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.

5 what? Parrots?

BLIZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARD!!!!!

Only Stroustrup could design an operator that signals failure by returning a special value in one case and throwing an exception in another.

Three thoughts. Well… four thoughts. Well… four thoughts and a lizard.

1. Trainwreckdeusexmachinaresetbuttonhowdoesthatwork blah blah blah. Those fans squeeing over how Moffat is soooo much better than Davies have no ground to stand on. River constantly complaining to the Doctor about how his plans make no sense sounded to me like the writer throwing his arms up and exclaiming, “Look, I’ve written myself into a corner! I know this makes no sense! I’m sorry! We just needed a spectacular cliffhanger to boost the ratings!”
2. I told you so. Of course, the Moffat-gushing fans will invent some excuse to like it anyway.
3. The entirety of season 6 can now be summed up as “The one where we find out that River is a future Amy and the man she killed was Rory.” Maybe. My speculation has been wrong many times before. (Edit: Disregard this, really. There are too many things with this theory that don’t match up. Some writers would be eager to discard the lack of logic because “it would be cool”, but I don’t think even Moffat can sink that low.)
4. So, I’m out. No more talking about Moffat Who. I gave him a chance to redeem himself with the finale. Now all that’s left for me is to wait for a new head writer. That’s what the RTD haters did in the first five years, didn’t they? Now I guess it’s my turn.

And since I’m not going to be talking about this subject myself anymore, let someone else say the closing words.

Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn’t), but because he’s vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that’s attempting something – anything – than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies.

~ Lawrence Miles

Disclaimer: I’m not a member of the Ayatana team. I’m not affiliated with Canonical. I cannot guarantee that they’ll ever find this idea interesting enough to implement, or even read this thing.

Indicators are becoming more and more common with each Ubuntu release, as a part of the desktop notification mechanism, and a way to group alike applications running in the background. This is an idea of what I think could make a good generic indicator: file operations.

On today’s desktop, there are many applications doing file transfer in the background. Nautilus already uses an indicator for its file copy operations, but it’s specific to Nautilus. Other applications — web browsers, P2P clients, FTP clients, download managers — usually display progress in their main window, without a way to see the progress without switching to the application.

So, why not have a single menu where applications can add their entries when file operations are in progress? It can include information on the percentage completed, and maybe provide buttons to cancel and (if the application supports it) pause an operation. And an application whose sole purpose is to download files, like transmission or gwget, can live entirely in that indicator without cluttering the notification area with its own custom icon.

There is a children’s book well-known in the former Soviet Union, called Neznaika. The titular character, whose name can be translated as “know-nothing”, is basically a “lovable ditz” type, and in the beginning of the book, he tries his amateur hand at various creative activities — painting, poetry, music — all with abysmal results, before going on an Adventure™.

There is, however, some insight, such as his supposedly “bad” poetry being arguably better than the cringeworthy odes of the resident professional poet who tried to teach him, and him claiming that the others “haven’t grown up enough to appreciate his music”. Some critics might see social commentary here, but that way darkness lies. I wanted to draw attention to a different peculiar point.

Neznaika comes up with verses describing his friends doing nonsensical activities, such as jumping over a sheep or swallowing a cold iron. When they demand he stops “making up lies” about them, he says, “Why should I make up truth? The truth doesn’t need making up — it’s there already.”

The analogy with speculative fiction is left as an exercise to the reader.

So, Skype has released an open source SDK for their proprietary, obfuscated, incompatible-with-anything client.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic attempt to bring open source people on one’s side, with the possible exception of Microsoft donating the kernel drivers that they were legally obligated to anyway.

This post really shouldn’t be here, but… gah…

I’m sick of Twitter. I’m fed up to the brink with it, raging with enough passion to fuel a thousand suns and incidentally provide a long-term solution to Earth’s energy concerns.

It is my berserk button. Worse even than reading about stupid Internet memes, or immature testosterone-overdosed conversations, or watching Doctor Who fansites sing odes to Steven Moffat and realizing I’m basically alone in my grudge against him for breaking a series I used to enjoy, or sitting late at night wondering why my love hasn’t woken up yet on the other side of the planet, or finding out that the shop is out of my favorite kind of chocolate.

No, this is all survivable. There is a special, raw, undistilled kind of hatred reserved for Twitter, enough to cause swollen veins every time I see references to it on every single website I visit, in every single IRC community I chat in. And I’m so sick of “not getting it” that my nasty side causes me to vent against people using it, bringing out my worst qualities that I usually keep locked up, or at least try to.

The worst thing about Twitter is not even that it’s a solution in search of a problem; that it’s basically asking you to justify using it; that for most of uses that its proponents defend, there are better, tried and true solutions that are open standards to boot rather than centrally controlled websites; or that most of it seems to be shallow, self-absorbed, pointless drivel or noise that’s incomprehensible unless you’re immersed in the Twitter subculture. (“RT @” anyone? What does that even mean?)

The worst thing is that it’s become self-perpetuating and self-sustaining, “famous for being famous”. From my experience, most people use it not because they have evaluated its sensible uses and decided it solves some of their genuine needs, but “because everyone else does”.

And with most other “trendy” things, I feel left out of the loop. But none of the others are regularly poked in my face with such prominence and persistence as this abomination of a website.

Forget that we’re talking about Doctor Who, a programme which means something slightly different to every single one of us, a programme so varied in its format and its history that it sparks more arguments about what it “should be” than any other series ever made.

~ Lawrence Miles

I remember how, back in the olden days (read: 2005-2009), actions in Doctor Who used to have consequences.

If a flying saucer damages the Big Ben, then it’s going to have scaffolding around it in the coming seasons. If the Doctor brings down a dystopia without staying and making sure that society recovers from it properly, then it’s going to bite him later. If London suffers from alien invasions two Christmases in a row, then it’s going to evacuate on the third. If the Doctor is forced to wipe a companion’s memory and reset all her character development, then he’s going to spend the next year traveling alone, ridden with guilt.

Then came 2010. The Doctor returned to the screens — but not my Doctor. (Which really has nothing to do with who portrayed the Doctor better, David T. or Matt S.: they are both just actors and work with the lines they’re given.) In this New and Improved season, bad things aren’t treated as bad things. Amy sexually assaults the Doctor, and while he’s initially horrified, he soon shakes it off and keeps traveling with her. Then in The Two With The Silurians…

Rory dies. Worse yet, he’s unpersoned. And it happens, ultimately, because the Doctor takes him and Amy to the wrong place. This would be a good moment for the Doctor to realize that his reckless actions put people around him in danger, perhaps remembering Donna or, heck, Lynda-with-a-Y.

What does the Doctor do? He takes Amy to an art gallery, then to a monster chase in Van Gogh’s time. Of course.

Head, meet desk.

The next version of the Pinta image editor is still quite far away apparently (this depends on the project leader, Jonathan Pobst), but here’s a sneak peak of what to expect (and what is currently landed in git):

• Support for opening and saving in OpenRaster (.ora), a simple multi-layered bitmap format compatible with Krita, MyPaint, and GIMP (with a plugin).
• Saving in BMP, ICO and TIFF in addition to the already supported JPEG and PNG.
• Docking tool windows.
• Better, non-pixelated resize algorithm.
• Improved text tool, with full Unicode input and no more pesky squares.
• Zoom by mouse wheel and hotkeys.
• Better GNOME integration: toolbar respecting system settings, and open/save dialogs remembering the directory and file name and suggesting the Pictures directory by default.
• And bugfixes, of course!

Thank Elune I’m an atheist.