You finally, really did it.

It’s not entirely unexpected for me, but it’s the kind of news one hopes to never find in his front door, like a car-bomb if you will. If this goes ahead I can imagine that less and less time and human and economic resources will be spent on the Mozilla Firefox proper for the PC, once B2G catches the OEMs’ attention.

I guess it’s time for me to accept (again) that Firefox has ultimately become the open-source Internet Explorer.

Previously I discovered that KDE SC 4.6 and X.org server 1.10 in Debian Wheezy are not a happy couple for various reasons. One of them is the garbage appearing behind new windows even on non-compositing window managers regardless of the DDX in use.

The issue appears to be tracked, in fact, as bug #31017 in freedesktop.org’s Bugzilla. Unfortunately, it’s classified as being of medium/normal importance, it’s been sitting there for some time while other entries get marked as duplicates and I hear rumors that X.org server 1.11.0 is coming out soon.

I guess I can only hope later versions of the 1.11 branch integrate a fix of some sort. I’m starting to doubt I’ll be able to stick to Debian Stable for much long, especially if I buy a new laptop this year — right now I’m compiling GCC 4.6.1, that’s not a good sign.

Bluecore is back, but this wasn’t necessarily good news for me. The current situation is a bit complicated, but it can be summed up like this: my father (who supposedly gave me rather than lent Reicore) wants a laptop again, and so do I. He doesn’t need graphics or CPU power, but I do. Right now, Reicore barely fits the bill even if it works better than Bluecore in practice thanks to the extra 100 Hz of clock frequency and not suffering from Bluecore’s mysteriously subnormal I/O performance.

The most optimal solution for us is that we buy a new laptop for me and I return Reicore to its original owner. The only problem with this is that I have even more special needs: I have to run Linux.

And I have a goal: I want to own a piece of NVIDIA hardware.

While I could easily buy the components to build a new desktop machine with the same money, this would not be a good investment now that I’m primarily a laptop user. My poor desktop machine, Blackcore is suspected of having an unstable PSU and may have more internal components damaged than it’s healthy for an expensive graphics card — until now Blackcore has been running with its utterly shitty (even on Windows) VIA Unichrome Pro IGP.

For the purpose of saving electric power while on batteries (or not, global warming and all that crap) computer hardware engineers have come up with hybrid configurations in which there’s a low-power IGP serving as front-end for a beefier discrete GPU that activates whenever it’s deemed to be required for heavy tasks. NVIDIA calls this “Optimus.”

NVIDIA Optimus is not officially supported in Linux, and won’t be, at least for a while.

Whether GPUs in Optimus configurations can be made to work on Linux without resorting to unsupported mechanisms appears to depend quite a bit on the computer model — for the larger unfortunate crowd there’s Bumblebee, which may have achieved memetic status due to an unfortunate typo in the installation script (not even the software proper!).

Unsupported solutions with NVIDIA sound very risky to me (temporary /usr bomb aside) after witnessing the possibilities of supported ones with AMD/ATI. Besides, it seems that to get Optimus to work with Bumblebee it’s necessary to use a wrapper for pretty much every application one wants to use. That isn’t bad per se, however I’m not sure I’ll be able to boast about running Linux and Windows/Wine games like that.

NVIDIA’s official statement on the matter makes me think of their leaders as vile and smug sadists who look down on poor mobile Linux users who pay for their shit. I personally don’t feel so keen on purchasing hardware made by people like that, but it’s a well known fact that NVIDIA basically owns the consumer graphics market nowadays, truly rivaled only by AMD.

Yet, I’m not sure I want to buy laptops with AMD ATI GPUs again after all that I went through with Bluecore’s Radeon HD 3200 on Linux.

Where do I start?

Sometimes it’s easier to let Randall unwittingly do the talking for us.

To be honest, I’ve never really been into social networks unless Twitter counts — your mileage may vary in that regard. I don’t have many close er, “friends” and I don’t know most of my relatives. Facebook is pretty much useless for me for that purpose, and so is Google+ or any other such service.

Facebook… oh gods, where do I start with Facebook? It’s always been a shadow lurking behind me, trying to catch me off-guard, sending me shady blackmail messages to my Gmail account. For some reason some people thought I’d be interested in Facebook invites back in the day so I got spammed with them multiple times. I joined last year to stalk one single person (one who is perfectly aware of the situation, mind you) and still I have not had much use for it.

It is outrageous, however, that I must receive (by default, anyway) stupid reminders telling me to come back to Facebook when I’ve not logged into the main web proper for a week or so.

Hi Ignacio,

You haven't been back to Facebook recently. Here are some people you may know on Facebook. Connect with friends, family, classmates, and co-workers to see their updates, pictures, and more.

[Partial list of people whom I don’t even remotely know.]

… Oh wait, this is post is not about Facebook. Alright, then! Sorry for veering off-topic.

So, Google+ looks better in a few senses, but it’s still vastly unexplored territory for me right now because I have even less contacts whose email address I (still) know or who I want to implicitly invite. I got one of my former minions from the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project users to add and invite me so I could check it out before my fellow countrymen get the chance.

• Google+ lets me add people to different circles and doesn’t force the “friend” misnomer upon me. I can have proper friends, relatives, acquaintances, or any other kind of contacts I want.
• I don’t need to add people who add me and I don’t need to be added by people who I add to my own circles; this is nice and reminds me a bit of Twitter
• It’s a Google product.
• It’s not Facebook.
• It doesn’t look like shit.

That said, if someone from my microscopic set of readers wants a Google+ invite, I may consider adding them depending on my mood that day at that time.

And here it is, at last. Just like the last time, the new version migrates from Aurora to Beta on Tuesday but it isn’t offered via the update channels until the next Friday, while the newer ex-Nightly is published in Aurora in the meantime.

I still think this is unnecessarily awkward for users who are interested in one specific Firefox version, or who want to avoid disabling incompatible add-ons as much as possible.

… Where’s Firefox 6 beta?

Supposedly, Firefox 6 entered the beta channel on July 5, yet there’s no signs of it in the Mozilla FTP server or in the website proper.

With Firefox 7 entering Aurora now, I’m in a slightly uncomfortable position because I hoped to continue tracking version 6 once it moved to beta — now I’m using an old version 6 snapshot from Aurora hoping that the beta will be packaged and announced soon.

It seems somewhat inconsistent from my standpoint to let Aurora be replaced by a newer version before the previous Aurora is properly promoted to Beta.

Interestingly, the same situation appears to have occurred with the announcement of Firefox 5 beta in May, the difference being that I didn’t particularly mind because it was in preparation for the first official release after Firefox 4 and the decision to switch to a rapid release schedule, so a little schedule slip was to be expected for an initial deployment.

Today, after the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev reached its most important milestone, I have decided to step down from the project administrator position to leave the decision making and user support tasks to Espreon and AI0867, who have done an undeniably good job in my absence the last year while I was busy working on other projects.

This does not mean that I’m completely breaking my ties with this exciting platform for add-on development which ESR and I founded. I’ll continue to take care of infrastructure matters such as the website design, content and coding, the Registry tools and miscellaneous utilities whenever I have time; I’m not going to abandon After the Storm either, since I continue to be a user of the project either way.

I mentioned that I’d be following up the official r10000 announcement with the history of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project. Most of the content below is taken from an interview I recently had with BfWEthnographer which eventually touched this subject.

The Coordinated Wesnoth User Made Content Development Project, better known as Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, has today reached SVN revision 10,000.

Here’s the official announcement.

I’ll soon post details about the project’s history here.

While searching for examples of translated generic unit names from data/core/macros/names.cfg in Wesnoth (much to my disappointment, the Japanese translation uses the source strings verbatim for this), I discovered an oddly familiar name amongst the female Elvish names for the markovian generator.

Anylindë.

Back in 2007/2008, I was pretty much forced by Syntax_Error/Blarumyrran to change the name of one of the main characters in Invasion from the Unknown. Why? Because her name was Analia — never mind that female human units named “Bra” occur quite often in the game thanks to the RNG’s influence over the name generation algorithm.

So I consulted ESR, who came up with Anlindë as a possible replacement. I never noticed before that it was just one letter away from being a generic unit name. Then again, Galas and Elynia were my own design choice and they are, indeed, part of the name generator sources — I had gotten so frustrated at the design phase that I took a random generic name for Galas and the first feminine-sounding name starting with ‘E’ for Elynia.

Furthermore, I also took Analia from names.cfg and it’s still there. No overzealous purists have complained so far.

Would IftU have been a better campaign if I had used custom names for these three characters? Maybe, by a marginal difference. On the other hand, the one time a recruited elf with the name Elynia appeared during gameplay (that one Sprite I got in IftU doesn’t count), I protected her until the end the second-to-last scenario of HttT — by then she was a veteran Elvish Shyde.