Sunrise Road

If you’re trying to run Visio 2003 in Wine, and you’re getting the “IOPL not enabled” error message (or it hangs at the splash screen), try this:

• Make sure you’re running the latest version of Wine. (The latest stable version at the time of writing is version 1.0.)
• Type winecfg in a terminal. Go to the Libraries tab, and add an entry called gdiplus. Then, edit the entry you just added, and select “Native (Windows)”. Do not select “Native then Builtin” — that doesn’t work (for some reason)!

I thought I’d post this, because I spent absolutely ages trying to get this working, because Google failed me. Hopefully this post will get some Google juice. If you tried this solution, please post a comment to let me know whether it worked or not!

Look what I found on the Microsoft Japan island in Second Life today:

A jab at our favourite penguin, perhaps?

Well, it turns out it’s the 8th day of the 8th month of the year 2008, or, 08/08/08. As I realised later today, that’s also the date of the opening ceremony of Beijing 2008.

Another arbitrary date: on the 6th of this month, I turned 18. Birthdays are strange — just an arbitrary date during the year that is used as an excuse to party. I didn’t have a party, mind you.

I’m now disappointed — being 18, I can’t use being underage as a defence in court in case I crack the US DOJ’s network, or bring down Google with a DoS attack. Ah well — fun’s over.

A List Apart: The Survey 2008.

Hey OLPC hackers and Wesnoth gamers!

I’ve just created a working Sugar-ised version of Battle for Wesnoth for the OLPC XO-1.

Basically, this is a self-contained Wesnoth within an activity bundle that has been slightly modified to be able to work within Rainbow security on newer OS versions.

This Wesnoth is based on version 1.4.3, and is able to play online on official Wesnoth servers, and between other PCs and Macs running Wesnoth 1.4.3.

Before I post this on the official Activities page, I would just like a handful of testers to download it, test it, and tell me whether it worked or not.

I don’t expect a painstakingly detailed test — a simple “I installed it on my OLPC running build 703, and it ran the tutorial fine, and I totally pwned that guy online today” is enough.

So, if you’re interested in testing it, just fire me a quick e-mail (jeremy AT visser DOT name) or leave a comment, and I’ll give you a download link.

If you test it, I’ll be sure to mention you in the README file when I release it.

Update: Samy Boutayeb has uploaded a screenshot of this port running on a Joyride build:

I’ve just been reading a report named Inquiry into technological protection measures (TPM) exceptions by our House Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.

The report sadly speaks of digital rights management quite positively (although they deviously disguise the term as “technological protection measures”), but even they could not ignore the fact that it does hinder the development of new technology in some cases:

Anti-circumvention laws ban certain technologies. As a result, these laws may impact on – and inhibit – both innovation, and competition in technology markets.

The above quote, interestingly, was referenced in a footnote as being quoted from Kimberlee Weatherall, an Australian intellectual property lawyer who was the recipient of the 2007 Rusty Wrench award.

Sorry to anyone who was expecting me to come to some sort of conclusion or argue a point at the end of this post. I just wanted to say what I’d been doing, and felt this was too big for Twitter, so I posted it in my blog instead.

I don’t like Ubuntu’s default shutdown menu. (You know, the one that appears when you press System → Quit and pops up a dialog with buttons for each option.)

GNOME, by default, doesn’t actually have the “Quit” menu. Instead, it has “Log Out username” and “Shut Down”. Those menus bring up dialogs that have a timer, so if you don’t click Shut Down/Log Out or Cancel in the resulting dialog, it will go ahead and shut down anyway.

Handy for if you click System → Shut Down when you’re in a rush to get out of the house, and forget about the dialog that comes up, because you ran off before it came up.

It’s really easy to enable. Just type this in a terminal:

$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/panel/global/upstream_session true

Either type killall gnome-panel, or log out and log on to see the changes.

In between constructing table-based layouts in Dreamweaver (groan) in a web design class, I slipstreamed Service Pack 3 into Windows XP using only tools available in Linux. I didn’t boot into Windows once during the process (except for, obviously, booting the resulting ISO image in a VM to make sure it worked), but I did use Wine at one point.

This post isn’t going to be a how-to; rather, I will just give you a quick overview of how I did it, and let you readers fill in the gaps.

Here are the tools I used:

• Linux distro of choice (I have used both Ubuntu and Gentoo to do this, but it doesn’t really matter)
• Windows XP CD or ISO image
• Service Pack 2 redistributable^*
• Service Pack 3 redistributable
• cabextract (available as a package in Ubuntu
• file-roller (a.k.a. GNOME’s Archive Manager)
• Wine (I used version 1.0-rc2)
• mkisofs (you can use genisoimage instead if that’s all you have)

^* Please note that if you are starting from a Windows XP image that doesn’t already have SP1 or SP2 slipstreamed, you will have to slipstream SP2 before you slipstream SP3, as SP3 won’t apply to a gold (non-service-pack) XP image.

What I did:

• Extracted the contents of a Windows XP ISO (in your case, it may be the CD) into a directory called “xp” on my Desktop. I initially loop-mounted the ISO and copied the files out of it that way, but I later had to re-extract them with file-roller instead. The reason? If you extract the contents of the ISO with lower-case names (the loop-mounted ISO lower-cased all the filenames), the CD will not boot. Make sure they are all in uppercase.
• Extracted Service Pack 2: mkdir ~/Desktop/sp2 && cd ~/Desktop/sp2 && cabextract ../xpsp2.exe
• Ran the slipstreamer for SP2 on the files: cd ~/sp2/update && wine update.exe /integrate:Z:\\home\\jeremy\\Desktop\\xp
• Extracted Service Pack 3: mkdir ~/Desktop/sp3 && cd ~/Desktop/sp3 && cabextract ../xpsp3.exe
• Ran the slipstreamer for SP3 on the files: cd ~/sp3/update && wine update.exe /integrate:Z:\\home\\jeremy\\Desktop\\xp
• Extracted the boot image from the existing Windows XP ISO. (To do this, you can either run BBIE under Wine, or follow the directions under the “Finding the CD boot image” heading on this guide.)
• Made the ISO image with genisoimage. You’ll at least need the -b (reference the boot image you extracted in the previous step), -no-emul-boot, -c, -max-iso9660-filenames, -relaxed-filenames options.

If you’re lucky, you now have a Windows XP SP3 ISO.

I was bored during the week, so I hacked up a new blog design based on a mockup I made in Inkscape a while ago. I’m pretty impressed with the result, so I would appreciate it if you would check it out if you’re reading this post via a planet or feed reader.

One of my major goals for the redesign was to return to a neutral greyish design much like a design I wrote over a year ago. Also, my hackergotchi is now displayed in the blog heading, which should make my blog twig in peoples’ memories a bit more (”Hey — I remember this blog — the one with the kooky dog picture in the corner and the drab grey sidebars”).

I like the fact that the Blog tab is connected to the sidebar, emphasising the fact that the sidebar contains useful navigation items relating to the blog. This breaks down, however, when you’re on a different page, like the home page. On the home page, it doesn’t make sense to join the “G’day” tab to the sidebar visually, as the sidebar isn’t within the context of that page.

Any constructive thoughts about the design are welcome. In the meantime, /me awaits another “minimalism” delicious tag from swallick.