Shadowmaster’s Blog

Rent-a-Mod

The Wesnoth users community has always been rather special compared to other gaming groups. The forumers are usually civilized, they respect the Posting Guidelines, rarely start heated discussions on their own, and follow our moderators and developers’ orders and recommendations.

The development team, our current moderators and I are usually around to help with any thread requiring moderation. Such a pacific community doesn’t require maintenance work like that very often, not counting the insatiable spam generators that never stop coming to attempt to plague the forums with cheap search engine-feeding signatures and gratuitously large ad-posts.

However, a rather recent phenomenon is that of Rent-a-Modding. There are some members who seem to think, consciously or not, that forum moderation works by following a tight set of rules resulting in mechanical procedures fitting every possible situation, derived of course from our Posting Guidelines. Other users attempt to answer to forum posts authored by newbies, by guessing what a developer or moderator would say in such situation, or by copying past moderator reactions.

The behavior I’m describing here is commonly known as backseat-modding, and as Urban Dictionary puts it (mature/NSFW language), they are, effectively, a pain in the ass for actual mods and admins, but it’s not because they look like wannabe-mods, but because most of the time they are doing it wrong!

As I was saying, moderators don’t really follow strict rules to decide how to react to a particular situation, since every situation involves completely different contexts which depend a lot on the poster’s background and past behavior — there is, after all, a reason for handpicking Forum Regulars who might fit the job. This is what makes Rent-a-Mods annoying in the first place, since they can easily give out a really bad impression of our community and standards, scaring away newcomers and spreading bad words about us in other corners of the ’net.

Taking a wild guess of what a Developer will say to a poster regarding a specific development issue, such as Wesnoth’s future plans, or why problem X has not been fixed yet, or why feature Y is apparently never going to be implemented, is also a really Bad Thing™ since it wastes our time correcting the spreading misinformation before it gets stuck in people’s heads. There has been a lot of random guesswork regarding recent problems such as the supposed GNU General Public License violations by the iPhone/iPad port creator and distributor, or why a complaining poster has been banned from the multiplayer server(s) — hence we had to ban both to keep things orderly and avoid the development of useless time-consuming arguments.

In case I’m not getting my point across:

DON’T DO IT. IT’S NOT USEFUL FOR ANY OF THE INVOLVED PARTIES. LET THE MODS DO THEIR JOB.

Thanks for reading. I’m fairly certain that this post might not provide a clear enough answer for cases such as this, but I don’t feel like writing a longer and thorough rant at this moment.

The problem with partitioning: Part II

Not very long ago, I posted an entry regarding some arguably bad installation decisions when I partitioned bluecore’s hard disk for installing Debian. Some weeks ago, I finally decided to risk it all and fix those problems, with the guarantee that if I screwed up like I did multiple times in the past with other installations, I could just restore from a rsnapshot backup stored in the external hard disk I bought earlier this month.

The real dilemma was settling for a new, permanent scheme, keeping performance in mind more than protection against physical or logical failures since I can just put my backups to use nowadays. Part of this dilemma involved choosing the right partitioning tool, after having really bad experiences both with the fdisk tool for Linux, and command-line based GNU parted.

This time I chose the smallest tool that fitted the task, also making sure I would feel comfortable with it previous to doing the real thing, by trying it out with VirtualBox’s help: the GParted Live CD, built around a minimalistic Debian Sid-based system with the GParted front-end on top of a small X server with the most complete toolchain for doing all sorts of funky operations on partitions containing some of the most popular filesystems, such as Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, ReiserFS, NTFS, FAT12/16 and FAT32/VFAT.

Although its X server is not accelerated and the default Fluxbox config doesn’t have opaque window moving disabled as it should, it’s a pretty neat tool for modifying unmounted partitions with the help of a friendly GUI, avoiding all the hassles and risks involved in toying around with the disk containing rootfs and other important filesystem on a running Linux installation — the impossibility of changing rootfs’ parameters and geometry in any way when the system is online is also eliminated with this procedure.

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Approaching Spring

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.

Update, and a thorough analysis:

This piece of text that only a foolish one would dare to call a “poem” happens to be my first serious poem-y output ever in my life, and I got the inspiration — if you want to call it that — from staring at the light rain this Wednesday around 3 to 4 pm at home, with the cloudy sky lingering above, a plum tree in front of me with new blossoms, and a dog in the shadows looking at me directly to my eyes, in an improvised kennel after murdering one of our cats while we weren’t at home — in particular, one who was pretty smart, if not a little bad tempered. She was, nonetheless, one of my favorites, and the other cats and I still miss her.

I’d say that the gorgeous view in front of me reflected more than just my emotional state at that particular moment, but instead something I’ve been trying to cope with for years already. Being a technology freak as I am, I rarely stop for a single moment to look at the wonders nature has to offer. In this opportunity, watching myself reflected in this rare scenario was a priceless experience, and it made me discover this hidden “poetic” side of myself, alleviating my hopelessness.

The original piece I muttered in Spanish follows:

El ciruelo en flor, la falsa esperanza que es la vida
La lluvia, el reflejo de mi profunda tristeza
El cielo, único e infinitamente amplio, la representación de mi infinita soledad
El perro en las sombras, el instrumento de la Muerte, que tanto temo.

Although my first revision of this post presents us with the piece at the start, it’s not a 1:1 translation to English, mostly due to the omission of all first-person references:

The blooming plum tree, the false hope that is my life
The rain, the reflection of my deep sadness
The sky, unique and infinitely vast, the representation of my infinite loneliness
The dog in the shadows, the instrument of Death, which I fear so much.

It’s very unusual for me to share my feelings with anyone else (not really having anyone else in the first place), but maybe it’s something I need to do more often. The last verse conveys my authentic fear of death — not as something that I don’t want to face at the end of my life, but as something that can harm me while alive, taking away those who I love the most. While this has probably been my sentiment for years already, I had never externalized this and other feelings.

Thanks to everyone who’s put up with this brief moment of emo-ness.

Curiosity killed the cat

People’s curiosity has no limits, particularly when it comes to Wesnoth add-ons.

In order to reproduce a bug, I had uploaded and removed a test add-on from the add-on servers for 1.8 and trunk several times, yet it seems I forgot to remove it the last time. This hasn’t stopped people from downloading it out of morbid curiosity, although nobody has dared to ask me about it on IRC or the forums. Certainly not news to me, since this is exactly what happened with it the last time prior to its removal.

As of this writing, the 1.8 version has had 949 downloads, as it can be seen in the screenshot above. You’d think an add-on with a description of “FOO” and a misspelled title would not attract anyone to try it, but this principle doesn’t work in practice. Had the add-on contained code to break all other add-ons, people would still not get the idea, I guess. Then again, I’m talking about users who often mistakenly download the source code tarballs and then ask how to install Wesnoth on Windows or Mac OS X.

This is what I get for forgetting to remove this kind of stuff. Thanks Gambit for pointing it out to me this night.

Wesnoth.org and the Prosilver transition, Part II

After some hesitation, I have deployed Prosilver Special Edition on the Wesnoth.org forums, with multiple changes meant to make it more similar to mainline Prosilver in terms of layout. Wesnoth’s custom Prosilver changes have also been applied on our copy of Prosilver SE.

In fact, Prosilver SE as used in Wesnoth.org depends completely on the main Prosilver template rather than its own partial template set, and it also replaces the default Prosilver theme/stylesheets and imagesets, since otherwise very few people would choose to use it. Besides, OAB.

Of course, further changes are not unlikely to occur, depending both on the users’ feedback and my own testing experiences.

KMS and Frogatto: a Retrospective

Not very long ago I mentioned that Frogatto’s iris transition effect didn’t work with the ATI R600 KMS drivers, and I assumed that this was caused by some lacking in the Mesa code. I even filed a bug report to its developers about it.

I was wrong. As MostAwesomeDude explained to me on IRC, and later posted in the bug tracker:

In UMS mode, r600c provides 8 bits of stencil on all configs, but in KMS mode, the normal wider variety of configs are available. The app used to have a call to SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_STENCIL_SIZE, 1), but it was commented out for some reason. Uncommenting that line caused a stencilled config to be properly selected.

The moral: Always check your GL configs.

Effectively, we discovered that restoring that line would solve the issue. It was apparently commented out by Dave at some point by accident. This won’t matter for long anyway, since Frogatto is already using a different mechanism to render the transitions on SVN trunk, solving the missing effect on who knows how many PC configurations. The iPhone port also lacked these transitions because of a platform limitation, so maybe the new technique will solve that minor shortcoming as well.

So now I’m basically just waiting for a new official release of the Tux-On-Ice patch for Linux 2.6.35 before switching to a complete KMS-based configuration. Until that happens, I’ll continue using 2.6.34.4 in UMS mode.

Again, thanks to MostAwesomeDude for the help with finding the cause of the bug!

Wesnoth.org and the Prosilver transition

Most people who frequented phpBB 2 forums have met the Subsilver theme at some point. Wesnoth’s community is not the exception, and the phpBB 3 switch completed by cycholka/Mist in March 2008 during the third-to-last host migration involved switching everyone to Subsilver2, which is the last incarnation of the good old Subsilver. Most of us Wesnoth forumers have become accustomed to the cleanness, quirks and old-school feel of Subsilver2.

However, that will eventually change.

Maintaining patches for mods affecting the forum user and moderator front-ends involves editing three template sets, which are Prosilver (phpBB 3’s new built-in and default style), Subsilver2 and AcidTech, which is Subsilver2-based with some essential layout differences. There are even some mods that don’t provide MODX instructions for Subsilver2, since it’s not essential for approval in the official modifications database to include support for this style that’s most likely going to be dropped in future phpBB release series.

If you take a look at my Projects section you’ll also notice that I’ve needed to write a couple of Subsilver2 hacks in the past to add minor functionality that’s present in the official phpBB 3 “Olympus” forum theme by default. There’s a third custom change in my tree, corresponding to the Quick Reply editor toggle button.

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Full system backup in progress!

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.

Kernel modesetting on Linux: Godsend, or imminent catastrophe?

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.

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The Giant Blinking Cursor of Doom

I have just rebooted from a 2.6.35 kernel to 2.6.34.2 in order to have the ability to hibernate bluecore with Tux-on-Ice again. However, the laptop acted up after the warm reboot as a consequence of running Linux in KMS operation mode, apparently. The greatest sign of doom: the Giant Blinking Cursor of Doom.

It’s normal for these HP laptops to display the text-mode blinking cursor for a bit after the BIOS splash screen, right before transferring execution to the first available boot medium. The cursor’s size is similar to Linux’s or MS-DOS under a default configuration with any generic VGA-compatible video adapter. In this transition state, the bold-white cursor blinks a few times at the top-left corner of the empty black screen, before changing its color to the normal text terminal white when GNU GRUB takes over.

However, whenever the AMD ATI Catalyst drivers lock up the laptop and I perform a warm reboot using one of the Magic SysRq sequences, the laptop doesn’t get past the system initialization code and after the BIOS splash screen disappears, instead of the usual bright blinking cursor, an abnormally large and wide white blinking cursor appears as the computer gets stuck forever.

I had not seen this occur after running with the open-source KMS drivers before, but I guess it might indicate I own a faulty GPU or motherboard.

EDIT: now I have pictures — taken with my three years old cell phone — showing the GBCoD and the normal blinking cursor:

Battering power sources, part II

Today, while having breakfast at a subway station before going to university, I stumbled upon a weird case of the laptop’s battery going crazy again.

As you know, Bluecore’s battery basically dropped dead after an unfortunate accident with charging cycles, but now the outlook has slightly improved after its capacity increased as a consequence of booting the laptop on battery power this morning.

$ acpitool -B
  Battery #1     : present
    Remaining capacity : 1504 mAh, 66.20%
    Design capacity    : 9000 mAh
    Last full capacity : 2272 mAh, 25.24% of design capacity
    Capacity loss      : 74.76%
    Present rate       : unknown
    Charging state     : charging
    Battery type       : rechargeable 
    Model number       : 25 mAh
    Serial number      : Primary

(The last two information fields and the design capacity are bogus as usual.)

The BIOS didn’t warn me about charge capacity this time either, nor after plugging the AC adapter in at the university’s central library, so there’s something clearly odd about this. I didn’t wait for the battery to discharge at the subway and left it at 66% before proceeding to charge it again now, so let’s see how this goes in the future. I might be able to squeeze some life out of this deteriorated power source before sending off Bluecore for maintenance and repair.

Bluecore, greycore and blackcore

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.

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