If Ubuntu 9.04 experienced regressions with the X.Org Intel driver version 2.6.3, so that many people needed to revert to version 2.4.1, why does Mandriva 2009.1 come with the version 2.7.0 of the driver? Which of the following assertions is true?

• 2.7.0 fixes the regressions, so Ubuntu should just upgrade from 2.6.3 to 2.7.0. Champagne for everybody and peanut butter for Mark… once it’s done.
• 2.7.0 still includes some regressions, but Mandriva didn’t bother to mention them in the release notes, nor in the Errata.

SELF-ANSWERING UPDATE: Mandriva 2009.1 One GNOME has a fabulous glxgears performance on my Intel video! I suppose it would be safe for Ubuntu to upgrade to version 2.7.0 of the X.Org Intel driver. Eh?

RE-UPDATE: Using the version 2.7.0 of the driver in Jaunty seems to be useless.

RE-RE-UPDATE: Jaunty: kernel 2.6.30 fixes the Intel video! (But… caveat emptor!)

What I said (that it works) is what I said, but indeed, reverting to version 2.4 of the Intel video driver more than doubled my glxgears FPS rate! (I know this is not a valid benchmark, but on the same machine, it’s a valid regression detector.)

Because the morons can’t just tell you how to add the GPG key, but they’re sending you to a different page that… also fails to say things in a straightforward way, here’s the short version:
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În timp ce tineretul cubanez a avut un weekend de muncă patriotică în cinstea zilei de 1 Mai (ocazie cu care se va devia şi la ei circulaţia) şi pentru refacerea ţării după uraganele care au devastat-o, iar francezii se pregătesc să-şi înmâneze unul altuia lăcrămioare sau mărgăritar (muguet), nouă ne este anunţat (şi în presa virtuală) un cadou neaşteptat: o nouă (şi rară) ediţie românească a Capitalului lui Marx! (Volumul I, se înţelege.) 900 pagini, 89 de lei.
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This is the reading that made my evening: Linux desktops… too much too late, by Tom Callway.

Essential quotes:

Guess what? They all do the same. The GUI was ‘done’ ten years ago but nothing can stop the developers.

Trackball mice, multi-button radio-controlled mice, rotating cubes, wobbly windows, sticky bits, widgets all designed to look pretty and slow your computer down and ideally stop it altogether with a system-crashing bug. Now we have touch-screens so we can do exactly the same as before but without a mouse.

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I won’t tell you what I was looking for, but here’s my amazing founding: a scientific paper by a Bulgarian mathematician proving that… a Parliament that has a voting majority is either “oligarchic”, or… inconsistent!

The paper can be found on Vladimir Sotirov’s website, either here or here. Direct link to the PDF editions: main, mirror.

Understanding the mathematical proofs contained in the paper “The Majority Voting Parliament is Either Oligarchic or Inconsistent” is not easy if the last time you used the set theory was 20 years ago. Should you have ever been able to understand those concept and notations (beware, you might not know the English equivalent if you only knew them in your native language other than English), you could do what I did, i.e. use Wikipedia to refresh your memory: Table of mathematical symbols; ISO 31-11; Iff;  Set theory; Set of all sets; Basic concepts in set theory; Power set; Partially ordered set; Filter; Ultrafilter.

I already know a couple of readers who won’t need any mathematical help to understand the paper.

Outside mathematics, you ought to know about the Social choice theory and Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem.
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• Le Figaro: L’avenir appartient à ceux qui se lèvent tard
• La Nutrition: Le monde appartient… à ceux qui se lèvent tard !
• IT Wire: Early risers sleepier in evenings (what a surprise)
• SCIENCE: Homeostatic sleep pressure and responses to sustained attention in the suprachiasmatic area
• Blog: Night owls - the energizer bunnies of society

F11-Preview can’t currently divert me from my <most-popular-U-word> 9.04 installation, being it only for it’s only supported for 13 months, versus 18 months, and also because I always felt that Fedora is pushing too many untested technologies too quickly in a distro (e.g. they include Firefox 3.1b3, when the numbering has changed and 3.5b4 was just released).

I have played a bit with F11-Preview-i686-Live.iso though, and I was happy to see that the bug that prevented my PC’s ATI Radeon 9200 to work properly was fixed in the meantime, alongside with some PackageKit annoyances that seem to be gone now. Notwithstanding the continuous improvements in PackageKit (gpk-application is at version 2.27.2! I fail to understand the numbering, unless they want to make it an official tool in GNOME 2.28), I still can’t get used with it. For instance, I don’t like the pending operations be hidden in the systray icon, I’d rather prefer to know what’s going on, etc.

I guess my memory is failing: I thought nautilus-open-terminal is on the LiveCD, but it’s not. If my memory is not failing again, it must be part of the default CentOS install, and I was mixing things. OK, it’s easy to install it, but please don’t tell me it wasn’t there for lack of space! There was enough space for a peculiar application such as AiksaurusGtk! Ouch, and gconf-editor was missing too (whereas it’s present on the <most-popular-U-word> 9.04 CD).

The fascinating part with Fedora is always the verbose Release  Notes document! Many notes are useful, and many workarounds are valid for other distros too!
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…dar nu o să pun botul la nici o teorie conspiraţionistă, totuşi o să vă sugerez să citiţi Un virus de mare porc!, cu tot cu comentarii — unul ne trimite la o pagină despre gripa porcină din 1976!
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It’s quite surrealistic for me to recommend a regularly-priced product sold under its own label by a chain store that never sells exquisite products, but here it is: I was surprised to see that the real,- Selection chocolate bar is actually excellent!

I’ve only tried the Vollmilch assortment (30% cocoa, 18% milk), and it was much, much better than expected! There are much worse products from other brands having a similar or higher price.

Next time I should try the 70% cocoa chocolate.

ZaReason, Inc. is selling for $5.00 sets of 10 Ubuntu Case Badges that can be very well be used for both notebooks and desktops: SKU16197.

The shipping is free and can currently be provided for the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, French Polynesia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Virgin Islands, Venezuela.
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This is not necessarily “breaking”, nor entirely “news”. Nevertheless, fact is that I am satisfied with Ubuntu 9.04 on my Acer TravelMate 5310, and I don’t plan to switch away from it in the foreseeable future.

How was this possible?

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Personal and less personal issues might make me take a relative distance with regards to this blog in the foreseeable future. For the time being, I am still going to mention a few issues that were “in the cache”. We’ll see what the future will be, and also what my mood will be like. Even if nothing worse will happen, I still have to let most things just pass by me. I am bored with most never ending issues…
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Unele lucruri se mai şi întâmplă, iar asta afectează viaţa şi moralul celor implicaţi. În speţă, este destul de probabil ca în perioada următoare să mă «îndepărtez» de acest blog, din lipsă de timp ori de chef. Deja mi-am pierdut aproape tot interesul faţă de o largă categorie de chestiuni, sper că numai temporar. Oricum ar fi, trebuie s-o las mai moale, cum s-ar zice.

Deocamdată, şi până la noi ordine, aveam unele teme «în cache», şi încerc să nu le şterg pe toate. Din lipsă de motivaţie, voi puncta doar unele dintre ele. Câtă vreme sunt încă într-o fază de relativă negare, şi în acelaşi timp de aşteptare, încă mai pot să bloghez.
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Personal matters. Family and friends. Not all still with us.

I ran into the FormulaOne Compiler by accident. I was looking for an algorithm to solve the “5 sailors, a monkey and a pile of coconuts” puzzle, popularized by Martin Gardner decades ago. Google returned this page for an answer.

This is how I’ve found about FormulaOne, “a constraint logic programming (CLP) system for the development of applications”. It’s a closed-source system that only releases Win32 binaries, but it happens to runs under WINE quite well.

FormulaOne is “a logical programming language based on the first order logic, allowing writing programs using language with syntax/semantics similar to logic formulae.” The interesting part is that “At this higher level of abstraction the programmer can concentrate on stating what is to be computed, not necessarily how it is to be computed.”

OK, here’s the solution:

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I was asked about NFS and SMB functionality in Ubuntu 9.04. I have not tested NFS at home (faute de moyens), but Samba works.

First of all, when I wanted to share a folder, I noticed that Samba is… not installed by default.

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I have not tried Skype yet with Ubuntu 9.04, nor anything else that would require a mike, but the audio output works just fine on my Acer… with ALSA. I’ll look again into it, but somehow it defaulted to ALSA and it seems to work.

I’ve just read Eva’s guide to Skype under Jaunty, and what I saw is this:

• sound input: “hardware”
• sound output: PulseAudio

Then:

• sound playback (that’s output): auto
• sound capture (that’s input): PulseAudio

Doesn’t this look a little… the other way around?!

Terzio, the sound mixer is… the ALSA mixer. What the fuck is PulseAudio for, and in which way is it “a proxy for your sound applications”, if the whole thing is such a stupid mess?!

…şi nu e moarte dupe mine. Ce să fac, să mă sinuciz?

O mâţă eviscerată de ovare, şi care nici nu mai are pofte lubrice, care va să zică că nu se pune ca “femeie”, plus că oricum, e altă specie.

Deci, nu mă iubeşte femeile. Ce e de făcut?
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