30 April 2009
While I prefer the cold weather to hot weather (it’s much easier to warm up than cool down), it seems to have two awful side-effects.
One, it’s harder to get up in the mornings. I have enough trouble with that without the cold weather.
Two, mice have been raiding our house for comfort and shelter. Two nights ago, I caught a mouse in my bedroom. I closed the door, cornered it in the corner of the room where the bed is, and proceeded to sift through every single box under the bed.
Of course, the mouse was nowhere to be found, so I left the door open so he could find his own way out. And I just found their way out: through the front door. Turns out there is a slight gap on the hinge side of the door that the mice can squeeze through. How do I know? I just caught two in the act.
Mice: just take what you want (bedding, food, supplies) for the winter and leave us alone!
Tagged: aargh, real life, weather | 2 Comments »
26 April 2009
I just read that WordPress is holding a design challenge for a brush-up of the current administration administration interface for the upcoming version 2.8. Here’s an mockup of what they’re looking for in a new design:
I am very happy with the WordPress 2.7 interface, and I am even happier that it is going to be polished and made even better with 2.8.
Unfortunately, entrants to the challenge must be based on the .psd file by Matt Thomas, which in their own words is because:
We’re providing Matt’s .psd file for you to work from. Please do not create your own file and submit that, since if your design is chosen but your file isn’t in the right format, we won’t have time to let you fix it. Just edit over the layers.
The problem? .psd is the proprietary format of Adobe Photoshop, which is a proprietary program that costs hundreds of dollars that also only runs on other proprietary operating systems.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
Photoshop may be the most widely used mockup program among web designers out there. So what? It requires you to step into a world of proprietary non-free software that has ideals directly contrary to that which enabled WordPress to flourish in the first place, and expend hundreds of dollars that is simply unnecessary.
I don’t mean anything personal to anybody — at Automattic or Adobe — I just thought the folks at Automattic were into this whole open source thing.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.
The solution? Don’t just accept open formats created by free software; actively encourage their use — hire someone who knows how to use them.
Tagged: aargh, open source, WordPress | 11 Comments »
25 April 2009
By chance, I checked my bandwidth usage stats for static.sunriseroad.net, hosted on DreamHost, which serves miscellaneous downloads like my hackergotchi, some pictures, some code downloads, among other things.
Well, my bandwidth usage for April so far was…(drumroll)…405 GB!
I couldn’t believe it! Both March and April were that high — about 40GB a day was the average. (Thanks to John who kindly lets me use his DreamHost account which has unlimited bandwidth.) How could that be? Well, I checked the access logs, and 99% of the access log is filled with basically the following, which sure surprised me:
201.221.x.x - - [23/Apr/2009:16:03:14 -0700] "GET /jeremy/releases/Wesnoth-1452.xo HTTP/1.0" 200 80241354 "http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008072400 OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3 (XO) Firefox/3.0"
Wow! Everyone is downloading Battle for Wesnoth for OLPC that I ported! I had no idea it was so popular.
Most of the user-agent strings contain “OLPC/0.4.6-1.olpc3″, which gives a pretty good indication that people are downloading it straight onto their XO using the built-in browser (which is contrary to my recommendation, but anyway). The majority of IPs are from Uruguay, so I suspect it is spreading like wildfire among schools there. Who says Linux doesn’t have viruses? 
To continue to keep the Children of the World entertained, I have already ported Wesnoth 1.6a to OLPC, but I haven’t released it yet. Hopefully I will release it to a testing audience in the coming weeks.
Tagged: gaming, Linux, networking, olpc | 1 Comment »
10 April 2009
You can now play Freelancer under Linux with 100% compatibility by running it under VirtualBox with Direct3D acceleration!
Thanks to the OpenGL support in VirtualBox, and the awesome WineD3D work by Robert Millan, Freelancer, which is a 2003 Direct3D 8.1 game, runs perfectly in VirtualBox.
All you need is the latest VirtualBox (2.1 or 2.2 will do), a copy of Windows to run inside it, and the latest WineD3D for Windows. I tested on both XP and Vista — it ran smoother on Vista (ironically), but both were playable.
Freelancer has worked in Wine on Linux without virtualisation for some years now, but multiplayer support is something that has never worked properly. With virtualisation, Freelancer can use the native Windows networking, and thus works perfectly with multiplayer.
(Well, actually, if you use Windows Vista, you have to disable IPv6, otherwise multiplayer doesn’t work, but that’s a different story.)
The game runs much smoother than back when I ran it in VMware: the speed was inconsistent, and I used to get booted off multiplayer servers for allegedly using “speed mods”. With VirtualBox, performance is extremely consistent. (Although Moore’s Law may have something to do with that.)
Have fun!
Tagged: gaming, hacks, Linux, virtualbox, virtualisation | 6 Comments »
