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.

• 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!”
• I told you so. Of course, the Moffat-gushing fans will invent some excuse to like it anyway.
• 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.)
• 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.

echo "127.0.0.1 linux.org.ru" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
echo "127.0.0.1 www.linux.org.ru" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Standard Russell T Davies episode: Earth or an alien planet is threatened by goofy CGI monsters. After a lot of running, fast-talking, and sonic-screwdriver-waving, the Doctor finds a way to stop them that comes completely out of the blue.

Standard Steven Moffat episode: Earth or an alien planet is threatened by a mysterious and deadly force. After experiencing a lot of timey-wimey weirdness, the Doctor asks it to please stop. So it does.

There was an old Doctor from Gallifrey…

Ahem.

There was an old show named Doctor Who on the BBC. It was watched by whole families and loved — it had witty dialogue, engaging stories and original aliens. And everyone was glad. But over time it deteriorated, and fell prey to repetitiveness and turning on itself, and fell in ratings, and was canceled.

Then there was a new show, under the same name. It was more of a reimagining than a straight continuation — a show that was noticeably different in tone, more self-aware, that just happened to be in continuity with the old one. As envisioned by head writer Russell T Davies, it challenged the implicit assumptions of the Doctor Who story framework, and grounded the Doctor and his adventures firmly in the real world, with real people, their real problems and real relatives. Admittedly there was a practical reason for this direction: it had to once again become a show for the general audience, rather than for the Doctor Who fandom.

Then Davies left, and there came a new head writer. In the past he wrote a few episodes for the new series that were near-universally pronounced “not bad at all”. So naturally the fandom regarded him as a savior. Unlike Davies the improviser, who wrote by gut instincts rather than careful planning, this new clever™ writer thought Doctor Who was supposed to be a fairy tale, and forgetting the principle of “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, retooled the show accordingly.

New Doctor Who: born March 26, 2005; died April 10, 2010.

I wrote the date for “The Beast Below”, but I actually kept watching after that, hoping it would improve. But that spirit of verisimilute from the Davies era, retained in the season opener, was irrevocably gone from the second episode and beyond. Later findings confirmed that this was all part of Steven Moffat’s deliberate, conscious Fairy Tale Vision. But wait. This is a show about a time-traveling alien who visits, like, alien worlds and such. If I was interested in fairy tales, I would be watching something completely different from Doctor Who. Maybe, I don’t know, The Little Mermaid or Cinderella.

In this New and Improved™ season, the RTD-bashing fans got exactly what they wanted: a head writer who knows what he’s doing. But if you ask me, the fact that he’s consciously taking the show in this direction is even worse.

The logical result is the kind of episode we got last Saturday: a misplaced Mr. Mxyzptlk shows up in the TARDIS to pull the heroes into a mind-screwy Cuckoo’s Nest “emotional” episode that evidently tries to be this season’s “Father’s Day”. Except “Father’s Day” made me feel sad for Rose (Me! Sad! For Rose of all people!), and I found it genuinely moving. Here, on the other hand, the only reaction this episode managed to evoke was wishing Amy would actually die in a van crash. She doesn’t, of course. The trio wakes up to discover that it was all a dream, even the supposedly “real” world. Congratulations, Simon Nye, you have managed to write the first ever episode in the new series where there were never any genuine threat at all.

A viewer like 7-year-old Amelia Pond would perhaps appreciate this episode, probably find it funny because the Nasty Grimacing Man is the kind of villain that kids find funny, or because the Doctor was preparing to catch Amy’s baby by holding his hands under her crotch. Sorry, but to make me take what’s happening on screen at least half-seriously, you need to do better.

This new season has become all style and no substance. The new TARDIS design, a steampunk retro glorified child’s bedroom with flashing bulbs (as opposed to the RTD-era alien look). The characters, also tuned up for kids instead of, I don’t know, ticking every age category and giving everyone someone to identify with (think of Martha, Jackie, Donna, and Wilf). And not even the supporting ones, although huggy-happy-go-round Winston Churchill could as well be drawing his battle plans in pink crayons for all the historical authenticity we got. The main cast are big offenders. Comparing their motivations with the RTD era makes me simply weep.

The Eleventh Doctor acts wacky and buffoonish because that’s what the Doctor is supposed to do. Amy follows him around and gets into trouble because that’s what the companion is supposed to do. Rory complains, quite rightfully, that she doesn’t look all too faithful to her groom, and her response is… to grin like an idiot after he crumbles to dust in front of her eyes in the dream world, firmly believing that he’s in no danger because her magic wizard in his magic phone box is around. Aaaargh. I’d strangle her, but when she displays all the personality of cardboard with bits of Rose 2.0 randomly thrown in, what’s the bloody point? To say this characterization is as deep as a puddle would be an insult to puddles.

As Alice summed it up, “nothing after 501 feels real”. Unlike the RTD series, starting at “The Beast Below”, at no point do I feel like I’m watching real events involving real people. But rather, toys (action figures?) being moved around a playground.

Next up: something or other with reptilians from 26 years ago. Meh. I’m done with Moffat and his fairy tales. I’ll return for the season finale, though, because it has River Song in it. You can’t go wrong with River Song. She’d make even “Love & Monsters” watchable. Other than that, I’m out.

My earlier patch for the xchat-gnome userlist setting was accepted upstream some months ago, but sadly, version 0.26.2 is still unreleased, so the code is only in git and didn’t make it into Lucid. Ah well.

For now, have another patch — this one turns the transparency slider in xchat-gnome settings into true alpha transparency, a la gnome-terminal, if desktop compositing is enabled (like with Compiz). As a bonus, it prevents xchat-gnome from crashing if the transparency setting is enabled with Murrine RGBA support turned on.

The PPA for Karmic and Lucid is here. It has both the user list and transparency patches applied.

We have had three stable Ubuntu releases featuring notify-osd, and yet, not a single one allowed the user any configuration. I don’t know why, really — it seems to fit the Ayatana team’s “our way or no way” general disposition, but who am I to judge them?

Then I stumbled upon this post. It’s in Russian, and quite old (2009-12!), but it gets the job done. To make notify-osd customizable, you need to add Roman Sukochev’s PPA to your Software Sources, do a system update, and then restart notify-osd (by relogging, or executing pkill notify-osd).

After installing the patched version, you can tweak notify-osd by creating a .notify-osd file in your home directory. A version replicating the Karmic/Lucid defaults can be copy-pasted from here. You can tweak it from there — it should be self-evident.

After I’m finished polishing the Liferea patch, I’ll look for a way to make this patch less hackish. Perhaps move from text settings to gconf, and then write a GUI configuration utility.

As for the only non-obvious setting: “slot-allocation” controls the placement of bubbles. By default, it uses the Jaunty behavior (“dynamic”): all bubbles in the upper-right corner. For the Karmic behavior, where there’s a gap reserved for confirmation bubbles (volume, etc), set it to “fixed”.

That simple image thing is right at the root of homophobia, too. The fundamental image of life, of family, of childhood, of survival, is man and woman. Every story, every myth, every image reinforces that. Even the images of the real world reinforce that, because statistically heterosexuality is the norm. It’s the default. It’s the icon. Man/man or woman/woman disrupts a fundamental childhood image. Homophobia does seem to come from some gut instinct that’s beyond the religious or the physical act or whatever. It’s primal, and I think that’s from the pictures. It’s from what we see and what we’re shown. That’s why, in this gay lark, I stress visibility. Change the law, have education classes, do whatever you want, just be seen.

~ Russell T Davies

If you’re as fond of the messaging indicator as I am, you will appreciate the news. I have made a patch for Liferea as a functional replacement for the old tray icon.

It is not in Ubuntu yet, and I haven’t actually tested the patch on the stable 1.6.x version yet. However, for 1.7.x, it is here, available in my PPA for Lucid, and I’m about to send it upstream. Like with Pidgin, the regular tray icon is not displayed at all if the indicator applet is present.

I think I should have a battlecry regarding annoying “features” in new Ubuntu releases. “THIS! IS! AYATANAAAAA!"