Sunrise Road

SourceForge being sued for hosting Shareaza

2008-11-14T22:54:47+00:00

According to a TorrentFreak article, SourceForge is being sued in France because it is hosting Shareaza, a popular P2P file-sharing application, which happens to be used by the community for illegally sharing music.

This is just beyond ridiculous. You know, terrorists can use the telephone system to coordinate attacks, so why don’t we ban the telephone? I can make copies of music in my mind — why not ban thinking, too?

I wonder if the US-based companies that are being sued by the French record labels can be dragged over to France and prosecuted. The linked article says so, but if they refuse to fly to France to show up in court, can the French police ask the US police to seize them nonetheless? Can I be immune from ridiculous foreign lawsuits by residing in a country where it is legal? Does it make them liable because they are conducting their business in France by sending data traffic to that country? So many questions.

Tagged: legal

Book meme

2008-11-14T05:03:24+00:00

Okay, here’s the latest meme going around Planet Linux Australia:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

And the result is:

“All I is knowing about myself is that I is very old, very old and crumply. Perhaps as old as the earth.”

From Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Haven’t read that book for years — I should read it again some time.

Tagged: meme

Testing 1..2..3

2008-11-13T12:50:13+00:00

Me thinks ebay had a little slip-up tonight (wondering why I was getting a “no route to host” from my squid proxy server while checking out some cameras) :-

marty@glenstorm:~$ dig catalog.ebay.com.au

; <> DiG 9.4.2-P1 <> catalog.ebay.com.au
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24374
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;catalog.ebay.com.au. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
catalog.ebay.com.au. 422 IN CNAME catalog-test.intl.ebay.com.
catalog-test.intl.ebay.com. 1022 IN A 10.14.90.92
catalog-test.intl.ebay.com. 1022 IN A 10.4.90.92

;; Query time: 23 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Nov 13 23:45:03 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 109

Take on PC vs. Mac with “I’m human”

2008-11-08T02:43:09+00:00

Next time somebody asks me whether I’m a PC or a Mac, I’m going to reply with “I’m human“.

Would make a nice Ubuntu marketing slogan.

Tagged: Ubuntu

OpenOffice.org Draw: the forgotten gem

2008-11-08T00:50:41+00:00

I see lots of people using tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress to easily create simple drawings and layouts. Sometimes, when I tell these people that they are actually designed to give slide show presentations, not for drawing, they are actually surprised!

As you might imagine, PowerPoint and Impress are not actually as apt for the job as they could be if all you wanted to do is drawing. For that reason, you should give OpenOffice.org Draw a try. It’s very similar to PowerPoint and Impress in terms of layout and ease-of-use, but it is actually designed to be used as a drawing tool.

I used to dig out PowerPoint or Visio to do flowcharts and things like that. Now, I use OpenOffice.org Draw exclusively, because it is a much simpler tool for the simple jobs I throw at it.

So, next time you want to do a flowchart or simple drawing mockup on paper (maybe a photo collage), give OpenOffice.org Draw a try. It might just impress you.

Tagged: design

Battle for Wesnoth for OLPC — Released!

2008-11-02T10:53:59+00:00

OLPC XO-1 users around the world, I give you: Battle for Wesnoth for OLPC.

(Screenshot credit: Samy Boutayeb)

Kudos

First, let me say a big thank you to all the testers who helped me shape this port into what it has now become — your feedback has been beyond helpful! Your names have been set in stone for millenia to come in the README file.

Furthermore, I would like to congratulate the Battle for Wesnoth team and contributors for creating this awesome game, which is sufficiently worthy of being ported to just about every platform out there.

Download

And, without further ado, I give you: Download (v1.4.5; 77MB; Readme; Signature; Public Key)

Further Notes

I recommend that you do not download the above bundle on your OLPC XO-1, due to the large filesize, and general unresponsiveness I have found with the user interface. Instead, you should download the bundle onto a USB flash drive, and transfer it to the XO using the Journal (insert flash drive, open Journal, select flash drive, select Wesnoth bundle, select Copy to Journal from toolbar).

I haven’t yet created an entry on the Activity repository, mainly because of the bundle’s large filesize relative to most other bundles. On the other hand, if anybody wants to create an entry, feel free. All I ask is that you link to my above download link, so I can count the downloads.

Tagged: gaming, Linux, olpc

Quick apology

2008-11-01T11:31:35+00:00

This is a quick apology to any Planet Linux Australia readers out there. It seems that every time I edit a post, it regurgitates the post back to the top of the list again.

I’ve been frequently updating my Battle for Wesnoth post — maybe I’ll consider moving it to a proper page, rather than a post, so this doesn’t happen again.

Tagged: aargh, WordPress

Telstra are the good guys for once !?

2008-11-01T11:17:49+00:00

Just read that two of my favourite ISPs and my least favourite ISP have spoken out against the “Clean Feed”, a.k.a the Great Firewall of Australia.

Wait, did I just mention my least favourite ISP, Telstra? Telstra opposing something draconian? You know when even Telstra opposes something, it’s bad.

Tagged: censorship, internet

Corrupted assignment

2008-10-31T12:12:43+00:00

I’ve been doing this assignment on system evaluation and change management as part of my TAFE course. Basically, what I’ve needed to do so far is research a hardware auditing tool (I chose OCS Inventory NG), change management software (if you actually buy any change management software, you’ve been duped hard — it’s not much different from bug tracking software), and produce some forms used for manual hardware auditing.

Well, I thought I would save some time by creating the hardware audit form in a table separate ODT document, and use OpenOffice.org’s Insert → Section feature to add the linked document to my report. That way, I could edit the document with the table in it, and have the one linked inside my report automatically, as well as link the table to other documents.

That was all well and good, except after I saved and closed down everything, and attempted to open it the next day, every document that had been linked to my hardware audit form had been corrupted.

As ODF documents are really just zip files with XML documents inside, I opened one of my ODF files in an unzipper. Interestingly, all the files extracted fine, except for content.xml. This was the same for all the documents.

So, content.xml got corrupted after linking the document to an external document? I’m probably just jumping to conclusions — after all, correlation does not mean causation, and the file could have been corrupted by another way. I can’t think why, though, especially seeing as though I was working on lots of documents at the time, and only the ones linked to this particular table were corrupted.

Luckily, I have a backup that I made on Monday, so I only lost the work I did on it yesterday. Here’s hoping this doesn’t happen to me again.

Update: Another two documents got corrupted today. These documents were completely unrelated, and weren’t linked to any others. I’m starting to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 as a culprit.

Tagged: aargh, openoffice, real life

Make Metacity compositing smoother

2008-10-25T07:55:55+00:00

If you’re like me, you’ll drink Coke and disrupt your sleeping cycle on a regular basis. You’ll also be frustrated that Metacity’s compositing is horribly jerky. Well, as I found out from chatting on IRC one day, Metacity’s compositor is hard-coded to run at 50fps.

Normally, your monitor’s refresh rate will be something around 75hz, so 50fps, which is less than your monitor’s refresh rate, is hardly optimal. Fortunately, you can fix it with this simple patch:

diff -ur metacity-2.22.0.orig/src/core/compositor.c metacity-2.22.0/src/core/compositor.c
--- metacity-2.22.0.orig/src/core/compositor.c	2008-03-10 08:49:15.000000000 +1100
+++ metacity-2.22.0/src/core/compositor.c	2008-10-25 11:30:13.000000000 +1100
@@ -1290,16 +1290,18 @@
   if (compositor->repaint_id > 0)
     return;

-#if 0
-  compositor->repaint_id = g_idle_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH_IDLE,
-                                            compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
-                                            NULL);
-#else
   /* Limit it to 50fps */
+  /*
   compositor->repaint_id = g_timeout_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH, 20,
                                                compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
                                                NULL);
-#endif
+  */
+
+  /* Nah, let's do 75fps */
+  compositor->repaint_id = g_timeout_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH, 13,
+                                               compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
+                                               NULL);
+
 }
 #endif

The timeout is changed from updating every 20 milliseconds (1000msec ÷ 50fps = 20msec), to every 13 milliseconds (1000msec ÷ 75fps ≈ 13msec), which makes it much smoother.

Tagged: aargh, coding, gnome, hacks, Linux