2 little bastards down. 2 little bastards to go

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So here I am, typing one handed because the other hand is holding a block of ice on my cheek to keep the swelling low (No, that’s the real reason. Now go and wash your brain). As you may have guessed by noticing my wonderfully blurred pic on the right, I have pulled out two of my wisdom teeth.

Yes, I wisened up at 27.

After I managed to go to the dentist 9 months later than what I wanted, I was convinced by Viola in coordination with the Dentist to get rid of these worthless pieces of bone. This was generally never high on my list of things to do as they never bothered me much but apparently, at least according to my dentist, they were partially to blame for the grinding of my teeth.

So I took the plunge and today my total sum of teeth has gone from thirty…errr…has been decreased by two.

Unfortunately for me, the roots of these damn things were horribly crooked and/or deep and/or many, leading one to need excessive force to pull out and the second a bit of an operation.

Now I really know what blood smells like, as well as how it feels to really hear a drill in the inside of your head as a piece of tooth root is being excavated, and I’m not joking…

Aaanyway, at least the good to come of this is that the dentist assumed that I would not be able to speak decently and also need some rest so he wrote me 3 days off. Which means the rest of the week is off for me. Kinda like a free and painful vacation.

Setting up a Brainstorm Clone

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Ubuntu Brainstorm has recently gone live and it’s really a great project and idea. For those not in the know, it is a dell brainstorm/digg mashup for voting on which ideas people want the Ubuntu devs to work on first.

I wanted to set something like that as a project which would give me a chance to see Drupal as well which is something I wanted to do for a while.

Fortunately a little search showed me that the custom modules have already been provided here and all I needed to do was install them.

So I went for the latest and greatest version of Drupal, 6.1 and I must say that I was surprised on how easy the installation procedure was. Just copy to your directory, set up a mysql database & user and run the script. 2 clicks later and you’re through. Cheers for the Drupal team ;).

I then tried to install the modules, fortunately, even though I was confused a bit, I eventually managed to figure out that I needed to place them into my /sites/all/modules directory. Unfortunately, even though that allowed Drupal to see them, it informed me that they are not compatible with Drupal 6.1 🙁

Oh well, no great loss. I went for an alternate installation of Drupal 5.7. One mysql db and installation later, I was set. I copied the modules in the correct directory again and this time I could activate them. Unfortunately I couldn’t get them to work as they need specific database tables to work. Apparently there is a qawebsite.install php script in the module directory that will create table structures, but there is not mention on how to run it. Am I supposed to rename it to .php and put it on my browser or what (Doesn’t seem that way)?

I hate it when no INSTALL.txt is included 🙁

In the end, I created a brainstorm entry and a launchpad question for this, so hopefully someome might be able to give me some instructions. Lets see.

If any of my readers have any ideas, I would much appreciate to hear them 🙂

At least I get to play with Drupal in the meantime 😀

I hate it when they do that…

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Me: IT Servide Desk, Konstantine speaking.

User: Hello, I have a problem.

Me: Alright, how can I help.

U: I changed my password this morning, and then I went to have a coffee. I returned and worked on my outlook for a bit and then called you about my internet problem…

Me: And the problem is…?

U: Well, after you solved that, I had to go away for a while, then I returned and I couldn’t login anymore

Me: Because…?

U: My account is locked.

Me: (Silently) Aaaaargh!

Couldn’t you just skip your day story and just tell me the last sentence from the start?

Seriously people. Don’t do that. Unlocking an account is usually a 10 second job. By explaining what happened before, you make it a 5 minute job and annoy the hell out of me.

Just tell me the problem initially.

This goes along with another classic

Me: IT Service Desk, Konstantine speaking.

U: I can’t login.

Me: How do you mean? What does it say?

U: I just can’t login.

Me: Well, can you tell me what is the message you get?

U: What does it matter? I can’t login, just fix it.

Me: Look I have to know if you’re locked out or if your password is wrong. Can you just read me the error message?

U: *Sigh* Alright, wait. It says to make sure my password and username is ok but I’m positive that it is. It was working until now. Just reset it for me.

Me: *Rolling my eyes* Unfortunately as per standard policy you’ll need to come to our office to reset your password…

This is such a classic conversation that it is annoying. Even though it has been this way for like 5 years, users will still demand that we reset their password remotely. They will also keep us on the phone for 5 minutes for what can be achieved in 10 seconds.

Arrgh!

New

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New AmarokHoly mama!

The new amaroK is coming out and the new stable of Wesnoth is out already.

Specifically, the new amaroK looks amazingly sweet. If anyone thought that it was not a killer app. before, they certainly cannot keep this belief anymore, and since it should be able to run under windows as well, this will probably blow all the competition out of the water.

I still cannot believe how cool the GUI has become 😮

Wesnoth 1.4 also brings a host of updates to the table. Although anyone who’s played the development tree (1.3) has seen them already, they are still a huge improvement over the last stable (1.2.8). If you tried out Wesnoth only about a year ago (or only with the stable) I strongly suggest you take a second look now 😉

How I made Steam play nice with my Ubuntu

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I tspent last afternoon trying to make this damn program work normally but for some reason I was always getting stuck when trying to register an account. Eventually I traced the problem with wine’s iexplore version which for some reason would freeze as soon as I start it. It would ask to download the gecko engine (if I hadn’t already downloaded it) and then display a white screen and become unresponsive. I tried various things, even testing it on a clean profile, but nothing fixed it (Wine 0.9.56 btw). This not working IE caused in turn Steam not to work well. It would open but it would also crash when clicking on the “create account” button.

Hopefully a quick googling directed me to the Ubuntu Forums and from there to the IEs for Linux page. Fortunately, that version of IE worked in my PC (PS: I was amazed by the simple and easy installation. Props to the developer!). Unfortunately I couldn’t it run through my normal wine installation. As it is installed on a different .wine directory, I tried linking to the iexplore.exe over there and replacing the one coming with wine but apparently due to different dlls, it didn’t work out. In exasperation, I renamed my .wine directory to winebak and copied the .ies4linux dir as .wine. I then installed Steam in that and started it.

It worked. And it worked perfectly. I was able to run it, create and account, log in and buy a game (which was the sole reason why I wasted my time making wine work) via a credit card (because paypal didn’t work).

Unfortunately, even though navigating steam worked very well, playing the game didn’t 🙁 Steam would vehemently complain that I didn’t have the current DirectX version when trying to run the game, even though I knew from the cracked version that it works without a problem. I could see no way around this unfortunately as I couldn’t figure out which .dlls are necessary to make Steam think I’ve got the correct one.

So, once again in exasperation, I renamed the current .wine dir to winebak2 and renamed winebak to .wine. I then copied the Steam client (which has Audiosurf installed) from winebak2 to .wine and tried again. Now steam would launch but would crash as soon as I logged in due to the annoying iexplore problem. Very fortunately for me, since Audiosurf created a program shortcut in the wine menu, I run it from there and lo and behold! It worked. (Albeit with the same problems as before)

So I now finally have an up-to-date version of Audiosurf and can finally submit my scores to the servers (which seem to running at a crawl, I guess do to the unforeseen popularity) . I must say that I’m loving it. A great luck that the game run on wine out of the box 🙂

Lawful Evil

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I have now seen the true face of Corporate Ethics first hand.

See how low the music recording cartel industry and their cronies will go to attack file sharing networks. They have now added domain stealing as well as licence and trademark abuse to their wonderful repertoire of threats, cracking, brainwash and extortion.

There is simply no limit to their immorality; and the latest case is just a wonderful example of how rabidly they are fighting against their inenvitable demise (which they have brought down upon themselves). It’s like the thrashing of a cornered beast. Now that they have decided to shit all over the GPL however, is where I draw the line.

Not only did they threaten an innocent person (the domain holder) with legal action in order to get him to pass the domain name to them. Not only did they subtly modify the site in order to trick regular users to please their corporate masters. Not only are they now giving away a (almost certainly) spyware infested propriertary client (in order to poison the credibility of Shareaza). They are not trying to get the trademark of “Shareaza” in what must be the sleaziest move yet. And they know it! (what with them opening a Cypress shell company to do it so that the true perpetrators won’t be litigated against).

All you D&D players reading this, take note. This is how lawful evil should be role-played.

At this point there are a few things all of us should do:

Finally, my personal idea is to put pressure on these scum. What we could probably do is use the Six Degrees and find out who is behind this. Once we do then their friends and families should be informed of their behaviour and perhaps given the appropriate social treatment they so deserve.

Seriously, the law is not our friend here. These people are using the law in order to go against the spirit of it. They are hiding behind shell companies and lawyers because they know they are in the wrong. They deserve no mercy and like Mediasentry before them, they will eventually get what is coming to them.

In Solidarity.

SHAREAZA™ IS THE PROPERTY OF THE SHAREAZA DEVELOPMENT TEAM.

European Copyrights

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European Copyrights for works created 50 years ago are about to expire and a handful of major record labels are lobbying heavily for their extension in order to be aligned with US copyrights and in a sense make our European version of the Mickey Mouse protection act.

As expected, the only activist group that cares for our digital rights, the EFF, is starting a petition to lobby the European Commission (and other relevant groups) to block this extension that is set to rob us of our cultural heritage for the benefit of a bunch of greedy corporations.

You should sign.

Even if you’re not EU Citizen.

Like, now!

And since I’m on this subject let me just state my personal opinion (This is a blog after all).

Copyrights represent a deal, or a promise if you want, between the artist and the goverment. The artist puts some effort in creating something of “artistic value”[1] and the goverment provides him with a limited protection so that he can capitulate on his work. This protection is a form of monopoly that is supposed to spur creativity by giving artists an incentive to create more work. It is not supposed to be a welfare system, as it has ended up today where the grandchildren of famous artists are earning money from the cultural work of their forefathers (How many of you keep getting paid for work you did 50 years ago?). This is not only bad for our culture, but it is counter to the spirit of copyrights.

Not only that, but extending copyrights so much is economically unsound as far too many researches have shown.

Furthermore, if we are to treat Copyrights as “Intellectual property“, shouldn’t the owner have to pay taxes like all of us? Here’s an alternative off the top of my head:

Have automatic copyrights last for 5 years after the day of publication and after that the author has to a fee proportionate to the number of years passed since initial publication in order to keep them from passing to the public domain. This way, the fee would be modest (but significant enough) initially but would grow steeper as the time passed. Thus, the economically viable works could be retained (while also paying the appropriate tax) while the rest would pass to the public domain for the benefit of everyone.

I personally don’t agree that copyrights should last more than 10 years (more than enough to earn from the effort you invested) and only for artistic work; but the previous suggestion is, at least, a better alternative than what we have now.

The problem you see, is not strictly Mickey Mouse or other known works. It’s that the copyright holder tends to possess copyrights to non-economically viable works. He does not release them because, hey, why should he? And he doesn’t publish them because they won’t make any money. This leads to our loss as we cannot anymore share, modify and enjoy our own culture.

PS: Take a few mins to FSD or Digg this to help raise awareness.

Footnotes
  1. This idea of course excludes absurd things like threatening people posting Cease & Desist letters online from being threatened with copyrights in order to silence them.