This is much more of an ongoing question in my head than a solidified opinion.  I’d definitely be interested in hearing what anyone has to say about this.  That said …

What do we gain from studying evolution and trying to piece everything together in our long long past?  Even if you just look at human evolution and things like culture changes, tools, and anything else that isn’t strictly biological, what good does it do?  I don’t understand why so many people invest so much money and time trying to look into the past and piece everything together.  When discoveries of bone/wood/stone tools are made, it is very difficult to say for sure what they were used for.  While there are some things that may be “obvious,” a huge amount of it is guesswork.  We will never know if some things are tools or merely byproducts of some other human (or non-human) process.

Even if some day we have it all figured out, we know exactly what evolved into what and what every artifact found was used for… what does it gain us?  This isn’t like studying nanotechnology or genetic engineering.  While those two fields are controversial, they can yield many things that are good for humans all over the planet.  Knowing where we came from is not going to do anything to help us, except silence incredibly religious fundies who believe that God created everything 5000 and some-odd years ago.  I don’t have anywhere else to go with this line of thought, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I’m not saying we should stop looking into it, I’m just wondering if anyone can provide some reasons for it, that’s all.

At some point or another, almost every Linux (and probably *BSD) user hears about the Wine project.  Wine is an open-source project that is building a compatibility layer for Windows applications to run on top of UNIX operating systems.  I used to use Wine for some simple Soldat server management applications when I first started using Linux, but have since stopped.  Every once in a while I try out a few applications in Wine, but I have started using it a lot more lately, mostly for games (Peggle, the crack cocaine of games).

Wine has a unique and interesting say of prioritizing attention given to bugs as well as application support.  They have a system by which registered members on their site can assign votes to applications that they would like to see supported, as well as to bug reports.  This system allows Wine developers and project managers to see where the demand is for application support and bug fixes.  Unfortunately, it does not appear that many people really use this feature.  If this feature was used, the community would see much more targeted support for applications that are in demand.  As of the time of this writing, the highest-voted application only has 147 votes.  Given the size of the userbase of Linux and other UNIX systems and those who use Wine, I would imagine this number should be much higher.

People should really use the voting system to show their support for applications and bugs they would like to see fixed, as well as to show support for Wine’s development as a whole.  There is no reason not to provide feedback into Wine’s development cycle.  As of right now, I’m pushing for support for the following applications and bugs:

• Application: Soldat
• Bug: Soldat anti-cheat system crashes and bans

If you are a Linux user who would like to see Soldat working on Linux with Wine, please consider registering on the Wine AppDB site and casting your votes for these items.  Even if you have no interest in Soldat, please go to the AppDB site to register and cast your votes for the applications and bugs you would like to see worked on.  It will only take a minute, and you can get started registering here and can read more about the voting systems here and here

Lately I’ve been playing with IPv6, but that will be the topic of another post when I have more time.

Generally speaking, most people who have IPv6 connectivity right now know what they’re doing and have put some effort into getting that connectivity.

It is a shame that some content providers appear to set themselves up with IPv6 connectivity, publish an AAAA record for their domain, and then forget to keep up on it.  Such is the case with http://wine.budgetdedicated.com, the main ubuntu repository for Wine.  I hope they fix this soon, but it is really great to see them providing an AAAA record for those of us who are trying to put some use onto the IPv6 Internet as it is today

edit: I haven’t checked it since I wrote this post, but as of today (03/04/2008) ipv6 for the wine mirror is working

I’ve been using the Firefox 3 beta for the past few days, and am loving the speed and reduced RAM footprint that it has.  They’re definitely doing something right.

Of course, most extension (”add-on”) developers aren’t yet updating their extensions to be compatible with the beta, and that’s to be expected.  I wanted my All-in-One gestures though.

I downloaded the xpi file and figured it is likely a compressed format containing the extension itself, as well as some metadata.  Sure enough, using the Unix `file` command told me it was a zip file.  I uncompressed it and looked at install.rdf.  It contained the install information, including the minimum and maximum firefox versions supported.  I changed the max to 3.*, recompressed it, and sure enough it appears to work on Firefox 3.

Do it yourself, or download here

This is an unofficial modified version of All-in-One gestures version 0.18.0 which is tweaked to work with Firefox 3 beta (and probably later RC/release versions).  I don’t know if it works entirely, but the “back” and “reload” gestures work, which is enough for me.

This is not supported by Mozilla or the original developer, I just wanted my gestures ;)   I assure you the file is safe, but do not make an guarantees about whether or not it’ll work or crash your browser.

I’ve finally gotten around to detailing the public protocol used by the lobby to interact with the Soldat client. This is largely due to my will to promote the new Official Soldat Community Dev Wiki by adding content to it. The site is intended as a repository for all knowledge related to community development projects.

As a result, I’ve taken a few hours to detail and format documentation the Lobby<>Client interface, and it can be found at http://devs.soldat.pl/wiki/index.php/Lobby_Protocol

Right now the Client<>Lobby interface can be found on there, though in the future there will be a simplified and much more flexible interface aimed at 3rd party/fan application developers. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions in the comments on here or, more preferably, at the Developers’ Corner board on the Soldat Forums

“Don’t block ads, those block out a huge portion of Internet business!” cries many web developers, site owners, and of course the owners of web advertising business.

Why do I have extensions like Flash Block and Ad Block Plus? To save battery power and CPU cycles. I’m tired of my CPU usage spiking up to 90% because of websites like weather.com that are laden with animated GIF ads and flash ads…. everywhere. I don’t want my battery to die an hour early because of these stupid things. Text ads? No problem there.

I have absolutely no problem with advertising, it is a good way to make money and a good way to get good products out to the people who can buy them and promote them. I now block all ads I can on my laptop because I’m sick of seeing huge distracting, flashing animated ads. I don’t want my computer to run slow and hot because someone decided it would be a good idea to animate their ads using flash. I don’t have much of an issue with flash: it allows for cross-platform content to be delivered in an interactive and intuitive way. But for crying out loud…. STICK WITH STATIC IMAGE/TEXT ADS!

I’ve noticed a few things about the new GMail interface, though some of them may be of limited significance.

• Using Intel’s PowerTOP, I noticed that the number of wakes-from-sleep per second is 4x higher when my laptop is sitting idle with the new GMail interface open. If I switch to the old one, it is lower. The old interface shows ~90 wakes/second. The new shows upwards of 270-280. The overall breakdown of time spent in each of the sleep+running states is approximately the same for both interfaces, and I don’t know what (if any) impact wakes/second has if the breakdown by time is the same.
• When a page/e-mail/display/screen/anything is loading in the new interface, Firefox is completely unresponsive until it completes loading. In the old interface, I am able to switch to other tabs and perform other tasks in Firefox while something is loading. This is really frustrating and is the main thing keeping me from using the new interface.
• When the new interface is open in a tab, my overall rendering/browsing speed in other tabs is highly impacted (negatively). Pages load/render noticeably slower. As soon as I switch back to the old interface, this behavior subsides and browsing is back to normal in other tabs.
• The new interface is generally MUCH less responsive.  Items/menus that used to load instantly now take upwards of a second or more.

I would be very interested to hear if anyone else can confirm these observations, especially in other browser and operating systems. I tested this in a Ubuntu Gutsy setup on a Thinkpad T42 running Fluxbox with Firefox 2.0.0.8. This T42 has 1GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz Pentium M processor.

Nov 6 13:49:11 wizard postfix/smtp[28963]: connect to f.mx.mail.yahoo.com[68.142.202.247]: server refused to talk to me: 421 Message from (67.106.77.7) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html (port 25)

I see an entry like that over a hundred times per day in my mail logs on MM’s server. Out of the past 452 messages sent from the server to Yahoo, 327 failed with this message and 125 were sent successfully. It seems to only happen part of the time. I’ll telnet to one of their MXes once and it’ll work. I’ll try again and the connection will instantly be closed with that connection. What does it mean? It means that Yahoo thinks that his server is sending spam for some reason, and is therefore closing all of these connections from this server before any mail is sent. As soon as the server connects to Yahoo’s inbound mailservers, that message is sent and the connection is closed.

I’ve gone to that URL various times and filled out one of their forms. Every time I’ve gotten no reply or a canned reply with no action taken. But in filling out their forms, one must notice a few things…

Note this URL: “http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_defer” That URL comes from the page mentioned in the error message, and from the URL it looks like it is going to a site that deals specifically with defer messages, and from the context they say it is a form. Where does it go? It goes to http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/forms_index.html , which is a general “My Yahoo Mail doesn’t work” page. Absolutely useless for mail server administrators, redirected from something that almost looked useful.

What else? In order to access those forms, you are required to have a Yahoo account… further evidence that they’re only intended for use by users of their mail service and probably also explaining why I’ve not received any replies to my calls for help. Lastly, the site also says something along the lines of “this e-mail was rejected due to its content.” Someone tell me how that is possibly the case when the connection is being closed before any part of the SMTP conversation even takes place? Anyone?

I’m growing tired of playing these games with Yahoo and having the server keep many messages in the outbound queue because Yahoo is deferring them wit ha temporary failure and refusing to help fix the problem. His server doesn’t send spam and never has. I was receiving these failures from the day the server went online a few months ago. I have reason to believe this IP was in use by someone else and may have been on various realtime spam blacklists for a while, but general practice is that you stop rejecting mail from blacklisted servers once they’re taken off of the lists. Yahoo is improperly using a temporary failure to prevent “spam” from being delivered to their mail exchange servers.

So with all of that said, my apologies to Yahoo users who are having problems receiving mail from SoldatForums.com and other sites hosted on this server. My hands are tied and there’s not much I can do until Yahoo decides to cooperate.

Comcast.net was doing something identical to this, but they took the server off of their list within 24 hours of e-mailing them. For some reason mail ended up being rejected again a few months later, but the fact is that they were quite responsive and had forms and a help section appropriate for mail administrators, not just comcast.net subscribers (and they weren’t hidden behind a login, either).

JRGP showed me this video the other day. He wasn’t able to get it on youtube because it was too large in the format he had it in. I converted it and was able to upload it to my account.

You can tell from the gray square near the clock that he’s recording it with gtkrecordmydesktop, which isn’t the fairest of apps when it comes to resources. I’ve been trying to use it to record gltail recently with no luck, it lags the app too badly. I’m sure his Soldat performance would be better if he wasn’t recording it.

Looks like the only remaining problems with Soldat in Wine on Gutsy is that inverted text thing you can see at the bottom of the screen. Soldat has the attention of a few Wine developers over the past few months, so I’m guessing things like this will be cleared up in the near future.

I don’t write here very often, but I’m trying to write more lately. When there’s nothing here to read, consider checking out these:

• ElephantHunter’s blog about the nitty-gritty of coding/development. He just started it up, so I’m sure there’ll be a lot more different things coming soon. He’s already written quite a bit
• Michal Marcinkowski’s blog about the development of his games (Soldat, link-dead), game theory, the game industry, as well as a variety of more personal and philosophical topics.
• Erin McAuley’s blog about a whole host of current events and political topics.
• Jason Rokeach’s blog about politics, rights, and anything else that gets him all riled up

I will try to write more over the next few weeks, keep tuned!