Shadowmaster’s Lair
A light in the darkness, where everything is possible...
 

About me

$ shadowmaster --help

Hello! I am Ignacio R. Morelle, better known as the shadowmaster or ShikadiLord, depending on the web site/community. You don't want to know where I come from, and I tend to forget where I go to. My native language is Spanish as I was born and live in Chile, but I also speak English. However, I am a hopelessly disorganized person and I can't speak fluently in either language.

I'm a geek, and I like to do stuff with computers as long as printers or document scanners are not involved (although there are a few exceptions), so that's often the limit of my proficiency with new technologies. Don't talk to me about cell phones, music players, cars, etc.; I won't understand a single word of what you speak.

I only use normal PCs because I do not own any Macs. In fact, I've never touched one at all; their prices are frightening enough. This also means that I'm always limited to x86 or AMD64/EM64T platforms for computer programming.

I like the C and C++ programming languages; especially C++. Perl is simple, flexible and powerful. Yes, I also use PHP. I don't want to learn Python; despite what people say, it looks alien and often unintelligible to me. I also like to write HTML/XHTML documents by hand, and use the power of CSS.

I'm one of the main C++ developers of the Battle for Wesnoth game project, which is free software, and which is best described in its own website. I'm also the administrator-in-chief of the official forum board as of this writing. Working for the Wesnoth community for a couple of years (and lurking around for some more time) has made me realize that I like to be helpful to others; um, yeah, I didn't know that before, really. It also made me rediscover my creativity, which kind of vanished for a long while.

Software preferences

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.

Operating system:
GNU/Linux, namely Debian GNU/Linux. I have used on my own computers, all in this exact order, SUSE Linux 9.1, 9.3, openSUSE 10.0, Mandriva Linux 2007.0 (free version), Ubuntu Linux Something, Knoppix 4, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, Ubuntu Linux Whatever and finally Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny) both when it was the testing distribution, and as the new 2009 stable distribution. I have also used Fedora Core 4 and 6, and Kubuntu Another in public computers. That said, I do not usually recommend Linux to “non-computer people”.
That said, I have also used virtually every Windows version ever and I tend to prefer Windows XP to the rest nowadays.
I have also used FreeBSD a bit out of necessity, and learned that I'm too used to GNU coreutils.
X11-based Desktop Environment:
KDE 3.5 or KDE 4. I don't understand those people who claim that KDE sucks and it's too “Windows-like”. I've got to say I can't stand GNOME and Gtk2-based software at all and if there's a KDE or Qt-based counterpart application providing similar functionality, I'll use that instead. That said, I don't use every feature of any desktop environment since I do most tasks with terminal emulators running Bash sessions; console applications are most often faster and lighter than their GUI counterparts, and in the case of simple file system operations (copy, move, etc.), the console shell commands are usually more flexible than the GUI front-ends, and analyze less details about the objects they manipulate, resulting in better performance; this is something that I learned with MS-DOS/Windows 95 rather than Linux, which is possibly an advantage over other Windows users migrating to Linux.
Text editor:
Kate if I can get away with it, for C, C++, Perl, PHP, Bash scripts, Wesnoth WML, XML, HTML/XHTML documents and CSS. Vim otherwise, although my skills with it are those of an eternal newbie.
Office suite:
Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier. Yes, I know that free software purists would like to rip my head off for saying this. In my defense, I prefer plain text or HTML/XHTML documents.
Graphics editor:
The GIMP 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6. Why, yes, the version numbers matter when a development team insists in changing some important user interface aspects with every new series.
Music player, video player:
Audacious and the VLC media player, respectively. Bonus points for the latter providing a Qt4 interface.
Web browser:
No particular preference. All web browsers suck. Happy now? Okay, I do prefer Failfox Firefox over the rest, but if I need a failsafe environment I use Opera instead. Of course, I almost always test my stuff with some of the most common browsers: Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Konqueror and Internet Exploiter Explorer. I occasionally write blog posts on this subject, too.
E-mail client:
Kmail, although I'm currently using Icedove (the Debian fork of Mozilla Thunderbird) due to some outstanding bugs in the KDE 3.5.9/10 version of Kmail shipping with Debian lenny.
IRC client:
Irssi or KVirc, although telnet suffices if I'm too desperate/lazy to install an IRC client.
Integrated Development Environment:
None at all! I prefer to have separate specialized tools for every task.
PC emulation/virtualization:
Dosbox for old DOS games. VirtualBox (not the open-source distribution) for complete system emulation; interestingly, I used to recommend qemu but some changes starting with 0.10.0 disappointed me, as explained around the end of this blog post.
Window manager:
Plain kwin. I usually work with too limited hardware or display controllers that are not completely/reliably (if at all) supported in Linux so I cannot run managers with more bling like Compiz or else.

To achieve the best experience of binary Linux distributions, I always build my own kernel configurations by hand, removing lots of unused modules and features that I could not even hope to use, and enabling some processor class-specific optimizations. This has allowed me some significant performance boosts, especially with 64-bit systems. I could probably get even better performance rebuilding glibc with some special flags, but replacing a glibc is, in my opinion, more risky and complicated than installing a new Linux kernel of the 2.6 series.

Despite what some people believe, compiling a modern Linux kernel source tree on a modern machine (even a laptop) can take less than an hour or 30 minutes depending on the build configuration. Also, one isn't staring at the make output for that interval; it's called a multitasking operating system for a reason, you know.

Website information

The website layout, codenamed “Dorset”, is arranged at runtime by the “Poison Ivy” engine. Absolutely all components were coded by hand; I don't trust web page editors. The blog runs with Serendipity using a heavily modified version of the Bulletproof template.

All pages are verified to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional using the mark-up validation tool from the W3C.

Some text in the website and blog may deliberately use non-ASCII characters encoded as UTF-8. Platforms or user agents that do not support UTF-8 or do not have appropriate fonts may not display some text correctly.

All the PHP, HTML and CSS was written using Kate 2.5.x (KDE 3.5.9/10) and later 3.3.x (KDE 4.3.x), and the layout graphics were generated using the GIMP.

The website and blog are verified to work correctly using the following reference browsers:

  • Iceweasel/Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (Debian GNU/Linux “lenny”), 3.5 (Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”, Microsoft Windows XP SP3)
  • Opera 10.00 (Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”)
  • Safari* 4.0.4 (Microsoft Windows XP SP3)
  • Google Chrome* 4.0.249.43 (Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”), 3.0.195.33 (Microsoft Windows XP SP3)
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer* 5.5, 6.0 SP 1, 7.0 (Microsoft Windows XP SP3)
  • Konqueror using KDE 4.3.2 (Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”)
  • Epiphany 2.22.3 (Debian GNU/Linux “lenny”)
  • Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.1.16 (Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”)

* (Minor rendering differences, works fine otherwise.)

Additionally, most pages will work mostly fine with Internet Explorer 5.5.

It might seem slightly ridiculous to include a list like this, but at least then nobody will complain that I'm discriminating operating systems or browsers or being elitist in one manner or another. Additionally, any HTML or CSS code I produce will be tested under these different browsers — I don't work on this website only, although it serves as a testbed for any new ideas I may come up with.

Contacting me

My e-mail address is . Should you want to contact me, please put something meaningful in the subject line or my account provider may classify it as spam. I hardly ever never only sometimes check the spam box for false positives.