I just saw an ad on VT4 that they're going to be broadcasting the excellent Battlestar Galactica series—that is, the reimagined version. Caught me by surprise there, because I was actually expecting Kanaal2 to broadcast this—they're usually the SciFi channel in .be. Not that this matters, of course. Luckily, they're also going to broadcast this at an excellent time slot: Sunday at 23:25 (or something), meaning, not prime time; as a result, I might actually be able to follow it this time around. Living together with people who like to watch prime time pulp would make watching this rather impossible during reasonable hours, otherwise. Not this time. As it happens, I bought the original 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica only a few weeks ago. That one's a bit dated though, and not half as much fun.

Tonight I turned 27. By chance, this fell onto a Tuesday, and there is a great dancing party every Monday. This monday, there was also a great band, the Souvenirs. They're pure fun and great for dancing - so I obviously opted to celebrate my birthday there.This probably was the nicest birthday party I've ever had: lots of friends showed up (though mostly girls, but thats fine with me :-)), we danced a lot. And danced. And danced. :-) And I'll probably spend some more hours today dancing later this day.And with dancing I mean: Swing, Lindy Hop, Balboa. I just love this music and these dances. So playful, sometimes cheeky - swinging...

Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar

Todays music was also great, a nice speed and patterns you could play with... I don't know what it is, adrenaline?, that makes dancing so much fun. And probably the communication. Dancing is all about communication. There was this class titled "Moves that make the follow smile" once... That is the best moment in a dance, when you managed to lead the follow into some slight variations or some fun move matching the music, it worked out great and you see this flash of delight in their face... this "I'm not sure what we just did, but it felt just so right"-smile. The "I didn't know we could do that"-smile. That's what I'm striving for. Sometimes there are some moments in a song where this works out great, and occasionally there is a song where it works out through most of the song. These are the really great moments when dancing.Sorry, no pictures or videos. Just memories.Keep on swingin'!I'm really looking forward to events such as Senigallia (Summer Jamboree) or the Munich Lindy Exchange.And of course our regular events here in Munich, such as our Thursday open air get-together at Hofgarten, sundays in Salon Erna and mondays in Cord.

I just got back from taking Zach Copley to the airport, and for the first time in a few days I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer again, trying to get back on track. I think it's probably a good idea to get my notes about RoCoCoCamp down on electronic paper while the experience is still fresh in my mind. (I wrote about the first day in Journal/29 Flor al CCXV). Saturday morning I got up considerably later than I had the day before, and I took my time getting to SAT. Which was OK, since things went much smoother in the morning. The only really annoying thing about Saturday was that I had to wash about 50 cups by hand -- we'd run out of clean cups, and I couldn't figure out how to run the dishwasher. It didn't take long, but it meant that I had my head down in the sink as people came in and didn't get to spend as much time talking to them. I was glad to hear that people had a good time going to L'Utopik on Friday night. Apparently a few people who'd flown in late on Friday got a chance to meet up with the experienced crew at L'Utopik, so they were well-prepped for Saturday. Probably the biggest buzz of the pre-sessions was SJ Klein's pair of functional OLPC laptops. They were cute and fun -- I got a few minutes to play with them, and I enjoyed the interface tremendously -- although it took me a few tries to open it. People were fiddling with them throughout the day -- including Amita June, who came late in the afternoon -- and Tristan P loquin even blogged about them. My first session was about wiki and other technologies, which I titled Wiki And.... (I borrowed the name from Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which it seems no-one eats anything but "coffee and".) My main point was that a) wiki people tend to overuse wiki where other software tools may be more appropriate and b) we need to be careful with impedance mismatches when using wiki with technologies with other cultures behind them. Wikis and blogs mismatch; wikis and forums mismatch. You need to work out ways to make them work culturally. As a proof-of-concept that there are ridiculous applications for wiki, I created in about 3 minutes before the session the wikiclock. It's a computer clock that runs on wiki technology: the time is kept up-to-date by human beings editing the page, rather than with software. I was so pleased with myself that I twittered about it, and from there it's taken on a life of its own. The clock is implemented on the amazing minimalist system pageoftext.com. I heard about p.o.t. from Liz Henry's April report from Palo Alto Wiki Wednesday, and I think it's totally great. It's a cross between a pastebin and a wiki -- like an open-edited ImageShack for text. Brilliant. The second session I did was a hyper-focused one on a particular Semantic Web problem. Both Wikitravel and Open Guides have tons of information on "places" in various cities. (That is, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels, museums, parks, etc.). It would be good to export our data on these places to each other, so we could possibly keep them in sync. For example, if a restaurant changes its hours , that info could be updated on The Open Guide to London and automatically synched to the Wikitravel page on London. So we went over some ways to do this kind of interchange; we'd brainstormed before about it on the Open Guides' RDF Workshop, but it was good to sit down with Earle Martin and do some face-to-face hacking on the idea. We don't yet have a vocabulary for it, but we'll get something going on the new wikirdf.org site (which also emerged from this session). I had a great lunch with a lot of people from RoCoCo on the terrace at the Bar St. Sulpice, about 8 blocks away on rue St. Denis. The sun was out, it was cool, and we had a very nice time. It was especially nice to see Marcus Bornfreund and Tina Pipers of Creative Commons Canada, who'd come to talk about the PDwiki, a project to collaboratively document Canadian works in the public domain (see Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced). We talked quite a bit about the social challenges of getting a community excited about such a dry subject, but I think we got some good ideas about it. In the afternoon I led a session on MediaWiki. We were lucky enough to have Tim Starling sit in, and he told everyone about the new developments going on with MW. He's refactoring some very deep parts of the storage and rendering sections of the code, which will result in considerably better reliability, performance, and flexibility. I think it sounds great. I had to work the registration desk for the last session of the day, which was pretty great because I ended up baby-sitting Anoushka Jaroski-Biava for most of the time. But I missed Robin Millette's cool talk about BuzzyBee, which looks to be really fun to play with. We rounded out the evening with music, pizza, and beer at the SAT. tobias.dj played some great dance music, and we had some wiki-collaborative VJ-ing using the SAT's fancy screen systems. All the kids were there -- Mark and Allegra's daughter No ma as well as Amita June. Fun. Sunday morning I didn't have to start coffee until 9AM -- luxury! We had a great Open Space Technology convergence -- a way to turn the discussions of the previous few days into action items for going forward. I did a convergence session on the future of RecentChangesCamp. We had most of the interested parties available (except for the RCC Portland organizers, who had to fly out early that morning). We made some decisions about future RCCs, and we made some plans for next year's RCC -- in the Bay Area (California). Last night we brought back the Keiki gang to our house, since it was great to have them all in Montreal for the event. We did a big brainstorming session on next steps to launching the project, and we also did some graphic design review of potential logos. We have some great designs coming; I'm really happy we got Sarven Capadisli and Bridget to work on the site. I had to crash out at 10:30PM -- Amita and I fell asleep together -- but others were up late talking and thinking. I don't know how they did it -- I was all talked out by the end of RoCoCo. All in all I had a fantastic time -- the event far surpassed my expectations. It was hard -- too hard. I bit off far more than I could chew. But I think we did a good job of establishing Montreal as a technology city -- Wiki City Canada -- in the international mind, and I think we also brought together some really interesting people for some fruitful and productive work. You can see some of the projects that came directly out of RoCoCo on the FutureChanges page -- an ingenious name courtesy of Pm. And there are some indirect ones that we can expect soon. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp wiki open space montreal barcampmontreal keiki wikiclock pageoftext

Cause and solution So, Technorati has a good listing for rocococamp items, but I especially liked Steve Faguy's post: Wiki: The cause of, and solution to, all of life s problems. Steve was an extremely game participant in the event, which I think was pretty incredible. He wrote a good overview of wikis in the Montreal Gazette this year. A funny thing happened on Friday evening during the daily wrap-up known as "Evening News". We had Open Space's minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space's "four principles" is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, "In the spirit of wiki, I'm going to correct it right now!" And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the "is" to "are". This stimulated an interesting discussion. One person noted that the "is" is there because possibly only one person could show up for a session, and that's OK. Finally, Brandon CS Sanders stood up and said, "I like 'is' because when we come together like this, we form a cohesive group, however temporary -- 'a people'. So I'm going to change it back." And he did -- to lots of applause, again. Steve came up to me at the end of the night, laughing. "I got reverted! I should have started an edit war!" It was a hoot; he's got a good sense of humour. tags: stevefaguy rocococamp wiki openspace brandoncssanders

On Sunday 20 May, I rode in the Leukemia Research Weston-super-Mare Bikeathon which "has so far raised in excess of 120,000 for the charity." I finished the course of about 23 miles in a bit over 2 hours. That was slightly slower than I expected, but I hadn't anticipated the batched mass start (20 riders set off every 30s or so) and the relatively slow speed of the large group ride to the first hill where the short course filtered off. I wasn't the fastest or the slowest by a long way. The first hill, Bleadon Hill, was new to me and it was a bit of a pain. It was rideable, unlike the hill nearest me, but it continued upwards at a challenging gradient for a long time. I'd estimate it's about 4km and mostly over 5% - I'll not be riding it again in a hurry. The view from the top was almost worth it (even if it didn't photograph well, looking almost south at 11am) but then you remember that you've just ridden up there from sea level and everything aches. Getting down from that hill was also fun. The descent was through Canada Coombe, which looks about 10% down for about 1km and it's a narrow uneven road with loose gravel washed onto the road. Then it was a fairly direct link north to Locking and Worle, a flattish loop from the crematorium to Ebdon, Bourton, Icelton and Wick St Lawrence (which felt good, like I could ride it forever - it's amazing how easy a well-tuned bicycle feels) and back to town via Sand Bay and Kewstoke. The picture is of me outside the pavillion at Clarence Park, just after finishing. The pack contained repair kit, water, food, rain gear and extra top, none of which was needed. I didn't pack sun block or insect-repellent, which would have helped (although thankfully not vital)! Thanks to everyone who sponsored me. If you still want to contribute, please put it in the comments form with an email address, and/or email me directly.

With great help from Ouattara Oumar Aziz an new version of SBackup is shaping up in the svn repo and a day ago I created a public beta version - 0.10.4~beta10 which can be downloaded here.
Please report any bugs or regressions to Sourceforge bug tracker. Also an update for translations and new translations can be added. You can either translate in Launchpad or download the template file from the SVN. But beware that there are more translations in Launchpad then in the SVN at the moment, so check there first.
If no blocker bugs are found, we could see a new stable release of SBackup in a weeks time. I am sure that a lot of people will be happy to hear that :). Edit: For some reason, the DEB on the Sourceforge site was cut to third of its size, I uploaded a new version, it should be fine now. And by popular request here is a screenshot, note that by using simple timing the /etc/cron. daily,weekly,monthly folders are used and thus anacron runs the backups if the computer was off at the scheduled time.

I recently started using a new machine with two 20" flat panels used as one giant desktop with Xinerama. It's very nice and comfortable, but X isn't yet smart enough to manage the backgrounds of the two screens separately, and wants one image stretched across the whole desktop.

So here's how to turn two 1680x1050 images such as these into one 3360x1050 image with ImageMagick:

$ montage -size 3360x1050 -geometry +0+0 left-image.jpg right-image.jpg result.jpg

It's much easier than assembling the images manually in The Gimp.

I've got a new desktop system, after going two years without a desktop at all. My last desktop, which served me well for about five years, was one that I built myself from parts. This time, though, I was feeling a little lazy, and I decided to order a computer from System 76, one of the few companies that will assemble and ship a computer to you with Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) preinstalled.



The cats were curious about something new appearing in our apartment. They were even more excited when they found out it was full of cat toys! Sadly for them, though, I confiscated all the styrofoam peanuts and stuck them in a cat-proof trash can.



The usual box of random CDs still exists when you have preloaded Linux. I was surprised to discover that it did not include an Ubuntu CD or five, which seems to me like a no-brainer.



Of course, this post wouldn't be complete without a picture of the actual box. It looks just like it did on the system76 web site; no surprise there.



I used the included Ubuntu install for a little while, and it looked like everything was configured reasonably well. The one piece of weirdness was that Ubuntu uses a program called network-manager to configure the network; while it has some nice features (like doing network discovery for wireless, letting programs easily get notifications when network devices go down or come up, etc), these are offset, at least for me, by the fact that it likes to randomly break the computer's network access. This isn't exclusively an Ubuntu problem, of course; etch also installs and configures network-manager by default, and I had the same problems on etch until I purged it. I assume that network-manager works for someone, so probably something to do with the network environment here breaks it.

The system is currently running Debian etch, with Xen domains booting testing and unstable that I use for development. Even without the NVidia graphics drivers and with one of the Xen domains running a computationally intensive job, it's quite snappy; a lot snappier than any other desktop system I've owned recently. And while it's doing this, it's one of the quietest computers I own.

So, in summary, I'm quite happy with this system and I'd suggest System 76 as an option for anyone who wants a Windows-free computer.

Right, some time has passed since our Fiesta Mexicana, but still here's my record of this memorable evening. In a word: Wow! Panteon Rococo did a spectacular show! I've known and liked their music before, but seeing them live is a whole different matter and just sooo much better! Although their tour has already been lasting for quite some time, they showed absolutely no sign of fatigue. The Vier Linden was pretty full but not cram-full so there was still enough space to dance. (And while we are speaking of dancing, let me say, that some of my muscles are still sore! Those guys just don't give you a rest!) Throughout the whole concert the mood both on and in front of the stage were great and the guys were fooling around and inciting the audience, with themselves setting a good example of how to absolutely lose it (and play an instrument at the same time!) the whole time. The only downer was that a lot of what they said seemed to get lost since many in the audience didn't speak (enough) Spanish, which lead to a kind of lack of timely reactions. (Shenka yells something - Spanish speakers: "Yaay!" - Tiny delay - Rest of crowd: "Yaaaaay!"). Most weren't botherd by this though, and neither seemed the band. After all, it is pretty clear where Panteon Rococo stand and what their opinions are, so there isn't much to guess. Consequently when the band showed first signs of getting towards the end of the concert the audience wouldn't let them go. They of course played La carencia and all the other favourites but the audience just wouldn't get enough, so the encores(?) kind of turned into a "Who drops first" contest. (We did.) If you have any chance to see them while they're over here, do it!. The tour is still on and you can still see Panteon Rococo on the following dates: 20.05.2007 D - Hamburg @ Fabrik
22.05.2007 D - Rostock @ Mau Club
23.05.2007 D - Potsdam @ Lindenpark
24.05.2007 D - Dresden @ Scheune
25.05.2007 D - Paderborn @ Kulturwerkstatt
26.05.2007 D - Rottenburg @ Stadthalle
27.05.2007 D - Passau @ Pfingst Open Air
28.05.2007 D - Essen @ Pfingst Open AIr
19.07.2007 E - Huesca @ Pirineos Sur
20.07.2007 E - Barcelona @ London Bar

PS: Paco soo reminds me of weasel!

An often quoted feature of services such as OpenBC/Xing (and most of such 'pure social networking' sites) is that they basically allow you to keep an address book without having the need to update it yourself.Some people may even argue that this is the only real benefit these social networking sites do actually offer.There are of course services dedicated to helping you keep your address book up to date. These often offer plugins for Thunderbird and Outlook, so you can actually use the address book directly. (e.g. Plaxo) Some email providers even have a function to send out "please update my address book entry on you" emails to your receipients (e.g. web.de), but most people find these quite annoying.Now some people might argue that you could use the FOAF standard for this. But publishing your FOAF data on the web is a privacy problem. Most people won't be willing to publish much more than their email address there. Just like some people are not willing to entrust their information to services such as OpenBC.Using e.g. HTTP authentification to restrict access to your FOAF data is also not working very well: you'd need some user management to be able to revoke access or change the access credentials if the passwords are leaked somehow.OpenID would definitely be interesting, but how many of your friends have OpenID yet? And not everybody has access to deploy the server side needed for this.The easiest to deploy approach would be to just use public key encryption. You could then upload an encrypted copy of your data for each 'friend' to any web site. You could also upload different data (including work contact information only, for example) for different recipients.My idea is like this:

• The contact information you are willing to share is published encypted via PGP for the recipient
• FOAF data includes a pointer to the base URI for this data
• Base URI + GPG key id gives the location for the data
• Data should be a more detailed FOAF file or vCard?
• Client ("address book management") applications retrieves and updates this data on demand ("update" button) or e.g. after a timeout of one month

Big benefits of this approach:

• Very high privacy
• You don't need to entrust any service provider with your data
• Distributed, vendor-neutral, provider-neutral approach
• Standards based (FOAF, HTTP, PGP, vCard/iCalendar)

Drawbacks:

• Standards such as FOAF and PGP aren't very widely used yet
• Not as easy to use (yet) as websites like OpenBC
• Require that you have some URI to publish your FOAF and contact data at
• No 'push' updates possible without active servers or sending emails
• (No implementations - well, this is just a concept right now!)

Openbox Reading that keeping X in 3D mode tends to use more power convinced me to finally drop compiz. Back to metacity, I found it unusable. I've always used Super+Right mouse drag to resize windows, and metacity refuses to do that. I haven't found a way to resize windows with it other than dragging the super-thin, impossible-to-catch window corners or using the keyboard. I had a look at debtags search x11::window-manager (I found x11::window-manager using debtags tagsearch window) and picked openbox. Quite light, standardards-compliant, it seems to handle everything as it should (gnome panel, popups, fullscreen applications, name it). It has a very simple configuration dialog, just like metacity. Unlike metacity, it also has a configuration file in which I can tweak those things that are not in the configuration dialog. And it supports much more of those than metacity does. So, here are three use cases that weren't covered by metacity (or compiz, in case of RaiseLower) and are now fully covered by openbox:

• I now have resize on right-mouse-drag: useful because applications don't often start with the size I'd like them to.
• I now have RaiseLower on Super+Esc, to quickly see what's in that partly covered window and then but it back where it was.
• I can now move windows beyond the top edge of the screen, to reveal those "Ok" buttons of stupid dialogs that for some reason are taller than my screen.

And also, the fan of my laptop is not on all the time anymore. Updates:

• many people wrote me to say that it's possible to resize a window in metacity using Alt and middle mouse button drag; it is however impossible to configure it to use Alt and right mouse button drag, which would be nice to have on a touchpad.
• I've also been pointed out that it is possible to move a window beyond the top edge of the screen with metacity. It is not possible to do it with compiz, though.

My girlfriend who was returned from hospital on Friday learnt a couple of days later that she d managed to suffer a fractured skull. Apart from that shocking news I ve been doing little. Lots of travelling, lots of tidying up _/bin, little else. One new toy is release which will allow me to easily release projects. The idea is you run /bin/release inside a project directory and it will:

• Run a command such as make release .
• Check the release is signed correctly.
• Upload the file, via scp, to a remote host.
• Run a command to trigger a mini-dinstall.

Very simple, almost trivially so, but it has a lot nicer than having to do all the bits manually. (sample .release file.) I had a piece of code for triggering new freshmeat announcements working a while back but it was a little too fragile when it came to reading the ChangeLog files I use so I ve killed it for the moment. (Probably $EDITOR fresmeat.tmp & would be a better idea anyway!) Connectivity is bad right now, since I m in the middle of changing home ISP, but hopefully that will be resolved in the next week or two. (Switching from Telewest/Virgin -> Sky for people in the UK who might care.)

In the image below you can see that NetworkManager is finding 16 wireless networks in my house neighbourhood. And for the ESSID I know that there are some others, that are not running today. I don't know how many networks can the spec hold at the same time, but for sure we are near to channel saturation.

Yesterday my ordered HP Thin Client T5725 arrived. The clue is, Debian sarge is and no moving parts (no noise) are inside. It’s a really nice thin client and it can be used as Surfstation out of the box. There is also a “HP Connection Administrator” which can manage ‘Citrix‘, ‘rdesktop‘ and ‘XDMCP‘ connections.
After taking a short overview, I decided to update to etch. This was a kind tricky, cause packages did need to update in correct order to save the HP packages. Due the switch from Xfree to xorg with etch, the graphical frontend for configuring the X server didn’t work anymore, but in my environment this is no issue.
So now I’m really happy with a HP Thin Client and bleeding edge software on it, for xdmcp use. ;) Debian, hacking, Linux, opensource, planet

I have purchased a new screen, and I have chosen an Acer AL2002W, mainly because of its low price. It is a 20″ wide screen, with a native resolution of 1680×1050 @60Hz. For now, it seems to be good value for money, and working with this screen is very confortable (I previously used a standard 4:3 17″ screen at 1280×1024). While configuring Xorg was painless (with both free nv and proprietary nvidia drivers), I still haven’t managed to get the framebuffer working with the native resolution of the screen. As vesafb doesn’t seem to be able to use a 1680×1050 resolution (hwinfo --framebuffer only gives 4:3 modes), I have tried to patch my kernel with vesafb-tng, which haven’t yield better results. While nvidiafb allows me to get a 1680×1050 framebuffer, it conflicts with proprietary nvidia driver, preventing it from being loaded. With the free nv driver, I can’t have the display centered both in console and in X (they both use the same mode, and the screen is able to stroe user modes at the condition the new display information habe 1Khz difference for horizontal frequency or 1Hz for vertical frequency or the syn signal polarities are different from the default modes). By the way, I have noticed that two of my laptops have the same Intel 915 video chipset, and one only is able to have a 1280×800 framebuffer (using the undocumented vga=0x362 code). I can’t understand the reason of this difference.

Since I never got managed to reemit my credit card, I was forced to reserve my plane ticket to DebConf7 via phone.

The good news is that, this time I was able to find e-car.ro which apparently has some better search engine since I still found some cheaper (not much) flights than I did in January (I have a printout of the flight I thought of initially).

The price now is NOT a lot bigger than the one I found in January. Back then it was about 400 , now I'll have to pay around 425 [*]. Is not the same set of flights, but I don't mind.

So, now I have these flights:

• BUH - EDI, 16th of June :
• KL1358 OTP, 06:00 - AMS, 07:50
• KL1279 AMS , 09:25 - EDI, 09:55
• EDI - BUH, 24th of June:
• KL1276 EDI, 06:00 - AMS, 08:35
• KL1389 AMS, 09:35 - OTP, 13:20

I would have liked to have a wider window at return, between the flights, but, although there was some flight that left from AMS at 13:00, it was not possible to couple with that flight and keep a low fare :-( . So, my visit to Amsterdam must wait for another occasion.

So,

1. if anybody else will be on any of these flights, I would welcome company.
2. Helooooo, DebConf

Now I'll just have to have the confirmation mail and go myself to do the payment at e-car. Fortunately e-car is somewhere in the center of Bucharest, in the Roman Plaza (Pia a Roman ).

[*] If this sounds like a contradiction with the previous, is not. Now I found some of the previousely found flights and some new cheaper ones (all "now" prices), but since the booking is done later, all "now" prices are bigger than "January" prices. So if I had done the same booking back in January, I would have payed less; but back then I didn't found the flights I booked now.

A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...

Well, today started out really anxious and is ending pretty reasonably. (Or so I think -- maybe tomorrow is going to be really nuts). First, RoCoCoCamp buzz is just nuts! Lots of people are blogging about it, planning to attend, and having fun talking about it. I count at least Patrick Tanguay, Sekhmet Design, Montreal Tech Watch, Montreal Tech League (no relation), Michel LeBlanc, Fred Ngo, Sylvain Carle, Rhymin' Simon Law, NathanR, Creative Commons Canada (thanks for the shout-out, gang!), Adrien O'Leary, Andreas Gohr (coming all the way from Berlin!). We're flirting with almost 100 people on the participants list, which I think is going to mean about 120-150 people. So I'm no longer worried that not enough people are going to come. Last night I got a quote for someone to provide coffee in the morning and at afternoon break for all three days... for $1800! So this morning I rented three coffee percolators (one for regular, one for decaf, and one for tea) and a bunch of cups and plates from Celebrations up on Jean-Talon. Maj and I shopped for coffee this afternoon. Total cost? $250. That means more money left over for pizza Saturday night! It means some more hassle for me and for the attendees, but I think we can handle it. Tomorrow morning early I have to stop in at St. Viateur and get 10 dozen bagels for the whole gang. I think many people who are attending don't know Montreal bagels, so they'll be in for a treat. Of course, some of the Montrealers will be mad I didn't get rival Fairmount Bagels instead. Tough for them. I know tomorrow is going to be crazy, but tonight I'm feeling pretty mellow. My good friend Zach Copley is on his way into town right now; we're working together on the kei.ki project and it will be great to have him here. Tomorrow Mark and Allegra arrive. So many good folks are going to be at RoCoCo: I think it's going to be a lot of fun. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp stviateur coffee keiki wiki barcamp

Better said, politicians. I am pretty sure most of you will know yet about a Belgian politic party called NEE in which the main candidat is a young girl that appear naked in promoting posters. But in a word joke, she promised 'blowjobs' for people who vote for her. Or perhaps she promised that for real...

Also, here in Spain we had our own naked politician. She is not at posters, but she was the girl on portrait of an important Spanish magazine.

It is interesting to see how politics is changing lately. It is becoming more and more insteresting... Do you trust your candidate? Undress him!

Ren’Py is an engine that supports the creation of visual novels and storytelling. I fell in love with it since I first saw it, almost two years ago, and some of my friends know how much work I’ve devoted to that package so that it’s finally in Debian in a proper state, including submitting many patches to upstream. Lots of thanks go to Ana for all her help and support with this package. Ren’Py is designed to make writing complete visual novels as easy as possible. The engine supports, of course, conversations between the two characters, but also images, different transitions between pictures, music and sound, so playing a game can be a complete multimedia experience. The engine itself is based in Python and SDL (in fact, it is based in python-pygame). Anyway, ccording to the manual, you don’t need to know any programming, or be able to program, to use Ren’Py. Even though right now there are a lot of games made with Ren’Py available for downloading, most of them are released pre-compiled (for a certain version of python, including the whole interpreter and libraries in the release), and usually targeted towards Windows (even though Ren’Py is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and can be made to run on other platforms). Of course all the authors of the games are welcome if they want to publish them as Free Software, anyway my plans go towards using the engine for developing educative applications. My only problem is that I need to draw the characters I’ll use throughout the tutorias, which is something I’m not especially good at. I’ve got myself a book on how to draw manga and anime characters, but it’s probably taking a while until I’m proficient enough at that. I’ll try to find someone to help me with that. In fact, it would be great to release a free set of characters that newbie creators of stories could use as a starting point. Lets see if I can find an artist for that. The main drawback I see is that the dependencies might be too much to put the engine in a small embedded portable gadget to be able to play a visual novel anywhere. Who knows, maybe in the future.