Month: January 2008

Gallery tags not working

Db0

So I’ve managed to fix the latest problem that stumped me. This was related to my latest WordPress-WPG2-Gallery combo installation and it was the fact that for some reason the Gallery tag plugin just refused to display the tag cloud correctly. No matter what I tried, the tag cloud always displayed as a list on the blog, (separated by a line, one under the other etc) instead of an inline big & small tag cloud you would expect. Not only that but anything I tried in order to fix this on the WP theme stylesheet did not work. I even tried disabling everything that had to do with <ul> and <li> tags and the damn thing still persists.

What was even more enraging was that by directly accessing the gallery the tag cloud would work as expected, colours and all. Exasperating.

So I spend the whole afternoon and I did manage to fix the tag cloud. I had to use the style injection box that is provided by the WPG2 plugin in order to put the style code that forced list items to be put inline and without line separators. However, no matter what I tried, I could not make the colours change.

Hopefully, while I was lying in bed, it clicked for me. I must have been the gallery theme I was using, wordpress embedded, which makes the gallery fit to your WP theme. However for some reason, the designer has hard coded the font and link colour to the theme, which as a result of being loaded after the WP theme, took precedence. This is the reason why my links had that ugly blue colour and my tag colours would not work. By commenting the colour lines for the <body> and the <a> tags, I was able to force the gallery theme to submit to the WP theme selections.

Just in case anyone is wondering, the stylesheet code I put in my WPG2 Output – Element header textbox is

.g2_column {
width: 100%;
margin: 0px 1px 0px 12px;
}

.tag1 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:8px;}
.tag1 a {color: #828282;}

.tag2 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:11px;}
.tag2 a {color: #AC6FCF;}

.tag3 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:14px;}
.tag3 a {color: #00659C;}

.tag4 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:18px;}
.tag4 a {color: #008200;}

.tag5 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:22px;}
.tag5 a {color: #FFCB21;}

.tag6 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:26px;}
.tag6 a {color: #FF0000;}

.tag7 {
display: inline;
background:none;
font-size:30px;}
.tag7 a {color: #1acdb6;}

Where tag1-7 is the class that the Gallery2 tag plugin uses for each level of tag (based on the quantity)

PS: Yes, I have insomnia again…

Yet another blog

Db0

So I’ve bit the bullet again and started yet another blog called The Wesnoth Journals.

Since I’m not in the mood of repeating myself, you’re welcome to check the second post on the reasons why I took the effort.

The whole issue took me around 6 hours to complete, between which my host suffered a load of doom which pretty much make my site unavailable as I was about to present it to the forum. Argh! In any case, fortunately they resolved it relatively fast and I managed to polish it before I went to bed.

Currently it is powered by a WordPress blog and a Gallery installation, linked via WPG2, much like my own site. This is the kind of thing why you love free software (and Dreamhost with their one-click installs. Without any extra money at all, within half a day, I’ve set up and configured a passable site that can fill a gap.

This is especially my opportunity to check out what Gallery can do when there are actually multiple users and need of correct categorization. Until now, my own gallery is used only by my which just does not give it enough to work with. Είδομεν…

So, take a look, and let me know if you see something blatant missing.

PS: If you can be bothered, remind me how to redirect http://wordpress.dbzer0.com to http://wordpress.dbzer0.com/blog

Cheers!

And you thought American privacy violations were bad…

Db03 Comments

According to a law passed by the German parties CDU, CSU and SPD, from 2008 on it will be possible to trace who has contacted whom via telephone, mobile phone or e-mail for a period of six months.

— Anonymising services will be prohibited. —

This is a really frightening prospect. However many organizations are already working on getting this up to the Supreme Court so hopefully it will receive a negative ruling.

Spread the word!

read more | digg story

Piratbyrån

Db05 Comments

Here is the main reason why people should know about and (hopefully) support the Pirate Party.

I’ve already set up a €5 donation per month just because this is a movement that deserves traction. Our personal freedoms are much more important than the bottom line of corporations who have a shady history of dealings (Payola, hacking etc).

Especially when we get to the point of pressuring the goverment to pass laws, only for the benefit of big corporations, to the detriment of the freedom and creativity of everyone else, then we really have an issue.

Now, can someone point me to the Greek and German Pirate parties?

To parents: A free (as in "freedom") exercise for your children

Db012 Comments

As I was lying in bed, waiting for Morpheus to take me in his embrace, I once again started getting a mindful of ideas (Must have been that pesky Belphegor again, the demon of invention and lost sleep). This time I thought about children and creativity and a way to channel it to more productive purposes.

Ok, first of all I will admit that I am not a parent so I am not explicitly aware of all the fine details of child raising, however I have been a child and at least I have kept my viewpoint of that time (for I do not mature, I just grow old). Lately as well, I’ve been trying to get back into [tag]Wesnoth[/tag] contributing once more and this has been expressed in me playing the new campaigns and begging people to update my campaign for now, but, you know, the year is still young…

In any case, for some reason, in my jumble of a thoughts, an idea was born, one which I will now make you suffer through (For misery loves company).

I know that many parents have problems directing their children’s enthusiasm and creativity to something useful (Gawd knows my mother always had a problem making me do something with a purpose.) Not only that, but I believe it should be of foremost importance for parents to give their children some experience of the real world, instead of keeping them cocooned until the age of rebellion. Of course there needs to be a limit and a purpose to this experience, so do not think that I am advocating the sending of your children to construction yards or something similar; rather I am thinking of a parent-driven activity that will teach your child to channel it’s creative juices to a specific task, the building of team spirit and the psychological reward that the appreciation of your peers will bring.

How do I propose to achieve that? Through free software contribution.

Now, when I say free software, do not assume immediately that I am talking about C++ coding (unless of course your child has the appropriate tendencies for hacking). What I am talking is recognizing where it’s talents lie and then selecting an appropriate project to do. Kids come with many kinds of them, but in this example we can discuss about three of the most common: Arts, Music and Maths (since these are the ones I can see as candidates, but feel free to correct me if I am mistaken)

So you know what your progeny is good at, I would assume; perhaps it has a great knack for drawing, or perhaps it loves music and wants to learn to play, in any case, it should give you a hint on what it likes to do.
The trick is now to find a project that the child will enjoy participating in, for if the exercise becomes a chore, we’ve already lost half the battle I’m afraid.

In my mind, a perfect candidate would be the aforementioned Battle for Wesnoth game which is, to my knowledge, always happy to receive Art, Music and more campaigns. Of course this suggestion is not restrictive and you can choose something else, closer to its preferences. I only chose that for it family content, easy play style and excellent community.

Starting the Exercise

So, you’ve know the Talent, you know the focus, all you need to do is select the project. Lets assume that you are using Wesnoth for now, and that your child has a tendency to draw well. Once you’ve hooked it to the game to create enthusiasm (lets say, had it play some of the introductory campaigns) you decide to have you child create some kind of art. As you can see, there are many option you might select but I believe that the best choice would be either to create a hero or unit portrait, or to create a new sprite/sprite animation.

The next step would be to join the forum as a parent and:

  1. Create an account for your child
  2. Look at what is needed
  3. Introduce yourself (if you haven’t already) and explain what you would like to do.
  4. Select a project or ask for advice. Discuss this part with your child to see what it would prefer to try (it is important to have it excited on the project)and initially you should attempt something easy. An idea for start could be that after the child plays the initial campaign, have it select a hero or unit which received a large amount of experience during the course of the game and create a portrait for it as it would envision it.

Once these initial steps have been done, the interesting part begins. Explain that this will become a project that it will need to complete. It should not be graded for it but there should be some kind of reward in the end for a successful completion, as well as for the various goals you’ve set (for example, a goal for a scetch, a goal for the coloured image and a last one of the full complete portrait.) These should keep the child working for the next reward. There should absolutely be no punishment involved.

The Community

Now, and this is really important, have the child join the community and post its progress. The point of this is manifold:

  • If the child is not really good at writing and grammar, then help it compose replies and posts, but do not allow it to dictate to you or otherwise make it extremely easy for it to post. This would help improve it’s writing skills without it realizing it.
  • Have it experience Teamwork. Explain to it that it is to follow the advice and instructions of experienced artists in the forum explicitly. You should not be afraid to be firm on this; for while artistic freedom and exercise is good, one of the main points of this project is to have the child experience groups as they will affect it during its adult life. The instructions of the forum regulars are not there to criticize but rather to guide and mold the contributions in such a way so as to fit into the game. It is no use creating something great that just won’t be used.
  • Have it experience the praise of its peers. I am absolutely certain that people informed of the project will praise any half-competent job by a minor to the heavens (especially with the crowd that frequents the Wesnoth fora) and the subsequent emotional boost this will provide should provide the fuel for continuing. I know I can only speak for myself here but in my experience, there is nothing more rewarding for a child that basking in hard-earned praise.
  • Have it experience constructive criticism. Your main role as a parent will be to have the child work as a junior member of a team and keep it civil if, as childs as wont to do, becomes aggressive or spiteful. If for example a criticism makes it want to shout profanities or whatnot, you should explain why the criticism was made and if your child does indeed have a point to argue, help it present it civilly.
  • And finally, have it experience the free software community and mindframe 😉

Reward

As I mentioned before, this can only work is the child is excited about the project and if rewards are given for achieving goals. The former is undeniable much more important than the later, which is why I stress that it should nurtured. The later however is important in helping the child push through even if enthusiasm starts to wane. The point is that we are trying to achieve a self-replicating circle between working from enthusiasm, and praise for work done which triggers more enthusiasm. If the child starts to lose steam between these two ends, a reward would be useful in getting it to a goal point and getting the subsequent praise.

The best kind of reward however is one that will be able to trigger enthusiasm just by itself. Some example that I can think of are:

  • Arrange with a campaign maintainer to have the new portrait added to the campaign once it is finished. I am certain that even if the mainline campaigns will not accept it, there are many unofficial campaign developers who would be glad to have some extra glitz in their story as long as it is at least passable.
  • If the work done is of sufficient quality, then it will be added to the main game itself as part of either a unit profile or a new unit animation. That is rock solid contribution for eternity right there.

Other talents

I am certain that astute readers can see how these instructions can be applied to any talent that your child might possess.

  • A musically gifted child might be able to enhance or improve an existing song or even compose it’s own music track that other might work on.
  • One that likes stories might be more comfortable on thinking of a short epic story to work on. Unfortunately by itself this is not the best choice as children although of great fantasy do not make good storytellers, and thus the community might remain unimpressed. However, when teamed up with other people this might make the exercise even better (see below)
  • Mathematical-attuned people make great coders. This would be a great chance to guide the child to a path that will surely come in handy in the life to come. Perhaps it could work on some short campaign WML (the engine of Wesnoth) which could serve as an introduction to the world and mindframe of programming. From its reaction you might even see if this is a path it might be worth pursuing in the future.
  • If you have a sufficiently large family or if you have enough time, you might even make this into a whole family experience. Perhaps you will provide the story that one child will work on coding, while the other will work on creating portraits for the heroes. This has the added benefit of bonding the family and also creating something much more complete.

Beyond Wesnoth

Of course, as I mentioned, I only used Wesnoth as my sample because of my recent attempts to start it again, but this does not mean that there are not other projects out there that you can switch it for. However I truly believe that it has the greatest potential as it has room for most creativity outlets, is easy enough for a young child to play, has a great community and is pretty family-safe (no blood and gore, sexual innuendo etc. At least not as far as I’ve seen).

I will leave it for interested parties to investigate what other options there are but please feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

So, this was my braindump for the night. As with most of the things I’ve written, it might be total bull so feel free to come in and make fun of me write your opinion on this. I would love to hear where my ideas have gone wrong and perhaps we might even improve this to a degree that it is actually useful.

Comment on Subjective Morality

Db04 Comments

Amazing! I was randomly reading my feeds and the Exapologist mentioned the Prosblogion and I though to take a quick look. There, checking up on a recent post, I happened upon a comment that perfectly describes my opinion on subjective morality.

That’s the essential distinction. People almost always seem to think that if the basis of morality is subjective then its arbitrary and any set of values is as good as another.

This (considering morality subjective) was something that the Objectivists I was recently discussing with, stood (and still do) upon to declare that I was using a defeated philosophy (or whatever).

Nice to see that there are others that think, at least similarly. I think I might visit that place again to find other such juicy nuggets of thought.

2 girls and shit

Db0

Do not see the “2 girls 1 Cup” video…ever.

I had to watch like 20 vids on top of that to flush it from my brain and I was still feeling nauseus after that.

You have been warned. It’smanages to rival and overcome internet gems like goatse and tubgirl. Ugh…

Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 6400

Db04 Comments

Crappy title I know, but it’s two-twentyfive a.m. indulge me…

So four days ago my girlfriend informed me that her laptop totally b0rked. Blue Screen of Death on boot.

Not having much chance to help from the phone, I instructed her to bring her laptop over to me to see what I could do. Now, this was a system that has been running WinXP for a while now and lately it had started giving some alarming problems, like Winamp crashing randomly or slowness on explorer etc. Now, the (cracked) AV had not reported anything and spyware scanning had not shown anything specific so I did not think to check in depth other than fix or workaround the issues as they cropped up.

I have no idea why the laptop BSODed but I put it down to either a slow AV update that allowed something nasty to pass through or just a random hdd fart that lost a system file or whatnot. Seeing as the windows installation was in Deutsch, there was not much I could see from the BSOD error other that it informed to run a chekdisk. Well, I did that and although it recovered some stuff, it did not really fix anything.

Unfortunately, as she didn’t have the recovery CDs for the laptop with her and I didn’t have any Windoze XP installation handy (well, to tell the truth, I did but it was not a good version) I considered installing Ubuntu. I was already preparing her that there was a high chance her OS would not be recovered so it wasn’t a complete surprise. Since I was always explaining her the virtues of the OS, I though that this might be the perfect chance to have her try it. Especially since she is neither a gamer nor uses the laptop for anything requiring professional apps. Fortunately she was not opposed to the idea. She just sighed and trusted in my capabilities to do what is best for her 😉

So I started the installation with Ubuntu 7.10. I chose that over Kubuntu mostly because I wanted to enjoy the 3D effects that come automatically with Ubuntu and because the support for it is more solid (just in case I’m not around to help). The initial installation went through perfectly, I created a 20G bpartition for the OS, 2 Gb swap (she has 1Gb of RAM) and the rest 70Gb as a /home separate partition which will preserve her settings in case a reinstallation is needed (a wise choice as it happened).

Once the system booted after the installation, I was greeted by a 1024×768 resolution which did not look right on the laptops LCD. I decided that the best thing to do would be to install the restricted drivers for the ATI card. That meant that I would have to connect to the net through my DSL connection and that meant a pppoe setup. Unfortunately, this is still something that lacks an easy user-friendly setup for the less technical users which I guess would not know how to deal with this at this point. Fortunately I knew the correct command to run on the terminal: pppoeconf
This took care of the internet connection so it allowed me to install the restricted drivers.

Their installation went through flawlessly and I was quite glad on that regard. A reboot however showed me that the resolution stayed the same and changing the display resolution from the System options was not possible. There was only the singe 1024×768 choice, which meant that I would have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and enter the right resolution to use (1280×800) and then restart the X-Server to activate it. This is still something that really bothers me with Ubuntu. There is no easy way to change or add a resolution option for the system. If the setup fails to autodetect your monitor then you are only left with the option to edit the configuration file and this is something that a normal user will find intimidating to say the least.

Anyway, that settled, I wanted to activate the compiz eye-candy to impress her. Unfortunately, even though the System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects option is a major improvement over running terminal commands, the system just refused to activate them. I just received a generic error message that “The Composite extension is not available”. Not very helpful because even though I installed compiz with synaptic(I had the impression that it came with the basic setup but apparently I was wrong) this still kept popping up. An Ubuntu Forum search did not provide with much results but fortunately a google search did (in the Ubuntu forums no less). All I had to do was to install the xserver-xgl package and reboot. Compiz presto.

I then started setting up various other useful apps that I knew she would need. Amarok (yes, I’m planning to convert her), Azureus, Pidgin (Finally an excuse to quit the horrible, add-riddled ICQ client), Picard and K3b. The first problems I run to were when I tried to play videos with Totem. Although it is much better now that it automatically suggests and can download the appropriate packages, it is still annoying a bit and I am guessing a bit perplexing for a non-technical user who is certain to run into problems of missing repositories and open apt sessions. Same problem exists for mp3 which need to be installed for various programs like amarok, k3b and picard. In the last case especially, because it does not give any indication on what is missing (it just does not accept mp3s dragged) you have to install a package that is not even easy to find for me. It is named libpimp-mp3 (or something) and is needed for picard to handle them. Fortunately. once again the Ubuntu forums were to the rescue.

Finally, after all software was installed, I updated the installed stuff and started testing what worked and what not.

I used this page to see what I should be aware of. Unfortunately however it is quite outdated (I am planning to update it at some point) and I was not sure if various issues were fixed in later versions. Most importantly it notified me that sleep/hibernate does not work because of driver issues. The workaround did not seem to work as the system would just not startup again after the sleep mode was activated and only a cold boot worked. At this time I left this to be fixed later as it was getting quite late.

The last thing I did was to install the German language support and I was surprised on how easily it was done. System -> Administration -> Language support and install the German. Then set it up as the default and you’re done. I also set up a new user for me which would use the English language. I especially hated WinXP on that issue actually; without giving you an option to switch the language of the system it made it pretty much impossible to perform system administration.
Fortunately in Ubuntu, to switch the system language was as easy as changing an option at the login prompt (although it did take me a few seconds to find the correct one 😉 )

Next day, I visited my girlfriend at her place to check out how it was working. She informed me that picard would not work but other than that it seemed to be working OK. I started looking around to find how to make the hibernation work which eventually led me here. I followed the instruction to install the newest ATI driver and everything seemed to go through fine. I tested Sleep and hibernation and they were finally working.

Then I started looking on how to make the laptop media buttons work with Amarok’s global keys. Unfortunately, through the Gnome DE it always creates problems. My first idea was to disable any keyboard shortcuts for play/pause, next and forward from gnome’s “keyboard shortcuts” application but this was not enough. I tried verious combinations on amarok but for some reason nothing worked solidly. Fortunately my search eventually led me to use the “Keytouch” application which seemed to be perfect for this use.
I configured it and it seemed to work fine on my account but for some reason when I switched users and used the media handling buttons, instead of manipulating Amarok it opened a new Amarok process which lacked any window decorators and stayed always on top…strange.

Later in the afternoon, we decided to watch a movie and then I discovered that my 2D acceleration was absolutely horrid. Watching a movie fullscreen was pretty much impossible. After we watched the movie in window-mode I set out to find the solution. Unfortunately from me, the issue was related to the new ATI drivers as I found more than a few people complaining about the same issue. Some managed to solve it by inserting

Option		"XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"

in their xorg.conf file and while it did help a bit, fullscreen videos were still unwatchable. The most unfortunate fact however was that there was nothing I could do about this. I couldn’t find a way to rollback the new ATI driver, and I couldn’t make it have a sufficient 2D acceleration. Finally after a few hours of searching I threw my hands up and just decided to reinstall the whole system and use Ubuntu’s restricted driver and leave the PC without hibernation function.

Since I didn’t have the CD at my girlfriend’s place I downloaded a new one (fortunately she did have a spare RW CD to use) and started the installation. Everything went through normally once again and the new environment was ready. I went through pretty much the same steps and a few more hours later it was done, eye candy and all.

So currently she’s been running the system for a whole week and it seems to be stable enough, although it does seem to lose some stability when a second user is logged in. Current issues I still have with the system are these:

  • When a second user is logged in, the stability of the system seems to drop. More than once time I had the system b0rk when I used the Alt-Ctrl-F# combination to switch between the users. No idea what is causing it.
  • The external HDD which was formatted as VFAT, seems to only work for the first user who logs into the system. Ubuntu’s automounter will then mount the drive and give only that user full rights while the rest won’t be able to even see the mount point. The odd thing is that my personal external HDD which is formatted as ext3 is mounted normally for all users so I assume this is something to do with the limited security of VFAT. Perhaps the developes felt that mounting these drives only for the current user (since the FS does not support rights) is the correct way to do it. Unfortunately I could not find a way to modify the automount options so I was forced to modify the fstab and add it there. I have not booted since I tried that so I’m hoping it will work.
  • Nautilus seems to freeze at random times. My girlfriend informed me of this while I was at my home and to her it seemed as if her HDD stopped working. The nautilus windows would not respond and new windows did not open. Fortunately I managed to guide her through the necessary steps to install kfrb (i.e. copy/paste the apt command in my IM windows 🙂 )and then I could use krdc to remote in. I noticed that nautilus was frozen with about 10 processes in the system sleeping so I killed everything and lo and behold, the file manager started responding again. No idea why this happened but since then this has happened again. She now knows how to resolve it by herself but it is still annoying. I am thinking of installing another file manager but I am not certain which. Doplhin seems like a good choice but I would rather have something that can be integrated with Gnome. Any ideas?
  • Amarok kept crashing after I set it up to handle the collection on the external drive. I managed to resolve it by having it manage only the stuff that is musicbrainz tagged and disabling the Replaygain script. I am not certain which was the issue (collection size or script) but I plan to activate it and see if the problem persists.
  • I still have not managed to make Keytouch work normally with two users connected. Currently it only works (I think) for the first user that activated it.
  • No Sleep & Hybernation functions. I am still waiting for newer ATI drivers.

This for now. Hopefully, another GNU/LINUX convert is in the making 🙂