A Man and his Penguin

It seems that lately, there has been a backlash against Nvidia cards in the Linux community, due to the proprietary driver required to get 3D acceleration.

This has probably been sparked by the news that ATI’s open-source driver is actually pretty good, and that AMD/ATI is working with the open-source community.

I was very disappointed with the Nvidia driver. It caused kernel panics (oopses) once or twice a week when I installed Gutsy. Then I updated to the next version of the driver, which fixed the problem but introduced another bug - this time, all my videos had too much green in them. (or not enough of another colour).

I sent a detailed bug report to Nvidia. They asked me how they could reproduce the problem. I recieved no further answer after that; not even anything like "We’ve got a new driver out, try it now" or "Try xyz".

In the end, I found a workaround - changing the video output settings in all my video programs and in gconf-editor from their default "xv" to just "X".

The Nvidia driver is not developed in tandum with X, so a new X version can be released without an Nvidia driver that works with it. This hurt Fedora recently. Nvidia’s driver causes kernel panics, is a bit floppy as regards mode changes, can cause problems with Aleph One, and is simply not something I want to deal with on an everyday basis anymore. Due to its license, you cannot have it working 100% out-of-the-box on Linux, which does feel strange for new users who are used to having their graphics card drivers out-of-the-box on a preinstalled Windows system.

By comparison, my colleague’s integrated ATI chipset works alright; Google Earth flickers when you’re running Compiz, but at least it doesn’t turn green. And there’s a more recent driver without that problem, apparantly… I just need to SSH back into her computer to apply the update

My next graphics card will either be an OGC2 (yeah, dream on) or a passively-cooled ATI card. Something by Sapphire with a lot of copper piping… yeah!

Our cat had to be sterilised today, so we took her to the vet. The vet had actually moved a hundred metres down the road, so it took us a few minutes to find it.

And it actually had a drive-through lane out the front of it! Drive-through desexing… what a brilliant idea! Snip snip, you don’t even need to turn your engine off.

Of course, that’s not true, but there is a drive-through lane at the front of the vet from the previous tenants.

Last night I realised that I don’t think before I write, and in the past and present that has hurt people. And it’s had an impact on my life that I possibly can’t even comprehend. I mean, I love to retell the story of Stan and the timer record on his VCR, and I only tell that story to make people feel less embarrased - but now that I think about it, Stan wouldn’t want me spraying that story around, because it would make *him* embarrased.

So from now on, I’m going to be much more careful. I have two new mottos:

"Next time you want to make some kind of idiotic pronouncement, you should first get up, step outside and plunge your head into a bucket of iced water" - what a judge told Alan Jones, featured in the "radio advertisement" for an earlier incarnation of this website

"If you don’t have anything nice to say, then STFU".

In other news, I had a reasonable day of sales thanks to eBay. A couple of people bought dishwashers from eBay, and some others came in to look at the d/ws and bought other things too. I also got some product training on Asko dishwashers, which really was a gap in my knowledge before.

Oh, and the rep from NEC told me how to get into one of the hidden menus on the NLT20G TVs. You press Display, then the first three colour buttons, then Menu. This brings up a menu where you can lock certain functions, set a maximum volume and stuff. Turn the TV off to exit the menu.

The first time I put in this code combination, I did it incorrectly, and actually discovered a SECOND secret menu! I think I did Display, all four colour buttons in order, and then Menu. This one seems to give you the ability to move the picture on the screen and change the RGB, brightness and everything else to do with the panel. Excellent! I love finding secrets in consumer electronics.

Part of this post was written on June 20th but not uploaded, then I appended more onto it today.

Today, I became part of the future of television.

My copy of the first episode of Doc Martin was added to
SurfTheChannel.com, and it has "New Show!" next to it. My online handle,
3rdalbum, is also displayed on the video page.

I’m rather pleased, and I’ve decided to put the rest of the episodes on
there. I can edit and fully upload one episode every two days. If I have
a day off work, I can do an episode in one day.

Unrestricted video-on-demand is the eventual future of television, and I
helped the online community to make what we currently have, even less
restrictive. I also hope the site puts Doc Martin on its front page as a
featured show; that would be really good.

I’m also going to put in an occasional advertisement. As in, one
advertisement for every three or four episodes. Actually, in the second
episode I’ve put in a hilarious advertisement for Firefox that I found
on Youtube. It’s the one where the other browser logos are making lots
of funny noises, and the Firefox one tells them to shut up.

I’ll also put in an ad for Ubuntu, in a later episode. I just need to
find one that’s short, brings the point across, and has good production
values. I’ve had a quick look, and I might have my work cut out for me.

In other news, Asus has released the Atom-based EeePC 901. Pricing is
the same for the Windows version as the Linux version, but the Linux one
has 8 gigs more storage. I think more people will buy the Windows one
because they’ve completely missed the point of the machine, but I’m sure
the Linux sales will be good due in part to people who already have
Windows and want a bigger SSD.

My boss decided to get rid of Firefox off the work computers. The
extended warranty program is now filled out online, and the website
displays the contract in a popup window. Of course, Firefox’s popup
blocker was turned on, my boss thought Firefox was "causing problems",
and promptly removed it before I even arrived to work.

Removing it opened a can of worms. All saved web pages try to open in
Firefox when double-clicked, and of course Firefox is no longer there.
My boss called the IT support line to get them to fix it, and they decided that installing IE 7 was the answer. But, of course, we were
running XP SP 1; so he spent hours running Windows Update and spyware
scans (surprisingly, found some!), and then installed IE 7, and found
that it didn’t fix the problem anyway.

I apologise unreservedly for what I wrote here before. As this blog post was written piecemeal, I was in a bad mood while writing that part. But that’s still not any sort of excuse for writing that in such a public place. I was wrong to say what I said, and I’m ashamed.

Isn’t IE 7’s font rendering just awful? They’ve applied some horrible
anti-aliasing to the fonts on the web pages, which just makes it look
blurred. When I was younger, and the CRT monitor was king, I liked
anti-aliased fonts. Heck, merely two years ago on my old
computer’s CRT monitor, I turned on anti-aliasing for XFCE
and liked it. Anti-aliasing looks shit on an LCD, which is why
Ubuntu’s default font settings are so great.

My father works specifically with fonts as part of his job. He agrees
that Ubuntu’s font rendering is nice.

Today, thanks to the Gentoo wiki, I managed to replace the ugly PC speaker noise with the playback of a short sound file. I will post a distro-agnostic version of the howto. I also uploaded the third episode of Doc Martin and I’m just about to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who.

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:27:12 +1000
From: "Null Ack" <nullack ("at" symbol) gmail com>
Subject: On Bugs and Linux Quality
To: ubuntu-au
 

I would like to respond to Dan’s comments about Linux/Ubuntu quality. To not
dilute the discussion on my specific bug Ive moved it over here.

Like all of you, I share the enthusiasm for Linux and open source software.
To me, the greatest features are the ability to see the inner mechanisms of
the software, for not just security reasons ( which is a compelling reason
all in itself) but also for the ability to understand / change core
components. However it is vitally important we do not remain critical in a
constructive way to improve the software, or more importantly, improve the
user experience.

I disagree with the notion that one bug should not effect the global
perception of Ubuntu quality. The point is, for software to be generally
useful, an expected level of robustness and capability is generally expected
in core features. If a bug prevents this from happening then the software is
not generally useful, or at the very least, is not very usable without
protracted workarounds and other annoyances.

Ubuntu has a number of flawed approaches to release management and support.
For example, not updating the Nvidia 169.12 driver in Hardy. 169.12 has
numerous oopses and other bugs, and there subsequently has been three
revisions of the driver since. Not to mention the old driver revision does
not support new Nvidia cards that have been released. Or lets look at the
many, many other device driver fixes in the vanilla kernel tree that have
not been backported into Hardy’s old kernel revision. Its wishful thinking
to somehow arbitarily declare that a release is "stable" and then hardly do
any device driver updates ongoing in the "support" phase. Clearly the word
support isnt actual support - I think its more driven by a lack of resources
to upgrade the baseline as is commonly done in Vista and Leopard.

Ubuntu has tens of thousands of bugs in the bug database. Reporting bugs
does not ensure that the bug is actually fixed or indeed investigated at
all. Of those that are, many of those are sent up stream where they again
sit like a statue and not seem to be resolved.

It doesnt take much of a look at say X for example, to see the countless
people complaining about X bugs that have not been fixed. Or, how X was
"released" and declared "stable" with a known blocker and other bugs that
could be argued to actually be blockers as well.

Lets look at what the insiders are saying. A kernel hacker recently said
"I’ll typically read the linux-kernel list in 1000-email batches once every
few days and each time I will come across multiple bug reports which are one
to three days old and which nobody has done anything about! And sometimes I
*know* that the person who is responsible for that part of the kernel has
read the report" He continues on answering a question about the declining
quality of Linux "I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I
might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix.
Obviously we fix bugs as well as add them, but it is very hard to determine
what the overall result of this is.When I’m out and about I will very often
hear from people whose machines we broke in ways which I’d never heard about
before. I ask them to send a bug report (expecting that nothing will end up
being done about it) but they rarely do.So I don’t know where we are and I
don’t know what to do. All I can do is to encourage testers to report bugs
and to be persistent with them, and I continue to stick my thumb in
developers’ ribs to get something done about them.I do think that it would
be nice to have a bugfix-only kernel release. One which is loudly publicised
and during which we encourage everyone to send us their bug reports and
we’ll spend a couple of months doing nothing else but try to fix them. I
haven’t pushed this much at all, but it would be interesting to try it once.
If it is beneficial, we can do it again some other time." His name is Andrew
Morton…….

Linux needs to have less scatterbrain behaviour where half done things are
left and the chaos moves forward to the next semi complete feature. It needs
to consolidate and have a unified effort to really work on stability and bug
fixing.

I just tried posting a comment to a Microsoft blog. Denied - the offensive language filter had found something it objected to. I realised that I used the phrase "thrust upon", so I changed it and resubmitted. Still offensive language, apparantly. So I looked further, and found where I refered to the root account on Linux. I changed it to "superuser". Resubmitted. Still too offensive.

By this time, I was thinking "Have they really blocked the word Linux from this Microsoft blog?". Finally, I removed the sentence "If any Mac users are sniggering, then don’t; your whole operating system is full of these kludges". Resubmitted. It went through fine.

I thought the offensive word was "kludges", but looking back I realise that "snigger" was the offensive one because it contains the word nigger. How dumb; snigger is a word, and not one that’s in the least offensive. (in America I’m sure they’d say "snicker").

But yeah, I bet Friendster lets me put the word "Nigger" into this post. Nigger. Niggers. Sniggering.

"He called me a dirty bitch, a cheap-ass whore, and a dick-sucking slut. And then he called me the N word!"

Seven has been pushing this show for the past week, and the Sunday Times TV guide had Charli Delaney on the front cover.

It always struck me as a bit naff that Charli, who’s never been in a choir nor been musically trained, and who recently admitted that she can’t pick a harmony, got the gig as judge on a show about choirs.  It’s like Chopper Reid judging a debutante ball.

I just watched the show anyway, because Charli is quite useful as eye candy, and I like choral music. I used to sing in a choir.  The first act (Vox Harmony) was terrible; they sang Love Is In The Air very out-of-tune. I’m surprised they were even let into the studio with so much metal on their faces, too. You wouldn’t know they were a choir, they just turned up to the show dressed as though they were going to TAFE.

The next one, The Blenders, was an all-male, supposedly barbershop-style group. They took The Idea Of North’s arrangement of "Man In The Mirror" and didn’t really do very well with it. Charli was very impressed; she said that "if their rendition of the song was played all around the world on loudspeakers, we’d immediately have world peace". Er, yeah. Something like that. The Blenders seemed to be just the slightest bit queer, too.

Next was some god-awful group of plastic-faced girls who, sadly, won a silver medal at the "Choir Olympics" with Pink’s "Get the party started". How many times does Pink harmonise with herself in that song? About as many times as this sad excuse for a choir did. Shit song, shit performers. If I’d been on the judging panel, I would have told them to go home immediately and get themselves a competant choirmaster. Or disband - whichever is easiest. Seriously though, their performance lacked harmonies and individually their timing was way too loose.

Then there was a gospel choir, made up of just anyone who wanted to join. As you’d expect from this sort of community gospel choir, they were all very enthusiastic. They sang some song that I had only heard in advertisements. You could see potential there, but they just need more direction. Considering that there were plenty of men in this choir, it was very difficult to hear any bass - very disappointing, and I’m surprised the judges never said anything about that. They criticised this group’s timing, which was fair to point out, but IMHO the lack of bass was the biggest problem.

Charli suggested that they all hold hands before they perform. Gawd, what the hell *is* she doing on this show? I think this is the dumbest thing I’ve heard her say, and remember that I’ve seen 9 years of her playing to kids.

They’ve all performed, it’s nearing the half-hour mark, now we’re going to find out the winner? No. Instead, they’re going to drag it out another 30 minutes by having them all sing songs that they’ve had only a couple of hours to arrange, learn and rehearse. Needless to say, this was simply embarrasing to all performers. You can’t expect anyone to be any good at something they’ve barely even learnt. Has as much to do with choral performance as parallel parking. To add dumbness to insult, the songs chosen were all Kylie Minogue songs. Written for a single voice, and remember that Kylie’s songs don’t usually have much in the way of harmony.

Now do we get to hear who’s the winner, if anyone still cares? Well, kinda. The Blenders go through to the next round. The gospel choir are eliminated. But apparantly, the other two groups are so evenly matched that they need a tiebreaker. Gee, it’s lucky they were given a song each two weeks ago to perform in the event that there be a tiebreaker!

A couple of ad-breaks later, they perform. The plastic girls sing "I Don’t Feel Like Dancing", which was an easy opportunity for them to score some points as the song already has harmonies in place on the original recording. Vox Harmony get Wonderwall - tough deal of the cards. They actually (in my opinion) nail it as much as any choir could nail an Oasis song. Good seperation and interplaying melodies between the males and the females in the choir, but only after a very shaky start.

I recorded the show because my Indian friend Shiv would kill me for missing another piece of footage of a Hi-5 member, but I’m certainly not going to watch it again.

If Charli is serious about becoming an actress (and not just an "adult entertainer", lol), she should learn to act like she’s qualified to judge a choral competition. That’s a bit harsh, I guess. Good actors and actresses study up for their parts by walking in their character’s shoes or going to the library and doing research on the main themes of the TV show or movie, so they can better prepare for the role. Charli really needs to take a crash-course on music - attend some choir rehearsals, buy CDs of internationally-renouned choirs as well as a book of listening notes to go along with them. Otherwise, she’s likely to make a fool of herself many more times this series.

But the show is foolishly done anyway. There are so many better choirs in Australia. Why weren’t Men In Harmony or the Perth Harmony Chorus invited onto the show? Or will they be?

The choirs should sing two contrasting songs each as the main round. Keyword: contrasting.  Not "Two songs that 94.5 play twice daily".  If the show is going to give the choirs songs to sing as a tiebreaker or a second round, they should at least give the ensembles the opportunity to use harmony and SATB seperation. Otherwise, there’s nothing to judge on, as Charli demonstrated with "Get the party started" (she disagreed with the judges who said it was too simple a song - "Well that’s the way the song is, so the girls nailed it!").  And, of course, give the songs to the choirs weeks in advance rather than hours.

The only problem with my idea for the show is that Charli could be made to look even more foolish by it. Imagine if a choir decided to sing Mack The Knife:

Charli: I think that was the wrong song to sing. The lyrics don’t sound right. It’s as though the song was translated from German or something.

For those of you who don’t get the joke, don’t worry. You don’t *need* to understand the joke, because you’re not judging a musical competition!

Battle of the Choirs. 1/10.
Pros: It makes me realise that the choir I was in was excellent.
Cons: It’s not so much a "battle" as a wet towl flicking contest.
Verdict: Don’t watch it. Even Charli fans should stay away.

Thanks for reading my post about Boycott Novell, and thanks to the people who discussed it. Now let’s answer some questions that I got asked on MSN, that you might be wondering about too

The forum post on Linsux was indirectly what made me write the article - I agreed that something had to be written about BN, but I disagreed with the Linsux article. So, in true Linux style, I wrote what I thought needed to be written. But there’s more to it than that; I was shocked by the "Credibility Index" page of BN because it reminded me of how George Orwell used to send letters to Downing Street, listing the people in parliment and public service who he thought were communists.

If you are worried about Mono, then remove it by all means. If you want to stop the ubuntu-desktop metapackage from being removed too, then it’s safe to manually delete the files that were installed by mono-common and any other affected packages. When you dist-upgrade, Apt will ask you if you want to fully install the new mono-common, or if you want to keep those files deleted.

I don’t work for any software company, nor open-source software project.

Now, let’s stop commenting on Boycott Novell stories or anti-Boycott-Novell stories, and let’s just vote the bad ones down. Press the red button

The West Australian are having a competition - subscribe to their daily news feed on your desktop and you get the chance to win a Dell laptop. The advertisement has the RSS logo in it, so silly me, I thought it might’ve been an RSS feed.

I went to the website and clicked on the RSS logo. It didn’t open my feed reader. It took me to another page that asked me to download their program. "This program works on Windows PCs only".

Not only is it wrong not to provide versions for other platforms (or a single version that works on multiple platforms, e.g. a Flash movie-based aggregator), but it’s also wrong to use the RSS logo when talking about their news feed.  The feed is locked to a proprietary program - you cannot look at the source code of the feed, nor access it from any other program - so the logo is being used in reference to a closed format. Mozilla’s guidelines for use of the RSS logo clearly state that it "should be used to indicate the presence of information provided via web syndication in an open format…".

By "Open format", the Mozilla Foundation define that, among other things, it should be "free of legal restrictions on use, especially restrictions
      that would prevent the format from being implemented by free and
      open source software". Finding the actual location of the feed file and reading it would require reverse-engineering or decompiling of the software, both of which are prohibited by the EULA of the software.

I did try running the distasteful program in WINE, but the windows would not render properly no matter what settings I used.

I hope I’m still bloody registered to win the laptop.

Recently on FSDaily, there has been a flood of stories being submitted from the site Boycott Novell. This site claims to be "Exploring the reality behind exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle (yet severe) implications".

The keyword is "Reality". Unfortunately, there is not a lot of reality or even any facts behind Boycott Novell’s articles, which seem to come several times daily. Let me explain:

I once knew a man who suffered from autism. He would take any single event out of context and create a full paranoid backstory around it, and start spreading it around as if it were the truth. If somebody told him that they didn’t think Hi-5’s latest album was as good as their previous albums, he would start telling people that Hi-5 had fired their previous music producers due to budget cuts and that fans were threatening to stop listening to Hi-5. The trouble was, this autistic guy believed every lie he created, and that’s what made himself so believable!

Boycott Novell must be run by an autism sufferer, because it does *exactly the same thing*. If somebody in the free software community says that they feel ambiguous about Mono, then Boycott Novell starts writing articles about how people en-masse are deleting Mono from their systems, and that Microsoft is secretly funding Mono’s development through Novell in an attempt to create a case to sue Linux users for patent infringements.

This would all be very spooky, except that they provide NO EVIDENCE of anything they claim. The closest thing to "evidence" would be when they quote previous articles they’ve written.

Most recently, Boycott Novell has published a story about how Mark Shuttleworth has supposedly "sold-out" to Microsoft by having licensed Windows Media codecs in the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Oh, and Mono, of course. Look at the source of this shocking revelation: their own IRC channel!  A more recent edition of the article says that Mark Shuttleworth should "be wise of the mistakes of others" in licensing Microsoft technology. Yeah; every consumer electronics company *really* got burnt by putting licensed Windows Media decoding in their DVD players! Sony and Samsung certainly didn’t survive the fallout of putting WMA playback in their MP3 players! </sarcasm>

The story even implies that Canonical has cut a Novell-style deal with Microsoft, just because he said he is willing to work with Microsoft when and where interests do not conflict, and where there is transparency. The case he provides is a good one, and I especially urge you to read the last paragraph.

No Canonical-Microsoft deal has been forged. Licensing of the codecs has come not through Microsoft, but through Fluendo who have native Gstreamer versions of the codecs that reportedly work better anyway.

I’ve had enough of Boycott Novell. I have to read parts of the stories (not articles, stories) as I’m browsing FSdaily. Attacking anything and everything is the mission for every day. Sometimes I wish they’d conduct a full ethnic cleansing of their own computers, deleting all lines of code contributed by anyone who’s had any contact indirectly with Microsoft, which would result in the complete breakage of their systems and an end to the flow of FUD from their site.

But if there was a culture shift at Boycott Novell, so they could start reporting on real shady deals, and things that are definitely bad for Free Software, then I’d be happy to read their site. Heck, I’d be happy to write for it as long as it gets some actual sources for information, rather than behaving like my autistic aquaintance. Oh, and when it removes the "Communist Credibility Index"  from the site, which is a truly McCarthyist creation of theirs.

Until then, let’s boycott the site, and click the "Negative" button on their stories on FSDaily to bury them.

I saw the headline in the newspaper today, the entertainment section. Something about the Spice Girls going to India. I thought "Yeah right, that’ll never happen. The Spice Girls don’t go south of the Equator."

I read the article, and it turns out it wasn’t actually about the Spice Girls. It was just a play on words.

It’s nice to see that there are still jokes to be made about the SGs!

Remember that disasterous date I went on a week ago? I just discovered, thanks to the power of Facebook, that she’s a fucking fence-sitter. Thank goodness everything happened as it did, after all.