An early start.

In 2010, a collaboration between the SyFy channel, Create Digital Music, XLR8R and Pitchfork created "Music for our Future": a compilation album of free music inspired by the TV show "Caprica".

XLR8R hosted it but their page for the release has subsequently disappeared. A few people here and there on the 'net have been asking for a copy, so here it is on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/MusicForOurFuture.

Some background info, photos etc. via CDM.

This is mainly for my own purposes, so I don’t have to hunt through Bugzilla and Peter Beverloo’s blog to find the one I’m looking for.

Somebody bought The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha for Sarah as a present and she asked me to read it so we could talk about it, so I did.

It's a novel about a family tragedy, Southern-state U.S.A. and the death penalty. A little boy is shot dead, a man is arrested for the crime and faces the death penalty. The book chronicles what happens to the family and to the killer during the 19 years or so that passes before the execution takes place.

The book could be accused of having an anti-capital punishment agenda, but I have no problem with that. At least until about half-way through the book, the plot and happenings follow the synopsis with little in the way of surprise, but then there's a twist.

I felt that the twist diminished the message of the book. Without trying to spoil what happens, I felt that you didn't need the core details of the story to be varied or expanded upon or U-turned to push that agenda. In my opinion, it's perfectly possible for someone to construct a story about a killer who faces death, who was unambiguously guilty of the crime they are charged with, and still leave the reader feeling remorse for the killer, and questioning the justice meted out. In fact I thought Rakha was doing a fine job of just that.

However, a twist (or twists) occur, and the facts are called into question, and so you ask even further questions about the practise of killing criminals, in my view redundantly.

It's a good book and worth a read, regardless of what your position is on the issue. It does a great job of describing the unbearable pain of losing a child, but also of the power of forgiveness for the victims.

Bugs I've hit in GNOME 3, in the last 5 minutes:

• gnome-shell's "run" pop-up lost focus and I couldn't get rid of it. Nor could I launch another "run" dialogue, which is my normal route for starting software.

• I tried to coax my web browser into launching a terminal by browsing to file:///usr/bin/gnome-terminal. Instead, it downloaded a copy to ~/Downloads. Fine, no problem, because after another click it launches nautilus to handle the file. (This is not a bug).

• nautilus doesn't know what to do with the file. Apparently I haven't installed a handler for viewing executable files. I'm guessing the copy of gnome-shell isn't +x. nautilus does sensible things when another file (such as a picture) is marked +x, so why doesn't it do so for the opposite case?

• This is such a bizarre error message I try to take a screenshot of it. I take one, then take another (cropped). I try to save the second picture over the first one, but gnome-screenshot complains that it cannot find a file somewhere in /tmp.

• The flash plugin crashed in the middle of streaming an album. I'm almost not allowed to complain about the flash plugin crashing.

• After and around and inbetween all that, I downloaded an .amz file (an Amazon MP3 download file, in fact, of the album I'm failing to stream) which I hoped to run through clamz (a command-line, open source tool that can interpret AMZ files). nautilus offers clamz as a launch option in the right-click menu, but it's not the default handler. If I select "properties" to set the default handler, clamz is not in the list of available handlers.

• After sending the HUP signal to gnome-shell, I've got rid of the "run" pop-up, but now something has happened to it's $PATH and future "run" pop-ups can't find anything in the standard locations, like /usr/bin.

• since the flash plugin died, nothing else seems to be able to make any sound, so I can't play the album I downloaded anyway.

I didn't set out to bug-hunt this morning, I'm actually trying to get some work done.

Whilst this is a particularly bad case of stacked-bugs, it's unfortunately, pretty representative of what it's like to try and use a Linux desktop at the moment. Every day I go through a similar experience.

I've just had to give up and log out and back in again. The shell path bug above has re-surfaced in a new session. Great.

I'm waiting on a delayed laptop at work. I'm very tempted to cancel the order and just use a Mac Air instead (we have one spare). It seems I'm walking the inevitable path of F/OSS desktop frustration and the end for many people seems to be the Mac… perhaps I should spare myself the pain of the journey. In the mean time, It's bye-bye to GNOME and off to Xfce for me.

As seen on reddit: an old Bill Joy quote often banded about as part of the (largely synthetic) vi-vs.-emacs holy war starts as follows:

vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore

The context of that quote is:

I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think.

(source: the register).

Furthermore:

unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.

You don't need anything as esoteric as a satellite phone: a cellular mobile phone will suffice. I've no idea what the effective/equivalent baud rate of GPRS is (or EDGE), but I have a new-found appreciation for vi's design goals having tried to run an SSH session over such a connection.

• Time-lapse footage of the natural world: the sun rising, ice melting, trees moving in the wind.
• Ponderous voice-over introduction with vague description of the topic at hand.
• Footage of people walking around the streets of a city.
• Scientist in the street, staring silently into the camera.
• Scientist in the street, posing awkwardly and staring into the distance.
• Scientist sitting in an incongruous environment.
• Footage of scientist with gimmicky jump-cuts, split-screens and focus shifts.
• Ponderous voice-over assuring us of scientist’s influence and expertise.
• Snippet of scientist talking in a hyperbolic and incredibly nebulous way about an area of theory.
• Scientist arriving at work outside a nondescript lab building.
• Scientist talking with colleagues, shot from a distance so we can’t hear what they’re saying.
• Scientist chalking something on a board that we can’t see.
• Scientist trying to explain a complicated aspect of theory in 20 seconds.
• Ponderous voice-over attempting to re-explain.
• Low-budget computer graphics to illustrate a concept, created by an artist who doesn’t understand the concept himself.
• A couple of different scientists, talking nebulously.
• More people walking in a street.
• Scientists walking around a lab.
• Scientists having lunch.
• Ponderous voice-over continues.
• Snippet of scientist promising spectacular but undefined impact of success in their research.
• Segue into logistics of research; no details, just assurance that it is expensive and difficult.
• Footage of anonymous lab equipment.
• Scientist trying to explain a complicated aspect of theory in 20 seconds, whilst wrestling with cheap, production-team supplied prop.
• Various scientists talking vaguely about importance of undefined future research.
• More natural world footage.
• Ponderous voice-over concluding programme, discussing excitement and importance of science we have learnt nothing about.

I've just finished reading Graham Joyce's haunting The Silent Land: an atmospheric and moving love story set in an Alpine ski resort.

Husband and Wife Jake and Zoe head out to the slopes early one morning and are caught in an avalanche. They survive, narrowly, but upon returning to the resort, everything has changed…

Anyone who has read any quantity of SF or fantasy will probably make an early guess at what's going on, and you'd most likely get it wrong. Even if you know where you're going, the journey is often the point, rather than the destination, and this journey is pretty gripping.

I do most of my reading on the train to and from work. I often listen to music when I'm reading and I try to choose things which aren't going to distract my attention from the book too much. Film soundtracks are good; so is classical; so is a lot of Eno's work.

For this book I mostly listened to the score from the latest film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Clocking in at only seven minutes shy of three hours, this is a haunting score that evokes a cold, isolated Swedish winter, and thematically matched the book perfectly. The score is a little less accessible than their previous work, but is rewarding on repeat listen. You can get a free 6-track sampler at the website linked above.

A mildly hacked Ikea "Expedit" shelving unit is a surprisingly snug home for my Hi-fi and my vinyl collection (even the 7" records). [

On 21st October 2004, Robert Smith of the Cure sat in for John Peel whilst he was on holiday and presented his show. This was part of a sequence of people covering for Peel. Off the top of my head Siouxie of the Banshees sat in on another night, but I forget who else.

Anyway, sadly, John died a few days later on the 25th.

Before John's death, in response to his pre-recorded show being butchered by the BBC, Smith posted an angry message on the Cure's website, which included the tracklisting as he had originally prepared. After John's death was announced, Smith deleted the post from his site, no doubt out of respect for Peel and to avoid any mis-interpretation.

I recorded the show onto minidisc when it was broadcast and discovered a lot of music that I loved and hadn't heard of before. I've just stumbled across a copy of Smith's post, including the tracklist, so for historical interest's sake, here it is (with only light typographical editing).

If anyone cares enough, I could have a look for that minidisc…

I recently finished reading Race For The South Pole by Roland Huntford. Prior to reading the book I knew little of polar exploration, and was only vaguely aware of the Captain Scott legend via its permeation of British popular culture. I knew roughly that Scott had lead a failed antarctic expedition of some sort, and in particular that one member of the team, Captain Oates, had apparently given his life in an attempt to save his fellows; leaving the tent with the famous words “I am just going outside, and may be some time”, an act which was held up both as an example of noble sacrifice and, occasionally, for ridicule.

Beyond these fragments however, I knew little, and didn’t much care. Tales of arctic exploration and cold-weather derring-do have never really appealed to me. I think because of the horrific physical affects that seem to be part and parcel of them. As a child I remember seeing horrible photos of frostbitten limbs and noses, whose only fate was amputation, and wondering why anybody would risk such injury. Especially to explore parts of the world that, while possessing a sweeping beauty, are ultimately barren wastelands, hostile to life. Even those explorers and adventurers who escaped frostbite always seemed in TV and film footage to be withered and aged by the experience. Buffeted by winds, shrunken by the cold, worn down by the effort, and cooked by the glaring sun.

A few months ago though, I read a short interview with Roland Huntford in a magazine, I think it was New Scientist. He was promoting his new book, Race For The South Pole, and in particular expounding its thesis that Scott had been an incompetent leader, and that his men had died not through poor luck and the unbeatable savagery of the elements, but through a catalogue of errors that had been their own responsibility. Huntford explained how his book compared and contrasted Scotts leadership with that of Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian who lead a simultaneous, successful expedition to the South Pole.

While I can’t recall the details of the interview, I was intrigued by Huntford’s arguments and impressed by the clear and forensic way he expressed them. I must admit, in my ignorance I had never heard of the Norwegian polar expedition, but the idea of an unsentimental comparison between Scott’s failed expedition, and Amundsen’s successful one appealed to me. I decided to pick up a copy when the chance arose.

Acquiring a copy proved a little difficult. The next time I was in a branch of Waterstones I  hunted around for it, but without success. I was slightly baffled by where exactly it would be shelved: Travel? Biography? History? Eventually I discovered an extreme-travel and exploration section, hidden away on a single bookcase in the corner of the store, but alas, no Race For The South Pole. The till staff confirmed via their computer that they did sell it, but were out of stock.

At this point I could have ordered it online via Amazon.com, and probably should have done, but for no real reason I became determined that I would purchase a copy via a physical shop. I have no problem normally shopping for books or just about anything online, but in this case it became a point of bizarre pride. I think it was because, after wandering around the store for so long, trying to determine where the book would be shelved, attempting to use the appalling self-service computers that Waterstones have in store to help me, I was determined that the shop would not best me. I would return, and I would purchase a copy of Race for the South Pole.

I did return, on each of my occasional jaunts into town. I even tried a couple of smaller Waterstones branches, but no dice. The shelf was always empty, and the staff apologetic. Branches down South had it, they earnestly assured me, though whether this was an inscrutable joke at my expense, based on the title I was looking for, I could never be sure. After a couple of months, I have all but given up hope, and was close to giving in and purchasing it online, when one day I popped into Waterstones to find not one, but three copies sitting upon the shelf.

The physical reality of my prize was not quite as impressive as I had anticipated. I had imagined a mighty hard-backed tome, but instead found a thick paperback, with a slightly shoddy cover containing a composite of various grainy photos of polar explorers. It made it look oddly like Scott had hauled his sledge right past the Norweigan camp, while his competitors stood staring at them. Nevertheless, I was excited to finally have acquired and purchased it, and took it home to serve as bedtime reading.

As a nighttime book, it is suited and unsuited, as it was by turns both highly compelling, leading me to stay awake far too late ploughing through the pages, and also sometimes a slog, sending me quickly off into slumberland after a few passages. The latter should not however be taken as a slight on Huntford’s writing, or the book itself, but it is simply a consequence of the book’s central premise or gimmick, which is to present the complete expedition diaries of RF Scott, alongside Huntfords own translations of botth Amundsen’s diary, and that of another member of the Norwegian expedition, a champion skier named Bjaaland.

These diary entries run sequentially and simultaneously, so you can read what both Scott’s English expedition and Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition were doing on the same days in different parts of the pole. While they provide fascinating detail, the entries are rarely thrilling, and that is where they can become a slog. The overland journeys to the pole were clearly difficult and often highly dangerous, but they were also monotonous. Men and animals hauling sledges for hundreds of miles across a snowy and icy wilderness.

In such circumstances, Scott and Amundsen often have little to write about other than the type of snow and ice they encounter, the weather conditions, and the distance they have travelled. To an expert or an experienced polar explorer, such detail might be fascinating, but to a more casual reader like myself, it can become rather dry, and I will confess to skimming some of the larger entries. Particularly those by Scott, whose verbiage, combined with his pomposity, becomes tiring.

Huntford intersperses the diary entries with his own comments, providing context on their content and comparing the approaches of the two expeditions. He offers praise and criticism to both, though it is fair to say he has on the whole very little positive to say about Scott or his expedition. Huntford does not shy away from making his opinions clear, and in that regard he becomes almost as much a character in his book as does Scott, Amundsen or Bjaaland. That is not a criticism; his comments are invariably interesting, and I often found myself wishing there were more of them. It becomes a perverse joy to spot strange or illogical points in Scott’s narrative and anticipate what Huntford’s withering response will be.

The diary entries, which form the central section of the book, are preceded by a long introduction, where Huntford introduces the major players, relates a little of the history of polar exploration and the run-up to the attempts, and lays out his thesis regarding Scott’s failure and Amundsen’s success. His central criticisms of Scott relate to his status as a ‘gentleman amateur’, with no expertise in the skills such as skiing that would be vital to polar exploration,  and to what Huntford perceives as his alienation from the natural world, relying too much on technology and viewing nature almost as an enemy to be conquered. From these stemmed a tide of poor choices and mistakes, in clothing, personnel, transportation, and training, that practically doomed his expedition to failure before it had begun.

Scott’s failings are compared to Amundsen, who had far greater experience in the right areas, both professionally and as a native of cold-climated country, and by Huntford’s reckoning, far more empathy with the natural world. Amundsen, it is argued, was a true professional explorer, who combined his lifetime of experience with exacting preparation to pave the way for his success.

A criticism I would level at Huntford is that he perhaps overreaches in the conclusions he draws. Scott’s failures are numerous and obvious. Even without Huntford’s analysis, the side-by-side comparison of the diaries makes the bumbling and confused nature of the English expedition painfully obvious. But from Scott’s personal failings, Huntford extrapolates to the entire nation of Britain, building up an almost apocalyptically condemning picture of political, spiritual and meritorious malaise. A nation that shuns success and celebrates and glorifies failure.

I’m not sure I buy it. That Scott’s legend is an inane case of undeserved hero-worship and the folly of the gentleman amateur seems true, but that it underlines some gaping flaw in the British national character seems less proven. Could it not just be an aberration, driven by a nationalistic media and a few opportunistic myth-makers? I wonder if Huntford, stung by the battles he has fought with Scott’s advocates, has magnified its philosophical significance through the lens of his own feelings.

In any case, the core of the book is still a highly compelling comparison of two very different expeditions. If I were a Hollywood producer, I might complain that the ‘race’ of the title never feels like much of one. Despite setting off within days of each other, Amundsen’s team are just too good, and Scott’s too poor, for there to be much real competition, even leaving aside that we know the ending anyway. A conventional narrative would have both teams exchanging the lead frequently, as each meet with triumph and mishap along their way, before at last, neck and neck, they reach the final straight and the winner emerges. In fact, Scott’s expedition quickly falls hundreds of miles behind Amundsen’s and its only battle is for survival in the face of its incompetence. Even Scott himself seems less concerned in his diary with the competing Norwegians as with settling scores with Ernest Shackleton, another explorer who had almost reached the South Pole in a previous attempt, and with whom he seems weirdly obsessed.

Another criticism I would make of the book is that, while I would not defend Scott from the charges of incompetence laid against him, I do think that Huntford is a little too easy on Amundsen. Scott’s errors and passive-aggressive bitchiness never pass without scathing comment, but though Amundsen makes mistakes as well, he gets off lightly. Despite his vastly greater skill, there is something of the pettiness and even the pomposity of Scott in Amundsen. His self-awareness is greater, but they are clearly two men on different ends of the same scale. Perhaps only such men, driven by a conflicting mix of nagging insecurity and self-regard, would pursue such lofty but dangerous goals to secure fame.

In stark comparison to both Scott and Amundsen is the third diarist, Olav Bjaaland. The inclusion of his diary entries is apparently something of a scoop, having never been translated into English before. Huntford is fluent in Norwegian, and apparently did the translations himself. Bjaaland was a champion skier, brought onto the Norwegian team for his vast expertise and experience in cross-country skiing. Unlike the two team leaders, Bjaaland was not looking for fame, or keeping his diary with a mind to write a book. His entries are terse, having been written for no audience but himself, but often very entertaining. He mixes entirely matter-of-fact missives with wry observations and the occasional sardonic comment on his leader Amundsen, or their situation. 

Bjaaland seems much more the voice of an ordinary man, even though, as a famous champion skier, he was not just anyone. His seems like the testimony of someone who is comfortable with himself, his abilities, and his achievements. His are some of the best parts of the book, undercutting the fairly humourless competition of the other two and bringing them down to Earth. Huntford seems to like him a lot as well.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a great deal, I would recommend it to anybody with an interest in history or human endeavour and the reasons, both technical and personal, why it succeeds or fails. Doubtless there are lessons to be drawn from it for all of us who engage in difficult or complex work, even if it is not quite as dangerous or intrepid as an expedition to the South Pole.

The Philip K. Dick Collection

I've just finished reading "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" by Philip K Dick, one of 13 novels collected in the Library of America's wonderful "The Philip K. Dick Collection" boxed set.

This story has never jumped out at me as one to read with any particular urgency, despite the title being a reference to a composition by my namesake. I was reminded about it whilst listening to one of BBC Radio 4's "Great Lives" broadcasts, where Michael Sheen read a passage from the book.

As an aside, the "Great Lives" series is a really interesting listen: I particularly enjoyed their episode on Ludwig Wittgenstein. You can get the whole series in podcast form.

Back to the book. It features Dick's trademark theme of fractured realities, perhaps more so than in many of his more well-known works such as Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. It also has much better characterisation than I expect from his writing. His female characters remain — as always — sinister, threatening, mischevious, but they are at least fleshed out. There is a lot more of an exploration of the human condition than usual. Dick wrote that the novel begun as an attempt to explore different varieties of love. I enjoyed the mystery of the weird goings-on whilst they were mysterious, but I felt mildly let down when the explanation was eventually proffered.

I recently completed "Ready Player One", Ernest Cline's debut novel. It's a Sci-Fi fan-service novel that explores a dystopian future (yes, another one) where the majority of the populace hide inside a VR environment to escape their "real" lives.

The sole-genius who authored the VR software hid a series of easter eggs inside, in the form of challenges relating to pop-culture and video game trivia circa the 80s. He constructs his will such that whoever first completes the challenges inherits the mega-bucks company who control the VR simulation.

Mike Hoye has an excellent summary:

Ready Player One is a nerdculture bender of a book, about as hard to hate while you’re in the middle of it as it is to love in hindsight; it’s young adult literature for people who were born in the late seventies and haven’t really grown up yet. Of which I am apparently one, it has become clear, but you’re still left with the sense that you’re reading a Cory Doctorow book whose discerning virtue is that the lead isn’t a thinly-veiled Cory Doctorow. Which is a huge, huge improvement, make no mistake, but it’s stills relentless, pandering fanservice.

(Whilst you are over on Mike's website you should really read this excellent piece on libraries and publishers.)

Despite the points above, I enjoyed the book. My biggest complaint was that the ending was quite abrupt. Quite often when I read a story which is essentially about a journey, I am disappointed if the story ends when the journey does. I hope I am not spoiling too much here by revealing that someone eventually solves the riddles and inherits — essentially — the earth. But what do they do with it? What impact do they make on the miserable world, described only briefly in sparse passages dotted around the bulk of the text detailing the VR one? During the book, the characters opine on what to do with the fortune, but we never see that come to fruition. Perhaps in a sequel.

Artwork from track 17, by Richard Ginns. CC-By-SA

Via Boing Boing, I stumbled across an excellent audio/visual project called instagr/am/bient: 25 ambient pieces of music inspired by 25 photos on the instagram photo service.

The original upload featured a high-resolution PDF of the pictures, with MP3 audio and low-quality embedded copies of each picture as each track's artwork. I was a little disappointed about this, as I thought the tracks would be best appreciated next to the higher-quality picture that inspired them. So, I fixed it:

Instagr/am/bient (HD images)

This was possible thanks the liberal licensing of the original, but also two excellent pieces of software: pdfimages (from the poppler-utils package) and eyeD3, which made it not just possible but trivial.

See also the 9.5M accompanying PDF.

I do like what people are creating with instagram; I also like the "tumble-blog" approach to sharing similar images. I occasionally rotate the indexpics on my site; perhaps I should do so more often, and publish the new ones on my blog, too.

Backups are something I don't do well. I hope to write a more thorough article about them at some point. For now, here are some tips.

Like most home users, I don't have access to a tape drive or jukebox for backups. I'm therefore looking for a solution that backs up to a local block device. I haven't ruled out a solution that backs up to DVD-Rs, but I haven't found a suitable one.

I first tried rsnapshot, which uses hard link trees to represent increments. I found that this resulted in enormous filesystem metadata, sufficient to cause the machine I was running it on (an embedded ARM system) to slow to a crawl. I'd recommend to avoid anything using this technique.

I more recently have been using rdiff-backup. This has appeared to work quite well for a number of years. However, it does not gracefully handle the backup volume being full, spewing python backtraces. This is compounded with some confusing use of temporary directies and not honouring $TMPDIR. This has been known about for years (1, 2). I've just independently discovered these problems for the second time. Aside from that, because it does not de-duplicate files, it is sensitive to large files being moved around in the source being backed up. It also cannot do a dry-run estimate of the disk space required for the next increment. So: time to move on.

Back in 2010 I discovered bup, an intriguing backup tool that used a git-style backing store. It's interesting enough that I packaged it and use it in a few situations, but I wouldn't rely on it for my main backups, for two reasons: one, it's not tried-and-tested enough yet (but that is rapidly being resolved), two: you can't get rid of old increments, so your backup volume will always increase in size over time, and never throw away old data. So, for now: move on.

Next on my list to try is Lars Wirzenius' obnam.

Here's the mail archiving script I was talking about: http://github.com/jmtd/detachment. Sorry about the name-pun.

There's still a LOT of work to do, but it's useful enough to deploy, with modifications, now. If you set up a way of pushing stuff in a local directory to a remote webserver (ideally behind an SSL certificate and with access control configured) and you have a resolvable hostname for that site, then you can get at your files from most mail/web client combinations, including smartphones.

Here's some stats from running it on a sample mailbox:

Before

$ du -sh ncl/archive/2010
116M    ncl/archive/2010

After

$ du -sh ncl/archive/2010 bucket
41M     ncl/archive/2010
51M     bucket

Or, approximately 20% smaller. (That's the on-disk usage for the mail and the attachments, now not base64-encoded, and saved to disk).

The above folder was a local Maildir copy of a folder on an Exchange mail system, synchronised via offlineimap. Here are the sizes reported by Exchange for the same folder:

• Before: 83991KB (82M)
• After: 25435KB (25M)

Or, approximately 70% smaller. (That's the mails without the attachments counted, which are not in the Exchange server any more).

Lots of caveats:

• If you are using offlineimap, you will need to do more than just run this script, or offlineimap may not notice that the messages have changed. Stripping out the U=\d+,FMD5=[0-9a-f]{32} component of filenames seemed to do the trick.
• If you are using Exchange, a copy of the original messages will be retained in your Deleted Items folder. Beware if you are close to your mail quota.
• If you are using Exchange via IMAP, then syncing the results of such an operation might be very slow. The above operation took well over an hour to sync, and I'm only a few hops away from the Exchange server via 100M links.

I'm happy to announce the release of wadc version 1.2.

A WadC session

WadC is a functional programming language for the composition of Doom-format maps. Originally created by Wouter "Aardappel" van Oortmerssen, I was granted permission to take over the project over a year ago, but didn't get around to releasing anything until now.

This version adds a few functions that permit you to draw two-sided lines which are textured and impassible: important for a lot of detailing techniques. You can also create friendly monsters for Boom-compatible ports. There's a new example demonstrating these features; plus a recreation of Doom 2's "entryway", courtesy of GreyGhost.

See WadC for a summary, or go straight to the binaries or source on github.

Discussions: reddit, doomworld.

Perhaps the most stupid part of this whole affair is that it's possibly the worst possible action to take. Scientology likes to smear any of its critics as suppressive persons, effectively labelling them as hopelessly mentally ill people with anti-social and destructive tendencies. By "attacking" Scientology, the members of "Anonymous" are fitting themselves exactly into the role that the Scientologists would like to portray them as: "The antisocial personality supports only destructive groups and rages against and attacks any constructive or betterment group". Now it's easy for Scientology to dismiss any Internet criticism as having been concocted by antisocial "suppressives".

While people continue to believe in Hubbard's teachings, Scientology will continue to exist. The way to destroy Scientology is to destroy those beliefs, to show the lies that the church propagates and all the crazy stories about aliens found in the upper levels. The greatest weapon against Scientology is the truth, and the Internet is the most effective way to disseminate it. Of course, now, the church has an excuse to get more of its members running censorship software - "protect yourself from dangerous Internet subversives, out to destroy Scientology!". David Miscavige himself couldn't have come up with such an effective scheme.

There is obviously a large group of people participating in the "war". What a shame that so much energy has been put towards such an utterly counterproductive effort.

Developing with GNUstep

Porting to OS X

Thoughts on GNUstep

How about implementing parts of the Application Kit with GTK?
Yes and No - The GNUstep architecture provides a single, platform-independent, API for handling all aspects of GUI interaction (implemented in the gstep-gui library), with a backend architecture that permits you to have different display models (display postscript, X-windows, win32, berlin ...) while letting you use the same code for printing as for displaying. Use of GTK in the frontend gui library would remove some of those advantages without adding any.

User Account Control

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
  <assemblyIdentity version="0.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="X86"
                    name="foo.exe" type="win32"/>
  <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges>
        <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />
      </requestedPrivileges>
    </security>
  </trustInfo>
</assembly>

1 24 MOVEABLE PURE "setup-manifest.xml"

Compatibility Assistant

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
  <assemblyIdentity version="0.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="X86"
                    name="foo.exe" type="win32"/>
  <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges>
        <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />
      </requestedPrivileges>
    </security>
  </trustInfo>

  <!-- Stop the Program Compatibility Assistant appearing: -->

  <compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1">
    <application>
      <supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/> <!-- 7 -->
      <supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}"/> <!-- Vista -->
    </application>
  </compatibility> 
</assembly>

References

• The same problem as it occurred in Cygwin
  
• Microsoft documentation on manifest files and compatibility
  

1. Software doesn't support it
   
2. Hardware doesn't support it
   
3. ISPs don't provide it

6to4

Setting up 6to4

create nat rule entry ruleid 41416 rdr prot num 41 lcladdrfrom 192.168.1.6 lcladdrto 192.168.1.6

iface tun6to4 inet6 v4tunnel
	address 2002:0102:0304::1
	netmask 16
	endpoint any
	local 192.168.1.6
	ttl 255
	remote 192.88.99.1
	post-up ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via ::192.88.99.1 dev tun6to4
	post-down ip -6 route flush dev tun6to4

auto tun6to4

$ ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:a003::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:a003::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=61 time=53.8 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:a003::68: icmp_seq=2 ttl=61 time=52.5 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:a003::68: icmp_seq=3 ttl=61 time=45.5 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:a003::68: icmp_seq=4 ttl=61 time=51.5 ms

Routing

interface eth0
{
	AdvSendAdvert on;
	prefix 2002:0102:0304:face::/64
	{
		AdvOnLink on;
		AdvAutonomous on;
		AdvRouterAddr on;
	};
};

iface eth0 inet6 static
        address 2002:0102:0304:face::1
	netmask 64

net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding=1

sudo sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
sudo sysctl net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding=1

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:10:63:63:d0
          inet addr:192.168.1.25  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: 2002:0102:0304:face:21c:10ff:fe63:63d0/64 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: fe80::21c:10ff:fe63:63d0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:7658 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:7228 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:4073660 (4.0 MB)  TX bytes:903010 (903.0 KB)

This is the battery that is supposed to go in it. Almost £15 for a battery! This seemed far too expensive to me, so I set out to find an alternative. Unfortunately 4.5 volt batteries are rather uncommon. However, I managed to find this, which was listed as a "lantern battery" used for torches, bike lamps and doorbells. I suspect that there are probably 3 AA batteries inside:

- Greencell 312G 4.5V lantern battery alongside the original (depleted) CMOS battery.

I did a quick sanity check of the old battery to make sure I had the polarity right. The voltage is down to 1V:

All that needs to be done now is to connect the connector from the old battery to the new one. I've always been hopeless at soldering, but fortunately this is a job that is simple enough for sellotape.

This is the logic board from the Mac. I've maxed out the RAM and added PCI Ethernet and USB cards. The black square at the bottom left is where the battery is supposed to be attached (it has a velcro strip at the back).

Obviously this is far too small for the new battery, and the card slides into the back of the machine, mounted vertically. It has to be attached to the board somehow. Where can it go?

Fortunately, the engineers at Apple were apparently smart enough to anticipate this very problem, and designed a convenient space on the riser card to put the battery in.

(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7886424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1  0xb7559163 in ?? () from /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#2  0xb74f1387 in ?? () from /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
Backtrace stopped: previous frame identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)

(gdb) info registers
eax            0xfffffe00	-512
ecx            0x80	128
edx            0x2	2
ebx            0xb75c33a0	-1218694240
esp            0xbfe55018	0xbfe55018    <= stack pointer on x86 
ebp            0xbfe55048	0xbfe55048
esi            0x0	0
edi            0x0	0
eip            0xb7886424	0xb7886424 <__kernel_vsyscall+16>
eflags         0x202	[ IF ]
cs             0x73	115
ss             0x7b	123
ds             0x7b	123
es             0x7b	123
fs             0x0	0
gs             0x33	51
(gdb) x/64x $sp
0xbfe55018:	0xbfe55048	0x00000002	0x00000080	0xb7559163
0xbfe55028:	0xb75c33a0	0xb75c1ff4	0x09ec0470	0xb74f1387
0xbfe55038:	0xb77c4afd	0xb782199c	0xb782199c	0x09ec0478
0xbfe55048:	0xbfe55078	0xb77c4bf4	0x09ec0478	0xb782199c
0xbfe55058:	0x0000ffff	0xb75c3438	0xbfe55098	0xb789a240
0xbfe55068:	0x00000000	0xb782199c	0x0000ffff	0xb75c3438
0xbfe55078:	0xbfe55098	0xb7818736	0x09ec0478	0x00000000
0xbfe55088:	0xb77c50cd	0xb782199c	0xb7818709	0xb782199c
0xbfe55098:	0xbfe550b8	0xb77c54ad	0x00000000	0x00000000
0xbfe550a8:	0x0000000b	0xb75c3438	0xb77c5449	0xb782199c
0xbfe550b8:	0xbfe550c8	0xb77bb7dd	0xb782199c	0x0000000b
0xbfe550c8:	0xbfe550e8	0xb77bb84e	0x0000ffff	0xb789a240
0xbfe550d8:	0x00000000	0xb77bb830	0xb77bb839	0xb782199c
0xbfe550e8:	0xbfe55108	0xb77bc08f	0x0000000b	0x00000000
0xbfe550f8:	0x00000000	0x00000010	0xb75c1ff4	0x3efafafb
0xbfe55108:	0xbfe556c8	0xb7886400	0x0000000b	0x00000033

Pick a location slightly further up the stack and set the $sp variable, and suddenly backtrace works!

(gdb) set $sp=0xbfe55048
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7886424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1  0xb782199c in ?? () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#2  0xb7818736 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#3  0xb77c54ad in ?? () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#4  0xb77bb7dd in SDL_QuitSubSystem () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#5  0xb77bb84e in SDL_Quit () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#6  0xb77bc08f in ?? () from /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#7  
#8  0xb74ede80 in ?? () from /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#9  0xb74efc8c in malloc () from /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#10 0xb7764eec in ?? () from /usr/lib/libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0
#11 0xb7765b98 in Mix_SetPanning () from /usr/lib/libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0
#12 0x080828b1 in I_SDL_StartSound (id=-1218694088, channel=-1218699276, 
    vol=120, sep=38) at i_sdlsound.c:671
#13 0x08073e9b in S_StartSound (origin_p=0xb624f990, sfx_id=22)
    at s_sound.c:656
#14 0x08061459 in T_MoveFloor (floor=0xb63271b8) at p_floor.c:220
#15 0x0806d0ea in P_RunThinkers () at p_tick.c:119
#16 0x0806d161 in P_Ticker () at p_tick.c:153
#17 0x08052fb6 in G_Ticker () at g_game.c:1151
#18 0x0804dbf4 in D_DoomLoop () at d_main.c:437
#19 0x0804ecc0 in D_DoomMain () at d_main.c:1506
#20 0x08054d1c in main (argc=5, argv=0xbfe55d04) at i_main.c:152

   void frobnicate(void)
   {
       int num_frobs = 0;
       void *frobs = NULL;

       num_frobs = get_num_frobs();
       frobs = malloc(num_frobs);

       ....

I think this is an actively harmful practise and should be discouraged. The reason I think this is that modern C compilers can detect when variables might be used without being initialised first (and gcc is scarily good at it), and adopting a rule like this of initialising everything breaks that functionality. Consider an example like this:

    void clever_function_name(void)
    {
        mystruct *obj = NULL;
        int bar = 0;

        if (somecondition) {
            obj = new_mystruct();
            bar = 1;
        } else {
            // oops, forgot to initialise obj here as well
            bar = 2;
        }

        ...

        obj->member = bar;
    }

I think the key thing is that initialising to a value like zero or NULL doesn't actually solve anything or prevent any bugs because it's just an arbitrary value. In a general sense, having a variable that is set to those values isn't any more helpful than having some random garbage that got left on the stack. It doesn't prevent uninitialised variable bugs, but it does prevent the compiler from detecting them.

A melancholic look at intellectual disability and how it was regarded and treated by the society of the time (1960s). Despite an inevitable conclusion, it was enjoyable and thought provoking.

I wrote a quick proof-of-concept script that can traverse my email (in local Maildir format) and detach all attachments: saving them to another location and replacing them with a text attachment which documents where they've gone.

This reduces my work mailbox size substantially and allows for more space-efficient storage of the attachments (utilising all 8 bits of the byte, at the very least, but with the potential for compression to be added to the mix). It maintains the link between email and attachment, however, which is crucial if the method of discovery of the attachment in the future is to find the email.

For this to be future proof, the path where the mail is saved needs to be. The best scheme I can think of involves dedicating a sub-domain to the problem and using a URI scheme which is guaranteed1 to be unique for the attachment, such as a hash-sum:

https://file.example.com/sha1/509c2fe2eba509e93987c3024a74d74583c274bd

I could finish up my script, set my my own personal infrastructure for this and convert my mailbox with a few hours more work. Before I do, I have two questions:

• Is this already available in an open source tool: am I re-inventing the wheel needlessly?
• Would anyone else find this useful?

Andrew Cowie blogs about 'A good GNOME 3 Experience'. He writes

I think it’s a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is … different.

and

if they had gone and bought an Apple laptop with Mac OS X on it they would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different.

I think Andrew's phrasing here is a bit disingeneous. Or perhaps he genuinely mistakes the frustration that has been felt by GNOME 3. I don't want to whine on too much, so I'll try to get this out of the way in one paragraph.

F/OSS users are members of a community. There is inevitably a wall between the majority of community members and the blessed: the decision makers, the developers. The art of maintaining a good community is partly to do with making this wall as invisible as possible: encouraging participation, lowering the barrier for contributions; welcoming feedback; etc.1. The GNOME community have invested a lot into the GNOME 2 way of doing things, and GNOME 3, by breaking away from that so fundamentally, has devalued the community's investment. It screams: we don't want your panel widgets! We don't want your themes! Your working practices are wrong: this is the right way! GNOME 3 is opinionated software, and it's opinion differs from a large body of the GNOME community. The result? resentment. Remember: GNOME 3 is not just something new: it's the abrupt termination of something old, tried and tested.

…and hopefully that's the last time I need to vent about my GNOME 3 frustration. It's hear to stay, the question for the frustrated is: are you? Moving on…

Andrew goes on to recommend:

One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional “Hyper” … You do the mapping in:

System Settings → Keyboard Layout → Layout tab → Options..

I used to do this with GNOME 2, but I couldn't find how to do it on GNOME 3. Andrew's post gave me the important hint that it was still possible, but the precise location doesn't match: On my Fedora 16 / GNOME 3.2 system, it's System Settings → Region and Language → Layouts → Options…".

This is especially useful on my beloved UltraNav keyboard which lacks the Windows 95 keys. Sadly it does not work very well through various remote desktop tools: I get an inconsistent capslock state within VMs connected to via VNC. rdesktop seems ok.

I heard on twitter from my homeboy Peter Beverloo¹ that Google are gonna start implementing CSS Grid Layout in Webkit. This is rad news for web devs, for a few reasons:

Firstly, CSS Grid Layout is just great. It’s a proposal from Microsoft on a new way to layout HTML components via CSS. See, one big problem with HTML/CSS over the years has been that the layout model was meant for documents, not for application UI. Document layout is pretty simple, you get a width as input, and then you lay words out in rows until you reach the end of a line. Then you go to the next line, and continue until you run out of words, at which point you get a height, and you can render a resulting box. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work at all for the layouts with buttons and widgets and columns and all the other crap that UIs have.

Web devs needed to find a way to build these kind of UIs on the web. The first way they did it was using HTML tables, because tables are pretty much perfect for building those kinds of UI. However, the problem was that HTML isn’t meant to be presentational, it’s meant to be “semantic”, where elements express the meaning of data rather than how it looks, and using tables for layout violates that principle. Presentation was meant to be controlled using CSS. However, CSS was originally created for styling documents, not laying out UI. It didn’t provide any obvious way to achieve equivalent results, nor was any such functionality forthcoming. Instead, web devs learned to abuse features such as margins, padding and (especially) floats to get the results they wanted. Later-on absolute positioning came along, which made things easier, but was still far from a silver bullet.

This difficulty lead to a schism in web development between those who build web sites using tables for layout. and those who use CSS. And it’s one that you still see see today, whenever people in blogs, forums, etc. discuss the topic of web development. A lot of developers, especially those who only do a bit of web development, really hate CSS. They don’t see any problem using tables for layout, and override objections with the argument that it is simply too awkward to try and build complex layouts with CSS. Most of these people aren’t building web sites for fortune 500 companies, more often just small firms and internal tools, but they’re still a sizeable group of vocally dissatisfied customers. Arguing back is usually an equal number of CSS apologists who are adamant that using tables for layout is an abhorrence, and that everything is easily achievable with CSS.

While I don’t use tables for layout, I do have sympathy with the former of the two groups. Building UIs with floats and margins is a horribly unnatural and unintuitive process, especially for the beginner. These features were never intended to be leveraged in this way, and in that respect it’s an abuse just as much as using tables for layout was. It’s also an approach that is practically impossible to build good visual tooling experience around. Something is badly wrong when doing things the “right” way is so difficult.

Some better means of laying out pages via CSS was badly needed, and for years the W3C worked on various half-assed proposals around adding columns and weird ASCII-art based templates, but nothing practical ever arrived in the browsers. Things weren’t helped of course by this being Internet Explorer’s wilderness years, where it was enjoying 90%+ market share and 0% development effort. However, while they were ignoring IE, Microsoft were building WPF and Silverlight, two closely related technologies that took a lot of inspiration from the web, while attempting to improve it. One such area of improvement was layout. In particular, they provided a grid layout container that could be used to lay out controls in rows and columns.

Finally, a couple of years ago, Microsoft started getting serious about the web again, and putting a lot more effort into improving IE and participating in the creation of web standards. They submitted a number of proposals to the W3C, and one such proposal was Grid Layout, essentially an adaption of the model they developed in WPF and Silverlight for HTML and CSS.

The key thing about Grid Layout is that the structure of the grid is not specified in markup. There are no <tr> and <td> elements containing things. Instead, there is just a container element of some kind, perhaps a <div>, and some other elements within it, and then the grid is specified through CSS properties that target the elements via their id.

While the grid layout is a major improvement on floats and margins for hand-coded layouts, its real strength is that it’s eminently toolable. It should finally be possible to build a visual design tool for HTML and CSS that is…

• Intuitive
• Powerful
• Round-tripping
• Produces clean and straightforward markup and CSS

Truly a promised land, eh? We’re not quite there yet, but the holy grail of easy layout for web UIs is within our grasp.

Microsoft themselves have already implemented Grid Layout and shipped it in previews of IE10, so it’ll be available on Windows 7 and Windows 8. There’s still the long tail of IE7-9 users to worry about, but at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Firefox doesn’t yet appearing to be working on support, although I expect they’ll try to get one in time for the Windows 8 release in order to stay competetitive, especially if webkit also has an implementation. There is a Firefox bug open here, voting on it can’t hurt.

¹He’s not really my homeboy, I don’t even know him.

Work has been pretty crazy over the last few months, hence my not finding the time to write much here. As evidenced by my previous posts, when I do write I tend to ramble on for pages at a time, so rattling off a quick new post here and there wasn’t really an option. However, now that I’ve got my weekends back, I might have time to start blogging a little more, particularly on the technical side.

The past six months have been spent working on two projects. The first of these was a fairly significant Silverlight application for a financial services company. The second, which I’m still working on, is an AJAX intensive website for a property company. Somehow, through this work, I’ve transitioned from being a mainly server-side developer to being a mainly client-side one. Right now, 90% of the code I write is client-side JavaScript, which is something of a change from the 100% C# I was writing before this.

It’s certainly a change, but not an unwelcome one. I’ve always had an (un)healthy fascination with browsers and the client-side, um, side of web-development, but traditionally at my  firm, “real” programmers have done the server stuff, while designers and front-end specialists have handled the scripting stuff alongside the photoshop, HTML and CSS work, with little crossover between the two. However, the realities of, firstly, developing in Silverlight, and secondly, developing a complex AJAX interface, have meant the lines have become somewhat blurred.

The Silverlight project was an interesting experience. I’m not really a fan of proprietary web stacks, being more of an open-web advocate. Albeit one who is often driven to despair by the politics of the standardisation process and the glacial rate of advancement (mainly due to IE version lag). It also became increasingly clear as the project went on that Silverlight as a technology was sitting on a rather shaky foundation, as the news coming out of Microsoft regarding its future was not promising. In fact, just last week the shoe dropped, and Mary J Foley all but confirmed that the next release of Silverlight, version 5, will be the last.

What happened to cause this is, of course, the rise of the Smartphone and iOS, and the decline of Flash. Silverlight was developed by Microsoft purely as a competitive move against Adobe, in the days when it genuinely seemed possible that Flash might take over the web. Now that everyone agrees that isn’t going to happen, and focus is instead switching to “HTML5″ for the web and integrated app stores selling native apps. Indeed, even as we were finishing up work on the Silverlight app, work was beginning on an alternative HTML version to run on mobile platforms. From what I gather, that version may end up supplanting the Silverlight app on desktops as well.

It might sound like a frustrating experience, to invest that much time in what appears to be a doomed app and platform, but it was actually an incredibly useful one. As I said, I have no love of proprietary web stacks, and will not shed any tears over the death of Silverlight for that reason. On the other hand, I cannot deny that it is a fantastic piece of technology is many respects. It’s clearly the product of some smart people who looked at web development, understood what worked about it and what didn’t, and tried to make a technology that improved upon it. In some respects they succeeded, in some they didn’t. In some respects I think they succeeded even in-spite of themselves.

Working with Silverlight, and learning the patterns and practices required to implement a complex app, really helped me grasp the right way to build for the client-side web, in particular the use of the MVVM pattern and asynchronous operations. In many ways Silverlight forces you, or at least strongly encourages you, down the right path in these areas, and this is tremendously useful when you move back to regular web development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That is something I want to expand on in future posts, and go into the kinds of libraries and patterns that have been particularly useful in my latest work project. I think that’ll do for now though.

After over five years, I've decided to retire from the Debian Games Team.

The games team has been a fun group to work within Debian: packaging doom-related programs was my route into Debian and I've really enjoyed it.

Spare time is very tight at the moment, and I'm not dedicating much at all to Debian work. Within that, I'd quite like to try and focus on some other areas.

Good luck to the team going forward!

The Archipelago

Bird's eye view

You're on a small island in the middle of a vast ocean. There's nothing but dirt, stone and grass on the your island, which is part of a tiny archipelago. One of the nearby islands features a dark cave, with what looks like a coal seam near the entrance. You can glimps two small trees on another island nearby.

All around your little clutch of islands is what appears to be vast, unending ocean in all directions.

It's midday and you need to make yourself safe for the night. You can use the wood from the trees to craft a pickaxe. With this, you can fetch some coal from the seam. With the coal, you can create some torches, to see in the dark. You might have enough wood left over to make a door, if you're lucky. Or perhaps you should save it to craft a boat, or a sword. Groans from something unknown emanate worryingly closely from the darkness of the cave.

You're lucky: one of your two trees has dropped a sapling. You eagerly plant it. In a few days time, you might be able to harvest some more wood. You've been granted a temporary reprieve, but the law of diminishing returns means at some point, and soon, you'll run out of wood.

Swimming is time-consuming. By the time you have assembled a meagre supply of wood and coal, it's almost sunset. You nervously dig a burrow in the mud of your original island, light it with a torch and block the entrance back up. Night passes slowly as you listen to things crawling around in the darkness outside.

I first learned about Minecraft from this blog post by Mike Watson last year. Mike did a great job of demonstrating the narrative power of the game and his post left a lasting impression on me.

Every now and then I dip in to Minecraft to see what's new since the last time I played it. In the last few months version 1.8 was released and so I started a new map to check it out. I ended up with a corker of a randomly-generated map. Inspired by Mike's post, I thought I'd write a bit about it. In a follow-up post I will provide the map itself.

Oh, boy. Where do I start…

I postulate that there exists something called the "UI Singularity". Those who spend too much time considering the optimal way to interact with computing devices eventually pass through this singularity and can no longer effectively communicate with those of us on the other side.

At least that's one way to explain what seems to be happening to free-software desktop environments. From the outside, it would appear this happened to KDE with KDE 4, and now, unfortunately, it has happened to GNOME, with GNOME 3.

I've had GNOME 3.0 running on my Debian laptop for a few months, which I have used casually. At work, we installed Fedora 15 (GNOME 3.0) on our 69-seat Linux lab over the summer, which I have used on occasion to achieve specific things. I haven't dared upgrade my main work machine yet. So, it could be argued that I haven't spent enough time immersed in the GNOME 3 experience to really judge it fairly.

On the face of it, I wish 3 was an iterative development from 2, and didn't throw so many babies out with the bathwater. My casual use of it so far has not endeared it to me at all.

In the interests of being fair, rather than deliver my opinion of GNOME 3 as it currently stands, I've decided to try and use it in anger for a while to truly see whether I can "get it". Now that we're past the start of term, I am attempting to use a lab-configured Fedora 15 machine as my main work environment. I'll run with this for a while, and then try a Fedora 16 instance (I need to consider whether we should move to F16 for the second semester anyway) to see what improvements GNOME 3.2 brings.

private pool in Kos

In August 2010, Sarah and I had a lovely (but short) week-long holiday in Rhodes, Greece. We thoroughly enjoyed it but I didn't document it here. When John Goerzen was looking for European holiday destinations earlier this year, I had no hesitation in recommending Rhodes. I am surprised and delighted that John took up my suggestion and loved it too! See John's holiday blogging for more on this beautiful place.

This year we wanted to take a two-week holiday and have a similar experience again. We ended up choosing Kos, Greece. Kos was, perhaps not surprisingly, quite similar to Rhodes. We were based in "Hotel Oceanis" in Psalidi, on the north-east side, about ten minutes bus journey from Kos town.

The hotel was very relaxing with plenty of space. It's based on the sea-side and has two public pools: the large main one and a smaller (but seemingly deeper) one adjacent to a snack bar. We were very lucky to find that the hotel had put is in a room with a private swimming pool! In total, we had four separate places to swim in the hotel.

Kos town was similar to Rhodes town, but not quite as "historic" feeling. It was a bit larger/more spread-out. Some areas of the town are quite lively but we always managed to find pleasant and quiet places to eat and drink together.

We had twice as much time and took advantage of that by hiring a car and visiting the rest of the island. In particular we loved the beach in Mastichari (middle-North), which had quite turbulent rolling waves. "Sunny beach" on the south coast was absolutely packed with holiday makers, but was none-the-less worth the look.

All in all, my first two experiences of Greek islands were wonderful. One day, I'm sure we will return to (at least) Rhodes, but we may leave it for a while and see what the rest of the world has to offer in the mean time.

Rage is the latest game by Id Software, a company whose prior work I have an immense fondness for. I picked it up at the same time as buying a refurbished Playstation 3 a few weeks ago.

Sadly, I'm not too impressed.

The graphics are very pretty, most of the time, but the PS3 suffers the same problem which has plagued the PC version, namely, texture pop-up: A noticeable delay for a low-resolution texture to be swapped in for a high-resolution one.

I'm only about 45 minutes in but my experience mirrors that of Rock Paper Shotgun's: It's desperately trying to disguise it's own linearity.

Finally, and most crucially, I'm suffering majorly from motion sickness after more than a few minutes of play. This might be related to the fact that Rage's framerate is apparently double that of most games at 60 frames per second. Whatever the explanation, I can't play it if it makes me sick to do so!

I may trade it in for the similarly-themed Fallout: New Vegas, which I held off buying simply because I thought two post-apocalyptic FPS games was too many. I loved Fallout 3 (albeit on Xbox 360), logging perhaps 50+ hours of play with plenty more to do; but I don't think I could return to the beginning of that game.

I've just learned of if this then that: a simple web tool that performs actions based on events. It's like a streamlined, easy-to-use subset of yahoo pipes. I'm going to try and use it to achieve a few bits of integration, such as tweeting when I write a new blog post.

With this, my NIN vinyl album collection is now complete.

I don't have a comprehensive NIN vinyl collection by any account: I don't have all the singles nor the remix albums, rarities, etc., but I do have all the albums. This is the newly-remastered version of "Pretty Hate Machine", which sites proudly next to an original.

I'm still waiting for the much-anticipated remaster of The Fragile, which turned 12 last month. It appears to have been sidelined by movie soundtrack work.

mr (multi-repository) is a useful script by Joey Hess for managing multiple version control check-outs. It's particularly useful for team Debian package maintenance, where you can have a common mrconfig file allowing team members to have easy access to all packages. Here's the mrconfig file for the Games team (which bizarrely only lists git repositories despite being maintained in svn…). It could also be useful for maintaining a collection of puppet modules from separate places.

I frequently find myself wanting to sanity check my local copies of repositories. Have I forgotten to push commits upstream? Are my local branches not up-to-date? In a package management context, have I remembered to tag each package release? Are all the upstream releases tagged?

To aid this process, I've hacked together a script I've called mr-lint. This reads your mrconfig file and performs the above tests on every repository it finds. It attempts to determine whether the check-out is a debian package or not, and performs additional tests where appropriate.

Sample output:

$ mr-lint wd/debian/bup
wd/debian/bup: local branches not present in origin: rescue-diverge
wd/debian/bup: local branch debian does not match origin branch debian
wd/debian/bup: local branch master does not match origin branch master
wd/debian/bup: 5 missing upstream tags: 0.21, 0.17b, 0.20, 0.24b, 0.14a
wd/debian/bup: 3 missing debian tags: debian/0.17b-1, debian/0.20-2,
debian/0.21-1

I've called it mr-lint because I hope that if people think the idea is sound or the script useful, I might be able to adapt it into a patch against mr itself. Here's the script. If there is any interest, I'll put it somewhere more permanent.

In an earlier post, I asked a number of questions, most of which are now answered. Here's a recap:

I wrote

I stumbled across some CF Engine-style definitions for puppet in a Debian Administration article (taken originally from puppet's own wiki, which have since been moved/deleted)

Perhaps it was removed with good reason ☺ This is a fairly horrid solution to the problem. Phil was the first to suggest investigating Augeas, a neat tool that abstracts away the nasty specifics of parsing the myriad configuration file formats and provides a unified, tree-like interface for adjusting configurations. The interface reminds me of manipulating XML via the DOM. More on Augeas in a later blog post…

I also wrote

package { [foo,bar]: …} syntax worked fine, but is a little verbose and the package list is awkward to maintain buried inside the puppet syntax. I spent some time trying to see whether I could populate a puppet list based on the contents of a file: then I could list the packages one-per-line in a separate file. I haven't found a way of doing that yet.

I haven't found a more concise way of solving this problem, but as I have grown more familiar with puppet's syntax I have become less bothered by it. Iñigo suggested pre-processing the puppet configuration, but I'd rather not complicate my provisioning approach (VCS hooks) by attempting that.

Finally I wrote

Using my laptop as a second node also exposed some interesting puppet client behaviour. Once I went off-site, the laptop tried to look up puppet on foreign networks (such as my home network). I would have assumed that, once the strong SSL association had been made, the client would try to connect to the FQDN of the server. This probably isn't a serious problem in practice, as we probably won't need to rely on nodes off-site talking to the configuration server, but I hope that the client doesn't trust any host that happens to answer to puppet...

I'm pleased to report that the client is at least this clever: it refused to talk to a local puppetmaster that I setup at home.

Puppet lets you install packages on your system, like this:

package { 'foo': ensure => installed }

You can also ask it to make sure that the package is kept up-to-date:

package { 'foo': ensure => latest }

What does "latest" mean? How does this interact with a mixed repository sources.list on Debian?

It turns out that both ensure => installed and ensure => latest honour pinning. For example: if you have a stable system; sid in your sources.list and pinning set up; either of the above will install stable's version of foo.

I think ensure => latest is less useful than it might initially appear. If you install a package foo and use ensure => latest, but foo depends on packages bar and baz, it will only ensure that foo is up-to-date, not bar or baz. Similarly any other packages that you have not installed with puppet will not be kept up-to-date unless you name them explicitly. If you want to automatically take all updates from your distributor, you need to use another mechanism to do so.

The News of the World phone hacking scandal has provided no end of entertainment and office chat over the past week. I must admit to getting swept along with the mob spirit and sending a few polite emails to various companies, expressing my wish that they cease advertising with the paper due to its nefarious activities. It’s all a bit of self-righteous moral masturbation of course. After all, the British social-networking crowd were recently falling over themselves to aid newspapers in exposing the private affairs of Ryan Giggs and other celebrities, who were using super-injunctions to keep details of their private lives out of the tabloids. And now everyone is waging war on the News of the World for going too far in giving people exactly what they want, and seem to believe they’re entitled to?

But you know what, fuck it. I never buy tabloid papers, and it’s nice to engage in a little moral posturing and schadenfreude when the targets are as disagreeable as Rupert Murdoch and his cohorts. I do feel a little sorry for the journalists who will lose their jobs now that the News of the World has been shut down. They’ve basically been used as human shields in News International’s desperate attempt to protect Rebecca Brooks at all costs. However, I’m not sure I buy into all their teary eyed laments that NotW was a great paper and its closure a terrible loss. Looking through their website now the paywall has been pulled down, it just seems like a fairly worthless mix of tits, celebs and right-wing political rhetoric that the country won’t be much poorer without.

I also got involved in the campaign to stop Rupert Murdoch from taking over BSkyB, by submitting an entry to the government consultation on the matter. They’ve already achieved a minor victory, as the submission of over 100,000 responses to the consultation apparently means the decision will be delayed until at least September, as they examine every single response as they are legally required to do. If you want to contribute yourself, the consultation is closing on Friday 8th July, so I suggest you submit a response as soon as possible.

I didn’t send the form letter the campaign provided, as there seemed little point. It opines that the takeover is undesirable for various reasons, but the government’s line seems to be that its hands are tied as it can only block the deal on the grounds of media plurality, not on ethics. Therefore, I decided to write my own response, attempting to present a quasi-legal argument why recent events do in fact have a bearing on whether the deal affects media plurality. I don’t have the exact text of what I sent, so I can’t include it here (I may have used some language that it wouldn’t be wise to openly publish anyway), but I’ll try and provide a summary.

I am not a lawyer, so cannot really make a properly informed legal argument, but I decided to at least start by looking at what the law says. In particular, I found a Media Plurality Dossier by the London School of Economics that included an interesting quote from the relevant legislation:

2a.1. Enterprise Act 2002

“Section 67 allows the Secretary of State to intervene in order to protect legitimate interests, including that there is a sufficient plurality of persons with control of media enterprises.” http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/40/contents

The use of the word “sufficient” seemed particularly interesting. What is “sufficient” plurality of the media? It seemed to me that if there was a case to be made, this was a promising area of attack.

News International has allegedly been involved in a wide range of illegal and immoral activities, and also an effort to cover-up that activity that has continued for a number of years. Some claim this attempted cover-up is still ongoing. Perhaps of more concern however, is that there seemed to be little appetite to investigate News International and hold them to account. The metropolitan police, the government, the Press Complaints Commission, the government; all of them failed to give the oversight that it is their responsibility to provide. Even the rest of the press, with the exception of the Guardian, were highly reluctant to investigate or cover the story.

Why did this occur? The most plausible explanation appears to be that News International was powerful enough that it could frighten politicians, dissuade police officers, pay-off victims, and silence journalists. And it did exactly that for many years. Its power stemmed from the scale of its reach within British public life. It had too many newspapers, too many people on the payroll, and too many friends for anyone to cross it and expect to win, especially in the highly-political upper-echelons of bodies like the police, parliament and national newspapers.

This situation came abount due to the plurality, or lack thereof, of the British media. Too much power has been concentrated in the hands of too few, unaccountable individuals. In this context, for the plurality of the media to be eroded even further, by allowing News International to take full ownership of BSkyB, seems highly foolish. It is clear that, instead, the definition of what is “sufficient” plurality needs to be examined in light of these events, with the likely conclusion that organisations like News International should be owning less of the media, not more. Media plurality over the past decade has obviously been grossly insufficient, and contributed to a media and wider establishment wholly unequal to the task of holding News International to account over its actions.

That was pretty much the gist of my argument, although I couldn’t resist getting in one, slightly cheeky, final point. Given that there is an ongoing police investigation into criminal activity by the News of the World, and that there is grounds to suspect that News International used its influence to unduly disrupt attempts to investigate and expose this activity, wouldn’t any decision by the government to extend News International’s influence even further mean it was essentially acting an accessory to this activity? Not a position that government would want to be in, I’m sure!

That was more or less what I sent in. Given how quickly things are changing, the next days and months may render current questions about the takeover of BSkyB moot anyway, but I’m still glad I made my voice heard, in however small a way. I encourage you to do so as well. It really is therapeutic to unload on an issue like this, with the hope, however small, that it might have some effect or do some good somewhere down the line.

The second platform preview of IE10 was released yesterday. Apparently it is the same version of Trident that powered the recent Windows 8 demos, so there you go.

First impression is it continues the rapid pace of recent IE development. There’s a lots of really cool additions, although no single, striking visual feature, like gradients or transforms, this time. Instead, mostly this release seems to be focused on a spread of new APIs and more subtle features, although it’s no less impressive for that. As usual, Hachamovitch writes the announcement blog post and mixes in the usual marketing stuff, around Microsoft’s ‘site-ready HTML5′ line, with the descriptions of new features. Personally I wish they’d get someone technical to write these posts and put in a few code snippets and whatnot, Scott Guthrie style, but whatever.

I know it’s not wise to pay any attention to political or marketing waffle, but this whole ‘site-ready’ especially confuses me when you look at what they’ve actually added in this release. As far as I understand, The ‘site-ready’ thing is about Microsoft wanting to make the distinction between browsers adding features that are experimental vs those that are stable. Experimental features are things like Web Sockets that are still undergoing a standardisation effort and may change significantly before they are finished, as parts are added or changed, and bugs discovered. Whereas stable features are those that have been in development for longer, and which have reached a level of maturity where major changes are unlikely. Microsoft point to the trouble with Web Sockets experienced by Chrome and Firefox, where they implemented an early version of the protocol, only to have to disable it when a security flaw was discovered, as demonstrating the dangers of releasing experimental features too early. It puts users in danger, they say, and leads to developers having to keep rewriting their code to target changing APIs. In response, Microsoft created their HTML5 Labs initiative to prototype implementations without building them into IE proper.

Now, that’s all reasonable and sensible. But now look at the most trumpeted of the more visual features added to PP2: Positioned Floats. The idea here is to allow text to wrap around floated elements in a controllable way, such as in the manner demonstrated in this image that I have ‘borrowed’ from Microsoft’s draft spec:

Nice idea, very useful, etc. The spec it’s contained within is CSS Floats and Positioning Level 3. Although the spec is formatted as W3C editor’s draft, if you look at the URL you’ll see that it’s hosted on interoperabilitybridges.com, which is a site Microsoft uses to host a lot of its standards-based and interoperability projects. That’s because it’s not actually an official W3C CSS3 module, just a proposal for one.

In fact, the spec is an amalgamation of two previous proposal: One by Microsoft to extend positioning for floats, and the other being Adobe’s CSS Exclusions. Adobe’s spec was previously part of their CSS Regions and Exclusions proposal, which was created and prototyped together by Adobe as a way of letting web browsers create the kinds of fancy, magazine type layouts that a lot of publishers are creating in native iPad apps. The spec for the feature was laster split into separate Regions and Exclusions modules. In addition, Tab Atkins of Google has also been working on a Positioned Layout spec that covers much of the same ground and which he was supposedly going to publish as a new CSS3 module later this summer. Oh, and there’s another CSS3 module called Generated Content for Paged Media that also extends CSS 2.1 floats to allowing floats elements with respect to pages and multiple columns.

At the recent Kyoto face-to-face meeting on the 11th of June the W3C CSS working group looked at all these different proposals and decided on an action to bring them all together in a single new mega-spec called CSS Floats. Whereupon, they can be all be progressed together and the overlaps and interactions between them defined, and at some point in the future possibly split out again into separate specs.

Confused yet? There’s nothing really wrong with all the above, it’s just a result of there being a lot of people with good ideas, all interested in making progress in the same area, and having to work together to achieve it. However, it seems to me to be very clear that what Microsoft calls Positioned Floats in IE PP2, which is as yet only specced in a non-official W3C proposal on interoperabilitybridges.com, is very far from being in the least bit stable. In fact, it has effectively already been superseded by this as-yet unwritten spec that the W3c intends to produce. It also appears from the minutes of the FTF that at least one person, Mozilla’s David Baron, has strong concerns about whether it is a good idea at all.

In this situation, for Microsoft to turn around and not only implement positioned floats, but to do so while beating their drum on so called ‘site-ready’ standards vs those that are still experimental, seem just a little hypocritical. Now, I know Microsoft guys would say that their competitors add new CSS features as and when they feel like it, often without even a proposal spec. Apple in particular have been guilty of this on several occasions. And they’re right of course. I don’t object to Microsoft including an experimental implementation of positioned floats in IE10 if they want, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to point out such a blatant example of double-standards and use it to illustrate ome of the craziness in the CSS standardisation process.

…and this is what Yahoo demanded in order to connect the accounts. I mean, just look at that shit. Words fail me.