If your male protagonist stuck in a female body against his will falls in love with a man, that doesn’t make him “more of a woman”.

It makes him a gay man.

This is my second time now — writing from my netbook. Last time, in March, I was invited to make a presentation about the Ubuntu developer community, process, and technical details of packaging. (Incidentally, this upload was made from there when I was showing the process of fixing a bug in a package.)

The atmosphere is not very different — perhaps more summery, though, as back then it was cold like it always is in early March, and now it’s +30 Celsius outside. There are about 17 people in a local university, most of whom look like your average geeks.

This time, technical details of packaging were explained right before me, allowing me to jump straight to the matter when the time came for practice session. Unfortunately, it turned out wireless wasn’t working on my Eee PC 1000H when I arrived (even though it always worked out of the box here, under Karmic, Lucid and Maverick), but downloading 300 MB worth of Maverick updates fixed that. The attenders were pleasantly impressed with Unity, although it took some time to explain what was “that network thing that replaced Network Manager), and how indicators were better than the notification area.

My presentation was about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. I explained the difference in release cycles and the processes by which packages and patches are exchanged between the two distributions. I cited the recent statistics on people who are both Ubuntu and Debian developers, stressing that they can help Ubuntu contributors share their changes with Debian, and get started with Debian developer teams.

Finally, as the second part of my topic, I demonstrated merging package changes with Debian and Ubuntu in the case of a VCS-maintained package, by using xvidcore and git-buildpackage as an example.

I hope that these presentations running together got people interested, if not about joining the Ubuntu and Debian development teams (although one was curious how long it took for me to become a MOTU), then at least about contributing to their packages.

I cannot stand questions like “How are you?” and “What’s up?” Please do not approach me with them. If you have no concrete topic to talk about, starting with a generic conversation-starter won’t score you points. Especially since you’re usually not interested in the real answer — namely, in hearing me rant about my recent problems, or on the contrary, singing praises detailing all the good happenings. You just expect to hear a stock non-answer. Hint: you won’t.

So, please, don’t do that.

Especially when I’m at work.

Because inviting me to type a two-paragraph-long summary of the events in my life for the past few days when my brain is full of Java code and Eclipse RCP documentation is beyond rude.

Be afraid of religious people. They have a god that forgives them anything.

Disclaimer: I know all generalizations are false, and the statement above in no way represents all religious people, merely a certain vocal minority.

Drama.

Abridged version: “How dare Canonical do something I don’t like with my GPL code!”

(The patch in question wasn’t even written by a regular Ubuntu developer, by the way.)

Some people have asked about the GTK theme on the screenshot in my previous post, wondering if it’s the Radiance Maverick beta.

It’s not. However, while I’ve been waiting for said beta, I applied the color scheme of Ambiance Maverick, with its delightfully pronounced orange, to the excellent Finery theme by iperationer, itself intended to be a “better Radiance”. I’m not really planning to become a long-term maintainer for the modified theme, and it’s rather hackish, but here it is.

You can download the theme from the github fork of iperationer’s Finery, or directly as a tarball here.

To use Finery and derived themes, you will need the Equinox theme engine, which in Maverick is available in the gtk2-engines-equinox package.

The effort of Ayatana and Ubuntu developers has finally paid off. Since the new keyboard indicator has landed in Maverick and I previously replaced network-manager with connman/indicator-network, at last I could ditch the ugly, now-empty notification area on my GNOME panel, and leave only the indicators.

None of the applications I use now make use of the notification area. If I do find some that do, I’ll try to fix that before Maverick release; gwget comes to mind, but really it’s quite old by itself and what I need is a new, slick-looking download manager. Now, if only there was a way to hide individual indicators to reduce clutter… (Hint, hint.)

Watched Inception. My impression can be summed by:

DREAMS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!

Got my supply of Ubuntu stickers from the Canonical store today. Oddly enough, they shipped faster than goods from the Russian online shop I occasionally order books and DVDs on, go figure.

I like this shade of orange. Just bright enough to make good contrast with white and look interesting, and just subdued enough not to seem rawr-aggressive.

Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.

… It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. …

~ Robert Grudin, “Time and the Art of Living”

Google has discovered that just because a technology is “trendy” and geeky and has a cool name and is backed by a major corporation does not guarantee it will actually be useful.

How soon until the Twitter fad wears off?

As for the comedy, that is a part of the setting, and has been since the first Warcraft, orcs and humans. There are some who would prefer that this be Lord of the Rings or Conan, to whom the only suggestion can be that those games exist.

~ Scurvy

Blah, ill. Got a permission not to go to work today.

During my extended sleep, I had a dream I was Amy Pond, reliving completely different versions of the first four series 5 episodes.

Okay, it was strange.

First of all, I bought and started reading a book about the philosophy of Vincent Van Gogh. (Yes, the artist. I don’t know about him writing any philosophy books.) To my retroactive surprise, I was actually able to read the intro and it contained some insightful ideas, although I didn’t remember much.

Then when I went to the toilet in the shop, and stood near a far wall, a girl about my age walked in and (the men’s and women’s sections were not separated there, just some distance away) started urinating into one of the men’s toilets, standing. From what I managed to see from my position, apparenly she didn’t have a dong, so…

At this exquisite vision Tip’s old comrades stared in wonder for the space of a full minute, and then every head bent low in honest admiration of the lovely Princess Ozma. The girl herself cast one look into Glinda’s bright face, which glowed with pleasure and satisfaction, and then turned upon the others. Speaking the words with sweet diffidence, she said:

“I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before. I’m just the same Tip, you know; only — only — “
 
“Only you’re different!” said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made.

Not that Baum was interested in anything resembling realism in this matter, as the later books showed.

It’s been a long ride, but support for the messaging indicator for Liferea has finally landed in Maverick, backported to version 1.6.3.

There is now a separate PPA for those wishing to try and test this version on Lucid, rather than the unstable 1.7. One major difference between the version that went in and the 1.7 version in my PPA is that the now-official Maverick version never sets the attention flag (the “green envelope”). To quote Ken VanDine:

I don’t think liferea should set draw-attention at all, the intention of that is for important messages that need somewhat immediate attention. I think of RSS feeds as rather passive, read them when you can as opposed to an IM that might require a response within a few minutes. Setting draw-attention everytime liferea refreshes will make that property less effective for IMs, calls, emails, etc.

Meanwhile, I have patched the Epiphany web browser to replace the download notification area icon with a custom indicator. One more step towards doing away with the tray.

I wasn’t born an atheist. Or at least, there is no recorded evidence of a pre-one-year-old me screaming “There is no God!!11” with a Timothy Dalton spit.

In my childhood, I was influenced by my great-grandmother, who was a fundamentalist to the point of absurdity. (My grandmother is more of a liberal Christian, and my parents are basically non-religious but not strong atheists like me — more like “meh, maybe God, maybe not”.) I was baptized in really early childhood, early enough that I have a very vague recollection of the event. I remember there being a church where we went by car, inscriptions on donation boxes in a Church Slavonic font, and a crowd of people crossing before a priest, including myself. I crossed with my left hand at first, being left-handed, before being told that it’s “wrong” — followed by my immediate question why.

I’ve been a questioner ever since my childhood, as long as I remember, to the point that my grandma affectionately nicknamed me “Why-er”. I guess it left an imprint on my early religious experience. I questioned what exactly made holy water different from regular water, and how exactly it was made “holy”. (Reading about the ritual involving River Jordan did little to clarify matters in regard to a backwater church on the outskirts of Novosibirsk.) I was given a cross to wear on my neck by my great-grandmother, and I was bought a prayer book. I used to read adaptations of the New Testament back then, more out of curiosity than anything.

And yes, I actually prayed as a child. Silently, though. The prayer book was preceded by short instructions, which began with, “Imagine yourself standing in front of the all-seeing God.” And that was just what I did, because my logic told me, “If God is all-seeing, surely he would notice my praying even without spoken words?” And so I began mentally reading from the book, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen… — but it was all in my head, because I thought that praying aloud at home would be just weird.

Then, however, came kindergarten, and I started reading popular science books — and questioning. I saw contradictions between the Book of Genesis and the Big Bang, I couldn’t bring myself to literally believe in the miracles Jesus was described to perform, and was quick to seek plausible explanations for them as illusionist tricks or something. And with my habit to chew things back then, I chewed my cross regularly until first its paint came off, and then eventually I bit its strap off. My great-grandmother gave me another one, and I bit it too, but not quite so seriously. I just wore a partially-chewn cross on my neck. It wasn’t some kind of protest, I actually believed back then — but I was a five-to-six-year-old kid and felt the urge to engage my teeth…

Eventually I just abandoned faith altogether. I didn’t know it was called atheism, I just poked Christian beliefs with self-invented logical arguments (which I later discovered were common atheist arguments — among them were the cosmological argument and the argument from many religions) until I arrived to the conclusion that there would be no sense in there being a God, and ultimately this concept is not needed to describe the world around me, nor did I need an external source of morality, which I could just derive from common sense. My cross ended up hanging on my desk lamp for years, until I finally threw it away during a routine cleanup of my room.

So, when I look back at my early years, I can’t help but wonder: could I be called a Christian when I prayed and wore a cross? Probably not; I was always a closet atheist. True believers don’t question, they just believe. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that; it’s their path, I just chose a different one.

I spent the last two days fixing regressions in the Murrine engine related to the unholy mix of Cairo 1.9 and the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. As a result, I now have a patch that should almost completely fix the dreaded white widgets bug in Maverick. I have prepared a PPA and uploaded the packages to build while I’m waiting for my patch to get reviewed and sponsored into Ubuntu proper. (Isn’t it ironic that I, a MOTU, have to rely on sponsorship for so many of my uploads because they touch packages in main?)

There is also Docky, and it’s most certainly also Cairo-related, but it’s a separate problem and I’ll look into it alter. As for Pinta, the grey canvas problem I mentioned in my previous post was also not Murrine-related (but it was Cairo-related), and is now actually patched in Maverick, along with the upgrade to version 0.4.

On an unrelated note, I fixed (in Maverick) the bug with the Epiphany bookmarks menu not being updated in the application menu. Epiphany users, rejoice!

Almost everything works fine, the upgrade went more smoothly than I expected. However, half my GTK widgets are now white in all themes, and the Pinta canvas is grey and doesn’t work. I suspect it might be due to the large number of custom PPA packages previously installed on my Lucid system.

Going to do a fresh install from the daily ISO, to get btrfs. Also, it’s going to be a 64-bit ISO. This will be my first time trying 64-bit Ubuntu, after spending four and a half years on 32-bit. Wish me luck!

This “closed fonts beta” thing was a big PR mistake.

It’s not enough for you to push a proprietary font into Ubuntu in the default install. No, you can’t even release it publicly. You just had to release it as a closed-doors, “members-only” beta.

Think about it. Canonical develops one of the world’s flagship free operating systems. Now they have made a decision that runs contrary to the entire spirit of free software. They are going to bestow their free operating system with a proprietary font (because apparently using any of the better free fonts instead of DejaVu isn’t cool enough). Why a closed beta? Did Canonical suddenly become Blizzard?

They try to sweeten the pill by saying words like “It will be free for everyone to use and share”, adding, of course, that the license is not finalized. Judging by Canonical’s prior history with such “exclusive initiatives” ([coughubuntuonecough]), know what this means: we won’t get the source until the heat death of the universe.

And then I saw the package name: “ubuntu-private-nda-fonts”.

NDA?

That dreaded TLA that you never mention in the free software community, lest you get bombarded by rotten tomatoes?

Wait a minute. I have never signed any NDAs in my life. Did Canonical make me implicitly sign one just by being a member? Ow.

And before I get comments like “don’t use it if you don’t want to”: not only will I be forced to do that on default installations starting with Maverick, but I feel dirty just for having access to that PPA. I would like to have a way to get this privilege, which I feel embarassed for having, revoked.