systems (with quad core CPUs on sale soon).

If you want to encrypt data on a P3 system with a RAID array (EG a P3 server) then you should expect some performance loss. But for a typical modern desktop system you shouldn't expect to notice any overhead.

As anyone who follows my blog knows, I’m fond of linking to other sites with brief little quotes that either get me thinking or reinforce points I’m trying to make elsewhere. (Credit where credit is due: Dave Winer and Doc Searls both do this very effectively, and I’m just shamelessly copying them, down to the quoting style they typically use.) One of the quotes I’ve had queued up for a long time is this one from Jon Udell:

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I m working on will deploy to Linux, I ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. Why? Because on Windows, an open source component is likely to come with an installer that just works.

He’s right. Unless an application is included with your Linux distribution of choice, installing that application on Linux is a nightmare compared to Windows. Here’s an example. To install Sun’s Java Studio Creator on Windows, I just click on the .exe on Sun’s web site, which downloads the file and places it on my desktop. I double click the .exe (after, of course, checking it for viruses) and am up and running in a few minutes. In contrast, on Linux, I click on the .bin, which downloads the file and.. up pops a text editor showing me a /bin/sh script. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that is, so I save the script to a file on my desktop. I double click the file, and.. up pops a dialog box telling me the file isn’t executable. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that means, so I drop into a shell and run chmod +x ./creator-2_1-linux-ml.bin. I double click the file again, and there’s a nice graphical installer now. Finally, it looks like everything is going my way. Halfway through, though, the installation fails, telling me I need to install the RPMs for compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev. Nice. Assuming I even know what an “RPM” is, I then realize: I’m running Debian, and Debian doesn’t use RPM. Maybe I know about alien, but even if I do, where do I go about getting the compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev RPMs? At this point, I’ll probably hit Google—that is, if I haven’t already thrown up my hands in disgust and gone back to Windows. After a bit of Googling, I find this page, which tells me on Debian what I really need is libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 and libstdc++2.10-dev. Of course! I should have known that. (Note: I’m being sarcastic.) After installing those two packages, I restart the installer (which, thankfully, knows how to deal with the fact that it’s already half installed, but that won’t always be true). The installation finishes this time, and the installer kindly offers to start the program for me. However, after poking around a bit and exiting back to the desktop, I don’t see a menu entry or a desktop icon, so I’m not sure how I’m going to find it again (and I hope I don’t have to explain why cd’ing to ~/sun/Creator2_1/bin is not an answer). Anyone who has ever installed software on Linux is familiar with this song and dance. If it’s in your distro of choice, you’re only an apt-get or a yum install away from running it. But if not, you’d better know what you’re doing, have a lot of patience, and understand how to construct effective Google search terms. (And, no, moving everything into the distribution is not a very good option. Remember that one of the key tenets of open source is decentralization, so if the only solution is to centralize everything, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture.) Oh, well. At least I didn’t have to check for viruses! Fortunately, some of the problems I experienced are bugs. The above was done on a pre-release Debian etch system over the summer, so it’s likely the problems have been fixed. I repeated the experiment on an Ubuntu edgy system, and it didn’t open the text editor, nor did it complain about an incompatible C++ environment. However, there were still no menu entries or desktop icons, and there was an additional problem too in that when I double clicked the file, it opened it in CrossOver Office, which I also have installed. Regardless, even if it works better on some distros than others, there’s still no usable solution until ISVs and end users alike can depend on things consistently working regardless of the distro being used. Again, fortunately, we have solutions to parts of the problem already. The LSB abstracts away the differences between the runtime environments of the various distros, so the Java Studio Creator installer could have simply said “you must install the LSB environment” rather than trying to deal with the hundreds of little variations in both the environments and the package namespaces that provide them (e.g., compat-libstdc++ vs. libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2). Better yet, on distros that provide the LSB environment in their default configuration, the installer doesn’t have to do anything. And Project Portland promises to give us a consistent interface for creating menu entries, desktop icons and such things. However, far too few applications take advantage of the LSB today (though that’s changing), and Project Portland isn’t in any of the distros yet (though we’re looking at bundling its primary deliverable, xdg-utils, with the LSB 3.2 SDK to work around that). Finally, even though the LSB provides ISVs with a consistent way to create an LSB compliant executable, there’s no consistent way to deliver an LSB compliant application that’s easy to install and that integrates well with the distribution’s package system. Yes, the LSB includes RPM today, but for a variety of reasons, ISVs don’t want to use RPM, and as already mentioned, not all distributions support RPM natively. Fortunately, once again, this isn’t just a rant. The LSB tackled these very issues at the LSB face to face and Packaging Summit last week in Berlin, Germany, and we think we have a way forward that’s acceptable to all involved: Linux distribution vendors who already have well established package systems and systems management tools built around them; ISVs who need to support multiple platforms and so don’t want to support the Linux specific RPM format or who otherwise want more control over the installation experience; and end users who want to use the software management facilities their distributions provide, whether that’s RPM or something higher level like APT and yum. More in part 2…

So, phone call today went something like this

• Hello Robert [voice I dont recognise]
• Hi, who is this.
• This is a courtesy call from Telstra mobile, is that ok?
• Maybe, what do you want?
• Are you aware that Telstra a running a special right now - 400 dollars credit and a BRAND NEW PHONE absolutely FREE if you bring your number over to Telstra today?
• Are, so you are calling me unsolicted even though I'm not a customer of yours?
• <starts to say something>
• Let me make this clear, <shouting>FUCK OFF</shouting>
• dead phone..

Yeah, I was seriously cranky - after the amount of email spam I cleaned out this morning, it was -not- a good day to be spamming my mobile phone number. I feel somewhat guilty about the abusive (its not my normal persona!) language to the poor shmuck (who sounded like they come from an Indian call centre by accent) whose job it is to spam people, but not very: they are willing to do so - so I dont feel guilty. I do feel quite a sense of satisfaction though : imagine having one of the pharma spammers on the phone - what would you choose to say to them ?

Nick and Ian have just announced a new MIT Press book series: Platform Studies. The series will investigate the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. The first book’s already under contract and will be about the Atari 2600 (sweet!) but Nick and Ian are currently seeking book proposals for the rest of the series. They’ve got a list of example platforms on the Platform Studies website (I’d personally be really keen to see something related to free software) so if you’re interested, why not check out the site and submit something!

mpbeventd made it to unstable today, and I’ve just released version 0.8. Changelog:

• configuration file
• Apple Remote support (optional)
• small tweak on the ambient light sensors

Version 0.7 also fixed the machine identifier string for the Core2 Duo MacBook, which was wrong despite coming straight from the Apple Technote for the machine. Tarball available on http://people.debian.org/~jblache/pkg/mbpeventd/ Browse the SVN repository or check it out from http://svn.technologeek.org/repos/mbpeventd/trunk

On his recent (and first) visit to Ecuador, Richard Stallman interviewed with elected president Rafael Correa. Stallman spoke about the benefits and advantages that free software would bring to Correa’s administration. Some of the Ecuadorian free software community members were present and they reported that Correa listened to Stallman for like 20 minutes without replying. Then they agreed on freedom issues and had a conversation where they agreed on everything. After that, president Rafael Correa asked his assistants if Ecuador could migrate to free software (on being viable) and they replied that of course, that’d be a wise choice. These are, of course, excelent news for Ecuador itself and Latin America! Congratulations yuntas! Leftist Rafael Correa won on a 2-round election held on Oct 15th and Nov 20th. He will get into office on January 5th.

Elizabeth Montalbano and Andy Updegrove write about IBM’s donation of iAccessible2 to the Free Standards Group, which is being formally announced today (see the IBM and FSG press releases). In addition to IBM, the project is backed by Sun, Oracle, SAP and other major vendors. This is a big deal in and of itself, of course, because it will make applications based on ODF, AJAX, and other emerging open standards more accessible to visually impaired users. But it’s also an important milestone for the FSG, so I thought I should say a few words about that here from my own little pulpit. The first clue is that iAccessible2 is an accessibility API for Windows. Windows? Yes, the FSG is primarily a Linux organization (our main project is, of course, the Linux Standard Base), so why on earth are we now involved in building APIs for Windows? First of all, we’ll be moving this project forward as an extension to our existing accessibility projects—which, given the way the FSG is structured, flow into the LSB as they are adopted by the Linux distributions (who, as I’ve already mentioned here, are active participants in the LSB project, so we’re not just hoping the distros adopt our work, we’re proactively trying to drive consensus on these key issues). So, this definitely impacts our Linux work by bringing accessibility features to Linux that not only equal those of Windows but exceed them (iAccessible2 itself came about because Microsoft Active Accessibility has notable shortcomings). But it’s more than that. Another way to look at this is that the LSB APIs will be taking on a distinctly more cross platform flavor, particularly in the “around the edges” cases such as this. Again, that begs the question: Why is cross platform support important for a Linux organization? That one’s simple. APIs are for application developers. Application developers target multiple platforms. The less Linux specific work an application developer has to do to support Linux, the more cost effective a Linux version will be, the more likely it is to get done. It’s all about more Linux apps. There’s another dimension to it as well. There are a certain class of features that the vast majority of developers don’t think much about because that vast majority doesn’t need them. There’s no itch to scratch, as it were. Accessibility is a great example of such a feature: I have no idea what it’s like to be blind, nor do most people. If we can provide a set of open, cross platform APIs that allow application developers to easily add such features to their products, more standards based products will support them. As Massachusetts and ODF brings into sharp focus, these “around the edges” cases developers don’t think much about can turn out to be very important indeed.

Makers of Dojo, Prototype, jQuery and Mochikit, I salute you.It is immensely gratifying that there are those with the courage and sense to make JavaScript in the browser workable for the rest of us. Like many busy developers, I've steered myself away from hacking JavaScript for many years. Cross-browser incompatibilities, the troubles of debugging and the relatively small reward for effort have kept me focusing on the server side (not to mention the temptation JavaScript poses to those prone to stray from the REST religion).This is now starting to change. The immense efforts of JavaScript developers are providing frameworks that allow developers to work on the client side with something approaching the elegance and concision that we can now wield on the server side.One of the wonderful things about the web is that it has become the forum for its own improvement. JavaScript has ensured that this is now true of the browser too. New techniques can be proved in script before they ever need baking into a markup language.Even the most ardent of declarative programming hacks will appreciate the way toolkits such as jQuery allow painting of behaviour onto pages rather than littering semantic markup with snippets of script.The problem that faces us now is: which JavaScript framework to choose?As is my habit in programming languages, I've found myself move from framework to framework depending on the actual tools available. Starting off in Prototype as it came with Rails, paying a happy visit to jQuery because of Thickbox, considering Dojo because of its rich text editor, and now being wowed by Plotkit and thus checking out Mochikit.So, here's an idea for aspiring XTech presenters: we'd love to hear more about these toolkits. Experiences, future plans for the kits themselves, and how developers should choose between them.

• XTech 2007 call for participation. Closes this weekend, so hurry! 

An important PHP security developer retires, with some rather harsh words on the project and PHP security. While I agree that PHP by itself isn't really insecure (actual security bugs excluded), the one thing I really blame PHP for is that it does not assist the developer at all in writing secure applications. On contrary, give a novice PHP developer some non-trivial task involving a database and some extra files and you'll have at least two security issues. I stopped using PHP some years ago for a few reasons, including above "security issues by default" (which IMHO are due to a badly designed language) and because PHP is heavily encouraging the user to mix design and application (which is a pain from a maintainance point of view). Of course you could do model-view-controller in PHP, but it doesn't make it easy to do so (another thing why I consider the language to be badly designed). And don't get me started on "register_globals"... OTOH, some years ago I maintained a PHP extension, ming, which has recently found it's way back into Debian. Back then, I had the impression that PHP itself is also a pain to package. Building an extension worked okay, but it seemed as if getting PHP to build and work reliably on all architectures with all extensions is a pain. (That maybe is why the php packages have many open bugs; and why it took e.g. four years to add packages for the pspell extension)

It's out - and barely missed the etch freeze, so we'll still ship the previous version. But the 1.00 version is sitting in the Debian NEW queue (I moved the manual to it's own package, so this needs ftp-master intervention); a recent beta is already in unstable for you to begin playing. Enigma is a game with a great mixture of mouse skill and puzzle elements. Some levels rely on precise mouse movements, others on speed, and others are pure puzzle levels. And of course everything inbetween. Sometimes you have to use items in a clever way, sometimes control several marbles at once, or switch control between two marbles as needed (some of these levels will be playable in a multiplayer mode sometime). It's the smooth mouse control (which varies from floor type, too bad we don't have force feedback...) and this unique mixture that makes it so great. If you've ever played Oxyd on Atari ST or Mac (later versions were also available on MS DOS) - then you'll definitely want to get enigma - it's a clone of that classic, and it can load levels from your Oxyd data files, if you want to play the original levels.

We‘ll be attending The Killers‘ concert tonight. I’m not completely fan of their synthesized-rock-indie music, but she likes them so much and she made me dig their last album, Sam’s Town, like a thousand times in the car; so I acceded and bought the tickets online. She was even jelaous of a friend who is also attending, heh I wasn’t happy at all since they are still a more or less new band, they only have two albums released and prices for tickets were high as hell (ironic), but her surprise smile worth it, it definitively does.