I renewed my Last.fm subscription a couple days ago so that I could have full access to its wonderful radio streams, primarily while at work. My iAudio holds 20 GB of music — a mere pittance — which means it is barely sufficient for my varied tastes in music, and Last.fm’s service, with its search tag, recommendation, previously played and favorite tracks radio streams, is an easy way to solve that problem.

No, they don’t have everything available to play through their radio. Yes, they have a lot, including a lot from the big labels. They have approximately all of OverClocked Remix. They have plenty of other artists along the entire professional/amateur scale.

The service isn’t perfect — it can be dog slow at times — and the recommendation system always has seemed a bit confused by my varied tastes, but nevertheless, I enjoy it thoroughly. Over the course of the week, I’ve been playing my recommendations radio along with the personal radio of myself and others, and as part of the process, my eMusic “Save For Later” list has four new albums in it. And then I was reminded of a survey I took a month or so ago…

It was a fairly straightforward survey, asking questions like “How much music do you listen to?” and “How much do you hate DRM? Enough to kill a man?” (I may be generalizing here.) However, one question that stood out asked to rate the importance or desirability of eMusic collaborating with Last.fm. That was my highest rated point on the survey. I’d love to see eMusic’s impressive independent catalog sharing data with Last.fm’s social (and, for music lovers, fun) data tracking and recommendation system. Each service has some parts that are a bit rough on the edges — eMusic’s artist/album info can be woefully short, its album reviews unary, and its album ratings only scored by preexisting fans, while Last.fm could use more songs in its database available for radio — and some sort of coupling could go a long way in making Lastmusic.fm some sort of online music juggernaut. Tell the service (through your favorite audio player) what you’re listening to, get free recommendations in the form of ad-free radio stations, and immediately be pointed to the quickest way to download the songs in a free format.

Heavenly.

I really hope eMusic intends to follow through on their survey. I think both Last.fm and eMusic would have me as a customer for a good long while if they could pull off some real — grin and bear it — synergy.

Oh. I had a technical interview over the phone today for a job. I think it went fairly well.

Bunch of gaming stuff today. I’ve spent my off time the past couple days working on Sepulture, my True20 campaign, and while there’s still not a whole lot there at the wiki, it’s a lot more than was there on Thursday, and another dozen or so pages still need to be made just from yesterday’s session. It’s this kind of activity that is so helpful and so hard to get the ball rolling on for world-building — every link makes the setting seem more real, if for no reason other than to have a proper noun to throw out. It feels nice just to be able to point towards something with actual information, and the fact that there are crude approximations of maps and other handouts to link to is wonderful. It really lights a fire under a world-builder.

And as alluded to above, the IRC group gathered yesterday (and today, we went from 9 AM–3AM) to play for the first time since March, and it went, in my opinion, very well. I think everyone is showing new excitement and interest in their characters, as everyone gets a feel for their abilities and dynamic in the party and so on. I’d like to see more actual roleplaying — I think some of us still get dragged into dungeoneering routines too often, myself included — but overall it’s going very well. The game left on a light cliffhanger — two dungeon levels down, at least two to go — and featured one near-death experience, as we all saw first hand the danger of swarms of enemies in True20, even mere minion enemies.

The key point is that any one creature’s natural 20 can get a hit in, and if the PC then tanks their Toughness save, it could start the road to death: an otherwise capable and well-defensed character gets two bad rolls in succession, is stunned for a round, and then is poked and prodded while stunned until dropped. It’s not instant, but it is a very dangerous situation in True20 to be surrounded by much of anything. 1st-level minion orcs took out two of the four 5th-level party members in my game, and it was only a series of beneficial rolls that took out the “boss” before at least another party member dropped.

But, nevertheless, dripping from head to toe in orc blood, blades dull from so many strikes against bone, the party made it out alive, and certainly with a story to tell in the tavern.

True20 Companion (which, by the way, still rocks) just arrived at my door about an hour ago and despite having seen it all from the PDF, I’m still paging through it, because it seems every time I open it up I find some insight, or something to pinch and apply in my game. It really is an amazing book in its own right, perfect for tinkerers such as myself. PDFs have limited appeal to me, compared to books, and I don’t really mind paying for True20 product twice, when it’s something as nice as the Companion.

One last thing: in a comment which might have slipped through the cracks for interested parties, a visitor suggested rolling a d20 in tandem with a 2d10 attack roll, where the d20 is used solely to determine if the hit is a critical or not. If the 2d10 attack roll hits, and the d20’s in the threat range for the weapon, it’s a critical hit, and otherwise the d20 is ignored. It seems like a pretty good compromise, although I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to test it.

Bunch of stuff happening today. Naturally, the big news in the world of Gentoo is the release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, available on mirrors and torrent trackers now. I’m in the process of downloading the AMD64 and x86/i686 minimal CDs and LiveDVDs, and am looking forward to burning them to disc soon. I don’t immediately have any installations to do, but it’s of course a good idea to have the discs on hand, just in case.

I’m also free to admit that I had been cheating, running the 2007.0 profile on some of my boxes for a couple weeks now… Well, it’s not like it made much of a difference; just a couple changes to the default USE flags.

Also, with the release finished and 2007.0 out the door, developers have found the time for Gentoo Weekly Newsletters to be released and announced. I contributed to one, can you recognize my writing style? ;)

Finally, Gen Con’s event registration was today, and as expected it was hellish. Servers were timing out left and right, and I spent somewhere around two hours trying to get my events. I lost on a couple, but I got into the big games I was hoping to. If anyone else out there in Gentoo land or wherever is going to our great gaming Mecca, leave me a note one way or another, maybe we’ll bump into each other (hell, maybe you’ll be my GM).

On a whim, I decided to try the Z shell (or, commonly, zsh) today on my Mini-ITX server, and I must say, I’m pretty impressed. The tab completion is such a huge improvement over bash’s that it alone is enough reason for me to switch. zsh is already my default shell in my screen session of doom, and I’m basically just making sure there’s no residual weirdness before I make it my default shell over the entire system (and likely my other computers in the apartment).

My one concern is that the change to zsh will complicate my commands which log into the server and run aliases I’ve set up. On the other hand, since I have to manually run bash to get the alias initialized, I suppose I can just ignore the default shell and keep things the way they are, or perhaps even zsh will make things simpler. It seems possible; the shell still feels a bit like magic, after years of knowing only bash and tcsh.

If anyone cares to pipe in, to explain my dilemma, what I want to do is ssh -Y -t kaylee [alias]. Currently my command is ssh -Y -t kaylee bash -l -i -c [alias] (although I think one of -l or -i would be superfluous if I cleaned up my bash files). Would zsh as my login shell make this easier, just as unwieldy, or even worse?

Anyway, zsh has been a hoot so far. Thanks to a Gentoo forums thread, Gentoo’s zsh documentation, and diox for all helping me see the light. ;)

A follow-up to what I just posted about some sites looking bad in Konqueror when using a dark KDE theme, I discovered a fairly simple way to work around Konqueror’s color behavior: just make a small bit of CSS and apply it as an user stylesheet in Konq’s settings:

~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/black-color-scheme-fixes.css

body {
	background: white;
	color: black;
}
input {
	background: white;
	color: black;
}

The above defines default colors in case a website defines none, without clobbering existing colors (as far as I can tell, anyway ;).

With that file made, just go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror… -> Stylesheets, select “Use user-defined stylesheet", and navigate to the just-created file.

I don’t think it will fix all of the websites I will surely encounter, but it seems to fix Planet Larry and a couple other sites I hit while looking for a fix. Huzzah!

It’s hard getting a dark desktop theme to look right everywhere. KDE is fairly flexible with color settings, but just barely not enough things don’t follow them, leading to ugly color clashes and difficult visual combinations. With some work, though, and a bit of tolerance, the major color clashes can be managed.

Web pages that don’t properly declare their colors can have light-on-light or dark-on-dark input fields — or even entire websites (Planet Larry, I’m unsuccessfully looking at you) — in Konqueror. Akregator doesn’t follow the KDE color schemes for its links, and you can’t configure its behavior for them or the red new article list entries. KTorrent has some constants that definitely assume a light color theme. These inconsistencies are not a huge problem, but things are just a small ways off from perfect. Maybe in the not-so-distant future, these problems will be solved and KDE will be an even more amazing DE.

It looks a bit strange to my unaccustomed eye to have light websites displayed with a dark theme and window decoration around them, but there’s not much that can be done about them, and I think I’ll get used to that fairly quickly. Otherwise, though, the dark theme’s going pretty well.

In real life news (as real as my life can be), Peter and I have been looking at plans and such for the Ultimate Gaming Table. Neither of us, nor the rest of our friends, are known to be real handypersons, yet we’ve all become very excited about the prospect of building the table come June. The plans don’t make the build out to be too difficult, assuming we can round up all of the necessary tools.

Oh, and as you may see in the desktop image, I solved my eMusic quandary this month by downloading a couple albums by a group I’d never heard of before called Vitamin String Quartet. They do primarily string arrangements of modern popular music, so I grabbed albums of them doing Guns N’ Roses and Pink Floyd songs. Their overall catalog is kind of hit and miss, but there’s a lot on eMusic to check out, so it seems that for the short term, I have plenty of music to download!

The beginning of every month rings in a couple things for me. Most of them are nagging reminders of bills to pay and blood pacts to deliver, but one pleasant event is the refresh of my eMusic account’s monthly downloads. The subscription-based service isn’t perfect, but eMusic has a really nice catalog of independent labels and artists. Most mainstream acts aren’t showcased there, but here and there there’ll be a lone album, hiding in the corners, waiting to surprise.

Not that I mind it; I have a voracity towards music where I can enjoy many styles and artists, well known or not, which makes eMusic both a boon and a bane to my easily distracted ear. The past couple months have been metal for me. I don’t know if I missed it the first time of if its arrival on the service is recent, but last month I spent most of my downloads on Mastodon. I’d mentioned other downloads previously, so there’s no need to go through all of that again, but I think for now they are done monopolizing my quota until I run out of alternatives again.

Poking around in some wanderlust, I found my way to some Philip Glass I had previously downloaded, and I’m thinking I might want to flesh out my classical collection a bit. There’s a lot there, so as usual, picking what I want for the month is difficult. Glass is generally considered minimalist, which is a very understandable position, but despite whatever misgivings one may have towards the label, I find it very beautiful when in the right mood, and a fine accompaniment to evenings such as these. Always a lover of the piano, I enjoy Metamorphosis especially. I have a couple albums I believe I will download, including a rendition of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.

And while discovering that album, I have also found what eMusic describes as “techno-classical hybrid", Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound performs Aphex Twin, which seems like it could be interesting… and maybe I ought to flesh out my Aphex Twin a little bit, while I’m thinking of it.

See why this is so hard? In any event, these selections aren’t enough to use my downloads for the month, so it seems I’ll have to poke around the site again later and find some more music.

Another reply to a post of mine. So, of course, it is time I respond in kind.

Brian thinks my poo-flinging does not help either way and that I am a monkey because I do it. I take that as a compliment, and I find it quite interesting that two people can draw opposite conclusions from the same material.

No, this statement is already a problem, whether you mean it or not. From our incidental interactions on IRC, I don’t think you’re a monkey. I just think you’re wrong here. Or short-sighted. (Also, my conclusions regarding the IRC log are irrelevant.)

I posted excerpts from an IRC log that was in parts quite offensive as far as I’m concerned and added some comments because I thought that a naked IRC log would be a bit boring on a blog. Of course those comments reflect my personal opinion, but who looks childish and unprofessional? Me, some of the kids being stupid on IRC, and that’s about it. So as far as I’m concerned there is no harm to the community - au contraire, we have a kind of discussion going over our blogs and the larrythecow aggregator. The sum of it all looks positive to me.

If you think your (continued) ad hominem attacks helped the discussion, I’d love to see the justification.

To the point, though, you’re seemingly dodging my assertion. You say that the negative aspects of your post (the “poo-flinging") only make you look bad, yet you seem to think the positive elements are the only parts that reach the community. On this I quite disagree. You can’t partition the two parts of your post, chastising one behavior with negative behavior of your own, and then say that, because positive elements exist, people will only be affected by that part.

And that is what is troubling in this: as a spectator I believe, whether or not I agree with you about package manager A vs. package manager B vs. package manager C, that there is a lot of rightness in what you said. However, it is damaged by the additional fuel it put on the fire. Do you think “$DEVS are a bunch of stupid chimp brits, $DEV_A could also be a stupid American who would bungle many wars overseas, etc.” (obviously, to paraphrase your attacks), rather than “everyone could learn to take things in stride” or maybe “both sides need to be less antagonistic in public", makes your post, Planet Larry, Gentoo ex-developers, Gentoo developers, Gentoo users, and Linux users look more or less professional?

Not to say that you speak for any of those sets of people, but someone could draw their own line from your antagonistic behavior to any of those sets if they wanted. And that’s a harm to the community. Another harm is that almost certainly did your post entrench the “factions” of the “war” further, instead of leading to armistice (to borrow your analogy).

And maybe if I do that often enough (and others too) people will stop behaving like muppets and start behaving a bit nicer. Shaming them into complianc, so to speak.

Browbeating others would potentially work if we needed to interact with each other to survive — if we were truly animals, and this was our life. If, somehow, some volume of people saying “we don’t approve of what you’re doing” cut individuals out of the community and left them without software and development tools, then perhaps could a group of people’s social tendencies be changed by shame. But, that is of course a savage solution — “conform to our norms or get out” — when it is as unnecessary as it is in the FLOSS world. People could spew vitriol until their face turned green, and it would have no affect on their targets, if their targets were more concerned with using and developing software than with being agreeable to people.

But this is just a hobby to some (most?), and merely a job to others. Internally, everyone can get by in their own way, sharing each others code and ignoring whomever they need to ignore, without fear of any reprisal. So why then the public hate, real or not? What problem are you solving via name calling?

That’s my point. Not that you’re wrong about the developers, but that your methods are at best unstable and could potentially start a new fire, and at worst are akin to flying over four alarm fires and dropping gasoline. If you’re fine with that risk for purposes of entertainment (as you alluded to), fine, but do not be surprised when people dislike the gasoline cans you carry around.

Prodded by “When fighting spam becomes censorship”, a post by Jürgen Geuter (who has already done a bit of back and forth here), I removed the b2evolution blacklist, which was quite expansive, although it was only barely solving the problem.

Part of the motivation for removing the blacklist was that, embarrassingly, my blog would have been one that didn’t allow his comments; he only wasn’t aware of it when he posted because I had to remove an overzealous entry — yes, triggering on “gay” — before I could submit my post which started our communications. So as an in the wild example of exactly what he wrote of, honest communication being thwarted by automatons, I decided it was only prudent to correct the error and own up to it.

So with that out of the way, between the above post and this local comment, I thought I would do a quick and dirty usability test and see what people thought of the current captcha engine. I’ve included a sample image, this is what anonymous users would be expected to decipher:

To my eyes this is pretty good; it’s mostly clear which letters are those to enter in the field, and it uses colors, rotates, and shadows on TrueType text instead of some of the more obnoxious morphs seen on the ‘net. However, I’d be interested to know what other eyes think. I want something which defeats spam bots without getting in the way of humans — and I can certainly relate to the feeling of “I can’t make out WTF this captcha is supposed to be.”

I’ve also been looking into common sense questions, such as the one ciaranm uses. Their weakness is of course once a spammer has picked up on the question(s), they’re trivial to defeat, but the question is how likely is it that a spammer will care enough to tweak their botnet for little ol’ sites like ours?