Monday 23 June 2008

More than a game: GUADEC FreeFA tourney!

The FreeFA tournament will take place again this year, on Tuesday 8th July. We still have room for a couple of people. Seems like keeping it low-key wasn't enough to get it under-subscribed.

Diego will soon be taking care of setting up the teams. There might be some room left for a couple of people to join, in case we get late cancellations, so please add your name and contacts to the wiki page if you're interested.

Tuesday 17 June 2008

Everything sucks

Anyone that says it's just a game is a cunt. Excuse my French.

Link for the uninformed.

PS: I'm so miserable that an Irishman bought me a drink without expecting anything in return, and a Turk gave me back my change for a kebab despite me offering it to him. And the Turk agrees with me on the above.

Monday 16 June 2008

He does it again!

Frank Scholz is the hero again. The Coherence UPNP framework developer, after bravely fixing many bugs in Rhythmbox' UPNP plugin, added UPNP support to Totem.


Will get integrated in Totem itself in due time.

And after people whinged a lot in my previous post's comments, Carlo filed a lot of bugs, and while some of them are already fixed with newer kernels, others are getting fixed by our very own mjg59 (I know he doesn't like me being so possessive).

And as a proof that filing bugs helps other people, one user added himself to the CC: for all the opened EeePC bugs. Now he can monitor progress, help with testing, and disable his work-arounds when the time comes. Yiipee!

Thursday 12 June 2008

How not to do a laptop support page

While the goal is laudable, pages like this one to support the Eee PC on Fedora 9 are what's broken about hardware support in Linux.

Grant X access to local user root: That's horrendous. Never ever do that.

Now we must [...] modprobe the eeepc module: File a bug against the kernel, with the output of "dmidecode", the module should load automatically on those machines.

Now let's handle some FN keys and events create these files: File a bug against the kernel, the eeepc module should be sending out its events through the input layer, so there's no need to install acpid, or tweak any of its config files.

I'll pass on the gruesomeness of the scripts that call into X from a daemon, remove modules by hand (why would anyone need to remove the PCI Express driver?), and the usefulness of having the camera disabled in hardware (it could also be on all the time, and only turn on the feature when the device is opened).

All in all, people writing those web pages had better spend their time filing bugs against the right components in Bugzilla. That also goes for most of the pages on sites like Tuxmobile. File bugs!

Monday 9 June 2008

Crunch time!

If Makelele isn't available, I can fill in, next to Toulalan.

Saturday 7 June 2008

Best meme ever

pjones says:
You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.
Pretty straight forward:
  1. Pump-action shotgun, plenty of ammo
  2. Could have been Rob Zombie, or Zombie by the Cranberries, but it's White Zombie's The One (from the Escape from L.A. soundtrack)
  3. Seth Gecko, Clooney's character in From Dusk Till Dawn (even though he killed vampires then, he looks like he could handle it)
Update: Planets seem to be removing the nice little video. So here goes the direct link to enjoy White Zombie's fury.

Wednesday 4 June 2008

Whaaaaaappaaawooo! Shoof shoof!


My good friend told me two years ago that I should “check out the cast and
director it's a forgotten gem”. His words.

I rented the DVD, and here's my checklist:
  • Badly dubbed, check.
  • Grainy picture, worse than a VHS, check.
  • Bad translations (they call each sister and brother, when they're married, or cousins...), check.[1]
  • Incomprehensible story line, check.
  • Powerful enemies bringing you to a netherworld like in X-Or, check.
  • Dodgy sound effects, and badly timed ones, check.
The film is called “Deadly Snail vs. Kung Fu Killers” in one version, and “Deadly Snake Versus Kung Fu Killers” in other one. Confusing as hell. I still don't know who's supposed to be the snake/snail or the kung-fu killers.

I hate you Rog.

[1]: See also, John Woo's The Killer, french DVD version, where the translations and the dubbing don't match.

Monday 2 June 2008

More chpe rocking!

GNOME hero Christian Persch did it again. He removed all the Mozilla-specific code from Totem's web browser plugin, meaning it should now work with WebKit. All the code's in totem trunk.