Plum blossoms, the false hope of life
Rain, the reflection of infinite sadness
The sky, the unique embodiment of loneliness
A dog in the shadows, the instrument of Death.

Finally, now that I have a 2 TiB external hard disk drive, I can start making regular, complete backups of my dear laptop. With rsnapshot fully setup after experimenting for a while using Bluecore’s own internal hard disk as target, a full copy of all major filesystems, and a partial copy of my /home — filtering useless crap for now, to avoid including caches and such — as of this writing the system is being backed up. Considering that it resides within a 250 GiB hard disk, of which 28 GiB are allocated for the preinstalled copy of Windows Vista, this couldn’t have been a better investment.

The next logical step is backing up Greycore and Blackcore’s hard disk contents, in particular the latter since its hard disk is already dying, and many blocks near the end of the drive are unusable.

After finishing Bluecore’s backup, I intend to send it to technical support if possible, to solve the issues with the noisy fan, partially stuck touchpad buttons, excess of dirt and lint inside the case and beneath the keyboard, loose screen panel articulation, … so yeah. And I also need a new, better battery (although the current one got better!). I’d probably consider just replacing the whole damn thing, if it weren’t that I already feel comfortable using it, and that we recently invested money on a laptop for my father — which happens to be completely useless, but whatever.

Besides, I didn’t buy an extra 2 GiB RAM module to throw it away with the laptop.

(Granted, I could just use Bluecore as a backup laptop by itself, but really, it’s hard to get rid of it since I’ve had better experiences with it than Greycore, despite all the problems derived from using AMD/ATI hardware.)

I’m also considering relocating and resizing partitions since my current configuration isn’t really optimal anymore, now that I have an use for those 250 GiB.

Not very long ago, I had a rather frightening experience that made me reconsider my testing practices of the increasingly popular Kernel Modesetting (KMS) support for various ATI Radeon chipsets on Linux. While I couldn’t determine exactly what happened back then, I’ve now got another similar story of KMS-related bugs that can cause permanent damage to your hardware.

My Wesnoth-UMC-Dev collaborator and personal friend of mine, Espreon, owns a Dell Inspiron e1705 laptop which ships with an ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics controller. This is in contrast to my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la notebook (bluecore) which has an ATI Radeon HD 3200 (RS780-based) controller.

Espreon’s laptop is now damaged and unusable after some minor testing of KMS + Gallium3D drivers. The screen simply doesn’t work anymore.

I feel the need to carefully and meticulously analyze our stories since the KMS-enabled Radeon drivers are slowly becoming a standard amongst X.org-based Unix distributions including Debian GNU/Linux — Squeeze (6.0) is going to ship with a configuration apt for running on Radeon controllers in KMS operation without any user intervention. This is not to be unexpected since the KMS stack is clearly superior in terms of security and stability to the Xfree86/X.org based device drivers since it doesn’t require such things like making the X server’s executable setuid root, and allowing direct access to the host’s memory, video BIOS, etc. from a userland application.

But, is it really worth the risk? Is KMS really well-tested and safe enough to feature in stable mainline Linux kernels and in major general-purpose system distributions such as Debian? Let’s take a look at our personal experiences with the new graphics subsystem and drivers which are due to become mainstream around the end of this year.

Often on IRC I refer to my computers by their unique hostnames, which I also use to differentiate their Linux kernel configuration sets, optimized for every individual machine.

Many get confused with this because the names aren’t very descriptive of these machines, so here’s some technical background and history for every one of my technological pets.

Two days ago, my HP laptop’s battery was working perfectly fine. Then I had to unplug the AC adapter and do stuff with the laptop elsewhere, so the battery was completely discharged afterwards. Then, I charged it again, but when going to bed I unplugged the adapter again when the battery was around 50% charged.

Fast-forward to the next afternoon, when I’m going with my family to celebrate stuff, and I turn on the laptop while in the car. Linux resumes from hibernation fine, and I see my KDE desktop again, with the battery meter at 50%. I check the Wesnoth.org forums for spambots as usual, fire up my IRC client…

And then the battery meter drops to 0%, KDE warns about suspending to disk in 5 seconds, and the laptop’s front panel battery status LED starts flashing.

I assumed that the laptop had just gone bonkers like it’s done before and ignored the warnings of imminent failure. Just as I was mentioning the ongoing problem on IRC, the laptop shut down completely, as it ran out of power.

It seems that this battery has finally collapsed, since the maximum charge dropped dramatically afterwards, and even the BIOS software warned me about it on the next boot. Here’s what acpitool has to say about the poor thing:

$ acpitool -B
  Battery #1     : present
    Remaining capacity : 704 mAh, 100.0%
    Design capacity    : 9000 mAh
    Last full capacity : 704 mAh, 7.822% of design capacity
    Capacity loss      : 92.18%
    Present rate       : 0      
    Charging state     : charged
    Battery type       : rechargeable 
    Model number       : 25 mAh
    Serial number      : Primary

(Note: Linux has always reported 9,000 mAh as the battery’s design capacity since day zero. This information is incorrect, and the correct value should be 4,000 mAh. Also note the bogus model/serial information.)

Since this is a rather critical situation, I’m probably going to buy a new battery for the laptop soon — besides sending it away for maintenance, which is in my list as soon as I buy that external hard disk drive on which I’ll be able to fit a complete raw disk image of my laptop’s HDD.

Sometimes people (especially Windows users) ask me what I use for some common task in Linux. These are my software preferences when working on various environments; your mileage will definitively vary.

Finally, the trap that is social networking has caught me.

I have joined Twitter as ShikadiLord (since “shadowm” and “shadowmaster” were already taken ) mainly because of Frogatto, which also has presence in Twitter now.

Let's see if I make use of this thing. To make things easier for me I'm using Choqok, a micro-blogging client for KDE SC 4.

Yays.

Some time ago, a mysterious link was added to my site's sidebar to feed search engines, but I never got around to explain what the deal was with that link.

Well, it turns out that I've been semi-secretly working on a certain retro-style platformer game, Frogatto, along with other people from the Battle for Wesnoth Project. My work in Frogatto is almost exclusively in the level design area, although I've also done some minor object coding.

Our mysterious protagonist.

There are two things that attracted me to Frogatto:

Firstly, I have wanted since around 2006 to create a sidescrolling platformer engine of my own — that project, codenamed “Mesiga”, unfortunately, finally died around the end of last year after several years with no significant progress and no content to work with. But then, I stumbled upon Frogatto per David White (a.k.a. Sirp)'s recommendation during a talk about writing text parsers in C++, around 2008. I didn't pay much attention to Frogatto back then, but near December last year I started testing Frogatto mainly using it as a test case for the Mesa 7.7 DRI drivers for ATI R600-based chipsets. Around February some Wesnoth developers (including me) reported a Mesa issue affecting Frogatto which got quickly solved.

Secondly, Frogatto's level editor ease of use impressed me, although I don't have a lot of experience with tile-based game level editors in the first place — mainly with Wesnoth's map editor, a few fan-made editors for Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons, and TED5, the editor originally used for creating the levels in Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy! and Rise of the Triad. The nicest feature offered by Frogatto's editor is being able to place objects and set their parameters (unlike in Wesnoth), and actually preview some of their behavior without leaving the editor.

Rock-a-Fort (world1 level)

The editor is so flexible due to its usage of objects and automatic tiling that I instantly fell in love with it and made three levels of my own, reported bugs with some objects' behavior, and got invited to take part in the level design when there were only three or four forest area levels and only three quarters of the seaside level set done.

We have been working hard into bringing the first release of the game to completion and so far things are looking very well. In fact, the level set is rather complete now and most of the work remaining to be done is polishing what's finished and tying some loose knots in the art department.

The game engine itself is free software (in the “freedom” sense), but the game's content is not. See our About page for details. Frogatto runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as long as OpenGL support works. Naturally, you'll need drivers which support hardware-accelerated rendering for the best experience. Note that despite Frogatto using OpenGL interfaces for rendering, it's entirely 2D in terms of gameplay and graphics.

Frogatto will also be available as a paid AppStore application for iPhone and iPad once it's released, which means that you'll be able to waste your time playing as a frog no matter where you are at the moment!

If you are curious about which mainline levels were designed by me, here's a list:

Seaside (world1)

• Water adventure (superseded by Rock-a-Fort)
• Water adventure 2 (superseded by Flooded Caverns)
• Downhill from Here (later known as Downhill after a major edit by me)
• Rock-a-Fort and its small cave sub-level
• Flooded Caverns
• Fan House and its small sub-level (neither are connected to the main levelset yet)

Forest area (world2)

• Twisted Trees
• Peaceful Pond (to be removed from the main levelset unless I change my mind)
• Autumn Town (to be removed from the main levelset, at least for the first release)
• Eerie Arbor
• Bon Bosque (both versions)

Cave area/Limestone caverns (world3)

(Notably, I've designed all of the levels in this set. There are other cave levels around that are not part of this set which were designed by other people. Still, some cave levels may need to be cut from the first release to avoid monotony, etc.)

• Rocky Roots
• Caverns of holes
• Underground river
• Darkness Central
• Bombing Fools
• Hidden Depths
• Watery Alley
• Plagued Mine
• Bug Mining
• Fast Lane
• Hanging Platforms (formerly known as Plagued Mine, otherwise unrelated to the current level of the same name)
• The ancient secret (codename — may need to be removed from the first release but it's a WIP intended to be a secret level removed now)

Dungeon levels/Milgram's Fortress (world4)

(The only mainline levels here that weren't designed by me are Sirp's, “Dungeon Blocks,” and Jetrel's, which are Milgram's Throne Room prelude, main level and epilogue level.)

• Killer Bunnies
• Burning Stone
• Dark Corridor (codenamed Doomy Dooms of Doom)
• Dungeon Crawling

Dungeon Crawling (world4 level)

It's been an amazing 5-month work which has almost been halted by a great earthquake and a broken power adapter (twice). Admittedly, I had to abandon IftU to get more work done in less time, but I think it's a fair trade since Wesnoth campaign maintenance has slowly become a sucky job due to the always changing conventions with every mainline development cycle.

I couldn't finish my own platformer engine as I wanted, but instead I found this awesome opportunity to design nice levels inspired by my favorite platformers of the DOS gaming era (Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit), this time with a heavy focus in fun, yet reasonably challenging gameplay and ambient design thanks to Jetrel (also Wesnoth's Art Director) and Neorice's (also a Wesnoth artist) awesome art and Sirp's brilliantly designed engine. The main background music used in the seaside levels is also remarkably sweet, provided by Rain, another Wesnoth musician who has provided such epic themes as “Suspense” and “Knalgan Theme” to the strategy game.

We'll need lots of testing to make sure the final product's quality is what we've been aiming for and that nothing's been broken or messed up during development. It's a highly recommended game for retro-freaks like me.

After almost two days of wandering around the streets of the city, my emissaries located a place to buy a new AC adapter for my much beloved HP Pavilion “ATI hellspawn” dv5-1132la, and I have thusly regained access to my development environment for Wesnoth and related projects.

48 hours of using a laptop with a broken display, short-lived (8 minutes) battery, unusable touchpad buttons, different keyboard layout and outdated user config can be very frustrating, but it was a good exercise nevertheless. It's better to have a broken spare laptop running Linux (Debian Lenny before Stable) than no spare laptop or no Linux laptop at all.

My laptop's AC adapter has finally died after passing out in three opportunities. I've already sent my emissaries across the city to find a spare for this thing.

For now, I'm using my old, broken Acer laptop and I won't be available for most of the time until I can use my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la again.

My own software projects tend to be very much like pets to me. I take care of them, carry them with me anywhere if it's possible, I feel horribly sad when something bad happens to them and, even when I go mad at them for something, in a few hours we are together like a neat happy family again.

Invasion from the Unknown has been the Wesnoth add-on project of mine since around September 10th 2007 and it has evolved throughout time and endured 3 mainline development cycles introducing drastic game engine changes, receiving little automated help from the likes of wmllint. Instead, it has been kept on shape by me and a few people who have helped with the huge maintenance burden that this epic-length campaign is.

It's been almost 3 days since the earthquake in Chile which affected many regions of the central-south areas, including the region of Santiago. While things are mostly normal here — besides the many closed stores, the many damaged buildings, unusable highway infrastructure in some places, some fallen buildings, zones without electric power, unstable mobile phone networks and a bit more than 30 dead in the region, the disaster here pales in comparison to what can be seen following the coastal line to the south near the region of Maule and Bío-Bío. There's no way I could properly summarize what happened there, so you'd better use Google if you are curious. Many locations look like ruined, flooded, destroyed battlefields.

And yet, opportunists have pillaged around 16 supermarkets in our region so far; some succeeded, but most failed. There was not enough damage on this region to justify such vandalism. Naturally, Concepción and many other locations in the south are also being constantly vandalized, enough to justify passing the control of two regions over to the army to try to keep the order. They haven't completely succeeded, and the vandals have started fires, given false alarms of tsunamis and destroyed or damaged private and public property.

The aftershocks have been scarce today and they've mostly faded out from our point of view in the Santiago region — that is to say, they haven't stopped in Maule and Bío-Bío and it doesn't let those people rest or sleep for much time. A few stronger aftershocks have reached us as well. Fortunately, they are not anything like the original earthquake.

However, they seem not to stop for me. I've been feeling dizzy since the moment I got out of the house during the earthquake and, no matter if I'm on my bed or sitting on a chair or on the toilet, everything feels the same as in the aftershocks, like a big boat on the sea that never stays still. It's very annoying but I still work on stuff and chat on IRC despite of this.

As sad as this is, and as grim as everything may seem, Santiago is mostly alright and we must move on and continue our lives and help however it is possible. But an earthquake with epicenter near our city isn't a terribly far-fetched possibility since we live next to several (relatively inactive) volcanoes, so let's not relax too much either.