Tuesday, November 29. 2005
After my system came pretty unusable because of various reasons, I decided that it's time for a re-install. To keep things funny, I switched to the gcc 4.1 snapshot ebuilds. Although gcc 4.1 is not even released, it performs pretty well. Fixing most apps was quite trivial, most of the patches are now commited to the tree and sent to the upstream developers.
To try this, you need to add sys-libs/glibc and sys-devel/gcc to your package.keywords, set I_PROMISE_TO_SUPPLY_PATCHES_WITH_BUGS=1 in make.conf. Be prepared to fix things yourself and don't do this if you don't know what you're doing.
Remaining problems are some errors with wxGTK-compilation I wasn't able to figure out how to fix, tunepimp doesn't compile (there's a fix for it in bugzilla, but that's against 0.4.0, that breaks amarok and you'll have to patch amarok as well, so things are a bit complex) and some things aren't compiled till now.
Monday, November 28. 2005
Okay, let's be a bit sentimental. Years ago, back when I started using linux, I found a nice little browser called galeon, the default browser of gnome in that time (yes, I also was a gnome-user back then), based on the mozilla/gecko engine. I liked it, because in those days, it was the only browser really having all those features I wanted to have (I especially remember that it was near to impossible to get browsers to open *everything* in a tab).
Someday some gnome people started another browser called epiphany, which quickly became the default for gnome. I never liked it. It lacked features all over, it had no real bookmark management (yes, I know that some people state that it's bookmark management is great), it opened everything in a new window, it just sucked.
Well, in the meantime I've switched 90% of my apps to KDE ones, I'm happily browsing with konqueror, while I' still maintaining the gentoo package of galeon and I start it from time to time when I need to check something with gecko. Recently the galeon-devs announced to stop the development and concentrate their work on epiphany-extensions. It seems that epiphany isn't the feature-lacking piece of code it was back then, they even have something that can be called a bookmark management I heard. Today the galeon-team released 2.0.0, one of the probably last versions, you can expect continuing updates for the gentoo-packages from me as long as there are new releases and they can be built against new firefox versions.
Thursday, November 10. 2005
As I belong to the people being so crazy to build their gentoo with gcc 4, I also need the -*-keyworded glibc, finding out that the latest version says:
Portage have a serious bug in regards to symlinks, and merging this with current versions will fail!
!!! ERROR: sys-libs/glibc-2.3.6 failed.
!!! Function pkg_setup, Line 1071, Exitcode 0
!!! Portage sucks.
Wednesday, November 9. 2005
As Netzpolitik is reporting about the german Tagesschau having a video podcast, I was looking around for free video podcasting (or vlogging) clients.
While with amarok, we have a great audio player supporting podcasts, the most common free video players don't have any support for feeds (xine, totem, kaffeine). vlc seems to have something in svn, but not for the current and the next version. I've once tried this, but failed to get it running.
After some googling around, kmplayer seems to be the solution. kmplayer can use rss-feeds from podcasts as playlists, supports several backends (mplayer, xine, gstreamer) and is probably worth having a closer look at it.
Thursday, November 3. 2005
The Hugi Diskmag, which is a diskmag (ok, not really on disks any more) of the demoscene, just released it's 31th issue, containing my article about the demoscene and free software I've published here a while bag.
Hugi is released as a windows-executable, the windowed mode works fine in WINE, the fullscreen-mode doesn't (any wine-hackers around that want to fix this?).
As reported on several news-pages the last days, the author of the rootkit-protection sofware RootkitRevealer discovered that some Sony Audio CDs install rootkit-like software on your PC.
This is only a very grave case that shows why Digital Rights Management is bad.
The way this and several other copy protected CDs work: You cannot play them with your usual CD-player software on your PC, only if you install some special software delivered on the CD itself.
Beside the fact that you can only use such software if you're using the operating system they write the software for (which is usually Windows) and the fact that you cannot use the audio player of your choice, this leads to a number of other problems.
What this case shows: If you want to play DRM music, you often have to install "something" on your PC you don't know what it really does. You have to trust some unknown software just to play a CD you've bought, and in this case some software that probably leads to security problems, stays on your system without your knowledge and always uses some system ressources.
But think about some other scenarios: You find the CD in let's say 20 years, want to hear it just to find out that nobody uses Windows XP any more, that the software doesn't run on current computers (whatever they'll look like in 20 years). You have no access to the content any more. This is one big issue with DRM-systems: You'll never know how long they'll work.
If you buy a song in iTunes today, you don't know if apple still exists in 20, 30, or even let's say 50 years and if their online-DRM-check finds anything. Same goes with MS/WMA-based DRM-systems. Let's even imagine you want to access some DRM-proted content when the content is no longer copyrighted, you have the right to copy it, but cannot do so.
DRM-systems will have big consequences on the accessibility of older content in the future and that's a big threat to culture at all.
Tuesday, November 1. 2005
After blogging for more than a year with the default design of my blog software (at first bblog, now serendipity), I finally managed to create my own design. So if you are reading this in a RSS-reader, on some planet or some other place, today it's worth watching my page live in a real web browser.
As you may expect, the layout is 100% valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2. It works fine in all common browsers known to have basic support for CSS (tested in Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Opera). It's a well known fact that the so-called browser from Microsoft, the Internet Explorer, fails to support modern web standards, so it'll look ugly. For IE-visitors, I implemented a browser-check and they'll get a note. I've tried to create the check in a way that won't hurt browsers with user agent forging. If you see this message and aren't using the IE, I'd like to hear from you.
I don't know how this layout performs in the Internet Explorer 7 beta versions, as Microsoft doesn't provide them to the public. If you have access to those betas, I'd also like to hear about it.
For the technical side: The html is created with various text-editors, with the smarty template system used by serendipity. The graphics were edited with the great GIMP, using latest technology like the SIOX-algorithm, the sign was created with a wacom graphire graphics tablet, also in GIMP.
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