I recently decided to do another Google search for my name and came across an old post about a new cairo gtk widget called Fittsmenu. I had some complaints about it, but, overall, it's a really cool implementation of a concept for a radial menu. After doing some more hunting I found out that it's now in a thing called libsexier being hosted by codethink.

I'm mostly writing this post to remind myself about this project because I'd like to pick it up and play with it. It looks like nobody's actually messed with it since 2007 and I still wonder if I can fix the radial rotation to my liking. I'm also curious about how well sub menus can work by layering them in successive rows.

I recently decided to give KDE a try on my Fedora 10 box. I was a nearly instant convert because it is the only desktop environment I have ever used that gets the task manager right when you place a panel on the right side of the monitor. Every other desktop I have ever used seems to think that I care about the icon and not the name of the application. They come up with all sorts of ways to compress the space that make the entire task manager absolutely useless to me.


I like the initial organization where the display is split along the spaces with it faded away. You can still read enough of the window title to get the context you need to know what to click on. When I first saw this I worried that it would just end up like the Gnome picture because it was so similar in structure, but the lack of ellipses alone was actually an improvement.


Here we see the task manager with a whole lot of windows open. This is absolutely perfect. Every icon is still essentially visible in case that matters. The opening text of the window is still clearly readable. The KDE task manager here tries very very hard to make sure that all of these window titles never turn into a bunch of meaningless "..." crap.

As a note, normally KDE would group these windows up. I actually disdain grouping as well and have turned it off.

In essence, I'm switching to KDE because of the task manager. These are the only guys that get it right for me, and, in my not so humble opinion, the only guys that get it right from a usability standpoint for us precious few that like vertical panels. Thank you KDE people. You are awesome. Should I meet you, I will buy you a drink of choice.

I bought some components for a new computer. Phenom x3, 4G of ram, and a Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H. While I was really having problems with Fedora 10 on my laptop, I must say that with a fresh install on this new box I absolutely love it.

The most "holy fuck yes!" moment so far was when I went to download a video online. It pulled up the integrated totem player rather than just download it. In the past this has spelled defeat, anger, and other bad things. This time around PackageKit (I think) came up, hunted around for my missing codecs, quickly installed them, and then the video played fine inside of Firefox.

All I have to say is this: Job well done guys.

Since about Fedora 9, the GNU/Linux install on my laptop has been essentially worthless. Things that used to work fine like browsing on the internet while compiling a small piece of software just couldn't happen anymore. For some reason during this process something would start attacking my hard drive. On this particular laptop, touching the hard drive is likely signaling all processes to suspend and never return. Initially it clicks while the hard drive light flashes. As the horrible smashing continues eventually the clicking sound stops and the light goes solid. This is the time when I physically power off the laptop because it will never come back from this state.

Today it occurred to me that maybe the "random hard drive smashing" really was random and had nothing to do with what I was doing at the time. This would explain why no sequence of events seemed to be the trigger right? Definitely.

The problem with figuring out what was going on is that top shows CPU usage and memory usage. It doesn't tell me a damn thing about which process is eating hard drive. So far I haven't found any software that does and this is upsetting. Especially since *anything* that gave me *any information* about what was going on with the hard drive would have made the task easier.

Today I finally tracked it down and, to some of you, the answer will be obvious: cron. There's a bunch of crap that cron does that comes at about the worst possible time imaginable. Rather than try to figure out exactly whet the stupidity it was running did, I just uninstalled everything "cron" related. My cursory examination of what it was doing led me to conclude that none of it was actually useful.

The primary scripts that were causing the problems are 0logwatch and prelink.

0logwatch seems to have the job of "emailing" the local user to tell me what logs already say. I'm sure if I configured this it might be useful, but, as it stands, I don't care.

prelink just seems to eat up a lot of hard drive time and I can't figure out what it could possibly be doing that's useful.

After cron was done with its horror next came yum-updatesd to eat up even more hard drive and sometimes lock me out of yum. I really have no idea what this daemon does because yum seems to run an update every time I use it anyway. That's another service down.

Since culling all of these things my whole system seems to be running pretty acceptably on Fedora 10. My next challenge will be to make my sound stop skipping and "scrapping" every few seconds.

I'm having a whole bunch of fun trying out Google Chrome. When this comes to GNU/Linux, it's going to offset Firefox until it can play catch-up. Here are the top five features that are going to hang on to me:

Task Manager

Default Task Manager View

Extra Nerd Info

Inspect Element

Comes with DOM Inspector integrated through right-clicking on an element on a page. This is a tolerable trade-off from View Selection Source.

Download Toolbar

Integration of my favorite firefox add-on.

Download Toolbar

Gears/Prism style integration

Gears comes with it. The second I logged on to rememberthemilk it started asking for verification. With a few clicks, I now have a link on my desktop to load rtm in offline mode.

Places style front page

There is a firefox development that does this, but, looks like Chrome beat them to it.

Chrome Default Home Page

I came across this comment in the arstechnica boards in a discussion about information transfer through quantum entanglement. The verdict seems to be that information isn't transferred faster than the speed of light, but, the poster made this comment:

"You can control two orthognal states (i.e. make measurements along one axis to send a 1 and then change axis to send a zero) but now the other end needs to know which axis to measure along (and when) thus one needs a normal commuinications channel to pass this information along.

The other possibility is using the statistical nature itself to send information (i.e the rate of up/down), however, this requires copying the quantum state which cannot be done.

I read that and wonder, "Why not?" Firstly, let's talk about the top part where we need a communications channel to transfer two important bits of information: Which axis should we measure and at which time. It seems that both of these can be theoretically settled *before* extra-light distances are between the two subjects. Assume we have a protocol which maps axial shifts as a function of time. For example, to transmit an "A," we shift axis five times evenly distributed over a five-second period and then make no axial changes for another five second period.

For timing, each of the subjects start at the same point with a device they synchronize to the same timing sequence. A "second" is relative to the synchronization of these two devices. After they separate, rather than synchronizing them to each other, use known physical properties to augment drift due to whatever forces act upon the devices. Maybe even have them send physical sub-light waves and use the known properties of the transmission timing disparities to handle drift.

Now, on to the second paragraph, our storage of the protocol need not be tied up in the entangled photons. Rather than copying quantum state we simply have two communications devices which each only communicate one way. Since we have devices that can currently "read" the results of entanglement at a local level, these two devices can store the data at sub-light speeds.

It seems to me that the trick is developing a statistical protocol that makes error detection reliable within a certain percentage. It seems doable if we develop an appropriate statistical model for the 50% chance of change when forcing a quantum bit out of a superstate. Like all of those models you make a certain number of transmissions to enhance certainty of accuracy rather than ever expected your result to be perfect. If you find the right mix between valid and invalid, you can be relatively certain of the message.

Now, why what I have stated theoretically impossible? I know there are lots of really tough pieces to what I've outlined, but if the idea is doable, then those pieces are worth pursuing, and I want "instantaneous" communication over arbitrary distance damnit! Whittling interstellar communication down to a protocol that takes minutes to communicate a solid message is better than one that takes years.

</a> On its way to my house right now. I pre-ordered it the day that it was available online. I actually really love this new world of book buying where I can buy a version for my computer right now and still get a hard copy later. I figure it's also really helpful to the game companies since they can get more people to hand them funds before they have to fork it over to the publisher.

I'm checking out this new service that's making the waves and the splashes. I don't know how I feel about it yet, but here's the beginning of a pro/cons list:

Pro - Supports OpenID well. Other than a small bug with the way that livejournal implicitly translates http://gnu_lorien.livejournal.com to http://gnu-lorien.livejournal.com, the only data I had to give rejaw.com was an email address to activate. No passwords, nothing. It is great.

Con - No text messaging support. This is where Twitter became a wonderful application for me. It's a microblog as often as it's an SMS multiplexer.

I'll let you know as my opinions evolve.

I don't tend to update with many life things on this blog, but I sort of want to post some of them. I'm getting married next month on August 17th. Last weekend I had an engagement photo shoot. In general, these sorts of things bore me, but our photographer was interested in the idea of going to an abandoned building to take the pictures. I don't have them back yet, but you can check them out at Jody Burnett's photo blog.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I think of them. It seems like I may just look too intense, but, then again, we weren't exactly trying for the traditional feel anyway.

It seems I'm a registered user with MozillaParty.com that has no way to access their account!

Seeing as how I hate coming up with a new username and password for every site that I go to, I take the OpenID option whenever possible. I followed this same process with MozillaParty.com. Unfortunately, I started the registration process with http://gnu_lorien.livejournal.com. LiveJournal seemed to understand this syntax, but then returned http://gnu-lorien.livejournal.com. Well, according to MozillaParty.com, this is an invalid URL. I cleared the website field and somehow I now have an account with no valid OpenID to log in with and no password.

I bring this problem to the web mostly because I couldn't find an email address for anybody on MozillaParty.com to try and sort this problem out. No "Contact Us" anywhere!

So, does anybody out there know who to get in touch with, or maybe even the solution to this problem?

I just want to take a moment to laud this LoudTwitter for two reasons:

1. They help me maintain a link between my microblogging and my regular blogging.


2. It is the only website I have experienced that actually implemented OpenID properly.

You heard that right folks. I was able to set everything up with just my livejournal credentials. I was worried for a moment because a page asked for an email address, but, in noted that OpenID users could skip right by!

Finally, a web site that allows me to use a centralized identity rather than just pretending too and creating another password for me to remember.

As with most articles that put a Windows user in front of a GNU/Linux box and the GNU/Linux box isn't decided as the emphatic winner, The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment is making the rounds. Reading the responses to these articles is tedious because their are just so many, so, I'm responding separately.

By and large I find these sorts of usability experiences enlightening and useful. Rather than bog myself down in the finer points of the debate about which of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu GNU/Linux sucks the least, I prefer to focus on the flaws discovered that are very clearly flaws. In a lot of cases, the most experienced of us have simple solutions to them. The problem with these solutions is that they are mostly invisible and it's hard to find out about them without the right expert around. I will present some of my ideas on what the things that are clearly weaknesses and the solutions I'd like to see to the problem.

( Read more... )

I think I could make myself a big name in the open-source world if I put together an awesome visualization for the blog and mailing-list drama that all of these developers share. I know I love to follow it and read about it. Looking at kerneltrap.org and LWN the articles that follow developer arguments are the ones that I flock to.

Yesterday's post of mine transformed into a rather well-written article by Jonathan Corbet. I don't think I can write as well or put it together as well, but, a visualization would be nice. When you look at the framing of that article there's a distinct time-line wrapped amongst it that is lost. Neither the full article or the mailing list threads can seem to capture it.

Then there are other developing dramas that have no centralized place to watch them unfold. Such is the disadvantage to blogs, and the nature that drives RSS feeds.

Ryan Paul of Ars Technica fame wrote this article about GTK+ 3 development. Personally, I loved it. Thomas Wood, however, didn't agree. Ryan, being a member of the GNOME community and a blog watcher, didn't take these comments silently. Thomas, wanting to have the last word, defended himself against Ryan's attack of sorts. Seems both of them have a standing issue with the other's use of language, but, Thomas doesn't seem to like the threats of less coverage coming from Ryan over the whole matter.

These sorts of flows interest me a lot, and, I wonder how they might be transformed into something more visible and trackable. At the very least, what if I forget about this? These things are often settled quietly amongst blogs and, I think, this may actually be a core source of where so much misinformation comes from. We tend to assume that the heavy visibility of the whole matter makes the truth obvious. Ultimately though, there's a flood of information that's not easy for people to follow, even if they know exactly where to find it.

Kerneltrap thread archive

From: David Miller <davem@...>
Subject: Re: Reporting bugs and bisection
Date: Apr 14, 1:43 am 2008

From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:39:59 -0700 (PDT)

> I wrote or merged in ~10 bugs in the last hour, for example.

Bug fixes!  I meant "fixes" I swear!

That's quite a Freudian slip if I ever saw one.

Overall what we're looking at is a fairly classic debate between process vs. quality vs. code contribution. Looking at the individual pieces and steps, the conversation doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Miller and others don't want to be bogged down and think they are on the wrong track. Morton just wants to keep everybody on the right track and nobody else seems to agree that there's a problem.

I like conversations like this that manage to stay civil because they keep attention on the problem. People are pulling out data, solving problems, and doing everything they can to convince Morton that there isn't a problem. This, is a good thing. It's the sort of bureaucracy that the lkml represents: No process, but lots of arguing and attention to keep things going. That passion drives it. Somewhere I imagine Morton smiling as all of these developers jump on to fix bugs and prove him wrong. Maybe he wasn't right in the first place, but, if more bugs get fixed, should he even care?

http://gould.cx/ted/blog/Green_Windows

It seems everybody and their mothers are trying to do email the exact same way, or pick a paradigm I just don't care for.

Gmail and the Conversation

Gmail started with a wonderful idea: People often think of emails with each other as a conversation. You have all of the emails under a certain subject header grouped together in one continuous view. For times when you're talking to just one or two people, in order, this is fantastic. If it becomes more complicated than that it's just plain bedlam.

I'm on a number of mailing lists which have huge amounts of traffic and people respond to emails as they see them. This means I essentially get a random mixture of responses all simply ordered as they arrived in my inbox or as they were sent from the other person's. Take into account how YahooGroups! will sometimes send emails out in random order and it's just impossible to sort.

Because of how hard it is to comprehend where you are inside of these conversations, it encourages people to top-post, as that leaves the most of the previous message in tact. This, in my opinion, is probably the worst thing that can be done. Gmail uses a few ingenious methods to cut the cost of top-posting when trying to read the emails, but an important caveat is that we're still punishing everybody in the world that doesn't use gmail with these ridiculously huge emails.

Threading Done Mostly Right

For most things I prefer threaded views. It scales much better than conversations. Also, I rarely interact in threads where only two or there people are speaking.

YahooGroups! actually has one of the better thread views that I've seen. Gmane uses a threaded view that's just as functional and more spartan. I tend to like the way that YahooGroups! summarizes posts, but I understand wanting to use the gmane style view for huge mailing lists.

The Last Vestiges of Failure

I like the threaded view, but what's the biggest problem with it? Thread views seem to be entirely dependent on what the other person sending the email is doing. If they have a broken mailing client that doesn't mark the new post properly, then your entire thread view is fragged.

A much worse example is when you just have people that don't know what they're doing and rather than sending a fresh email to a list, they hit reply not realizing that some people's clients care who their replying to. This results in either strange and entirely off-topic posts, or brand-new posts that are buried in a thread from six months ago.

What do I want?

In something like Thunderbird, we shouldn't have this problem. All of the information is stored inside of a local mbox, so why can't I just move emails around to associate them between threads? This would mean that at least I can reorganize when the list gets too long or pull out somebody that sent a re: Blah [was: Mrah] that gets lumped in with the original thread. Maybe I want them lumped in? Who knows, but sometimes the engine is wrong and needs help.

The other thing that would be nice is some sort of flag to bring new emails straight to the top that seem to be to dead threads. We have spam detection and scam detection. Why aren't we also detecting potentially incorrect email listing? Chances are that a new email to a thread that's a year old doesn't belong. There could easily be a tweakable metric based on email volume to help decide how quickly a thread should be considered dead. On some lists I'm on, a thread is dead after a week.

Here's the beginning of a thread about the OpenBSD bcw driver copying code directly from the bcm43xx drive in linux: http://marc.info/?t=117571775000002&r=4&w=2

Let me summarize some points from this:

1. bcm43xx code was copied. The developer working on bcw accidentally committed code segments over multiple commits that were exact duplicates of bcm43xx code.
2. In taking this action, the developer of bcw relicensed GPL'd bcm43xx code into an ISC license which essentially only requires a dissolution of warranty notice. This is a violation of the GPL, and the developer did not have the right to do this.

That's really all that's important from this thread, but it is massively long. Theo seems to harp on the following points:

1. The bcm43xx developer is a jerk for bringing this up publicly.
2. The bcm43xx developer is calling the bcw developer a thief and shouldn't be.
3. The Linux/GPL community can't be trusted to work with us because they were ass-hats about the Atheros driver.

Firstly, it's hard to call the linux-wireless list public beyond its specific community.

Secondly, by the terms of the GPL, the bcw developer that committed this code is a thief. The GPL community is just generally more forgiving about these sorts of things. In many ways, we are less tolerant of *BSD taking our code because their adherents highly devalue our license because of its restrictions. Also, *BSD becomes a gateway for corporations to take GPL'd code and incorporate it into their products.

In that last sense, it's much worse for a person who prefers the GPL to dual-license than somebody that prefers BSD. BSD is often pushed by people that want you to do "anything" with their code, so why should they care?

On the last point, the only person that's been entirely unreasonable in this is Theo. He really does creatively snip emails and constantly shift the subject. I do agree with people that he spent a lot of time insulting bcm43xx developers in order to obfuscate that the bcw developer actually did something wrong. Theo also spent a lot of time upset that the bcw driver needed to be deleted to solve this problem. Well, that's what happens when you copy code illegally and post it to a "public" place.

In the end, this thread tells me something I've always known: Theo is a selfish asshole that doesn't respect the efforts of other projects and their opinions on anything related to copyrights and licensing. I don't think he necessarily needs to change because that leadership style seems to work for the community that's built around it. In the end though, it's ridiculous to hear him claim that anybody else is getting in the way of cooperation. I would put him at the top of the list.

As an aside, as angry as I am at Theo right now, I think he does have a point about how Linux developers shouldn't accept NDAs to make GPL'd drivers without specs being released. Although, that doesn't justify Theo's team taking GPLd drivers and relicensing them in a way incompatible with the GPL. Yes, Theo, it is possible for you to be partially right and partially wrong. This is something you need to realize.

This is mostly in response to a post from Joe Shaw on Planet Gnome.

He's right about one thing, yes, 'svn ls -v svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/tags | sort' is more annoying to type than 'cvs log', but it doesn't give you any less power.

"
This will give you the same info:

       2963  ?                    Nov 01 15:12 BEAGLE_0_2_12/
       3015  ?                    Nov 20 15:29 BEAGLE_0_2_13/
       3124  ?                    Dec 14 13:36 BEAGLE_0_2_14/

And you can diff between the tags, but you can’t easily diff the individual changes. That is something I am going to miss."

Yes, you can easily diff the individual changes, without having to deal with the tags directory. You get the log for the the main branch this tag comes from between those revisions.

I believe Joe knew the file he was trying to deal with annotating a single file. Let's call this file Blah.cs. When looking for the changes between 2.13, and 2.14, he could use the following command:

svn log -r 3015:3124 svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/trunk/Blah.cs

This would give the changelog for the differences between those two versions. You can even use that -r argument with annotation. It leaves a dash for each line that was changed outside of the range so you can see just what changed within the scope of your commits.

In essence, these tags are no weaker, they're just different. You should never really use your tags directory other than to checkout old releases and get a list of when you tagged your trunk.

Duke Nukem Forever really has taken a long time: http://duke.a-13.net/

It's been too long since a real update here. I'm going to start setting myself some schedules and such, but work is pretty hectic. News for the day is that I've set up a mugshot account. Feel free to add me and track my life more than google already lets you do so.

This Sunday I'm going to put some more time into Crack-Attack! I have a few things that need to get done before 1.1.15. Turns out that there is no automatic rate limiting so we'll just use however much bandwidth you have! This is unacceptable. I need to add a --rate switch so people can tune this. There are some other things I'd like to do, but the release will *never* come out if I don't just get this done and push it out the door.

I'm also redesigned the council web pages for One World by Night. That's certainly been fun to work on, and I'm not as finished as I should be. Doesn't really matter though because I'm not a real time-line. Not my hope is to get that done in January.

There's also the oft-forgotten Railsvine. Nobody else seems interested in it, but I still want to get this done. It's been set aside for so long now. I would really like help with it, but I'm not finding there are a lot of people that see the utility. Hopefully I can make it more generic one day and get some appeal from other game types. Anybody out there with ideas?