May 09, 2008 at 13:00:39 GMT - No comments

De quoi réjouir les communistes et les altermondialistes... ;-)

On May 9:

 the European Union celebrates Europe day, commemorating the Schuman declaration;

 Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and some other parts of the former Soviet Union celebrate the Victory Day, marking the capitulation of Nazi Germany.

But also...

J'aime la « logique » et la « cohérence » du capitalisme

Sources: AFP, La Tribune.

May 09, 2008 at 08:42:56 GMT - 1 comment

A better man tip; surviving git; why a docker? P.S.: Yahoo is dumb.

I never thought of improving my CLI experience this way, but the idea is great: How to prevent Linux man pages from clearing after you quit reading.

Sure thing, using "update-alternatives --config pager" would change the behavior system-wide, plus "update-alternatives" is not available on all the distros under the sun.

Adding to ~/.bashrc the line:

export PAGER=/bin/more

is less intrusive, hence much better. (Don't forget to "source ~/.bashrc" for instant results, and to "unset PAGER" to revert the changes.)

What if I still want the benefits of less over more?

I noticed that in my case, I can both eat the cake and still have it, by choosing to add this to my profile:

export PAGER='/usr/bin/less -X'

or

export PAGER='/usr/bin/less --no-init'

I haven't tried most though, maybe it has some useful options too.

QGit is a life saver! (Otherwise, bisecting a kernel is suicidal.)

The best and worst docks for Ubuntu made me wonder about a usability fact.

Many people dislike the 2-panel approach, configuring GNOME or XFCE too look like KDE, with a single-panel by default. Then, they lack the proper space for adding the desired application launchers (which otherwise would have plenty of space on the top panel in a dual-panel layout), and they choose to add... a docking bar, which generally is taking more vertical space than a second panel of their preferred desktop environment!

The logic behind this is far beyond my reach.

P.S.: Yahoo is dumb! There is no download whatsoever on font.com, all the results link to www.fonts.com, a legitimate site where you buy fonts!

Yahoo === dumb

May 09, 2008 at 08:25:43 GMT - 1 comment

China, Uncle Sam, India, patents & copying.

The contents of the article China refuses to guarantee open Internet during Olympics is starting from a wrong approach IMNSHO.

It's too late to pretend that you didn't know China is the way it is. If the Internet is censored ('filtered') in China, this is not a new fact: it was the same in times when Beijing was accepted to host the 2008 Olympic Games, so why was Beijing accepted in the first place?

The Tibet now. The Tibet is part of the PRC since 1950 (or 1959, should we count the last step of the invasion). Nobody cared for this for half a century and now, all of a sudden, they're "concerned" about some "troubles" in Tibet! How hypocrites they are!

Either you accept China "as is", or you accept you're a hypocrite.

When comes to the Western "champions of the democracy", they're all hypocrites, there is no doubt about that. The real anti-democratic parts of the Chinese society didn't prevent the Western countries to move almost all the production of everything technical and almost everything FMCG to China. They're happy to manufacture pretty much everything in a country where workers are heavily underpaid and exploited (no, China is not communist, it's the worst combination of authoritarian political ruling and savage capitalism!), but they're "very concerned" with the Internet censorship and the situation of Tibet!

I'm sick of the lack of vision of all the dumpster boys who pretend to be concerned about human rights in China. Each and every time you buy a product Made in China, you endorse the human exploitation in China, period.

Here's one more proof that Uncle Sam is not a democracy either: FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses.

OK, this time the FBI lost the game, but how is this a democracy, when in The Big Nation Blessed By God: «The Patriot Act greatly expanded the reach of NSLs, which are subpoenas for documents such as billing records and telephone records that the FBI can issue in terrorism investigations without a judge's approval. Nearly all NSLs come with gag orders forbidding the recipient from ever speaking of the subpoena, except to a lawyer.»

Forbidding you to even speak about the fact that you were subpoenaed! This is worse than in China!

Based on the Patriot Foockt

In India, The ghost of software patents is back!

When will people understand that in the 21st century, all the patents are abusive, not only software patents!

When you're buying a folded paper carton recipient with milk or juice, you're paying something as a royalty to TetraPak. C'mon, for a folded paper carton?!

When I receive a cardboard box from B&N or from Amazon, I notice that the box is covered by some 8 or 9 patents. C'mon, 8 or 9 valid patents for a folded cardboard with a self-adhesive stripe?!

Having gazillions of patents for trivial ideas is what will kill our civilization.

UPDATE: How about someone really caring about the legality (or lack of it thereof) of the appointing of those patent judges in the States? (Lawyer talk and lawyer food, the unconstitutionality of those patent judges. They will continue to patent trivial ideas, regardless of who is appointing them.)

My favorite Cory Doctorow quote (took from Little Brother): "It’s the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it’ll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we’ll have other problems). Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get slower or harder to access. If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the twenty-first century. There’s something charming about making work you don’t want to be copied, in the same way that it’s nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it’s hardly, you know, contemporary."

How about an e-book reader unable to display or count page numbers?

May 09, 2008 at 07:02:00 GMT - 4 comments

...sans citer la source pour une fois

 « se faire baver dessus par beranger c'est un label de qualité »

 « c'est l'adoubement moderne »

 « ce mec c'est tellement la négation de tout ce qui est bien »

 « faut mettre un !() autour de ses phrases ;) »

 « sourriez tous, on va être sur son blog de merde, il grep les logs ici pour voir si on dit du mal »

On m'aime, je le savais bien !

 « mais le plus beau c'est le coup sur le bugzilla de gnome »

 « il s'est fait fermer son compte en 3 commentaires »

Ben, cela ne veut pas dire que le sieur qui s'est senti touché aux bijoux de famille et a fermé mon compte est moins con qu'il l'était déjà. Les options du clavier doivent être en clair, pas en klingonien, et accuser l'upstream pour les descriptions débiles relève de l'idiotie congénitale.

Par outre, ils n'ont été toujours comme ça, au moins pas tous. J'avais rapporté quelques bogues in 2006 (#328637 pour gedit, jamais résolu ; #346538, « résolu » comme double du bogue #332549, considéré à son tour un double du bogue #328637, qui a été ouvert par quelqu'un d'autre en clonant un bogue que j'avais rapporté pour Debian, jamais résolu lui non plus ; #340072 pour Evolution, apparemment jamais résolu, bien que marqué « critique ») et personne n'a jamais eu de problème avec mes commentaires ! Plus récemment, les bogues GNOME #505639, #85735, #505641, #505642, #505643, #505644, #349677 ouverts par votre serviteur n'ont pas reçu aucun traitement défavorable !

Ce qu'on ignore ici est le fait que la plupart des bogues ne seront jamais fixés, bien que péniblement élémentaires.

 « lui par contre il continue à piller les images des autres, légale ou pas, moralement c'est nul »

 « ben paille, poutre, tout ça hein »

Au contraire, c'est de l'usage loyal, ça, car c'est une parodie à raisonnablement basse résolution qui ne reproduit qu'un centième d'un épisode de BD de Gotlib, sauf l'opinion contraire d'un juge dans un jugement définitif :

Vignettes que j'utilise des fois (séparement)

Et ça, c'est quoi en termes de droit d'auteur ? Ce n'est pas une parodie, car ce Garfield identifie le site, il lui est associé !

Puisqu'on est toujours dans ce billet en français, je voudrais corriger un mot dans une conclusion prise depuis une revue d'Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 (Hardy Heron) : "Je dois dire que j'ai un goût amer dans la bouche. Pourquoi ? Parce que Hardy est une LTS, elle est donc sensée être bien propre et avec peu de problèmes en entreprise. Les retours que j'ai de mon parc ne sont pas exactement exempts de reproches. Je sais que les correctifs vont arriver mais je suis tout de même un peu déçu de cette version finale qui ressemble un peu plus à une RC. Côté nouveautés et utilisation elle reste tout à fait utilisable dans un cadre privé..."

Elle est sans doute censée etc.

Pense-z-y :-)

May 08, 2008 at 14:52:57 GMT - No comments

When two editions of the same book are sold for the same price, and when you put into each copy of your books a useless unique coupon code, why shouldn't this coupon offer you access to the added contents from the newer edition? (Because they suck, that's why.)

I took some time to really open a book on Qt4 I own for some time already. Looking on the web for what to do with the coupon code printed inside the book, I discovered that a second edition of the book is available for the same price!

Here's the deal:

 «C++ GUI Programming with Qt4», by Jasmin Blanchette, Mark Summerfield. Published Jun 21, 2006 by Prentice Hall. I own the 3rd print of December 2006.

 «C++ GUI Programming with Qt4, 2nd Edition», by Jasmin Blanchette, Mark Summerfield. Published Feb 4, 2008 by Prentice Hall.

The problem is: you can buy either of the books for the same price! But why would anyone buy the 1st edition?! The 2nd edition comes with updated contents, including, but not limited to:

 "significant new coverage of databases, XML, and Qtopia embedded programming;"

 "all Qt 4.2/4.3 changes, including Windows Vista support, native CSS support for widget styling, and SVG file generation;"

 "coverage of Qt 4.3's new graphics view classes;"

 "new chapters on look-and-feel customization and application scripting;"

 "a new Appendix C on Qt Jambi, the new Java version of Qt."

Knowing that the 1st edition is written for Qt 4.1.1... everyone would choose the 2nd edition. How about the owners of the 1st edition?

They're losers.

They're fooled more than once though. Each copy of the book contains a coupon code supposed to enable a 45-day online access to the Safari edition of the book you bough. I tried to use the coupon, hoping that it will enable me to see the updated contents.

This coupon is a fraud! When entering it, I was told: «This coupon will give you: • Free access for 45 days to the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4.» OK, but... I still had to choose a subscription plan to Safari Bookshelf, either USD $22.99 per month, or USD $252.99 per year!

This is a rip-off. I wanted either limited access to the online edition of the book I bought, or the access to Errata, Updates, a "delta", stuff like that.

Maybe I am used from the software world to be entitled to "patches" and updates, but the Prentice Hal / Pearson Education / InformIT / Safari practices suck.

Well, of course there are some other books on Qt4. Say, The Book of Qt 4 (by Daniel Molkentin, at No Starch Press, July 2007), and Foundations of Qt Development (by Johan Thelin, at Apress, Aug 2007). If I'm not wrong, both are based on Qt 4.2. I can't tell which one is better, but one can't learn from several books at once — as once you've learned how to make a "Hello, Qt!" button, you can't be taught this twice :-)

Since we're at No Starch Press, I noticed the very practical style of a sample chapter from Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 (containing 30 chapters in a modular approach): Chapter 3: Apache HTTP Server 2.2.8. Extremely nice!

May 08, 2008 at 11:08:40 GMT - 5 comments

OpenSolaris, XP SP3, taxing MP3 players

I wanted to give OpenSolaris 2008.05 a try. On the PC, the kernel booted, then it wasn't able to access the CD-ROM anymore. On the Acer laptop, it froze while still decompressing or something, as it was stuck with a few progress dots on the graphical background.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 doesn't exist. Project Indiana doesn't love me. Full stop.

Windows XP SP3: Beware the service pack! — excerpt from the part about Vista SP1 : «The first thing that happened after installing Vista SP1 is that it broke my HP printer driver. That wasn't too bad, I fixed that quite easily by uninstalling the driver and doing a clean reinstallation. However, the fact that a service pack upgrade caused an instability in a previously working standard software installation is a concern. If it was only a matter of drivers I wouldn't worry. Unfortunately, for me the real issue is that SP1 has provided no performance improvement at all - in fact performance is discernibly worse - and my system is far less stable than it once was.»

So maybe KDE4 is indeed better than Vista.

One more country believes that you're guilty even before you ever thought of the possibility of doing something bad: Japan to tax MP3 players. I could never understand how so many modern countries, with allegedly democratic judicial systems, can pass legislation that criminalize in block all the buyers of blank media and of media players, thus mass-punishing people who were never proved to have committed any crime or infraction!

I suggest to the Japanese and to the other countries with similar legislation to broaden the use of this "judiciary innovation": as long as you can't find all the copyright violators, so you just punish everybody, why not doing the same judgment for all the other crimes? Therefore, any citizen reaching 18 years of age should pass one month in jail, just to make the punishment "democratic". Subsequently, the police should stop finding who the real killers and rapers are, because punishment has been applied.

Oh, I can already hearing you that the 1-month mass punishment won't provide any "moral reparation" to the victims of the real crimes. OK, but do you believe the money from the taxation of the media platers and the blank media are really "providing a reparation" to those artists who have really lost money due to the copyright infringement? (You must be born yesterday to believe that. That tax goes to the sharks only.)

This reminds me of an antique joke. A young lady is caught by a lake guard for having a fishing rod in hands. "Lady, the fishing is forbidden in this area! I'll have to fine you for that." "Sir, but I wasn't fishing, I was just carrying a rod with me!" "How would I know if you were fishing or not? You have all the necessary equipment!" "Well, then I should accuse you for having raped me!" "Lady, you're nuts? I haven't done such a thing!" "Maybe you didn't, but you have all the necessary equipment!"

We all have media players and blank media, so we're criminals and we have to pay for that, right?

P.S.: I forgot to ask the real question. There is a law principle that you can't be tried twice for the same crime on the same set of facts (double jeopardy). Therefore, as a buyer of a media player or of a blank media has been declared guilty ab initio and has paid for his crime of affecting the earnings of the recording industry, shouldn't this mean that such a buyer is free to rip and copy no matter how many musical recordings?

May 08, 2008 at 10:35:44 GMT - 5 comments

Just how smart it is to sue Wikipedia for calling you dumb?!

Wikinews is not self-censoring yet: Literary agent sues Wikimedia for being named among the 'worst agents'.

vnunet.com: Wikipedia in court over defamation claims — Wikipedia à nouveau accusé de diffamation.

Quite a dumb idea, or a winning one? «Barbara Bauer, who runs the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency, looks like she's set to learn that lesson the hard way after suing Wikipedia for an article that called her the "Dumbest of the Twenty Worst" literary agents and said that she had made no book sales at all. The controversy stems from a few brief statements regarding Bauer's track record (none of which remain on the site at this time). These statements weren't simply dragged from the ether; Bauer was included on a list of the twenty worst agents back in 2006 and that list was widely circulated in the blogosphere. The controversy was discussed at the time by writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who called Bauer a "well-known scam agent" and the "dumbest of the twenty worst." Even before that, writers were complaining about her agency in various discussion forums. Bauer's alleged faults are the usual ones that you hear about in the unregulated world of literary agents.»

Here starts the fun. Not only there is no Wikipedia page for Barbara Bauer anymore, but even the page for Bauer v. Glatzer et al has been deleted! Here's a cached version of it:

The worst has yet to come: the Wikipedia Articles for deletion/Barbara Bauer page has been... «blanked as a courtesy.»

Let's try now to take a look at the page of the Revision history of Barbara Bauer. «There is no revision history for this page.»

To end with a better one: I wasn't able to find any cached version of the Wikipedia page for Barbara Bauer! I don't know how they did it, but I guess they have some "shortcuts" to both Google and Yahoo.

Good Morning, America! Your lawyers are never sleeping! As for that piss piece of paper called Constitution...

May 08, 2008 at 09:38:19 GMT - No comments

Tracker and PulseAudio, the only major annoyances with Ubuntu 8.04? Ars Technica seems to think so.

Ars Technica: The heron has landed: a review of Ubuntu 8.04, by Ryan Paul.

Selected excerpts:

 «In our review of Ubuntu 7.10, we complained that Tracker's search tool is missing essential functionality, like support for sorting results by date. These flaws make it virtually useless when searching a large number of files. Unfortunately, it hasn't significantly improved since the 7.10 release and still suffers from all of the same problems. When I try to use Tracker's search tool, the top results are almost always program license files or drafts of articles that I wrote in 2004 rather than files that are actually relevant to my query.»

 «After several days of frustration with Tracker, I attempted to install Beagle from Ubuntu's package repositories, but I ran into some problems. The Beagle search tool crashes frequently on Ubuntu 8.04 because Ubuntu improperly packaged one of Beagle's core dependencies. After installing Beagle and fixing the problem manually from the command line, I was able to get a good desktop search experience.»

 «The most annoying PA problem I've encountered so far in Ubuntu 8.04 is that it will sometimes slow GStreamer video playback down to the point where it's practically a slideshow. The problem doesn't manifest itself at all when I use Alsa instead. [...] Many users also complaining about glitches and skipping in Flash audio, particularly on streaming video sites like YouTube.»

 «I'm convinced that PulseAudio is the best available solution for sound on Linux and I think that it will bring a lot of value to Ubuntu when it is fully integrated, but right now it represents a big regression because it creates lots of problems while most of its significant advantages aren't exposed or accessible to end users out of the box.»

 «With an incremental six-month release cycle, bugs are easily justified as transitional problems introduced by new technologies that haven't had a chance to mature yet. The problems are harder to excuse for this version because, as a long-term support release, it was supposed to be more robust. [...] I'm quite happy to suffer with the bugs for six months, but I can't imagine anybody using it on the desktop for three years in its current state. This release is disappointing because it falls short of what was promised, but it still delivers a lot of value for experienced users who will be able to work around the weaknesses.»

No, I wouldn't be happy to "suffer with the bugs" not even for a month!

May 07, 2008 at 22:33:46 GMT - 1 comment

With Bluewhite64 himself :-)

Yes, they're both Romanian by citizenship and place of living: the interviewer and the interviewee. Yes, the quality of some articles on Linux.com is not what it once was (or seemed to be). Yet, this is a surprise and a nice interview indeed: Interview with Bluewhite64 creator Attila Craciun.

The most interesting part is about the unfinished project BW64EL, an Enterprise Edition for servers.

What I wasn't able to find is what might be the differences between Bluewhite64 and Slamd64, the standard editions; otherwise, when we talk about the LiveDVD and the Flash editions, things are pretty much clear.

However, the discussion about the LiveDVD should have mentioned ALICE (Advanced Linux Installation and Configuration Environment), a joint project not very well-known.

Well, nobody's perfect, not even a Romanian :-)

May 07, 2008 at 21:16:22 GMT - No comments

Of interest for those affected by Ubuntu bugs #197064, #201086, #205221, #207615, #221213

The hibernation regression in Ubuntu 8.04 might come to an end soon (or not that soon, it depends on several factors). This regression affects some Intel 945GM/940GL/965GM-based systems, including my Acer TravelMate 5310.

As per the comment #7 to the bug #221213 (reported by me), I tried the proposed solution and it has fixed the regression!

The idea was to a kernel from the series in works for Intrepid Ibex 8.10, from kernel-ppa. To do that, I added:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kernel-ppa/ubuntu hardy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kernel-ppa/ubuntu hardy main

as repositories (the second one was not actually needed).

I then installed from there:

 linux-image-2.6.25-1-generic

 linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.25-1-generic

It now hibernates correctly and resumes reliably!

The only problem I have is that the bootsplash breaks the screen (it usually turns black), so I had to remove "splash" from the kernel line.

Another note: Ubuntu is now completely non-informative while suspending to disk; it only prints "drm_sysfs_suspend" during the whole operation. It was able to do better in the past: what happened to the lines saying "Syncing filesystems", "Freezing user space processes", "Freezing remaining freezable tasks", "Shrinking memory", etc.?