Kelsin's Journal

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

I’m getting disappointed reading the current news coming out of the OLPC camp. The reason I supported the project (and forked over my $400) was for two reasons. 1) I agree with education being the answer to most of the world’s problems and 2) I support open software. This project seemed to endorse both. I feel like both are deeply ingrained within each other. Not only does open software allow for creating awesome machines that are going to be usable for years without corporate lock in, but they also provide a learning experience for everyone regardless or age due to the nature of being able to play and pick apart the machine.

Hearing that the goal for the OLPC project is now to “get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible” I find myself disgusted. From the beginning it wasn’t a “laptop” project but a “education” project. That was stated so many times at talks over the past few years. Now all that has gone away. I’m totally fearful that this is just going to be another corporate sponsored “lock in another generation to our software” project. The world doesn’t need this. The world needs what OLPC was.

I hope the OLPC leaders listen to arguments like these. You aren’t helping anyone by spending money to help Microsoft get XP onto low power laptops. It’s wrong on so many levels. These kids need to be able to explore these systems and learn.

Even more important though is the apparent lack of my number one reason to be interested in the project. EDUCATION should be the primary concern, Not the spreading of technology. If the goal of the project is suddenly to only provide technology then I agree with all of the original naysayers: the money would better be spent on nutrition and poverty projects.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/21/1241234

What kind of moron do you have to best to proclaim that your disc encryption won’t be broken for 10 years. The model of DRM is retarded. It’s not security. You don’t walk around giving criminals your lock and your key to your house hidden in a haystack and say ‘Ha Ha try to break in’. Yet somehow that’s what they do. Not only that but then they make claims like “You can’t find that key in 10 years”. Morons.

You purchase an encrypted disc (like Blu-ray disc.) In order for you to see the content you have to de-crypt the data. This means that blu-ray players have the key needed to decrypt the data… This is simplifying a lot but the concepts are all there. It just takes time for people to find the key but THEY WILL. The problem is you can’t use encryption techniques to hide data AND SHOW DATA to the same crowd. It doesn’t work that way.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

So I’m in the process of geeking out my olpc and ran into a couple of annoying things. First I couldn’t get epiphany to install cause of some weird redhat-artwork and redhat-logos conflict. Google searching didn’t bring up anything that helped but I eventually found the answer. the “fedora-logos” packages provides a good version of redhat-logos. The currently installed (by default) “olpc-logos” provides the bad version.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS CHANGES ABOUT SUGAR IF ANYTHING, so remove the package at your own risk, but nothing depends on it so I was able to install epiphany with this series of commands:

prompt: $ su
bash-3.2# yum erase olpc-logos
bash-3.2# yum install fedora-logos
bash-3.2# yum install epiphany epiphany-extensions


I have already set my computer not to boot into sugar by adding the line “exec fvwm” to my .xsession file (you can copy .xsession-example to .xsession first). I do have a wierd issue that every other boot doesn’t finish. So far it really has been every other which is very confusing. I’m currently trying to solve that and trying to find the “proper” way to get a real fedora verion of NetworkManager installed so I can install pidgin, but at this rate I think I’m leaning towards emacs irc clients with bitlbee. If anyone has any recommendations or opinions on which emacs irc client to use speak up! I’m still reading feature lists of the available ones.

So far I’m yum installed: fvwm screen svn epiphany epiphany-extensions emacs firefox and gnome-terminal. It’s working out to be a pretty cool little machine. I think I want to get a cvs version of emacs running so I can use xft fonts to help with the screen, but that’s for another day.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

My OLPC was ordered on Nov 12th and was shipped out yesterday! The bad news is that it’s scheduled for delivery on Friday the 21st. I leave for my parent’s house Thurday night the 20th. I won’t be back until Sunday the 23rd at night! Oh well…. it will be sitting at my apartment waiting for me! Would have been very nice to have it during this trip though to test out it’s wireless power and battery life

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

In college when using linux I did not care about stability at all. I cared about baking up data of course since I was working on school projects, but due to having school labs with linux, a work computer with linux and multiple computers of my own I could care less about distro switching and reformatting my computer on (sometimes) a daily basis.

Recently I’ve started to care more. If I reformat my work laptop with a new distro and stuff doesn’t work right it can REALLY slow me down. I can’t just fix it now and do my work later (Well, I probably could but it wouldn’t look good to my co-workers as I sit there configuring X.org).

I’ve used (and enjoyed) MANY distros and my favorites switch all the time. I’m currently using Ubuntu on work computers and my home desktop has FreeBSD, Ubuntu and a free partition that’s going to be the alpha of Foresight linux 2 when I get the chance. I was using Foresight at work for a while until we switched all of our servers to ubuntu and I wanted to learn the inner workings of the distro a bit more. I think my distro-playing in college is helping out now by allowing me to know what I can play with and what I can’t.

It’s definately made me appreciate Conary’s rollback feature in Foresight. I think that’s the feature that allows my Foresight installs to remain stable even when packages break slightly (Which is a fact of life in a rolling release binary distro! Big round of applause to the Foresight devs, they do an outstanding job.). Rolling release binary distros are definitely hard, yet very cool to get working and Conary is definitely the secret behind Foresight’s success!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

I realized I wasn’t posting as often as I’d like because every post was shooting over to the Foresight planet. Now I’ve categorized better so that this doesn’t happen as often. Hopefully this will mean more posts!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

The emacs current in foresight :1-devel has support for loading packages dropped into the /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d directory. This makes packaging emacs modes a bit easier. The only other package I have made is the nxml package in my repo. This way any emacs-mode packages we make can simply drop a file in site-start.d and have emacs load it on start.

Later on I’ll be posting a rpath jira issue for ruby as well to get the ruby.el files that come with the ruby distro into their package of ruby. It was in foresight’s devel ruby package but we’ve decided to not maintain our own ruby package anymore.

I’m hoping to also make a emacs-goodies package that contains a number of small emacs add-ons (simular to the emacs-goodies package in ubuntu or debian).

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

This is disgusting. I hate when the market can’t function without the richer party pulling crap like this and turning the tables. Why the Nigerian government would rather put a non-current OS on the laptops that their students will receive is beyond me. Students will learn a lot more on computers that allow them to learn instead of charge them later for upgrades. Not to mention that it’s not going to run as well as Linux…

Oh well. Soon some of the Linux success stories will actually show some evidence of the right choice being made.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

So i got my blog added to the foresight planet!

Just for a quick introduction: My name is Christopher Giroir and I’m a programmer at Berklee College of Music in Boston MA. I mainly do web programming (Mostly in tcl and php) and we do use lots of open source technologies which is cool. My other interests include Go (I play at the Massachusetts Go Association). I also play a ton of video games (and work on programming some in my spare time). Currently I’m playing Portal. I enjoy movies and most any kind of music. I also do music recording which (because of hardware and drivers) I still use Windows for. I’ve used Cakewalk music software for a long time and really like, so Windows is still needed.

Everything else I do in Linux (including Wine for some Blizzard games). I’ve used Gentoo the longest, but also have used Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Arch and a tiny bit of CentOS. Foresight is my favorite so far for many reasons:

• Rolling release This is why I used Gentoo for so long (and Arch even though it can be pretty buggy). I love having the newest software be supported. I did not like waiting 6 months to update major release numbers the official way.
• Gnome I use Gnome. Even though I use FVWM as it’s windows manager instead of Metacity. This kind of goes with the last statement, but I love having the newest ready to go.
• Emacs I’m a BIG emacs fan and rPath has Emacs 23 in the distro already! No more compiling from source, using third party packages or packing it up myself!
• Packaging Ease of making and hosting my own packages. I can make packages easier in foresight then anything else I’ve tried (Arch is close to the same, but not as clean). I can host them easier than anything. Anyone can install one of my packages by just “conary update {package}=valefor.rpath.org@fl:1″ which I think is awesome.
• IRC Foresight has a really good group of people working for it. I feel welcome in the IRC channel and like the enthusiasm I see there so far. Here’s to making it better!

I’d like to help out on Foresight in a couple of ways. First I want to help package software. I’ve already started my repo with some Emacs modes, FVWM, mpd (with sonata, mpc, ncmpc) and Quarry. I’m hoping to add more and help our improving the packages currently in Foresight as well (Already helped a bit on Emacs and some others). I would also like to help with the website and some of the art for Foresight. I’m by no means an artist but can use Gimp and Inkscape pretty well. Hopefully if another event comes by in Boston I can help out at a Foresight table as well! Also I will hopefully be submitting and solving bugs (though I haven’t found any yet!) and feel free to ask my questions in IRC. I go by “Kelsin” normally and will help if I can.

I’m also hoping to contribute some to my favorite software projects as well, but that will come with I get some more time.

Anyway that was a rather long introduction but Hi! I’m looking forward to using Foresight for a long time to come!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

They’re a great band. Used to be Boston based until I moved to Boston and they moved to LA. For a while they didn’t have a set guitarist and the guitarist from Scattered played for them. I went to see Scattered at UMass a lot and they were excellent. Great songwriting.

Anyway saw On The Surface last night and bought a T-Shirt. They put on a great show. I was hoping to hear Peace and War or Chasing Lights, but they only did three songs from “The Fall” (Between The Lines, Enough and Pulse Pulse). The new songs sounded very good and they did two covers. Rock You Like a Hurricane and The Sweetness. Hurricane featured one of the new guitar players singing and he had a great voice so hopefully the new songs feature lots of good 3 part vocal work. Both guitar players seemed very good so that’s exciting. Should be a good EP when they come out with it!

I got to say hi to both singers after the show. Both were very nice and introduced themselves. I mentioned that I used to see Scattered a lot and heard about them through that and have been waiting for them to play Boston again. I also saw the two guitar players. Definitely a fun show. Hope to see them again soon!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

Portal is one incredible game, right down to the ending theme written by Jonathan Coulton. The game is so simple, yet is so fun. Hopefully they do make a Portal 2. I started last night, and after this morning I have the main game beaten and 4/6 advance levels beaten. Doing the challenges is going to be the hardest part, but oh well Will still be fun!

The “Plot” is awesome. So funny and well designed. It’s a great experience playing through it and since it’s only like 2-3 hours long definitely make sure you play it if you have access to a 360.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

This show is incredible. This was one of those shows with a great setup and then it just KILLS you when they finally deliver the very simple line that tells you what they are very simply trying to say. I think that’s what I like best about the show. Their messages aren’t incredibly complex. They’re very simple and yet 95% of America still can’t understand and get the messages.

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I wish when bands came back from 4-year pauses and played in their home town (that I now live in) they would play a venue so that at least MOST fans can get tickets to ONE of their 5 shows. Hopefully they announce some normal concerts soon cause this is bullshit.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4e1f782be5ba2841

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So I went out to the Middle East Downstairs yesterday with Alex to see a show. It was pretty good. All three of those bands can be found on MySpace in case you want to hear some things. As normal with me I bought every album they had for sale so I have lots of new music ready for work tomorrow!

Lil’Ones I think was my favorite from the show. They remind me a lot of the Shins which is a very good thing. My other best way to describe them involves a small story. After playing a lot of Guitar Hero I I enjoyed the song “Even Rats” by The Slip. They came to UMass soon after so about 5 of us from Video Game club went to see the show. They were largely an improv band and kind of turned me off completely. Messing up lyrics on Even Rats and fading in and out of the song with noise improv also did not impress me. Lil’Ones is the band that I was hoping the Slip would be!

1990s were very fun and I loved the sound they got out of just guitar, bass and drums. Voxtrot sounded like I would really like their cd’s so I’m excited to get those out. The singer was very entertaining and a lot of the songs had really good hooks and interesting keyboard parts. All in all well worth the 12 bucks it cost to get in.

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Wicked was amazing. Having only listened to the cd (a lot) I had no idea of the plot and that’s definitely a fun way to see a musical for the first time. Most I have a big idea of the plot just from listening to the music and it’s fun to not have that in mind going in.

We saw it at the Opera House in Boston and that is currently my favorite theater. That place is gorgeous. A small like 20-30 foot front facing entrance (that’s very pretty as well) and then it opens up into an amazing place on the inside. I’m definitely going to see more stuff there just cause it’s so pretty!

The cast of wicked was great. I like that they put more personality into the songs live then on the cd. When listening to the cd I don’t always want to hear that, it disturbs the music, but seeing it live is great with all of the little things they add in, or do differently. The voices were all superb. Gravity did not disappoint in the least. The one thing the heavily impressed me was the sets and all of the special effects. It was done very well! The wizard head was great, the flying monkeys were great, and every flying effect was awesome.

Anyway it definitely reminded me that I should see more musicals, cause this one was amazing. Going to try and get tickets to see Spam-a-lot as well. Sweeney Todd is also playing soon and I don’t want to miss it either.

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

Plot is pretty bad… well not “bad” but just not interesting enough so far. I’m about 30 hours in but I’ve spent about 10 of those just leveling. I found a leveling “trick”, not really a trick, but I learned that the “Field Barrier” skill is amazing. I should have leveled someone in barrier magic RIGHT away.

At barrier level 21 you get Field Barrier 2 which lets you cast a spell while in the field that puts a shield on you that instantly kills enemies that you run into and gives you half of the SP you would have received from winning the battle. I got to a zone called the Underground River that has LOTS of small easy enemies in it. By putting on field barrier and running through you get SP points very quickly.

This let me level up all of my classes very quickly. It doesn’t give you character levels, but it does let you level up classes. So now each of my characters has generalist up to level 36 which is what you need to for the +8 skill slots. The one issue is that one of my melee people doesn’t have monk and one caster doesn’t have the support magic class so for now they have to take on the opposite role. As far as the game goes no difference, but it’s not the class make up I had in mind for them.

All in all I am enjoying it, but I’m also excited to finish and start up another game as well!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

It’s HARD. I’m going to really like it I think. The battle system seems really cool. Basically it’s a simple job system. You level up the “Warrior” type for your shadow, and you learn warrior abilities. Later on you can equipment the “White Magic” type for you shadow and still use some warrior abilities but level up your white magic abilities. There are achievements to get every character to level 99 and to max out each of the types for your shadows…. guess what I want to do?

Bioshock is cool to. Started a Hard mode game so I can a) see the “bad” ending by harvesting every girl. This should make hard mode easier, and b) get some achievements I missed (Some weapon upgrades and diaries etc). Should be fun!

Originally published at Valefor. You can comment here or there.

So Bioshock was great. I got the good ending despite not dealing with one of the Little Sisters. I even got the achievement. So I guess if you rescue one and leave ALL of the others alone you still get the good ending? I’ll probably go back and kill the last one later just to have done it. I have a save right before the last boss so it should be easy enough.

On to Blue Dragon and finishing Project Silpheed!

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So Bioshock is still fun. I’m in world 5-7 (I think, that’s all that’s listed in the metro system at the moment. It could open up bigger of course), so I think I’m getting close to beating it. The Big Daddies are still hard but with more and more power ups the game is getting very fun. Except for hacking. They make some of the hacks impossible if you don’t use enough hacking power ups and that sucks.

Foresight linux development is going awesome. I’m going to update my desktop to a development system later so I can test my emacs package change and commit it and nxml-mode to the repos. I also want to put quarry in as well, but we’ll see if they want that in.

Can’t wait to start Blue Dragon! I also want to finish FF12 but I think Blue Dragon is going to come first.