A Blog of Very Little Brain

Leaving Las Blogger

2006-07-09T17:58:00.000+03:00

It was bound to happen.
Following a 2 week-long period in which Blogger have decided to block my posting right due to "spam-blogging" (whatever that means), I've decided to move the whole blog, lock, stock, and posts to WordPress.
The new blog can be found at http://erez.wordpress.com, and the new RSS feed is now http://erez.wordpress.com/feed/.

AWWWWWWWWWWWW...

2006-06-28T20:00:00.000+03:00

Kittens. Probably the sole proof of the existance of a deity.

Site make big issue out of nothing new

2006-06-28T19:25:00.000+03:00

C|net, usually restricted in their titles, have given their short review of "Titan Quest" the following headline: "PC game lets players rewrite mythology".

The immediate question that comes to mind is "So?". Haven't computer games allowed people to "rewrite" myth and history since the olden days of Civilization and it's likes?

It's an odd one, at it. Two paragraphs, nothing really interesting in them, I just don't get this one. I've been reading C|net's news for quite a while now, and this mini-article doesn't look like anything I've previously encountered. I would consider it bought write-up if it wasn't for the writer describing the game as "graphics-intensive ... [but] otherwise a standard computer role-playing game with monsters, loot and exotic journeys." So its not even an enthusiastic write-up.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. It's probably a slow news article read by a slow news reader. Maybe the conspiracy against mankind has sunk deeper than we can imagine.

Makes sense, hit me with another

2006-06-24T15:53:00.000+03:00

Now this may come as no surprise to anyone who knows my view of things, but otherwise this article regarding the process of understanding releases an
opium-like substance in our brain may come as a bit of a shocker. But in all honesty, that's just the way we behave.
Many of our behaviour patterns are driven by biological needs and urges, or, at the base, were conditioned by such biological causes. We tend to abstract these patterns, but the core of our personality remains electrical connection between neurons and nerve ends.

In this view, making sense as a very narrow case of biological cause-reaction/stimulus-reward mechanism is, to reuse the pun, making sense. A child must understand the world around him to survive. He must make sense of what is good (for him) and bad, what nourishes and what hurts. To do so, our brain rewards every cognitive association with a "hit" of an opium-like substance. The body gets addicted to this substance, which in turn drives the child towards more attempts at make sense of the world, constantly trying to sort things, differentiate, adapt his views and understandings and forge a form out of the chaos into which he is born.
By this, the "scientist" model becomes our form of existence. To quote Descartes, "Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum" (I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am).

It all makes sense. Hit me with another.

Thanks to Warren Ellis for the link.

Title me this

2006-06-22T17:38:00.000+03:00

Found an excellent Warren Ellis interview considering the new Desolation Jones series he's writing, and about his collaboration with new artist, Danijel Zezelj. He gets pretty Warren Ellis in it, which is always good.

"What I'm looking forward to is actually forcing [Zezelj, E.S.] into space, seeing him use the wide, deep space and the mid-distance shot. His work appears very intense because he switches between hard close-ups and long shots, but there are very few instances I've seen where he's been given space to work in a landscape situation and really compose a master shot. That's where a lot of artists really find new ground. Bryan Hitch just burst out of his skin when he was given the space to work the mid-distance, reduce the size of the figures and emphasize the environment and the composition. I'm going to be interested in trying that with Danijel, using the Japanese trick of knocking the panel borders out to bleed to take out time-progression...

You're in a coma, aren't you?"

This is why I don't leave the house

2006-06-16T16:04:00.000+03:00

Probably the most insane dialog this side of madness:

Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me.
Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me!
Gangsta: Man, what are you excusing me about? Fuck you!
Old Chinese lady: Fuck me? Ok, take-a off the pant.

Stairway in silence.

Old Chinese lady: Ex-see-cus-see me!
Gangsta: Sure thing, ma'am. I'm sorry.
Chinese kid: And that's why we respect our elders.

--Canal St station

via Overheard in New York, Jun 16, 2006

(Don't) Speak your mind

2006-06-13T23:15:00.000+03:00

If anyone follows the latest XboX360 news, then the story about Microsoft marketing yokel, one Peter Moore claiming "Nobody cares about backwards compatibility" must have made some ripples in your personal pond.

Now, of course, no marketing yobo likes to disturb his customers' (the pay-through-the-nose crowd, as they are called), and so, lo and behold a clarification has surfaced:
A) He was misquoted, he said "No one is concerned" rather than "No one cares".
B) He meant "concerned" as in "worried"
C) He meant "worried" as in "We don't need to worry about it, as we reached our goals".

So, why am I interested in all this?
You see, marketing spokesmen are suppose to be the masters of dopplesprecht* and labyrinthian syntax, so it's rare to see one falters like this. For example, when trying to clarify his kerfuddle, Moore say "It's quite simply not that we don't care about backward compat." And grammar rules be damned. It's quite amazing to see how this type of cloaked lingo turned and byte its master. Here's to more of Moore and his All-Singing-All-Dancing repartee.

*I know that's not how you say "doublespeak" in German, get with the program

Free as in Forgetaboutit?

2006-06-13T21:40:00.000+03:00

I've recently visited Mozilla's site, where I found a link to "Firefox Flicks", which, if memory serves me right, was a contest where users created and submitted home-made commercials.

Now, with Firefox being both the "IE killer" and the iconic Free Software product, I was mostly expecting something that will, at least in some vague way, address those, and other benefits of the browser. However, from looking at the aforementioned page, I quickly realised it was not to be so. What I didn't expect was my inability to actually view those "flicks".

You see, the video clips were presented in Flash. Yep, a non-free, proprietary format, which my computer doesn't support (Both for idealistic and practical reasons). Fortunately, the good folks at Mozilla offer a download option, where you can get the clips. In QuickTime format.

What exactly happened here? Either the Mozilla guys forgot what actually puts bread on their tables, which is the Free Software concept, without which they'd be where Netscape is now (which is nowhere), or they hired a marketing company who doesn't even know what's Free Software, and thinks God farts in Flash. Either way, bad move.

Sadly, it doesn't end there.
As I've recently mentioned, I played a bit with Damn Small Linux. When I got to their download section, a weird file, named "GPL_Sources.txt" caught my eye. The text file included with the downloaded files had this to say: "We honnor the GPL (sic) and will send anybody the sources to the GPL software in Damn Small.
If you want to receive copies of the software please send us $7 (cost of media and shipping) and we will gladly mail you the sources."

Now, I'm not a GPL expert, but it seems weird to me that a Free product (both Liber and Gratis) will demand money for sharing its source code, the holy pinnacle of the Free Software concept. And we're not talking about some forsaken application here, we're talking about a GNU/Linux distro. For comparison, if Firefox is the icon Free Software product, GNU/Linux is the Flagship. More so, Damn Small is based on Debian, a 100% communitee project that is also boasting a Free Software Social Contract.

In both cases, we're dealing with people and companies who spit into the well they drink from. Neither Damn Small nor Firefox would've existed without Free Software. Dissing the Free Software concepts, is just not Cricket.

Back to basics

2006-06-11T13:52:00.000+03:00

Not BASIC, mind you.

I've neglected the ole blog in the recent month, part of it was caused by a trip to Turkey (in a nutshell, great experience, beautiful country, I'm madly in love with my girlfriend), the other part was me trying to sort a lot of things in my head, and eventually post them here.

In the meanwhile, lot of things happened. The world cup has begun (ho-hum), I've celebrated one year at my workplace (ho-ho-ho), Ubuntu 6.06 was officially released (ho-yeah!), and I've been reading tons of comics (ho-ho-homicide!).

I've attempted to upgrade my laptop to 6.06, after doing a dist-upgrade with one of the Ubuntu alpha (aka Flight) CDs. The result was an overall hard drive format and a reinstallation. The laptop, nicknamed Wildstar, should actually be named Apache, not for the use of it as a web server (which it isn't) but for the way I've installed stuff on it. The method is very simple, I've installed the base Ubuntu system, then put over it whatever packages I needed, and then removed whatever packages I didn't. The result was a working system, but not much more.

Not that I need much more, honestly.
However, the attempted upgrades resulted in what could be best defined as "some sort of problem". I mean, things worked, then they didn't. Then they partially worked, then they broke, then they worked like nothing. For instance, I had to reboot to mount a USB device, after unmounting it, it found it perfectly, but mounting it didn't work. When I finally got it to mount, it wouldn't unmount and so on. Eventually I gave up.

I've tried installing Damn Small Linux, but the Live CD chugged the system to a halt (Pen III 445, 64 MB RAM), so I tried installing from the boot menu. Didn't really work. I've then pulled Slackware and decided to give it a go. Installation went fine, but the system hung every time I tried to run it. I then thought about Debian, which is more-or-less the best choice in this matter, as I'm familiar with apt, the Debian package manager, so I downloaded the latest testing (aka "Etch") CD and started it. Once again, being familiar with Ubuntu's installer, which is basically Debian's, resulted in a very smooth operation, until everything went quickly down the drain as the partitioner failed to locate my hard drive.

I am not a proud man, mind you.
The sole reason for me testing all those different systems is because Ubuntu runs GNOME "out of the box" and I want to use a lighter desktop, such as Fluxbox, or FVWM. I've been using those with Ubuntu, but I wanted a bit more "integration" which you can get in a distro that uses those as an integral part of it (like Damn Small), and not just as a package.
This been said, after the whole installation fiasco, I had no alternative but to pick up the Ubuntu (Alternative CD, the Live CD installation is a HUGE, huge pain). Amazingly enough, it installed the base system in a flash, which leaves me with the nice chore of finding whatever packages I want and installing them. More on that later.
As a side note, this process happens about every 3-4 months here, so I'm pretty used to it, and still am surprised when I find myself returning to Ubuntu. Great job guys.)

Australia trailblazer as world goes insane

2006-06-05T18:14:00.000+03:00

I think it was just a matter of time till they snapped.

Odden Couplettes

2006-06-03T16:39:00.000+03:00

What
The
Hell?

The chicken or the feather?

2006-05-04T18:10:00.000+03:00

Maybe it's a sign of the times, Patriotic Act and DMCA and the overall sorry state of liberties around the world, but it seems that more and more web-writers tend to confuse cause with result these days.

Case in question, Informit.com, a somewhat seriously-browed online magazine that asks "Will Cell Phones be Responsible for the Next Internet Worm?".
Now, last time I checked, malicious programmers (aka 'crackers') were responsible for creating those Internet worms, while non-informed users were "responsible" for spreading them. Not the hardware.

The worse example of this is something I mentioned before, which is the new and exciting "natural language" syntax of Inform 7, which goes a long way to make a point most programmers already know, which is basically that while the user-side should be as natural and simple as possible, the programmer side shouldn't.
Using a "natural-language" syntax usually means that the programmer will have to use a lot more text to define what he would've been able to do previously with a very short text.
I realise that game creators don't easily understand programming-language like syntax, but, then again, they're not the ones that need it. It's not a Saturday afternoon D&D session, and the medium here is the computer. The writer should devote the most of his work to the actual descriptions (you know, those that the player will actually read) and not write paragraphs over paragraphs of description for the computer, which doesn't need more than a clear indication of what goes where.
The argument here is usually "I don't need to learn to program to create an Interactive Fiction game". That may be true, but if you really want your game to be more than a "Choose Your Own Adventure" and really be INTERACTIVE, then you will need to use robust and dynamic tools, which, from the computer point of view, isn't natural-language.

It's deeper than that, it seems, this page shows a mind map of common GNU/Linux libraries in a way that the writer claims to be "human readable". In reality, if this diagram is "human readable", I might be in need of a biological check.
But that's besides the point. Why do I need a "human readable" diagram anyway? If someone's going to become a GNU/Linux developer, that someone is (or will need to be) well versed in the library dependency structure. Anyone else just doesn't need it.
Just to push forth that argument, take this clown who claims "Freedom to use" is irrelevant if the software demands a high degree of technical know-how. I'm not going to delve too far into his argument, as the writer obviously doesn't understand the concept of free (as in Willy) software, and seems to confuse the Open Source ideas with the Free Software ones, while peppering it all with a nice dosage of demagogy.
Basically, free software doesn't mean "everyone should be able to use it". It means that if you want to use it, you will have the means to use it freely, and unrestrictedly. Free software doesn't mean "freedom from complexity". In fact, one of RMS' constant mantras is that one should ALWAYS choose the free solution DESPITE the limitations that it poses. You want to play your mp3 collection while reading a site rendered in Flash? You can't. Those are proprietary formats.
In my view, this whole argument is as empty as claiming that the "everyone should be able to view and modify the source code" isn't a real freedom since only programmers are able to understand and modify source code. And only in languages they know.

We live in a technological world. But we are not technological people, so sometimes ideas like "ease of use" and "user friendliness" and "better productivity" and "Interface design" get mingled and mixed up. Other times we get reviews that claim that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 "has no soul".
There isn't really any harm in these things, at least not in the way I presented them. The real harm comes when companies start market their latest lock-up technology as "protecting the customer", and when laws that throw civil rights out of the window claim to be a "Patriotic act" (which reminds me of that Catch-22 scene where people had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance just to enter mess hall).
So once in a while, someone need to stop and remind himself that it's not the boxes that brings the planes, it's the war.

ChessVariants Pages have an RSS feed

2006-05-04T11:43:00.000+03:00

Finally.

Q-Whack!

2006-05-04T10:24:00.000+03:00

Alright!

Kitchen maker use stupid defence line, rescued by judge

2006-05-03T11:30:00.000+03:00

The register registers the following item:
A Manchester kitchen company "Moben" was accused of misleading their consumers by placing an umlaut over the 'o', thus giving the impression that they are a German company, which is grasped by British consumers as a seal of quality.

Moben's defense was, and I quote, "the dots are an artistic device and that any resemblance with an umlaut is coincidental".

However, instead of throwing them out of court and holding them in contempt, the court decided that "using a German-sounding name did not imply that Moben or its products were German" and that "umlauts are used in countries other than Germany ... and that viewers would recognise that a company's trademark would not necessarily relate directly to the origin of that company or its products". Nice, but did you notice that the decision had absolutely no reference to Moben's actual claims? Wonders will never cease.

First lesson of the day

2006-05-02T18:46:00.000+03:00

After a 60% post vanished when Firefox just decided to call it a day and happily crashed: Write posts in Vi before entering them to the online interface.
I get the html syntax-highlighted that way too.

Seven lucky seven

2006-05-02T12:09:00.000+03:00

As an avid user of The Editor, it's a no-brainer that I'm anxiously expecting the release of Vim v.7. To make my salivate even further, Linux.com are offering a review of the 7.0f beta, running on Ubuntu 5.10, would you believe it :)

Another of the Great Ones has been awoken from it's slumber, as Graham Nelson releases (after 10 years!) the next release of Inform, aka inform 7. Inform is a language for writing Interactive Fiction, fully compatible with Infocom's Z engine, which makes Inform interpreters able to play Infocom games as well as more contemporary ones. Inform 7 is a complete IDE package (including an editor as well as an interpreter), with a 'correct while you test' feature, as well as many other niceties.
The language itself has shifted from the more programming-language-like syntax into the land of cargo cult "natural English-language" syntax.
For more information, Brass Lantern offers a nice introduction.

While on the matter of updates, I've just discovered that updating both my desktop and laptop to the latest Ubuntu Beta 2, has broken GTK-VIM and TinyCOBOL on my laptop (I was able to resurrect TinyCOBOL by downgrading libncurses5), and GTK-LyX on both the laptop and the desktop. I hope that eventually this will be fixed in one way or the other, but it's not a big issue, as GTK-LyX was only introduced with the 1.4.X version, and up until that point I was using the QT flavour (the GTK version is also less featured, I needed to set most of the preferences using the QT one). To those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, a quick "first look" at LyX is available at the LinuxCult.

Atonement of the Programming Language

2006-04-28T09:53:00.000+03:00

"Sometimes, people ask me if it is a sin in the church of Emacs to use the editor Vi. It is true that Vi-Vi-Vi is the editor of the beast. But using a free version of Vi is not a sin but a penance." - Richard Stallman.

I'm not a religious person (and in all honesty, neither is RMS).
But, in the same manner that not being Christian doesn't prevent me from debating Kirkegaard's philosophy, being a secret member of the Cult of VI doesn't prevent me from accepting the wisdom of St. iGNUcius regarding the Evil inherent in proprietary software.

Biggest problem from my point is inherent in the choice of the language of the scripture. True advocates of the One True Freedom (or the 4 freedoms of the apocalypse) know that software made with proprietary tools can never be free. And so came the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), a free software tool that allows ye followers to compile code. This is all fine and dandy when it comes to the "classic" hackers languages, such as C, C++, Lisp, and today's Perl, Python et al, which are released under free (as in free-for-all) licenses.

But here's my problem, I use COBOL. The ancient, monolithic, elephantine language, which has the style and elegance of a Rube Goldberg machine without the humour. Until recently, the only way to create COBOL software was to use proprietary tools. Not that there is some sort of voodoo mystery surrounding the language, since the specification for it are available as an ANSI standard for decades. However, it isn't exactly a hacker favourite, so no one bothered developing free tools for it.

But, those days are long past, as now, not only I am able to enjoy two excellent GNU compilers, but I was also able to install them by using Debian/Ubuntu's own .deb format. The first, TinyCOBOL, compiles COBOL-85 code to GNU assembly, and the other is Open-COBOL which goes a bit extra by converting the code to C and then compiling it using GCC, however, Open-COBOL does offer support of the later 97 (COBOL2000/OOCOBOL) and the 2002 standards.

The homepages have the source code for both projects, however, to install them apt-get style, head here for the TinyCOBOL packages, and to the Debian Repositories for the Open-COBOL project Packages.

On the other hand, nothing I've just said can explain Vigor

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!(?)

2006-04-28T08:10:00.000+03:00

Turns out the next Nintendo console will not be named Revolution, but Wii.
I believe my first reaction what "Wha?"™
OK, the concept is just feels too much like a marketing department jerking off each other (disturbing metaphor, to say the least). It's Wii, like "we" with the 'ii' which supposed to look like two people standing together. This, of course, immediately brings to mind the concept of people interacting, and the multiplayer/communal experience the new console promotes.

Only it doesn't.

It never does, actually. All those "clever" names are just wasted efforts. Sony's Playstation didn't succeed because the name conveyed immediate playable station-ness. Nintendo's Nintendo Entertainment System didn't create a feeling of systematically entertainment, and besides, most people refer to those as "PS" and "NES". What the hell does "xbox" even supposed to convey? (it's a continuation of the "x" branding Microsoft has given to it's games/multimedia driver/API, like DirectX, nothing more).

For example, Gamers.net have created a 10 worst Console names articles, toting Sega's Dreamcast at number 9, claiming that "Sega's got a history of creating inspired console names: Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, and particularly, Sega Genesis sounded effortlessly sleek and powerful."
No they didn't. The writing is projecting his opinion of the console over the name. Same with Nintendo: "Usually, simplicity is the best course -- "Game Boy" and "Nintendo 64" were smart, smart choices." Were they? What so smart about "Game boy" exactly?

Bottom line: Consoles are only as good as their names. Good games on a system give it better consumer appreciation, create a "cool" image, and infuse the name with more positive connotation than any marketing group might ever achieve. People don't care if it's PlayStation II, PS2, or "the machine that plays GTA"™. They didn't care when it was called Atari 2600, Famicom/super Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System/NES/SNES/Super Nintendo Entertainment System/etc. Sega's Gamegear failed miserably despite having a superior technology AND a cooler name than Nintendo's Gameboy. And besides, people have grown accustomed to calling Nintendo's consoles "the Nintendo". It's even more obvious in the new handhelds, both Nintendo and Sony released their products under the names of "DS" and "PSP" (Dual Screen and PlayStation Portable), predicting that everyone will already abbreviate it, so if you can't beat them...

I can easily predict that, in the very fortunate (and sadly, tragically, unlikely) case that Nintendo Wii's games will rule the next years, that kids growing up with cherish the name wii like other's cherish the name NES, or like Gamers.net writer cherish the name "Master System". Other than that, it's a cute name, with a cute logo.

(Just as a side note, whoever came up with the "two lowercase i's that appear like two people" concept knows his stuff. It doesn't "do" anything, but it's well designed).

Image-in.

2006-04-25T00:02:00.000+03:00

I know I keep a straight text-only blog, but I happened to come across a couple of more colourful pages.

The age of Photoshop tends to constantly feed us with mushed-up hilarities, and this art "history" page featuring Mr. Potato Head is no different.

A little bit more artistic, but tres cool nontheless, is this page featuring actual classical CD covers of famous composer's compilations, drawn by top cartoonists. Beautiful.

And to end it all, a revised mindmap of GNU/Linux distros. Much better than the first try.

Hello Dapper (and goodbye Windows)

2006-04-23T23:11:00.000+03:00

All in all it wasn't such a turbulent affair. Just a long winded one.

I've started the process at Friday noon. First I had to work on a promised backup to my mum, which took sometime, with zipping a couple of gigabytes worth of files into 7z files, then burning them on 2 CDs. Once I got that out of my way, I sudo update-manager -h and hit the upgrade button. When the smoke cleared, I was informed that the upgrade will demand a hefty 1 GB download, which will take anything between 2 and 7 hours, depending on the download rate. Ecstatic as I was, this was a real downer, but nothing comes easy. At exactly 9 pm, all the files have been downloaded and the installation process began. This was also the moment when I was supposed to go to my night shift.

I left everything running and went to work. I (correctly) assumed that things will stop somewhere along the way for some input, which will have to wait until my return. They were, I was prompted to replace both the GDM and the Vim configuration files. I approved both, which may, or may not, have been the best decision, as I was soon to learn. The installation and cleaning process went without a hitch, and the system rebooted.

Into a GDM error message. I don't know if anyone had the pleasure of experiencing this error message, which, from what I've yet seen (and I've managed to get several of the more interesting error messages), is probably ranked quite high. The problem with it isn't that it's incomprehensible (which it is), or upsetting (which it is), it's the, how shall I put it, look of the message. It's quite apparent that someone wanted to make this as pleasant as possible. And failed.

"let's make it nice and friendly," said our programmer. "After all, we just told our user that his X server is probably riding in the fields of eternal hunting, for all that he cares. We don't want those unfriendly, laconic messages, no Blue-Screen-of-Death-style stuff either. Let's give it a light-gray background, and a sky-blue frame, with some nice ASCII motifs in it, and give him a yes/no "buttons" for the error logs, all rendered in what is the last word in ncurses design." And then our programmer went and painstakingly designed this error message window, and then someone took this code and re-wrote everything in ADA, then used babelfish to translate it to Spanish and back and made sure that whatever error message it displays will be as garbled and misrepresented as possible.

It is quite a mess, really. Fortunately, I've already met with this monument to the futility of man, otherwise, it would've been a very unfortunate encounter, considering it was close to 8 am, and me coming from an all-nighter at work. A quick sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg later and... Nothing. Apart from the same Vogon-quality error message. Two more tries, didn't improve things any better. I eventually decided to sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx driver and reconfigure X with the nvidia driver, which, lo and behold, worked. I had to sudo killall gdm and restart it, but it worked.

I tried playing around with the settings, and so far I like what I see. But I've yet to dig deep enough into all the tweaks. In fact, it preserved most of my gnome configurations, which meant that all the GUI bells and whistles were still turned off. I'm quite comfortable with it as it is, so I doubt I'll change it just for the sake of it. I can't seem to get the screensaver to not work, as the new setting dialog doesn't include that option, but I'll find where they hid it.

Which brings me to what seems to be the biggest problem I have with Ubuntu's new version. A lot of things are hidden. The gconf menu, for once. It's not buried or anything, and can be enabled with a simple click, but the decision to remove it is bothering. Same with the Palm Pilot setting menu item. I'm sure that hard-core GNU/Linux users probably don't need those fancy-schmancy menu items, and new users are probably better off without another way to shoot themselves in the foot, but I'm neither, and I don't really like to dig for what I consider to be basic features. (In fairness, to enable all the menu option, one only need to access the "Alcarta" application which lies on the top of the Application> Accessories menu (not that they WANTED it to be located that high (It just was fortunate to be the A on the A on the A...))).

Another item high on the not-working list is actually gvim. I works fine, but can't seem to find the designated color scheme. Probably need a quite gvimrc shake.

So I'm still testing the ropes, as mentioned I made no sudden moves, no major configuration changes. I'll try XGL this coming weekend, but until then, I'm still swimming in the kiddie pool as far as the new version is considered. One major decision was to move everything from the two Windows partitions into one, and format the other to Linux as well. You can count the times I've rebooted to Windows in the past couple of months on one hand. All of those were as result of IE only sites, such as my bank's and my girlfriend's school's. And for that I definitely don't need 30 GB of space.

Dapper is in the hizhouse!

2006-04-22T08:18:00.000+03:00

Got Ubuntu Dapper Drake Beta running, now sleep.

DapperDapperDapperDapperDapper MushroomMushroom!

2006-04-20T23:56:00.000+03:00

Gah. Hnng. Bleh.

I'm riveting insanely for a week now. All those Dapper (p)reviews and suchlike have been giving me a dapper craving... However, I've been constantly reminding myself that it's still a pre-release, and there's nothing that guarantees it won't destroy my entire system, or at the best case scenario, stop things from working. On the other hand, I have a very stable, smoothly running system, which should be able to withstand any such upgrade. On the other other hand, I have a very stable, smoothly running system, why would I want to toy around with an unstable release?

Well, no real reason, apart from this video.

I know, upgrading just for the sake of eye-candy is not the "Linux way", but dammit, it's one hellova candy, if you ask me. I mean, the first time I heard of XGL I wasn't really impressed. I assumed it was yet another nicety, your "coat of paint" rather than a really usable feature. I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong.

I think it was Novell's presentation that got me interested. There are a lot of stuff running there, some of them better, some worse, some not really usable (why would I want to run a program on the side of the "cube"?), but the overall concept was very solid, it looked like someone got a lot of stuff that have "usability" written all over them. The whole "3d GUI" started to make sense all of the sudden. I mean, first thing I do in any new desktop is kill everything that isn't functional. All those shadows, 3d menus and buttons, you name it. I've been considering Mac OSX's look as "stupid" since it insists on adding all sort of cutesy animations that don't do anything. However with XGL, everything has a reason, somehow, moving from pseudo 3d to real 3d gives all those cutesies context, and therefore make them a true part of the GUI.

The big question is, whether it'll run. I did the test with Kororaa's Live CD and it was quite a nice experience. Of course, with a Live CD being one, the machine wasn't running anything else but the 3d GUI. How will it run as a front-end to a full blown operation system? I would risk a guess and say it will do a good job. Most of it is the concept of finally using the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) of the video card rather than the CPU to render the screen, freeing the CPU to actually handling the non-graphical part of the interface. In the worst case I'll shove another 500 mb of RAM, or buy a new(er) video card.

With all this being said, Ubuntu 6.06 has just gone beta, which only further adds to my grieving. It might just be the final straw on my way to upgrading.

Oh, and the subject is based on this page'o'silliness.

Drool-buntu, or Flight of the Drake VI

2006-04-17T20:23:00.000+03:00

The June 1 date for the next Ubuntu GNU/Linux release is closing (although the original April 24 date would've been closer... Oh well), and many "previews" are already available. I placed preview in double quotes, as these are based on the Flight Series alpha test releases, which is a snapshot release of the product.

First to rise on my browser was Linuxforums which aptly claims to be not a preview but a survey of the current available flight CD. He pushes some nice points regarding the GUI installer holy war, and it's an overall positive survey, but then again the writer is a self proclaimed Ubuntu lover.

Second is a lookahead straight from the padded cells of the Mad Penguin. The insanity of said waterfowl doesn't deter him from warmly recommending Ubuntu, despite it being, as he claims "not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora". Whatever league is that, I don't know, but then again, the writer does, as par with his words, "prefer Slackware over any other distro".

And, naturally, you might want to go over the actual description of the release, which is displayed for your inquiring eyes in all shades of brown.

The current alpha release, code named "flight 6" is available here for download.

Dress to suck-less on excess?

2006-04-17T15:42:00.000+03:00

I kept postponing this issue because I wanted to distance myself away from it, until I would be able to comment on it rationally (hopefully).

This whole mess started when Peter Quinn, Massachusetts' Open-Document martyr and former CIO, announced that the cause for companies and institutions not accepting Open-Source and open standards is due to the "Sandals and ponytail unprofessional appearance" practiced by FOSS leaders and hackers.
While this load of bull would've gone unnoticed, or at best, become the recent laughing stock among the communitee, this time it was spoken by one of the "good guys", so people took heed of the call.
This (long and overbearing, don't bother) article in Groklaw, claims that one should "adjust your appearance (wherever you are) to help you achieve those goals."

To this I say, screw them all. Anyone who makes his business-crucial decisions based on what the other side is wearing is deserving what he gets in return. This explains those Lotus Notes offices that runs everything BUT email on Lotus, since they use Exchange for that. This explains why someone will move AWAY from using Apache into Microsoft's Aye-yay-ass. It also harks back to all those "When will GNU/Linux be ready for the Desktop", which is, actually "When will GNU/Linux be windows?".

But then again, we are talking about a world where CEOs are more interested in "standardised, enterprise-ready, business-management solutions" rather than asking "how does it work, and how good is it?" Where one needs to "learn the lingo" to progress in his company, where upper management makes Dilbert's boss look like an IT guru. Reminds me of those who claim that the future of "e-business" lies with "protected, trusted technology" (Read, DRM and software patents), comfortably forgetting that the whole Internet from which they make their money is an open, free technology.

I hope that eventually all those will implode, which on that day, I'll be there to go and sing comic songs on the ruins. Oh, and Peter Quinn didn't lose his battle for ODF in Massachusetts (and his job) due to any dress code, but due to a blatant lobbying effort on behalf of Microsoft. I'd like to see him dress to that.

Two-torials

2006-04-16T22:09:00.000+03:00

First off the bat is a very nice visual Vim tutorial, made of several images that point you to various functions and keys in the Vim (Vi IMproved) text editor.

Also, All about Linux gives a once-over guide to compiling source code using GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection). Keep in mind that it's not the usual "how to compile source code in Linux" which usually revolves around the ./configure-make-make install holy trinity, but a guide to actually running the C/C++ free (as in shared beer recipe) code compilers. make is a different GNU utility which creates a script that configures and utilised the system's compiler (Usually in GNU/Linux, a GCC one).

This is your webserver, this is your webserver on MS

2006-04-16T09:56:00.000+03:00

Quite a fun post on a blog called "Treat Chaos" showing a map/diagram of system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. One of them is Apache on Linux, the other is Microsoft's IIS. Hilarity ensues.

Hollowood honors the wrong Pooh

2006-04-16T09:52:00.000+03:00

A quick one, The Hollowood stars walk of shame has decided to merit Disney's 40+ year abuse of the A.A.Milne classic by awarding their flawed, infantile and distorted version of Winnie the Pooh with a broadwalk star. Yeech.

They are our best friends, not our substitutes

2006-04-08T00:36:00.000+03:00

Last month, there was a bit of a shocker when 6 people who volunteered to take an experimental drug were rushed to a hospital with a near-terminal illness
A couple of days ago, the last two were released, which finally can allow everyone to concentrate on the more serious part of this issue, blame assignment.
Won't be easy, as the trial has been carried out according to regs and every precaution was taken. The biggest surprise is that the previous tests, on monkeys and rabbits showed almost no adverse results. I think this might serve as a warning sign. We're grown accustomed to the horrors of animal testing, despite constant proof that animal testing doesn't always get us the needed results. Animal biology and physiology is at times so different that a drug that doesn't have any negative effect on an animal nearly kills a human being.

So far the only excuse still standing for scientific cruelty against animals was the human lives that are saved by those experiments. Now, that the flaws of this logic nearly cost 6 people their lives, maybe it's time to rethink this whole mess.

And to sum it up in a positive mind, here are some pictures of a monkey and a kitten.

Aversion number

2006-04-07T01:13:00.000+03:00

Anyone interested in the Mono project probably knows already that Mono's second cousin project, the IDE Mono "crashes while you write" develop just got the latest version out through the door. As the previous version was 0.9, one would expect this one will be 1.0, which is a cause for celebration. Funkily enough, it's 0.10.

If I were a Vulcan, this would be the moment I'd raise my eyebrows in total contempt of the erratic human race and stroll out of the room muttering "Illogical" under my goatee. To anyone who's eyes gone into cardiac arrest, or forgot his algebra, there is no difference between 0.10 and 0.1, which makes that number most definitely not applicable for the release that comes after 0.9. I won't fall into the trap of suggesting that the total contempt MonoDevelop' developers have for simple math may go a long way toward explaining why the actual product can't even carry its own weight (oh, wait, I just did), but it's really ridiculous.

(Update, turns out it's a version numbering convention. Oh well. Still don't like it)

Get ready for the Open Discussion Day - May 19th.

2006-04-07T00:25:00.000+03:00

Been doing some backing up of old floppies for mum, while catching up with my humongous RSS backlog (860 feeds and counting), when this one caught my eye.

It's always interesting how those things start. In this case, a guy called darco, posted a reminder that he will drop all his IM accounts, except one - Jabber - come May 19th. Reasons? Jabber is an open technology, unlike the other, closed, ones. Therefore, he believes this technology might be the biggest thing since email. I think he has a point there, and I know I'm hardly objective about this, but just think for a second.

Email, http, IRC, Usenet, all those are, or use, open protocols. AOL, ICQ, MSN, are not. Open protocol means everyone can set a server, and communication is free (as in freedom, although beer is always welcomed). Closed protocols means we have to connect to a proprietary server, and play by some company's rules. I'm not even talking about the bloatware those "official" clients became, but just think how many times your MSN/AOL was down. Would you want your emails to go exclusively through Microsoft/AOL's servers? The Internet is free. And the only way to keep it this way, is to keep wresting it out of the "major players" control. Stop letting them dictate the game, and start making them play by OUR rules. And if Google can play by those rules, it's time for the others to straighten up.

So comes May 19th, I'll be closing down all my IM accounts for (at least) 24 hours. See you on the other side.

(Oh, and Gaim 2's third beta is available, go get it)

Firefox extensions update, the HARD way

2006-04-06T07:56:00.000+03:00

At home, I'm enjoying the best of both worlds, splashing around the secure comfort of my /home/, and suing whenever the need arises, such as when I want to update Firefox's extensions.

At work, I'm very much limited by the user access, with (obviously) no root access. This doesn't bode well, when it comes to stuff like updating/installing extensions. It isn't such a hurdle, most of the times, as I had a couple of useful extension loaded from 1.0.7 which didn't have these restrictions. However, I recently learned that extensions have a good piece of the blame pie when it comes to the famous memory leak experienced by Firefox users. Biggest offenders turned out to be Session Saver, which I use, and Tabbrowser, which I used, but removed since the 1.5 tab features made that extension redundant to my needs. It also mentioned that AdBlock had a leak issue which is resolved with the latest version.
All this meant I needed to update. I also wanted to replace SessionSaver with Tab Mix Plus, which I use at home and which covers most of the "Opera" features I was longing for, like duplicating tabs, multi-rows tabs, session saving etc.

As I couldn't simply use the update dialog window, I had to get creative. I first navigated to said extensions pages, and downloaded the .xpi files. Updating existing extensions was simply a matter of extracting the .xpi into the extension folder. Funkily, those extensions are saved at the extension folder (on Windows XP, usually C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profile name\extensions, while on GNU/Linux it's /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/extensions<) under clear and simple names such as {871c5380-2851-459b-a3c8-27a41d4bc9f7}. This is where the extensions.rdf comes to the rescue. A quick drag into Vim shows that AdBlock is hidden inside "{34274bf4-1d97-a289-e984-17e546307e4f}". A quick "extract to folder" later and both AdBlock and its FilterSet.G were updated (although FilterSet kept claiming it wasn't).

Now came the interesting part. Uninstalling SessionSaver was possible from the dialog window, but installing Tab Mix Plus suggested that I'd need to burrow deeper into the extension.rdf file. A quick scan of both the extension.rdf file and Tab Mix Plus' install.rdf suggested the elegant, yet stylish and cunning solution: Dump everything from one file into the other, change the syntax, close everything, restart Firefox, and pray, pray, pray.

For some bizarre reason, it worked. Once I examined the content, it turns out most of it was credits, links etc. What Firefox needed was mostly the folder name and one or two basic indications of where stuff is located at. Less crufty than I thought, but much cruder than it should be, considering the extension.rdf looks quite a mess in first glance. At least it works. For now.

Things you probably did('nt) GNU

2006-03-30T09:47:00.000+02:00

A cool summary of how to deal with all things GNU/Linux for the total "newbie" is presented by the ever-informant Dominic. It's a nice summary of how to get things up and working, and what do to when those thing

Speaking of things not working, I've once again decided to go headon with the possible solution to running COBOL code on GNU/Linux. Failed. Miserably. I've tried compiling and running TinyCobol and OpenCobol, which both threw errors. I'll try hiting whatever forums/support those projects have and hope for the best.

Tidbits and tidbytes

2006-03-28T11:56:00.000+02:00

Actually not much computer related, to be honest

In a (sort of) response/rebuttal to the whole Mohammad Danish cartoons fiasco, "Dimona Comics" have announced an "Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest". One of the judges will be none other than the semi legendary Art Spiegelman, also known as the creator of Maus, one of comics' seminal masterpieces.

Ronald Moore, producer of the current incarnation of Battlestar Galactica (a.k.a. the gift that keeps on giving), said some stuff about the show, video games and whatever else he had on his mind.

I'm a fan of The Prisoner, no secret there, so here are scans of three "novelisations" and a Jack Kirby The Prisoner comics.

The above two links are courtesy of the Website at the End of the Universe, which also obituaries the passing away of Science Fiction writer Stanislav Lem.

Finally, some notes on how to finally get rid of that mind-numbing, productivity-stamping, over-rated, user-unfriendly computer peripheral, the mouse.

Oh well...

2006-03-26T17:46:00.000+02:00

No, your other left!

2006-03-26T00:25:00.000+02:00

I believe in equilibrium.

This goes to say that whenever something tilts to one (usually wrong) side, eventually it will be tilted to the other side, balancing things right. For example, more often than not, someone releases some research that claims the opposite of what we all know. I'm not referring to Microsoft Get-The-FUD campaigns and their ilk, but to a third-party (usually a respected one) that announces, that something isn't the way you always thought it to be, only to return on their claims several months later (sadly, after the damage has already been done).

For example, several months ago, Symantec published an article claiming that Firefox has twice the amount of security flaws than Micrsoft's Internet Explorer. I have claimed then, and still stand by it, that being Open-Sourced, Firefox not only is not twice as insecure, but can deal with those flaws much faster and more efficiently, while Microsoft either ignore or refuse to recognise flaws (which exist nonetheless), until they release a fix for them, which can take as much as several months.

This been said, lately, Symantec had a change of heart, now counting "vendor- and non-vendor-confirmed flaws", clearly showing that Firefox is the more secure of the two.

Another recent example comes in this article regarding Nature.com's comparison of the Britannica and everyone's favourite encyclopedic punch bag, Wikipedia. To refresh the memory, Nature.com conducted a review of 50 articles from each publication, and found, to their surprise, 30% more errors in Britannica than in Wikipedia. A short debate erupted, some claimed the triumph of the "common intelligence" over the old-fashioned academic one, some wondered what was the basis for error (for instance, what the hell is Wagnerian Rock?) but the sad writing was apparent on everyone's wall.

Not really.
You see, it appears that Nature.com "cooked" their research. Cooked, I said? More like steamed, stewed, roasted, soaked overnight, mashed, baked, fried, boiled, and brewed, as, according to the Register, "Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry."
And they could only find 33% more errors? This doesn't bodes well for Wikipedia. But then again, those mashed-up examples that Nature.com used for the Britannica are more-or-less how Wikipedia articles are created.

Get on with the program

2006-03-25T22:41:00.000+02:00

The Register has an article about COBOL. It's mostly "COBOL is still alive!" and "You can still use COBOL" stuff. Nothing really interesting if you're actually working with it, and keep updated, but I assume this is shocking or even horrifying news to people who think the world of computers starts and ends with AJAX.

Speaking of ancient languages, here's something really bizzare. This blog has a neat-o post about Doctor Who special effects, including a detailed review of some of the code seen here and there on the TARDIS screen. Turns out that after writing the program for all those "high-tech" grapics seen on the TARDIS' screen, they actually displayed the BASIC and Assembly code on said screens. It's quirky, but then again, wasn't the Terminator running on DOS?

As a side note, the world of gaming seems to be going, no, make that spiraling down, and fast. First came the announcement about a video game based on "Desperate Housewives", and then came this Pokemon penis, er, stylus.

More of Moore

2006-03-23T18:13:00.000+02:00

I've thought about my previous post regarding Alan Moore and the movie version of V for Vendetta. I believe some clarifications are in order.

First, I kept referring to Moore's cinematic writing, which might seem to be inappropriate, as we tend to think of the art - the drawing - as the cinematic part. This would've been correct, had Moore's writing style been different. An Alan Moore script includes everything we will see: the position of the characters in the panel, the POV, what the characters do, what they look like when they do it; making the artist less of a creator and more of a deployer.

For example, this opening panel from the (unpublished) Nightjar script:

"Two tiers of three frames each with all the frames the same size, then a narrow strip along the bottom with frame seven quite small and frame eight being the title logo. If you've got a better idea then please don't feel intimidated by all this junk - just go ahead and do what you like.

First of the six flash-back frames that form the opening sequence. I'm still quite fond of the idea of maybe using some different medium for these first few panels to give them a different look. If you're doing the rest of the strip using a half-tone maybe you could do these frames in pencil? Just a thought... This first frame shows a view of an overgrown and untended terraced garden, looking towards the peeling back door which is opening towards us showing a rectangle of darkness within. Someone unseen is opening the door from inside - we can see his fingers clasped round the edge of it. The garden is deathly still, maybe just a couple of insects droning somewhere. There's junk everywhere - bricks, pram wheels, tin bath, plant pots - I want to give the impression of a frozen instant, like something out of an old photograph album. As an almost subliminal detail there is a small bird swooping low over the garden, it's shadow falling neatly beneath it. We have caught it at one split instant of it's flight. It'll be gone by next frame."

So yes, we are basically talking about much more than just the writing/narrating/plotting. This style places the writer in the role of scriptwriter, director, and actor, while the artist is the cameraman, set designer and "puppeteer" of the actors. It's a writing style which has become synonymous with Moore, and at times is even referred to by name.

Second, I am well aware that movies are not made for the sole reason of realising a story in another media. I mean, I'm sure Kubrik's main reason for creating "The Shining" was to reimagine Stephen King's horror story in cinematic tools, but to his producer, and that producer's boss and so on, the main reason was "Successful book by famous writer + famous director = Mucho $$". Movie licenses cost money, and a director/writer/producer can stand in a Hollywood studio and scream till he's blue in the face about the innovative qualities of the original piece and the cinematic breakthrough that the adoption will be, but the guys with the money only care about whether the original's name will sell tickets, and whether the adoption will be marketable enough for them to shill out the dough for the license.

This is partly the reason why Alan Moore's Magnum Opus, The Watchmen, still rolls around unproduced. A complex book that always been more critically than commerially acclaimed, and no real way to make it into a 90-120 minutes movie without losing either the comic fans (for being unfaithful to the original), or the movie-goers (for being too complex and heavy), or, more likely, losing both.
I think this is also the reason why V for Vendetta was made into a movie. I've no idea on how successful was the comic book, but the movie equation is golden with script written by the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), and featuring Natalie Portman. Add a dark, gothic atmosphere and recent success of comic-book movies, and you have a seller. Sadly, not the seller I'm looking for.

Finally, I think my point regarding the cinematic qualities of V for Vendetta being the exact element that would make it a bad movie wasn't explained fully. I'll leave the overall concept, which was detailed in the previous post, alone, and focus on the key elements that "make" the comic book and would break the movie.

V for Vendetta has a very strict format. The story was seperated into 3 volumes, which are made of 3-4 issues, each issue split into 3 episodes. There are visual - monochrome, full page - separators between every episode, issue and volume, which help set the tone, like some grave, monolithic bookends. The plot develops accordingly, the internal and external narrative progresses accordingly. This almost beckons a movie trilogy, separated into acts and scenes in correlation with the segmentation of the comics. Any attempt to make it into one 2 hour movie forces some serious cuts to be made, damaging the story.

The panel narrative is built by short action scenes. Character enters room, waking woman, CUT to detectives brainstorming on computer, CUT to character and woman talking, CUT to police officer being informed, CUT to detectives talking, CUT to character saying goodbye to woman, leaves room and is stopped by policeman. (I'm leaving the actual details to limit the spoilers). The pacing of the panels, their positions, how many panels for each scene, etc. Those were created with the idea that the action will be read and viewed by a comic book reader, not on a screen. To adopt this to a movie would demand two things; either maintain the pacing of the action, and kill the scene, or ignore the original and "reimagine" the action (which would probably kill the scene...)

The comic book format offers some unexpected advantages. It's a silent film, and Moore takes full advantage of it. There is no background music to dictate the tone, for instance, but more than that, there is only as much "sound" as the writer allows us to experience. The above scene ends with the death of one of the characters, and the whole fight between the two is fast and silent (no sound effects like "Pow!" or "Wham!" etc.), the dying character looks at us with what is obviously a terrified shriek, made even more terrifying by the lack of sound. Just think of watching the same scene in the movie, and there is no sound. No music, no voices, nothing. Wouldn't have the same effect. On the contrary.

Superman's origin has been told about 4-5 times already (not including the changes forced by the Crisis and Zero Hour); Batman's origin was told about 3-4 times as well. The X-men were "rebooted" about 3 times, not including the "ultimate" version and similar projects. All of DC/Marvel characters have a history full of retold, retconned, reimagined, rebooted and rephrased stories told over and over again by dozens of different writers and drawn by dozens of different artists. In this view, the movies are just another link in the chain.
V for Vendetta was told once. Start to finish. It was drawn once. There was only one artist drawing it. This isn't "yet another version". So why make it?

There is an ounce of vanity to creating such a movie. A writer/director taking on themselves to create such a movie don't usually think "I will humbly deliver the genious of Alan Moore to the masses", but rather "I love this story, bet I can make a hell of a movie out of it", which roughly translate to "I can do this better". This doesn't fit the Wachowskis, whose breakthrough project was a philosophicalhilospohical mash-up full of narrative holes (which they attempted to plug with CGI effects and martial arts scenes) that failed to hold one movie, not to mention three. Any shred of actual, solid, cinematic quality was thrown to the four corners of the earth with the two bloated sequels which did nothing, told nothing, went nowhere, and cost gazillion of dollars to do it. There are some good directors/writers who are probably more capable of "doing it better". Terri Gilliam comes to mind. Tim Burton, perhaps. Johnny Depp as V would probably be perfect, and might give enough of his own interpretation to make us forget the original V, one of comic books greatest anti-heroes. Just for reference, Evey, a 16-year-old girl, is played by the 25-year-old Natalie Portman. There's a scene where Evey is supposed to fool another character into thinking she is less than 15. I just don't see that happen here.

R for Redundant

2006-03-23T10:26:00.000+02:00

A lot of hoopla has been thrown around due to the latest release of the V for Vendetta movie, based on Alan Moore's comics by the same name.

I've not seen the movie, so I can't really commend about it (let's just say that fans of Moore, and the writer himself are Not Pleased), but I think that Alan Moore's works would, in general, make a lousy movie, as they are very cinematic.

I know this sounds like arguing for the sake of argument, but there's a very simple logic behind this one. Take any Alan Moore comic, and you'll realise what I mean by "cinematic". The quasi-camera movements of the POV (the sidewalk to top floor zoomout at the start of Watchmen comes to mind as a good example, as well as the train scene from the first V for Vendetta), the way characters move around the panels, etc. It's all very "cinematic" and makes the panels almost spring out of the pages and come to life, as if you're watching a movie instead of reading a comic. And for that reason, it will never work as a true, live-action or animated, movie.

If it's still not clear, the whole concept of Moore's writing revolves around making the comics itself an engrossing, moving, vivid, immersing and, in general, cinematic. This works in the confinements of the media, i.e. a printed comic book. Taking this, and presenting it in a movie just doesn't work. If anything, it's redundant. V for Vendetta's plot is spread across 10 issues, dictating the narrative development and the pace of the story. This isn't a Batman movie, based on a comic that is 70 years old with a thousand issues to its name, but a short, concise, and self-containing story, created with the format in mind, and for the format. Transposing it to a 2 hour movie would mean crippling it, removing all that is good about it, and hanging it to dry. It might be a great movie, but it will be a great movie despite being a poor representation of the original material (not that it's a bad thing, Kubrik's The Shining basically butchered the Stephen King book, but was a masterpiece nonetheless).

There's also been rumours that the Watchmen movie license is rolling around in Hollywood, looking for someone to take it and make a movie out of it. Here's to hoping it will never find one.

Freedom fries

2006-03-23T09:05:00.000+02:00

A small ripple in the pond was made by French lower parliament decision to ban DRM, forcing every music playing gadget to be allowed to play every digital music format, and vice-versa. Apple Computers, probably the biggest company to "suffer" from this legislation was quick to respond.

What argument did they respond with? FUD.

Just to push a point here, Apple's have no problem with other formats being played on their iPods (which supports mp3 and other non-DRM formats), it's that their proprietary 'Freeplay' (snigger) files would be available to play on other machines. How does that become "state-sponsored piracy", you ask? Simple, once the file-format is open, you would be able to take the music file you bought from Apple and play it on every other machine, thus encouraging you to buy more music files from Apple... No, wait...

Let's try again. Today, if you want to play your iTunes file at anything else but an iPod, you need to 'crack' it with some third-party (illegal) software, which is a bit of a hassle and tussle, making it much easier to just illegally download the file in the first place instead of buying it from... Rats.

I can go on forever. But it's not the point. Here is what Apple is really saying:

Allowing iTunes files to be played on other machines would mean people don't have to buy iPods to play music they downloaded from Apple.

That's it. All the "state-sponsored piracy" bullcrap is just that.

Shogi the money

2006-03-23T08:33:00.000+02:00

I've found this image at Kotaku. It links to some Nintendo seminar, which I've no idea, but the image is tres cool.

I'm not much of a Shogi fan, despite my interest in Chinese Chess. Main reason for this is that while Chinese Chess (Xiang-Qi) contains similar thematic elements to Western (FIDE) Chess, Shogi is a distant cousin, with less similarities for my taste. I've included a couple of Shogi pieces (or a variant of) in one of the variants I created, but simply due to those pieces moves, rather than their function in Shogi.

Coincidence? Or is it...

2006-03-22T17:50:00.000+02:00

About 2 days ago, came the official announcement that Ubuntu's next version, 6.04 ("Dapper Drake") will be delayed until June 1 (and will be renamed "6.06" as well).

A day later, Microsoft came out of the blue and announced that Windows "Vista" will only be released at January 1st, and not in late 2006 as they previously hinted.

Hmm...

Isaac Haze?

2006-03-22T16:08:00.000+02:00

I had the laugh of my life reading about Hayes' leaving SouthPark over their misrepresentation of Scientology, but it seems we haven't heard the last of it, as according to FoxNews, Hayes did not quit the show. On the other hand, it seems that SouthPark's creators want to get even with Hayes for leaving the show, by doing an episode that will parodise Chef, Hayes' SouthPark character.

Has my ears gotten insane? So what is it?
Stay Tuned! (always wanted to say that)

Is that a slash in your dot?

2006-03-20T07:07:00.000+02:00

Or are you just happy to... Err... Let's not go there, shall we?

Some recent Slashdotting.

Most "main-stream" GNU/Linux distros nowadays go with the "pre-compiled packages" solution to software installation. This goes against the compile from source concept which is, for many GNU/Linux purists, the whole heart and soul of the whole GNU/Linux concept (or the bread-and-butter of it, pick your choice), as the actual compiling method allows the user to configure and customise the software to his needs, preferences and optimal system compatibility. This article tests both options.

One of the Mars rovers, Spirit, has lost one of it's 6 wheels. Not bad for something that wasn't supposed to last more than 3 months, now well into its second year, or to quote NASA "two years into its 90-day mission" Much like the Star Trek franchise which after almost 40 years into its 5 year mission has lost all the brakes.

Speaking of Open Source, the Economist runs a (somewhat clueless, it seems) article regarding open source projects, citing MySQL, Firefox and, well, Wikipedia as examples of a method of which "Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does." Which serves as a lesson to kids everywhere that writing under the influence of drugs is not a good habit.
Hehe. Sorry.
I think the biggest confusion here is by bundling open-source software projects with the "communal-edited" Wikipedia. Open-source projects are not chaotic, anarchic, or "contributed by anyone". These projects have a maintaining body, which has the final word on what goes in and what not. Contributions are welcomed, but do not immediately become part of the product, even when the nature of the contribution is a free-for-all one. For example, while anyone can create a Firefox extension, those are not available as an integral part of the downloaded software (i.e. "The product"), but are presented on a separate "use at your own risk" basis. Other products, like the Debian Distro, goes even further and restrict the software packages submitting to authorised maintainers. This is why the Wikipedia concept is not a good example of Open-Source or, to quote the NYTimes, "Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source." The "everyone can do anything" method is just not the same as open-source development, not by far.

And, a double-duo couple of two Microsoft issues:
An analysis of .NET usage in vista shows that "Vista has no services implemented in .NET". Always nice to see a company backing up their own technology. Almost makes one wonder what are the Mono guys doing supporting this framework while its creators prefer running native code to utilising the .NET framework. Once again, it seems developers and companies are falling for Microsoft PR rather than the simple reality.
Which speaks volumes for the next article, claiming "Windows Vista's tough approach to spyware may put anti-spyware companies out of business". But seriously, folks. I'll believe it when I see it. Marketing your yet-to-be-released product as "100% spyware proof" to a point where it will cause anti-spyware companies to go out of business just don't cut it in my book. Remember Bill Gates announcement at 2004 that "Two years from now, spam will be solved"? Remember Gates claiming, this year, that Microsoft has, true to its word, eliminated spam? I just hope their concept of "eliminating spyware" isn't as fuzzy as their concept of spam-removing.

Links from the Planet

2006-03-17T19:49:00.000+02:00

Ubuntu Planet that is.

Mark Shuttleworth apparently made his money from self digestion, and not from killing every other GNU/Linux distro or by eating babies.

Solve a bug, get a hug? Wonders will never cease.

Just when you thought you got the latest buzzword sorted out, comes a new definition of LAMP.

And on the other side, there seems to be some rumble among the communitee regarding LaunchPad, Canonical's bug-tracking, translation and project co-ordination service. This guy adds some oil to the fire.

Isaac Hayes: "Isaac Hayes has a problem"

2006-03-14T21:28:00.000+02:00

Just read.

The root of all security

2006-03-13T19:10:00.000+02:00

Anyone who reads the Tech news regularly have probably heard about the latest announcement that a flaw in the Ubuntu 5.10 installation process leaves the default user password saved as plain text on the harddrive. As Ubuntu doesn't (by default) allow for a root password to be created and instead gives the first user root abilities by way of 'sudo', this means the de-facto root password is left in plain view as plain text (pun not intended, at least not originally...), allowing other users access to the First User password.

However...
No, scratch that, I'll however in the next paragraph.
What's most surprising here isn't that Ubuntu has a security flaw, software isn't perfect, and since every new version of Ubuntu have rewrote the installer, installation flaws might appear. Actually, what's supervising here is that it took so long to locate it. A lot of the open source "evangelists" claim that those kind of bugs tend to surface more easily due to the large amount of users/developers, the access to the code, the better method of communication, the community etc. etc. This didn't happen here. Until now.

What did happen is that this was patched in hours. What did happen is that this doesn't allow outside users to have root access, only local users (and users connected remotely through SSH). It also emphasised the fact that security practices are still the best way to ensure that your system is safe from outside attacks. Meaning, users who installed the OS through the "expert" mode, and have created a root password were not in any danger, or users that following the installation have enabled root, or a root-like user (meaning creating a second user that has the sudo-root privileges , and making the First User a limited, non-sudo user) wouldn't have been compromised by this flaw.

Also interesting is the question regarding the whole sudo model. Ubuntu's decision to use sudo instead of root has brought many complaints from veteran Gnu/Linux users. Many people feel that this practice compromise the system's inherent security model and is a very good example how Ubuntu, in its attempt to be more "accessible" broke the security model.

I don't subscribe to this concept. The danger of working with a root terminal are very known, as the user might not close the terminal, or logout from root, after completing the operation. With the sudo model, leaving open a superuser terminal minimizes this by forcing you to enter a password for each root operation. Adding a second layer of distancing the default user from the root operations, by creating an "admin" user with sudo privileges is even better than the normal user/root model, as logging into "admin" would still demand the sudo password to be entered, and forgetting to close the "admin" terminal won't compromise the system.

In a similar note, I wrote in the past regarding the faulty concept that a products security is measured by the number of officially disclosed flaws. I'm happy to see that there seem to be some changes in this way of thinking.

Dapper Drake Delayed? Decisive Debate Devolves.

2006-03-11T15:25:00.000+02:00

Looks like I might not get a birthday present from Canonical next month, as Mark Shuttleworth, company owner and Ubuntu Benevolent Dictator for Life, said that he want s the distro to be delayed for six weeks for "additional validation, certification, localisation, and polish".

My opinion? Great news. The current version of the distro does everything I need and more, so it's not something that burns in my bones. I don't mind holding on for an early June release. I mentioned before how profound were the improvements in the current version (5.10 a.k.a. "Breezy Badger) over the 5.04 version (Hoary Hedgehog), and this alone makes me very, very excited towards the next release (6.04, Dapper Drake, although I guess it'll be called 6.06 now...).

Actually, the biggest issue of concern is that Ubuntu and Canonical have tried to differentiate themselves from other non-commercial GNU/Linux distribution by offering a quasi-commercial development cycle, i.e. new release every 6 months. This delay might be the first crack in the wall of excellence Ubuntu has been building around itself. Only, to be honest, I doubt it would do any actual damage.

I've previously posted my concerns that it seems the developers are concerning more on bells, whistles and gongs rather than refining the software, but it seems their hearts and minds are in the right place. For me, it's a Good Thing. I'll wait the extra weeks for something that would make my (already excellent) Ubuntu experience better.

Reclaim your office

2006-03-10T09:24:00.000+02:00

I've been bashing OpenOffice.org in some of my posts, so I guess I should set things straight.

I've been using the office suite for several years now, and exclusively for more than 2 years. I've done all my writings on it, use it for spreadsheets and presentations, the whole bunch. In fact, my current Windows partition doesn't even have MS Office. It's not as fast as I would wish, but that's a long way from being a bad application, which it isn't. It is currently a fully usable, and includes everything I need for my daily work, either at home or at the office.

In this note, OpenOffice.org (when will the decide to drop the oh-so-1998 '.org' from their name?) has just gone to version 2.0.2.

New Technology Journalism

2006-03-10T08:59:00.000+02:00

Found this at the Inquirer. It seems Nvidia's second editors rule is very simply "No leaks to the Inquirer". Too late for that, eh?

I fart in your art!

2006-03-09T13:51:00.000+02:00

Just a quick one, Evil Avatar pointed to an article in 4 Colour Rebellion which pointed to an article in Joystiq about Shigero Miyamoto being Knighted in France along with 2 other game designers.

Of course Joystiq couldn't leave well enough alone, and I quote: "With several OBEs awarded in Britain to game developers, it seems that games are becoming recognised as art--enough to deserve national honours, at least"

And there you have it! In the same way Army generals are being knighted means that war is art, football managers knighted to mean that football is recognised as art, and scientists being knighted means that science is art.
Or in other words, I would love to know how did the cunning minds in Joystiq reach that conclusion. Industries key figures have been knighted in many fields, it mostly means they have contributed to their field, or industry, in a way that is either profitable, or honorable (or both) to the country, or in a way that is extremely remarkable (or just for good PR...). Knighting has nothing with being recognised as art, sorry.

It's clobberin' time! Oi vey...

2006-03-09T08:27:00.000+02:00

A fun post to the Website at the End of the Universe shows that the Fantastic Four Thing is Jewish (proof here). It also links to a WikiPedia list of Jewish, or Jewish born superheroes and comic books characters. As always, with WikiPedia, there just HAS to be the odd item that reminds us all how unreliable WikiPedia is. In this case, one Phantom Stranger, tagged as "possibly Jewish", which is basically like saying the Christian god (all three of him) is "possibly Jewish".

The Phantom Stranger's true origin was never fully disclosured, and he is one of the more mysterious characters in the DC universe. He's supposedly immortal, spiritual, mystical and arcane character, with god-like, yet never fully discussed, powers and nature. In Secret Origins, several writers presented their version of the Stranger's origin. One of them claimed him to be an Angel, that after Lucifer's rebellion was cast away from heaven, but were forbidden entry to hell, left to eternally wander the earth. Another one had him as the Wandering Jew, and so on. Extrapolating that this means the Stranger is Jewish... I don't think so.

In Pratchett's Discworld, magical characters, such are Wizards and Witches, are said to not believe in Gods, in the same way you don't believe in doors. They're there, and they're useful, but just not something you believe in. Attributing religion to the Phantom Stranger, in my opinion, is following a similar route, as he is a demigod in his essence, and is "beyond religion". Are the angels religious? That's an obvious one, but, was Moses religious?
I don't think so. There's a pre-requisite for being attributed as "religious", which is the blind faith in your deity. I find it hard that someone who's been talking to god on a daily basis, even arguing and openly defying said god, can be said to be religious. In Comic book terms, characters like the Phantom Stranger, or the Spectre (the embodiment of the Angel of Vengeance), cannot be said to be religious.

Wonder Woman, on the other hand, is an interesting character in this aspect. In her current format, she was created from sand (clay) by the Greek Gods, she walks with them, and was even deified at a certain point. In War of the Gods, she fought with them and against them. Despite all that, she is constantly portrayed as devoutly religious, often invoking, or praying to them. Is this a case of simply a person needing something to believe in (as many religious figures would have you believe (no pun intended), belief is a natural instinct, like love or hunger), or just a plea from one on a lower level to a higher one? Most often, Wonder Woman is invoking Gaia, Which is 2 "generations" above the Greek or Roman gods, so that might be the case. Or it might be that the act of praying is what the gods accept as a form of calling or summoning. So when a god meets someone in a pub, he doesn't leave his phone number, but praying instructions. That would be it.

Create a kennel for your cat

2006-02-25T23:32:00.000+02:00

Speaking of trying to put one system on top of another, using brute and unnecessary force if needed, Here's a short, yet uninspiring article from Mono creator Miguel De Icasa's blog regarding "Using Visual Studio to develop with Mono".
In a nutshell, Mono is a free, open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET development platform for GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Solaris, and MS Windows. By supporting all those different architectures/OS Mono's actually helping to resolve a paradox, with .NET being a cross-platform development platform which is only available for Windows.

Part of the whole Mono project is their dedicated IDE called MonoDevelop, available for the GNOME desktop environment, but can basically run on any GNU/Linux or Unix machine. But apparently there are some people who must run their Mono developing-ing on Windows. Naturally, one would assume they would be using .NET as their dev platform, but no. And while working on Windows, why not get the most of the pinnacle in the IDE crown, Mr. Visual "my-way-or-the-highway" Studio. (If you misunderstand my sarcasm, I'm not what you might call a VS fan).

Now, I'm all for freedom of choice, and if someone wants to do his Mono mojo on Windows using Visual studio, let im have it, and just hope he's not actually developing a Windows application, since the extreme mass of irony will probably rip a new one in the space-time continuum. Still it's nice to see De Icasa drooling all over the VS plugin, reminding us all that free software or not, GNU/Linux revolution or not, some out there still consider Microsoft to be the one to follow, rather than to shy away from.

In and out of context

2006-02-25T23:22:00.000+02:00

This post from OSNews quotes verbatim from the article it links to, and yet, in some magical way, manages to convey exactly the opposite:

"Yesterday, I got Qt running on top of the Glib main loop. By using the QAbstractEventDispatcher API, I was able to completely replace the entire event dispatching mechanism of a Qt 4 application with less than 600 lines of code. What does this mean?"

That was exactly my question when I read the extract. Amusingly enough, the writer is actually a QT developer, and he answers his question with "No integration" rather than "I've no fucking clue". Which is more or less my answer. And keep in mind, I have some minimal understanding of what he's referring to. I guess someone with even less understanding of programming would probably use many more expletives in his answer.

One day, they'll run out of books

2006-02-25T20:51:00.000+02:00

Courtesy of the Site at the End of the Universe (whos RSS feed is constantly feeding me with up to 20 of past articles, read and unread) comes this interesting Wired article about Holliwood execs being less reluctant to authorise Philip K. Dick based Science Fiction movies. Who would've thunk it? I wonder if any of them actually read any of Dick's works to realise they stand for everything he hated. Still more power to us. Unless that power is anything like Lawnmower Man 2, *shudder*.

We put the fun in dysfunctional

2006-02-25T20:27:00.000+02:00

The main man R.Cobbett is at it again, and in full force.
Go read his take on humanity, morales, ethics, and a very stupid download form quesiton...

News, views, interviews.

2006-02-25T17:43:00.000+02:00

A lot of stuff going on lately, work, life (beta-testing the current version of it), et all.

I'll be at the OSDC for the next three days, hope to be able to write about some X-citink new and ground-shaking discoveries, or at least bump into some cool and famous guys.

There's a nice interview with one of the OpenOffice.org developers, where harsh questions like "why is OOo is so slow", "reasons for OOo being bloated and slow", and "OOo's slowness, why, dammit?". No punches are pulled, but other than "we are trying to solve it", no real answer is given. Oh well, I've always been a fan of actions speak louder than words, let's hope this is the case here.

A nice, if immensely, excruciatingly, bring-a-pillow, boring article regarding GNU/Linux distros on older hardware is available here. Most of the discussion is regarding the usual suspects, meaning Slackware and the Business-card distros (Damn Small and Puppy). I think the biggest point here is that many distros can be tweaked and adjusted to run on old hardware. A full-blown Fedora or Mandriva install won't probably work right (Actually, won't even install), but I've been having some good experience with an old laptop running "Xubuntu", which is Ubuntu using XFCE. And there are other Desktop managers like Fluxbox and FVWM that would run even faster, and allow you to use the latest and greatest software.

Two great projects, and my personal favourites, GNOME and Ubuntu, are getting propped up for their up coming major releases. Version 2.14 of GNOME, the desktop environment (or however it's called these days), is scheduled for March 15, a detailed preview of what to expect is found here.
Ubuntu, the GNU/Linux distro that warms up my screen, is also gearing up for it's 6.04 release, silly-code-named "Dapper Drake" and is scheduled to be available April 20th (hence the version number); the last alpha release "Flight 4" is already available for download, and as the project reached feature freeze, it's high time for das preview, as can be grokked here.

Most of the stuff available in both previews isn't really going to user experience, as this can't be "transferred" via screenshots. I have some issues/requests of my own with both releases:

GNOME will incorporate a more robust desktop search, which will be able to interface with Beagle, not a bad idea, assuming that Beagle is up to snuff. I have Beagle installed here, and have hardly used it. It has potential, but haven't lived to that yet, and it's biggest problem is being a resource hog. I have some of those resources-munchin apps running, and with the right amount of RAM, all those memory & CPU suckers can be satisfied, but Beagle's hunger is tantalisingly never ending. Also, if the search is dependent on Beagle to be able to do deep inter-file search (meaning not only searching for files, but also searching IN files), what's going to be the difference between it and the options we have now?

The much toted "DeskBar", the more I try to understand its functions, looks like something that, eventually, won't be of much usage to me.

GNOME's sub-folder treeview (look under File Manager here), which is incorporated to their file-manager is sweet, but I would like to have some better keyboard-manipulations. For instance, if I click on 't', I expect to get to the first file, or folder that start with that letter. Currently, it only works with the upper level, not with anything that is opened as a sub-folder.
The file-manager search is complete kerfuddle, with a "search-as-you-type" feature that chokes when you type the first letter (as you have about a zillion files that start with that letter), and can only search from the start of a file name (meaning 'boog' will find "boogleband.odf" but not "doctor_boogenboom.mp3")

YELP, the help browser, is said to have a huge face-lift and feature enhancement. Good. VERY Good. The promised ability to search and view man files is extremely welcomed, but the main target is to actually make yelp usable.

But I guess my main beef with GNOME is that the "packaged" applications are almost always not up to snuff. RhythmBox, Totem, GEdit, you name it, are the first to be replaced, and usually uninstalled. I think only Evolution is used, and probably because I don't need an email client, and use it for synching my Palm.

Which reminds me, Palm synching should work better. It's quite a mess right now.
I don't really know whether any, or all of those have been addressed in either Ubuntu or GNOME, but I would really like to see some work done on these, instead of putting all the time and effort into making a GUI installer. I don't need a GUI installer. Nobody needs one. I think people who cite the text-based installer as the biggest problem in any distro that use it has a major problem and need to have some therapy and have their computer rights revoked for a year. Made my point? I would appreciate if more man-hours would've been directed towards usability and compatibility instead of that GUI-installer.

I'm pretty optimistic, all around. Ubuntu 5.10 was light-years ahead of 5.04, in terms of ease of configuration, usability and "Out-of-the-Box work-ability". If 6.04 only partially matches that jump, it will be a very nice birthday present.

You look like you've seen an optical self-delusion

2006-02-14T11:05:00.000+02:00

I'm currently re-reading DC's Ghosts crossover. I love the art, and the writing is solid, if nothing spectacular. I especially like the underlying theme, that the superheroes are haunted by those who are a manifest of their own guilt about something they consider among their biggest errors.

However, one thing I can't "get" about this whole thing. In every single issue of the crossover, at one point, the main character will go "this can't be a ghost", or "I don't believe/you don't believe it's a ghost". I mean, C'mon. It's expect that from anyone else BUT DC's characters. After all, what exactly is the Spectre? Deadman? Those heroes deal, live and eat with the metaphysical/supernatural/occult on a daily basis, I find it a bit hard to digest that they would go skeptic all of the sudden. I know that the writers do tend to "keep it real" when it comes to characters, and those skeptic remarks are our own (as in the readers) immediate reaction, but it's quite a stretch of the suspension of disbelief.
I recall those late-seasons Star Trek: The Next Generation where one of the characters would enter and go like "I've heard voices all night" and the crew, instead of sending that character to a nice, long vacation with a nice prescription of medical drugs, would immediately start scanning for stuff and theorising on what could've caused it. It looks silly, and probably is silly, but those characters met with the unknown on a weekly, daily and hourly basis, they'd be more susceptible to accepting the metaphysical than the rational.

On the other hand, it does create some interesting reflections. At the ST:TNG episode "Journey's End", Wesley Crusher announces he is quitting Starfleet Academy (this being TNG, quitting the academy is akin to giving up all chance of post-graduate education. There are, technically, other academic institute, but in the TNG world it's "SF Academy or bust"). He gives the usual "young adult" reasoning, he doesn't "find" himself there, the pressure is too high, etc. etc. Then he meets a colony of Native Americans who refuse to be transferred from their planet due to some connection they feel with the land. He meets one of them, who takes him to a "ritual room", puts some heavy incense, which induces a trance-like state in Wesley, resulting in him seeing and talking to his dead father.

Now, let's take a different look. Had I come, several years ago to my mother, and told her that not only I'm quitting school, but I'm doing this after I inhaled some drugs that made me talk to my late father who encouraged me to not follow in his footsteps, I would really hope that my mother would have the sense to beat the crap out of my head. Literally, if necessary. Not surprisingly, this is hardly the case here. Dr. Crusher shows some maternal concern for her boy, but nothing that really hints that she thinks he did anything wrong, or is making a bad decision. While at it, Picard nearly rekindles a war with the Cardassians rather than kick the hell out of the Native Americans, just because they have this "bond" with the land, so there you have it.

Ridiculous as it may sound, this is perfectly in theme with the rest of the series, a bit to the extreme, granted, but not something we haven't seen before. Having the Flash doubt the existence of ghosts, is just bad writing.

Everything you know is wrong

2006-02-14T10:38:00.000+02:00

Apparently I'm not the only one who "doesn't get it". Ever misinterpreted an email or an IM for being the opposite of what it was. Child, you're not alone.
Although I rather be alone than going hunting with Dick Cheney. Let me guess, guns don't kill people, people do? Try to use that line again. While at it, if you do go hunting with the VP, make sure to bring this visual aide with you. Not that he needs a gun to kill you, mind, as you know, if there's a will, there's a way (although if Law & Order, CSI and the rest are correct, when you do write a will, don't tell anybody). (Thanks to BoingBoing for the links). Of course, it might be that he was checking for WMD on that guy

Speaking of will (nice connection, eat your heart, new journalism), here are the shining knights of will power, the Green Lanterns. Courtesy of Monitor Duty comes a nice recap of what is probably DC's more interesting (if somewhat ridiculously over-the-top) heroes. Of course, everyone has his favourite GL, and while that GL is usually one Hal Jordan, mine's actually Alan Scott and Guy Gardner. I got acquainted with Alan Scott by reading the All Star Squadron, and that got my attention. Especially the story where he demolishes entire Japanese villages in a blind rage. His breakdown at the end of that issue is one of my best memories from a Comic book.

Video Games Journalists Hold Breath, Get Blue in the Face

2006-02-02T07:06:00.000+02:00

In yet another case of Gaming Journalistic giants collision, Kyle Orland from the VGMwatch comments on a comment made by 1UP's John Davison.
In a column with a dozen or so 2006 predictions, Davison writes 'Games journalists will stop writing "the thing that's wrong with games journalism" musings, and start actually fucking doing something about it.' To which Orland replies '... But just because you’re yelling at the wind doesn’t mean you aren’t, on some level, yelling at yourself at the same time ... I think anyone who complains about game journalism has to reflect, at some point, on how their own writing measures up to the ideals they’re espousing.'

And to which I say: Stop splashing in your pond and call it a tsunami.
Why is it that I don't see movie critics release article after article about "state of Movie Journalism", even though a huge percentage of written material about movies is based on, or is promotional releases? We've seen those "interviews" which made of dozens of reporters waiting in line to get 15 minutes out of a half-asleep actor/director/whatever, then blowing it up to a full, three pages, front page article. So what, goes the communal opinion, we all know the rules of the game.

The movie "reports" are almost entirely PR in disguise, the interviews are mostly fake, and the gossip/rumours is at the bottom of the yellow barrel, but the movie reviews are mostly independent, free of commercial dictation, and true to the opinion of the critic. It might not be a fair tradeoff, but nobody really cares. In fact, of the whole loop, those receiving the short end of the stick are the critics, probably for not taking place in the whole charade. Not surprising, as movies are supposed to entertain. So we get an entertaining total package of marketing bliss, occasionally marred by the odd spoil-sport critic. These are the rules of the game.

The same could be said about the music journalistic world, while acknowledging the differences, not in favour of objectivity, or commercial free reporting, as music reporters exist almost solely on record-company-paid trips to live shows and events, music critics are bombarded with free material and are often over-saturated with new releases, the radio playlists are almost exclusively dominated by but commercially promoted material, you get the drift. It's all a huge festival centred on one common trait: create hype for your latest release and shove it into music buyers' pockets.

But that's the whole point isn't it?
Getting all high and mighty about Video Games Journalism is just ignoring the fact that this is a commercial media, not a philanthropic one. Everyone's out to make money, a fact no New Gaming Journalism manifesto can change. It's time to get on with the show, the way you do with every other popular media. Find the writers you like, ignore those you dislike, etc. It gets us more glittering events coverage and better "Hollywood" chic, but it means almost everything you see is free advertising. Sort of like politics.

An analogous analogy

2006-01-31T14:17:00.000+02:00

Nintendo Advance with Yet-Another-Article-About-Video-Console-Controllers, makes the following statement regarding the Atari 2006 controller:
"Long before Nintendo arrived with the Nintendo 64 and made analog sticks mandatory on a controller, Atari experimented with the 2600 joystick. Unfortunately for Atari, and any of those who tried playing with this controller, it was too bulky and difficult for anyone with small hands to hold ... The joystick only had eight directions, so in technicality it wasn’t an analog joystick. Lastly with all the problems that plagued the controller, the absence of a pause button only made it worse, when the joystick stopped working, you couldn’t even pause the game."

A paragraph about the Atari 2006, with no actual content bar claiming the joystic was un-holdable, unmanageable and unplayable. Are those well researched facts, or does the writer vents his frustration of not being able to get past Pitfall!'s first level? A bit easier now to see why it's called "Nintendo Advanced" and not "GameSpot". I also like the "no pause button" on the controller meaning "when the joystick stopped working, you couldn’t even pause the game." I would like to know how do you pause a game with a dysfunctional controller? How does hitting a button on a non-working controller pauses a game?

But a couple of words, if you may:

"Long before ...(the N64) made analog sticks mandatory on a controller, Atari experimented with the 2600 joystic". What's the connection here? why not "Long before the Nintendo Gamecube had buttons, the Atari joystick had a button?" Also, the writer takes the wrong POV on the whole matter.
Atari's joystick and button design was considered the 'de-facto' standard until Nintendo came with the D-Pad four-directional button design for their Nintendo Entertainment System controller. It took quite a long while before Nintendo came back with the analogue controller concept, which also, in its turn became the de-facto standard (as did the SNES shoulder buttons).

This weird analogy between the N64 analogue stick and the Atary2006 joystick becomes more apparent here: "The joystick only had eight directions, so in technicality it wasn’t an analog joystick." This makes more sense. The guy simply has no clue about anything. Directions not make a joystic analogue. Analogue control means that different pressure on the control gets different outcomes. The joystick can move to 360 directions, but if a nudge right and a full pull to the right doesn't give you different moves, it's not analogue (meaning that your game character moves slower when you move the controller a bit, and run at full speed when you pull it all the way).
Controllers also have analogue buttons, which can only be pushed, so you can say they only have "2 directions". They are, however, fully analogue.
(side note, I don't pretend to know exactly how "analogue" was the Atari 2006 joystick as I have never actually used it.)

(Update: The guy's a barrel of laughter alright. The Nintendo Entertainment System is referred to as "The NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and Famicom (as it was referred to in Japan)". Of course, it's the other way round, as the system was called Famicom and the US version was called NES. Then he adds "the controller had ... a four way directional D-Pad, which was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, as a superior alternative to the joysticks from Atari." Actually the D pad was designed for the Game-and-Watch systems as a practical solution to the controlling problem those games offered, as they couldn't have a joystick attached to them. But you gotta love the "superiour" part. He later claims that "Nintendo decided to bring the analog stick to offer complete 3D control." How can 3d control be achieved with an analogue stick, heavens only knows.)

Holy recursive references, Batman!

2006-01-31T12:52:00.000+02:00

Pointing towards the Lowell Sun, a post already risen to fame concerning over 1000 edits to Wikipedia made from US government IP addresses. Most of these were made by interns working for congresspersons, and didn't involve much more than padding up relevant entries, however, the bigger spiel refers to one U.S. Rep Marty Meehan, who's staff edited his bio in the following way: Instead of "Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 ... As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts."
The edited entry read: "Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004."
Lovely, even thought they forgot to add "God bless America".

A quick jump to said Wikipedia entry reveals that indeed the damage has been undone: "Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 ... Meehan made a pledge not to serve more than four terms. He won the 1992 election and was re-elected to Congress every two years since, including the latest election (2004). On the House floor in 1995 he scolded members who might go back on their promise to limit their tenure in office. "The best test of any politicians' credibility on term limits," he said, "is whether they are willing to put their careers where their mouths are and limit their own service." Despite this peldge (sic), he again ran for Congress in the year 2000, exceeding four terms. [2]"

Nice one. See if they dare remove it. But, what's the [2] in the article stands for? It's actually referenced to an article in a site called the US Term Limit about politicians running on the promise to quit after X terms, but have some issues with actually keeping that promise. However, unless you click or hover over the link, there is no indication that this is a link to an outside article and not an inner link to a note or referendum (unless you're familiar with Wikipedia's system of placing links to notes and references in superscript). If you do check the "item [2]" in the articles notes, lo and behold, you'll find:
Lehmann, Evan. "Rewriting history under the dome". Lowell Sun Online. January 27, 2006.

This got me thinking. The Lowell Sun wrote about the change in Wikipedia's entry, which, after returning the original content "linked" to the Lowell Sun as a source! Isn't that like anything said in a Libel suit can be published as "quotes from the trial" despite being libel?

Of course, I'm just taking it too far, as the real paragraph linking to the Lowell Sun article was the one where the Wikipedia incident was mentioned (emphasises mine): "On 18 July 2005, U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan's staff made controversial changes to his Wikipedia article. These edits consisted of, among other things, removing verified facts that portrayed him in a bad light. On January 27, 2006, Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, admitted to authorizing a replacement article on Meehan published on Wikipedia, with a staff-written biography.[2] This ran afoul of internal Wikipedia guidelines and possibly federal law."

Oh my. Let's start with the simpler ones, "Controversial" is in the eye of the beholder. You'd expect that the writer would use this, taking Wikipedia's side, but keep in mind that Wikipedia, according to the Lowell Sun 'promotes a "neutral point of view" policy.' Hehe. sorry. Low blow.
Nos. 2, is the "his" reference. I assume the writer meant "this" (actually I don't assume it, but let's get on with it), as the Wikipedia entry about Rep Meehan is not exactly "his". "About him" yes, "of him", could be. "His"? Nope. Of course, Wikipedia writers tend to see themselves as the definitive article. In this way of thinking, writing an entry regarding person X is "the entry to end all entries". And as such should be treated with all respect and integrity.

Which brings us to "possibly federal law."
In a nutshell, WHAT?
Did I fell asleep or did someone hinted that Meehan's staff actions are against Federal Law? I truly hope whoever did this didn't log from home, as this goes way beyond libel.
Just to further clarify matters, here is the correlating paragraph from the Lowell Sun article (emphasises mine): "The changes by Meehan's staff are not as "reprehensible" as inserting derogatory comments in someone else's entry, said Stephen Potts, former director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, which establishes conduct standards for the executive branch."

Still with me? Ethics, not law. Conduct standards, not law. OTHER PEOPLE, not Meehan's staff.
After all the brouhaha about Meehan's staff editing this and editing that, there goes annonymous poster X and just, based on what apparently is nothing more than a customary glance at the original article, hints that the editing goes against Federal law. I would love to know which law that would be.

(Update: Going through the editing made to the Wikipedia article, it seems that the original text was "changes to the Wikipedia article about him" which was changed to "his wikipedia article" by Wikipedia user Achille for reasons of "Grammar". Feh.
The "possible federal law" bit was added by a user named Sukiari, no basis for this was given.
In both cases, this was the only change made, removing the possibility of a slip-up)

1024x768

2006-01-30T17:27:00.000+02:00

That's a joke BTW, about resolutions.

I keep noticing a trend in my posts, where I start a parenthesis, and then develop it to a full blown paragraph, never realising I need to close off a bracket. This is the evil of Code Completion. You just get used to the fact that something will notify you of keeping a bracket open.

Also, I should refrain in the future about not posting for several days, then doodle something about parenthesis and call it a day.

would have broken both of her arms

2006-01-28T16:58:00.000+02:00

I think the title of this short review says it all: "Marble Blast Ultra Fun, But Not Addictive".

I don't know about anyone else, but I just cring in dismay and, may I say, loathing upon this title. My opinions on "Addictive" are documented elsewhere, and while I'm no Tom Chick, I quite agree with his aversion to games being rated on the "fun" level. (In a nutshell, "fun" is a completely subjective element which has no similar meanings with any two different human beings. One sees fun in micro managing the Nth unit out of another gazillion ones, while the other sees fun in playing solitaire. Not that I have anything against subjectiveness in reviews (which are, after all, opinions), but saying that "Game X is fun" tells me nothing about it, unlike saying "Game X is a RTS with some heavy micro-management needed" or "Game X is a simple puzzle game like Tetris".
Fun is not a way to describe games, or anything else. It's simply not a description.

Try this as a test, supposed your friend/family/coworker comes back from the weekend and you ask him/her "what did you do on the weekend", to which comes the answer "we had fun". I believe this settles it, but just for the sake of the joke, let's continue the discussion: "Yes, but which kind of fun?" "There's only one kind of fun." And so on. That kind of discussion is no fun. At least in my opinion.

Somebody else

2006-01-28T16:38:00.000+02:00

Even if you don't frequent OneAndOneIs2, you're probably familiar with the author's "Linux is not Windows" article. One of the examples of functionality Vs. User-Friendliness is given by comparing VI's method of copying 5 lines to the bottom of the page (type d5d Shift-g p) to any Microsoft text editor (selecting the 5 lines block by either keyboard or mouse, cutting, scrolling to the bottom and pasting). Now this seems fairly straight forwards and simple. However, one guy didn't find it as straightforward. While both this article and OneAndOne's rebuttal tell the whole story, please notice what, according to PC Pipeline is the actual process of getting those 5 lines copied down:
ESC
d5d
ENTER
:Shift-g
ENTER
:p

My immediate reaction upon seeing this was "uh... no". Now I'm no VI guru, but where the hell did all those ':' and ENTERs come from? Click on the links for the whole story, I'll just laugh away here.

(I realise the link is to VIm's site and not VI's. Find me VI's site and I'll link to it)

I'm gonna stop wastin' my time

2006-01-28T16:19:00.000+02:00

I've recently made some comments about online RPGs, which, regardless of how true, they fail to catch the really important issue. Gold Farming. I'm hardly an expert on this, but from my understanding, these are groups, or evern companies that play MMORPGs for days and hours on end, collecting money, experience and items, and then sell them for real-world money. I assume the logic here is, if you already paying for a: the game and b: the right to play it, you might just as well pay for c: gold and items.

It's such an infallible logic that makes you understand why spam still thrives despite some technology moguls promises from 2 years ago. It would seem that people are dumb. Insanely so. You know all the SF stories about getting rid of all the mentally ill and ending up with a disfuncional world? Yep, we have reached that point.

We can Dick you

2006-01-28T05:44:00.000+02:00

More Philip K. Dick in the media, Boingboing once again with the spiel regarding a Robert Silverberg article in the Asimov's science fiction magazine about Philip K. Dick and his "predictions" coming true. Actually, from the article it seems that Silverberg reflects less on the prophetic concepts in K. Dick's work, or the inventions-come-realities concepts (which Dick's book didn't have), but more on his concepts of reality and what the future man will be.

On the other hand, some may say we already live in the future.

Packages and interestingies

2006-01-27T14:54:00.000+02:00

Just had the coolest dream with a full blown comic story. Forgot all about it, natch.

I've been using LyX for some time now, and have fallen in deep love with it. My only problem was that once again, the Ubuntu version was one step behind the version available. A quick search in the LyX's ftp server was just what the doctor ordered, as the 1.3.7 version is there in full Ubuntu packages glory.

I wish the same could be said of Gaim, it seems those guys believe the world begins and ends with Red Hat's Fedora. I can understand someone ignoring Ubuntu (but not for long, mind you!), but no Debian package? Insanity.

Losing reality, gaining domain

2006-01-27T14:41:00.000+02:00

The honorable Richard Cobbett, true friend of the above and below and a source for inspiration, always (tongue goes back in mouth now), has made a transaction of the less (or more) journalistic-inclined matter (aka, the blog) from their previous place of residence to a whole new domain name, patched in a cool template, and let it rip.

The new blog is titles Not Really Richard, and is definitely worth taking a look, and more. Of course, for a collection of Mr. Cobbett esq. Journalistic works, the old domain is still there.

Follow ups and downs.

2006-01-25T16:15:00.000+02:00

Some recent stuff I found which, in one way or the other resonate with stuff I wrote previously. Just interesting to see other people's takes on stuff I opinionated on:

Hideo Kojima, Director of the Metal Gear Solid games (and the Metal Gear ones, but who's counting) claims that, believe it or not, Games Are Not Art. He compares video games to cars, saying that "an actual car, like a videogame, is interactive, ... There are 100 people driving a car; they have 100 ways of driving it and using it ... So this car has to be able to be driven by all 100 of these people, so in that sense, it's totally not art". In his opinion, video games contain art, and the video games directors/producers' job is similar to "running a museum".
I find his opinions nicely resonating with some of my own on the matter. Looking forward to read the full interview once it becomes available.

In other news, Gaim, the multi-protocol Instant Messaging software, just released it's second beta. I've written quite at length about it and my experience with it. Sadly, no word on any Ubuntu adoption of it, yet. Not that I'm going to experiment with it... Yet.

Unlike the respected Mr. Jakub Wojnarowicz, I have no problem expressing my love for all things Nintendo, but this disturbing image of a mocked-mushed-up Zelda Revolution controller just irritates me to no end.
To which I can only say, ahem... IT MUST BE MINE!!!!!!!!!!111

Peter Pan in Scarlet. Why, goddamit?

2006-01-23T09:09:00.000+02:00

Now here's a nice thing to ruin your day.
According to the BBC, there is a Peter Pan sequel in the making, called "Peter Pan in Scarlet" and was written by one Geraldine McCaughrean, who's talent, it seems, focused on "reinterpreting" classics such as Noah's Ark, Moby Dick and The Canterbury Tales for younger readers.

Let's pull over for a second. Noah's Ark, Moby Dick and the Canterbury Tales? One is a 2 page story from the bible, the second one a huge, sprawling epic, and the third a middle-English collection of several tales of dark ages vice. Other than stomping on their heads, stripping them out to the bare bones, and then crossing out all the "naughty" things, sugar coating whatever is left and hanging it to dry, I don't see what exactly can this "reimagination" business be. Also, this is yet another writer specialising in making a living off other people's work, which is the OBVIOUS choice to crap all over J. M. Barrie's work, as any serious, original artist will never even dream of touching Peter Pan.

Back to the topic in hand. London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, holders of the Peter Pan rights decided to create a sequel, and hired the aforementioned writer to do it. Apparently raking in the money from James Matthew Barrie's novel and whatever merchandise/movies/TV series made of it wasn't enough, they are out to destroy the remains of the original by publishing a book that will have as much to do with Peter Pan as Disney's Winnie The Pooh has to do with A.A. Milne's works. That hack writer of them has apparently created a "high adventure, and swashbuckling danger". Fitting, as the original had nothing to do with any of those. Barrie's book was a story of children's view of the world, of child-like fear of growing, of infant morality, sex, and nightmares coming true. The whole pirate angle was just a way of realising those themes in what was, for the time, the popular trend in children literature. Had he lived today, he'll probably write about Superheroes and Pokemons.

They didn't stop there, mind you. From the article "The trustees stipulated the book must feature the original characters - Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell, the rest of the Darling family and the fearsome Captain Hook." Right. Heavens forbid anyone actually READ Peter Pan, where Captain Hook DIED.
Sod it, just read for yourself:

"Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him; so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say about himself.
She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.
"Who is Captain Hook?" he asked with interest when she spoke of the arch enemy.
"Don't you remember," she asked, amazed, "how you killed him and saved all our lives?"
"I forget them after I kill them," he replied carelessly.
When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said, "Who is Tinker Bell?"
"O Peter," she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.
"There are such a lot of them," he said. "I expect she is no more."
I expect he was right, for fairies don't live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them.
...
Next year he did not come for her. She waited in a new frock because the old one simply would not meet; but he never came. ".

No John. No Tinker Bell. No Captain Hook, only Michael, who's still almost an infant, and Wendy. And that's one year after, Peter only came back once, and that was when Wendy was already a mother herself. Thank you, noble copyright holders and trustees for "insisting" on the one aspect of the story that makes it clear that you haven't even read the original.

Oh, and it probably bears mentioning why did those noble trustees came up with this mess all of the sudden. From the BBC article: "Royalties from the new book will be split between the author and the hospital, whose ownership of the rights to Barrie's work is due to expire in 2007". Isn't that comfy? They only have one more year of milking it dry, so they give it all they got. "The success of Peter Pan in Scarlet will ensure that Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children will benefit from Barrie's legacy for many years to come" says the Hospital spokesperson. Read: we're going to lose the steady income we've been getting from Barrie's work, so we just made a new one that will compensate for this. They hired a paint-by-numbers author, gave her marching orders to create a sequel featuring all the known characters, and make it a "fun" book. They didn't want a re-visioning of Barrie's work in modern eyes. They didn't want to pursue the themes and ideas he painted in his works. They wanted a "franchise sequel", with all the original characters, and to hell with whatever integrity the name Peter Pan still has.

You know, I've seen the Disney movie, where Peter and Wendy looked like two naive teenagers and Hook was a cookie-cutter bad guy. I've seen some snippets of an animated series, which was as interesting as watered down milk. None have made me so furious as this one. Fortunately, the book is out of copyright next year, so that would be the last thing those people has to do with it. If only the same could be said of Disney.

Death wears no clothes

2006-01-23T06:50:00.000+02:00

I'm not into MMORPGs or whatever they are called these days. Never saw the point in paying monthly for a game I already owned, never saw the point in paying monthly for what is basically a 3d chatroom combined with a shallow RPG experience. Never saw the point in paying monthly for a game that demands dozens of hours on end for just reaching level 10 (I can get that for free just by playing Baldur's Gate). I think the monthly payment is what mostly had me off. And the games didn't really offer me something extra that would make me invest the money and the hours. Not to mention that I can put aside any game I'm playing and get back to it a month later without having to worry about a month I paid without playing. Not to mention that when a new expansion is released everyone has to buy it in order to have the privilege of accessing the new areas in a game they already have been paying for monthly for over a year.

At any rate, I'm not an online RPG player, one way or the other. So I might not "get" the point in the next thing I'm going to mention. This Wonderland article mentioned some (very nice indeed) concept art from "Guild Wars", with a link to even more concept art. What piqued my interest is actually this link to flickr collection of 2 factions from the game, the Assassin and the Ritualist.

Now, call me old fashioned, but don't both character seem to be somewhat lacking in terms of clothing? I don't know about the Ritualist (I guess there's more than one way pleasing the ghosts, if you catch mah drift), but I can't really see that assassin in that outfit. Especially if you check the head-gear. It seems that they had a very limited budget that could have gone either to clothes or to a headgear. If you take a look at the assassin, just to push the point, it looks completely ridiculous. (Speaking of which, why would an assassin need to hide her face? It's not like your victims will be in any state to recognise you). I think Soul Calibur's Taki had a better take on the whole thing, She wore a full body, tight fitting suit, which is a lot more reasonable. As a thief/assassin, any loose garment might get caught in some nail or the likes when you climb the fence/wall. She did have a mask in Soul Calibur, which, I guess was later dropped. Again, in comparison, Guild Wars assassin is all about loose garments, from skirt to jacket. I guess the idea is that she's dressed like that to her victims a very nice parting gift.

Again, I'm familiar with the females in fantasy, and the whole "wouldn't a chain armour be a better choice than that leather bra?" concept. It's not a one-way discussion, as having your heroine run around in (leather) underclothes is not much more sensible than having your hero run, jump and climb in full plate armour. But you can keep the eye-candy appeal without sacrificing your common sense. Take Xena for example. I also couldn't help noticing that both new classes were a bit morbid in nature. I guess someone has to cater to the Goth kids. That would explain the outfits as well.

gmail has a bug. Period.

2006-01-22T19:49:00.000+02:00

Recently some news have been popping up and down regarding a certain bug that Google's Gmail service has, that when someone is using a dot in his user name (sort of like erez.schatz@gmail.com) and another user has the same username, minus the dot (erezschatz@gmail.com), the email sent to the dotted client will arrive at the non-dotted one, or the other way around.
This has been supported by some and debunked by others. However, it's not a hoax.

I have several "sleeper" accounts with gmail, for reasons I don't even recall, each auto relaying messages to my main email account, and two of them using a dot in the user name as a separator between words, I've received emails sent to those two accounts which were obviously not sent to me. The "to" field in the email clearly showed that the emails were sent to the firstsecond@gmail.com address, rather than to the first.second@gmail.com.

The oddest thing here, is that the whole "point as separator" concept was suggested by gmail as an alternative when your username was already taken. On the other hand, it might be that this bug was introduced recently. At any rate, I doubt it'll hang around for long, what with Google's army of programmers probably tearing their communal asses in fixing it. Only everything one reads about Google gives the impression they don't really care... We'll wait and see.

Do P.K. Dick fans dream of electric books?

2006-01-22T18:47:00.000+02:00

Been sitting on those links for a while now, curtsey of the Double Boing regarding Philip K. Dick, who is also one of my favourite authors, apart from being an excellent writer.

For starters, we have the latest episode of Benjamen Walker's Theory Of Everything radio show, where he discusses Philip K. Dick's works with Jonathan Lethem and Josh Glenn .

Following that, this Philip K. Dick fansite offers a scanning of a comic magazine "Weirdo" which on its 18th issue offered a story called The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick. It's based on the events described by Dick in Valis, regarding some sort of religious, almost messianic experience he underwent during 1974, following which he wrote what later become his Valis trilogy. I tend not to recommend those books. Not because I don't like them, but because talking about them creates a huge expectation among the listener. That listener might go and buy those books expecting something out of this world. He might just find that, or he might find a pathos filled religious mambo jumbo without too much real content. It's sort of like listening to a Peter Hammill concert. I would sit there thinking this is the greatest experience of my life, another might try to sneak out the first moment he can.

Another nicety about this comic is that it is being created by R. Crumb which is a great comic artist with a very well recognised and well defined style. I sort of think about him as the father of many contemporary cartoons like Ren and Stimpy and their copiers.

The final piece of the trilogy is another radio show, this time from the BBC Radio 4. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, writer Ken Hollings discusses the Valis experience and tries to separate the writer from the work.

A word of warning, though. If anyone isn't familiar with the work of PK Dick, I suggest reading one of his earlier books like Ubik, rather than trying to familiarise with the author based on those links. They discuss the later, less communicative Dick, and might give one the wrong impression about what the rest of Dick's works are like. To anyone familiar with Dick, this is an excellent way to find out about the late works and this weird world he lived in during his final years.

You need help

2006-01-21T20:41:00.000+02:00

Those who've been with Ubuntu since the previous version are probably familiar with the UbuntuGuide, now, the guide has been resurrected and updated, and can be found here.

Keep in mind, it's still "unofficial", as much as that can mean anything. The official Starter Guide is here.

ReClam your web

2006-01-21T02:23:00.000+02:00

LifeHacker with the Gospel, A new Firefox extention called ClamWin Glue allows you to tie the open-sourced/free-software anti-virus ClamWin with your Firefox downloads, thus solving one of the biggest issues with the ClamAV derivative. It doesn't say whether it works with ClamAV for GNU/Linux (which is probably not), but then again...

Shock, Horror and Awe

2006-01-21T00:34:00.000+02:00

According to Giant-Panda.com, the Panda is a bear after all! Now that's disheartening. Or not. I'm too confused.

Speaking of shocking the news, the winner of the ChessVariants Pages "10-chess" contest has been announced, and it's not me. Not that surprising, as I didn't make it to the finals this year.

Also, regarding my previous post, found this at the Video Game Media Watch: The NYTimes offer the guide to Internet trolls, or how we here like to call them "The noisy kids who make a lot of rukus in forums and talkbacks and scare people like FiringSquad's Editor-In-Chief Jakub Wojnarowicz into writing self-discreting 'Disclaimers' about his lack of professionalism in fear of being called 'Fanboy' for having the audacity to make an opinion."

I am not a journalist

2006-01-20T21:27:00.000+02:00

Not me, of course, never claimed to be one.
I'm talking about Jakub Wojnarowicz from the self proclaimed "Home of the hardcore gamer" FiringSquad. This is the first paragraph of an article posted on that site (and linked by EvilAvatar) titled "Nintendo: For the win":

"Disclaimer: I am not a Nintendo fan. Of all Nintendo systems, I only owned the NES, GBA, and briefly, the SNES. The N64 was a subject of my humor and the GameCube earned immediate contempt for its storage format and the vastly inadequate memory cards it came with (it took 3 or 4 to save a season of Madden with rosters on release). Regular readers of the site will have no doubt read many of my scathing comments about the Revolution controller design."

Now, just in plain, simple words, what the hell is this guy's problem?
Do you see any other analyst column starting with the "I am not an Oracle fan"? "Of all HP's brands I only had..."? "WinXP Home was a subject of my humour"?
You don't, even if those articles were titled "Company X: For the win". It's just something you don't do as it A: discredit yourself as a writer, B: discredit your article as being unprofessional (since if it is professional, no one should think you're a "fanboy") C: discredit your profession, since if positive articles are "fanboism", and negative articles are "bashing", how serious do you want anyone to take you and your peers? And D: discredit your readers. If Wojnarowicz thinks FiringSquad readers really need that "disclaimer" before the article, it doesn't speak highly of what he thinks of them.

Try any review, or commentary about Nintendo, Microsoft of Sony's new (and old) consoles, and you'll never see those "disclaimers". Not for a bad commentary/analysis/review, not for a good one, and, would you believe it, not even if the writer is an in-your-face flat-out Nintendo fanboy! Why is that? Because that's what a commentary/analysis/review is all about, which is having an opinion, and expressing it. Some give both sides of the argument, some only one side, some are reporting and some are preaching, but that's quite alright, because all of them are looking at the current state of affairs and sounding off their opinions on it.

On a similar matter, Wojnarowicz description of his Nintendo experience is, for lack of other words, embarrassing. From a person writing for a site that claims to be one of the "big guns", I would expect a bit more than his "Nintendo resume". Not owning the SNES (or whatever briefly means)? Using the N64, home of Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye as nothing more than a "subject of my humour" and have nothing to say about the NGC, who offers Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, both being hailed as the best games released at their respected years other than blaming it for EA programmers' buggy memory usage in their Madden games? Not good for a person who is the site's "Editor-in-Chief, Games" (just bothered to look at his profile). At least GameSpy's writers lie about playing every game since SpaceWars (better in the sense that they realise that NOT playing those games might make their opinion undervalued in the eyes of their readers).

I don't really know how "big" is FiringSquad, to be honest. I know Tom Chick used to write for them, so they're "big" enough to be able to pay their writers, and I seem to recall their reviews being stretched over multiple pages, so they probably could pay a lot of money to their writers. Disregarding this issue, I doubt that there's a high air of professionalism in a site who's Editor In Chief has this to say about game review scores: "Though game review scores live in their own little world of the 60-90% range (with everything below being reserved for Daikatana and Mortyr)".

Fallo la subestimacian su registro neto del libro que usa

2006-01-19T08:34:00.000+02:00

(To anyone fluent in Spanish, the title was botched in purpose. It was Google-translated, but from a very garbled English original)

I've been using Bloglines as my RSS reader for a long time now, and up until now had almost zero complaints. Not only that, but every other similar solution I tried sent me back almost immediately. But, recently, I had encountered two interesting glitches. The first was a bit annoying, as it failed to count the actual number of new post in the C|net news feed, giving it as zero despite the actual number being around a hundred. Later, it failed to remove read posts from that feed. Only this morning did it report 125 new messages (about 115 of them I read already), and cleaned them, so that's one been solved.
The bigger, albeit less irritating and more odd-ish is the language issue. About a week ago, after I upgraded FireFox to 1.5, the Bloglines page would start with either Chinese or Japanese characters (can't really tell the difference). After the first page reload (which it does once I click on a feed), it sorted back to English. A couple of days ago, my work FireFox started showing the page in German, but also returned to English after the first reload.
Now it's in Spanish for almost two days, and apparently quite happy there, as it won't go back to English no matter what. My home computer show it in English, though.
I guess this is one way of opening people to other cultures.

In other news, Google Talk opened their protocol, which enables Google users to communicate directly with users of Linux IM client Gaim. As a happy Gaim user, this fills me with joy to no end.

(Update: Just like that, Bloglines returned to ye aulde English, wonders will never cease)

Sometimes you get kicked

2006-01-18T19:01:00.000+02:00

Brass Lantern, apart from having the one of the coolest names on the web, is also a great source for everything Interactive Fiction. This time, the information is regarding a new plugin for jEdit, named Inform SideKick, which adds features to jEdit, making it into a DE (Develop Environment) for the Inform game system.
In a nutshell, Inform is a scripting language used to create Interactive Fiction games (alias Text Adventures). Like most scripting languages it's a combination of the actual language, as well as an interpreter. It's similar (I don't really know to which magnitude) to the actual language used in the Infocom games (such as A Mind Forever Voyaging, Planetfall, and that other one).

The actual plug-in looks pretty neat, if I attempt to judge from the screenshots, it's based on the KickBack plugin, for the code formatting/completion, and the ErrorList plugin, for marking errors in the script.
My only issue here is that I've tried working with that combination to use jEdit as a Java DE, which wasn't exactly a remarkable experience. Things didn't work the way they should, and some serious tweaking was needed. After that, it got better, but still had major issues, and response time was horrible. In other words, the screenshots look nice, but they are no indication of how much work you need to invest in order to get those features up and running, and no indication of what exactly "running" means (could be walking, or limping, mind you). On the other side, I never claimed to be the final authority on these matters, or any authority at all. So if anyone's interesting in this, and had a good experience with jEdit, then by all means, this just might be the plugin for you.

Animal house

2006-01-14T08:48:00.000+02:00

Saw this at Cute Overload, some Japanese folks have created a site where they post pictures of Panda dolls. Wonders will never cease.

I've also been recently obsessed with owls. I'm looking for some really cool owl desktop. Any ideas?

Ostensibly maintainable eccentricities

2006-01-14T07:23:00.000+02:00

I've returned to an old passion of mine. No, not sex. NetHack. I've sunk more hours into that bugger than I did on many later games. Although not as much as I sunk in Rogue, though. Funny thing is, I never really beat, or came even close to beating any of those two. Just played them for ages. I'm not going to go in details about what is NetHack, what are Roguelike games etc. It's an experience best experienced, rather than told. Of course, if you have an aversion to crude ASCII graphics, don't even think of downloading it (There's a cutesy bitmap tiles version that comes with the game now, but for some unexplained, and most likely depraved reason, it just doesn't cut it for me.

Another thing that comes to mind concerning RogueLike games, is that they are usually associated with the ghastly term known as "addictive gameplay". This, for some reason is supposed to be a Good Thing. It's not. Like Immersion and "fun factor" this isn't something that can be defined, or created. Some can sink hours upon hours in Civilization, others in World of Warcraft, while others play Counter-Strike for days straight. There isn't anything even similar about those games, and yet they all have been attributed the "addictive" crown.

I've read the odd article about those (and others) games being about small progression, rewarding the player with small, or larger rewards for each stage he completes (levels, tech advances, etc) , with the requirements for each new step getting steeper and steeper. Also, another attribute is the occasional (and usually random) finds, such as unique items. While this is true, and easily applicable to many other "addictive" games (The diablo series, and it's spiritual heritage of the Roguelike games immediately comes to mind), it's also applicable to almost every game out there. RPGs are most easily defined by these qualities. RTS as well (tech trees, getting new units, missions getting longer and harder with bigger rewards).

However, this is not the general rule at all. The FPS genre, which is known to be seriously "addictive" does not include those attributes. Even more extreme, the puzzle genre doesn't even come close to include those traits. It is true that contemporary designers like PopCap insert their games with many elements that are designed to increase the addictive element, such as player level system, highly responsive game environment (items react to mouse overs, music changes with the game, etc) rewards that increase and expand the gameplay and more, but can the same be said of Microsoft Solitaire, or MineSweeper? Hardly. Those games, the scourge of office productivity offers none of the above. In fact, in term of game design, those two are supposed to be anything BUT addictive, offering the exact same pointless experience every time, with no rewarding, progressing or anything even similar.

So what is that addictive element? Apparently, human nature. We, and not game design, supply the added element that makes a game addictive. In fact, calling a game "addictive" is actually a misnomer. It suggests that the game has qualities that make us addicted to it, which it isn't. When we call a game "addictive" we mean it "sucks you in" and makes you play it for hours. That's not addictive. Addictive, or narcotic substances creates a temporary change in the mind, or body, chemistry, altering our reaction to the environment, but, and much more importantly, also cause a withdrawal effect to occur.

In the end, it's all about people. We get addicted to games, even to simple, mind numbing repetitive ones like Solitaire. We get addicted to online chats, to TV watching, to food, to sleep, you name it. It doesn't have to alter the pleasure cores in our brain, or mess with our sensory perception to make us addicted, and it definitely doesn't have to cause us a physical withdrawal discomfort. We develop those ourselves. It's perfectly human nature.

Stuff of the day

2006-01-13T04:41:00.000+02:00

Cool page of the day:
Saw this via Kotaku, a comparison of American and Japanese Xbox covers. Interesting comparisons, not exactly what you thought. Most people might be under the impression that either a: the Japanese get the better covers, or b: The Japanese get some dolled up "anime" style covers. In reality, it's neither, both, and something else completely.

Cool Visual Component of the day:
It's a VS.NET Windows Form component, so it's not exactly something I would even consider under pain of pain to attach the word "cool" or "recommended" to, but, all things considered, this mind-map component called TreeGX is really nice, if only it didn't belong to that cardinal sin called Visual Basic. For anyone interested in Mindmaps, I still find FreeMind to be the better, open source, free (as in an unlicensed beer) product. (Found this through the Secret Geek)

Cool Too Much Free Time project of the day:
The Brass Lantern links us to The Non-Comp Review Project 2005 is a compilation of reviews for every Interactive Fiction game released in 2005, which hasn't been part of the IFComp (the Interactive Fiction Competition).
To the uninitiated, Interactive Fiction is a genre also known as Text Adventure, the insanely brainy format that brought to us classics like A Mind Forever Voyaging and PlanetFall, as well as modern Gems like Spider and Web, So Far & All Roads, and, naturally, the usual overrated "classics".

Cool coincidence (?) of the day:
I was looking at the Geeks on Stun site which I RSS occasionally (meaning upon the occasion that they update the site) and when I got to this page, I found the following part:
"but for the spreading of FUN are bringing the best puzzle game of ALL TIME (Not including Lumines and Tetris Attack of course (And we just mean the Super Nintendo version, not Pokemon Puzzle League (But the Game Boy Color one was okay, we guess (Now, we really only DID played it this one time at a Waffle House with Mssrs. Amigarad and Turbeaux (Are we really using their online nicknames? (Or was that a Perkins? Can one of you refresh that memory? Send us an e-mail.))))))"
I mean, what? I know I haven't invented this, but it's not like, well, I don't know. Could be a case of great minds think alike, or that someone happened to pass by my humble blog and just lifted up the whole "multiple brackets" silliness... Oh well, I knew I should've patent it.

Speaking of which,
Cool patent of the day:
Microsoft somehow managed to patent FAT (File Allocation Table, Microsoft file system that preceded NTFS). This is not good. Not good at all. If this would mean that GNU/Linux OS wouldn't be able to read FAT partitions, I might have to completely delete windows from the harddrive. However, it appears that the fight is far from over.

This is your computer, this is your computer on Windows

2006-01-11T01:33:00.000+02:00

I assume everyone's been hearing of Microsoft's latest "GNU/Linux doesn't run on older hardware". Well, guess what? they lied. Side note, I've been running Ubuntu on my Pen III 800 ThinkPad laptop, with nothing more than 64 MB or RAM. Granted, I've been using XFCE4 rather than Gnome, but it runs like a charm. It also runs win98 SE, of course, but that's not exactly supported by Microsoft, hinting that they don't really want their users to keep the old hardware. So the real question here is why bother with this research in the first place?

More on Microsoft Security, last week I wrote about the whole WMF fuckup. By that time, Microsoft have released a very rushed patch, several days before the official release date (Meaning the patch was not planned to be released, despite the critical risk it presented anyone with a Windows machine) a move that was quickly spun as MS security execs patted themselves on the back claiming a "record release time".
So, with the patch released and the flaw addressed, is all well in Redmond?
Are you kidding me?
For starters, it might be that the patch force your computer to install it. Second, it seems that patch does not address all the flaws caused by the WMF rendering engine. And they still have the audacity to claim GNU/Linux is less secure.

While on the subject, Grisoft released a GNU/Linux free version of their much popular (and much recommended) Anti-Virus software.
I prefer using ClamAV, as well as its sister project, ClamWin for Windows, though, but it's nice to have a choice.

Thanks to OSNews for most of the links.

Connect the dots.... IF YOU DARE!!!

2006-01-10T22:11:00.001+02:00

There is a very interesting link between all the following links.

Starting with those amazing images of a member of the feline persuasion, found on Cute Overload, wherelse?

This just Boinged, it has been said that Jim Davis' Garfield isn't exactly the most innovative in terms of new material, but this takes it to a new extreme. Here you can find three panels from completely different strips. The result is interesting. But then again, so are car wrecks.

Speaking of car wrecks and BoingX2, this page in flickr is documenting people who see the Goatse.cx page for the first time. It's either that or pictures from my company's last holiday.

To close it off, this is probably the most post-modern-recursive post I've seen. As link-your-favourite-page site Digg presents Top 100 Digg Stories of 2005. It's a linked story about linked stories. Which makes this post, linking to that page with a link to a page about links to pages a real royal recursive headache, but in an artistic way!

Bwa-ha-ha

2006-01-10T11:11:00.000+02:00

This hillarious item just Boinged into my screen:

"Steven Spielberg will most likely not get any nomination for the BAFTA (British Film Academy) awards for "Munich" ... BAFTA's 3,000+ members were sent encrypted 'screener' DVDs that can only be played on special DVD players supplied by Cinea ... they would not play on any machine because they had been mastered for Region 1 (North America). As BAFTA members are cannot vote for films they have not seen ... the film ought to be disqualified from consideration."

Gotta be cracking eh? of course, the actual public can crack those CDs in less time than it takes to open the package. Brilliant guys, keep em coming!

Post that rumour, hacker, and I'll kill you...

2006-01-09T16:44:00.000+02:00

Through the Avatar of much Evil comes the following heart-warming, much awaited... rumour. Darn.
Amyway, GameGossip with the dish: "Though unconfirmed at this time, a recent filing (or should we say re-filing) on the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website shows that Electronic Arts re-filed the [System Shock - ES] name on December 15th, 2005."

OK, not something that should raise our heart beats in palpitation, as this might be some very ordinary, beurocratic procedure on behalf of the Gaming Giant, but if there's one thing EA has diligently insisted on doing with the System Shock franchise, was ignore it completely and utterly. From the total marketing blackout they laid on System Shock 2, to the almost complete absence of it from their (innavigational by human being) website. So why now? I've no idea. It could be, and probably is nothing. But, those things tend to have a reason, and so far every rumour that was backed by trademarking or domain purchasing turned out to be correct, if only to a degree, as it might be some diablo style XboX game "based" on the System Shock story called "System Shock: Rise of the Hackers" or "SHODAN's revenge" or something. Also keep in mind that EA had nothing to do with both System Shock and System Shock 2. The first was developed by Looking Glass and published by Origin, the second was produced by Looking Glass, developed by Irrational games, and only distributed by EA as the franchise holders, again, without any marketing whatsoever on their side. If this is really a System Shock III, made in the spirit and true to the two previous games, I'll be shocked (no pun intended (honestly, I only thought about it after I wrote it (although you have to admit it did came out kinda nice))).

The subject in question...

2006-01-09T10:19:00.000+02:00

From the Wikipedia article about the GNU hurd software.

"If you run the Hurd, you will encounter many bugs. For those people who use their computers for web-surfing, email, word processing, etc., and just want the infernal machine to work, the Hurd's bugs would prove extremely annoying."

Someone is taking this a *bit* too personal, don't you think?

Opening the office

2006-01-09T00:31:00.000+02:00

Addendum to previous post, as the 2.0 version of OpenOffice isn't anywhere to be seen, not to mention the 2.0.1 version, this page from the Ubuntu forums gives the current best method of upgrading the 1.9.129 version (the 2.0 "beta 2") of OpenOffice that comes with the installation CD.

How to train-wreck your browser (and half the system with it)

2006-01-09T00:04:00.000+02:00

Oh dear. According to the Ubuntu forums, it appears that Firefox 1.0.7 is the final version for the current 5.10 (Breezy Badger) release. The reason? Just too complicated to port.
"A backport will not be done for Firefox 1.5 because of compatibility issues with introducing a new browser, both to the rest of the Ubuntu Breezy platform and to users with heavily customized Firefox setups."

They are not joking about this. I've just spent the better half of the day reconstructing my system after I tried installing Firefox 1.5. Just too much relies on the damn browser for performing such an act. Even Gnome's own help browser had to be removed and re-installed. Nasty affair.
Of course, would you believe it, there is a very helpful HowTo page in the ole Ubuntu wiki site.
Memo to myself, first coffee, then playing Russian roulette with the system.

Confusion in Babylon

2006-01-07T12:35:00.000+02:00

That title does NOT work in English, but that's appropriate, given this post's nature.

Found this gem about(?) Intelligent design via the long fingers of the Bruck:

"The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism ... held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke... Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues."

All the rest is equally brilliant. Go with the reading, I've been with the linking.

Link or float

2006-01-06T08:11:00.000+02:00

Getting desperate for those puns.

More information about my previous post regarding the whole GNU/Linux "vs." Windows security befuddle.
NewsForge offers another way of judging the numbers, while The Register presents a somewhat lenghty article regarding the real difference in security between Open Source products and Microsoft's.

ShackNews unloads 8 screenshots of Galactic Civilizations II. Anyone here played GalCiv 1? No? good. Gotta keep my indie cred.

In the "don't ask me, I have no idea", here are excerpts from what appears to be an old Adamanese phrase book, but just might be simple culture jamming on account of Jabal A-Lughat. Thanks to tha Bruck for the link.

In a similar note, I got to this page of the Linux Journal via an RSS link from their feed. It was supposed to be something about Python. Must be some new concept they're trying out.

Show and tell

2006-01-05T06:52:00.000+02:00

These things I never seem to get.

A recent post over at the slash of many dottings.

To sum up, the poster mentions that "... According to InformationWeek.com, Linux/Unix (including Mac OS) had almost three times the number of OS-specific vulnerabilities reported last year compared to Microsoft Windows. Obviously, statistics are meaningless without the proper conjecture, speculation, and opinionation, ..."

Let's talk about disclosure-ation, shall we?
The reason UNIX/GNU/Linux, as well as every other Open-Source software, has more REPORTED security vulnerabilities is because THESE ARE EASIER TO LOCATE ONCE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO THE SOURCE CODE.
That doesn't mean Open-source software has more security holes than proprietary, on the contrary, since those are easier to locate (given enough eyes...) and are easier to fix, as result. What I can't undestand is why do people confuse the sharing of knowledge with being secure? It may just be that Microsoft's products are very much less secure than GNU/Linux ones, but you'll never hear of them unless someone else finds that out and post it. That's when the vulnerability becomes "reported".

I'm not saying that Microsoft's products are not secure, mind you. In fact, it may just be that those few and far between, I don't know. Nobody does, Microsoft does not reveal the information. But what I do know, is that a vulnerability that was reported, not by Microsoft, has yet to be officially addressed, causing security companies to advise businesses to use a third party patch despite Microsoft's advisal. And even when such an official patch is released, there's no guarantee it won't cause more damage, or fix the issue at all.

At any given rate, information about GNU/Linux having more reported vulnerabilities only makes me a firmer believer in that system's security. At least GNU/Linux developers are not afraid to disclose such flaws and deal with them.

Fire at the Opera

2006-01-04T23:26:00.000+02:00

Lame headline, I know.

Via OSNews: "Opera is Faster, More Secure and More Compliant than Firefox"

The quoted article speaks of the browser's speed (known issue and non-issue, Opera's greatest merit is the way they constantly manage to back up the "Fastest Internet Experience" tagline), security (using the Secunia results), and Standards compliency, via the Acid Test (which I've already found out about).

I've written about this issue several times now, and I think this private little browser war of mine is far from being settled. I don't really think both browsers are good. Excellent, even. And each has their own things that draw me towards them. I think I've mentioned a lot of those, but here are just two key points, which I haven't yet mentioned.

1. I've been using Opera since late 1999, and it's always been my "browser of choice". I've seen it mature and evolve through the 5 and 6 releases, then suffered through the 7 re-writing, which took the browser a step back before it took two steps forwards towards the 7.5 and the triumph which is the 8 version. Compared to that, the year I've been using Firefox isn't really comparable.

2. At the past, I've tried both Mozilla and Opera email clients (Thunderbird and Opera's inner client Mail2), it has become a moot issue, as I've been using gmail these days, so there isn't any need for an email client. Same goes for RSS, PIM and many other "suite" features that are available, either "out of the box" or via browser extensions and complimentary software).

3. Firefox, unlike Opera is Open source and Free software. Not only is that a great issue for me, it's also allows other project, like NVU and Celtx to be based on it, adding to their appeal.

Current situation? I'm using both, until a winner will be decided.

Jumping the Trigger

2006-01-04T22:40:00.000+02:00

I guess got online for some times now, but, better late than later, as someone probably always say.

Item in question is OCReMix's newest project, The Chrono Symphonic and this time it's the mother of all Game OST, the Chrono Trigger one. Probably the most loved, remixed, quoted and referenced game soundtrack, (apart from the Final Fantasies, natch).

The name hints of the nature of the project, it's a work of Symphonic re-arrangements/ReMixes. Not a good idea. Orchestrations are a hit and miss, as not everyone who can create a good, solid tune can carry something as massive as a symphonic orchestration. For every brilliant musician like Russell Cox, there are a dozen mediocre ones like Unknown, and worse, two dozen awful ones like Jeremy Robson (Link only supplied for the sake of completeness, actual listening to Robson's tracks is NOT RECOMMENDED). In this case, there are just too many down moments, and just too many Slow-chamber/Epic-massive transitions in almost every one. The usual problem with this kind of thinking is that repetitiveness, which works wonderfully in dance/techno tracks, usually kills an orchestrated track before it get a chance to develop.

Also, going symphonic deprives us of the more exciting and experimental works like Children of the Monkey Machine's Magus works, and many, many others.

It's available to download, and torrent, through the OCReMix site, but, and that's a big one, I really recommend listening to the original before taking a stroll through remix land. While not a prerequisite for 95% of the OCReMix site, in this case there are so many remixes done for almost every track it's always better to actually listen to the original beforehand.

If anyone feels a little experimental, I would suggest trying the Frog songs, the Memories of Green ones, and the Wind Scene ones, to see how different remixers tackle a similar tune.

And, it would seem that after all is said and done, Cox's "The Chrono Trigger" is the best track. Just goes to show, you can't beat quality.

Last year remover

2006-01-04T16:59:00.000+02:00

Getting rid of the last (hopefully) 2005 summaries, here is, what I believe is tbe epoch, nay, the zenith of what 2005 meant for you, and for me:
Typographica chooses the best fonts of 2005. And I thought I was depraved.

While on the matter, the BBC site offers 100 things we didn't know last year:
"100. Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a "public performance"."
and it gets worse. Not only that, but I can't stand all those American kids calling it "The Beeb", as if they've been driving in Double-Decker busses since they were just wee lads. Bah Humbug.

In recent news

2006-01-04T04:24:00.000+02:00

Nothing really interesting.

Well, ArsTechnica has a tidbit about a new GNU VOIP (Voice Over IP) solution, which will probably never get used, for same reasons everyone sticks to their crashing NT and their bloated Exchange servers.
At Slashdot, you can find Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner (gesundheit)'s answers to reader questions.

And to close it off with a more spiritual node, let's all close our eyes and pray that the Ubuntu Breezy Backport people will FINALLY get around to packaging Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.1. I mean, it's not even funny anymore, guys.

Pull the other one

2006-01-04T04:01:00.000+02:00

Just got an answer from the comp.lang.cobol newsgroup on the OpenCobol issue I blabbed about recently.
I'll give it a run and see whether this does the trick. If not, 2 more to go.

Don't bang the DRM

2006-01-04T00:17:00.000+02:00

Excellent post from my homey at OneAndOneIs2 (BTW, kudos on the new site):
"Essentially, the GPL says "This code is copyright and you aren't allowed to use it, but we'll let you use it if you abide by these terms" - remove copyright, and the GPL is worthless.
(...)
So no, I can't agree that copyrights should be removed. The creator of a work should be granted ownership of that work. Sharing copyright music over P2P against the copyright owner's wishes is illegal, and it should be. If you're against that view, your'e against any intellectual creation being owned. You're even anti-GPL."

He then goes to sprecht about where did record companies fucked up on the whole mp3 biz, and that's really REALLY wrong with DRM. Check it out.