… and I’m going to use it as an example of free software projects being capable of marketing crap as a good product.
I’m almost wishing KDE 3.5 gets forked and developed in a sane manner. And I’ve even considered testing out Gnome.
The people who said KDE 4.2 rocks, meant “in comparison to 4.1 or 4.0.” If KDE 4.2 is good in comparison to those, I never want to find out how horrible the earlier versions were.
Now, normally you’d start making bug reports about issues you find, but if the overall quality is sour crud, it’d make more sense to report what works.
And the answer to that is “a lot less than in KDE 3.5.”
rant kde, rant
I earlied ranted about Freshmeat being slow on approving submissions, but based on the Freshmeat Support discussions, it seems the problem lies in their new software that makes some releases pending approval invisible to the admins. And the oddities don’t end there…
No idea whether just releases submitted within a given period are affected. In any case, I hope they patch it up.
rant rant
I just got my second order from Bike24 (from Germany to Finland), and I’ve got to say it was smooth.
- 2009-03-31 Made the order
- 2009-04-03 Bike24 shipped the order (from Dresden, Germany)
- 2009-04-07 Delivery by DHL (in Finland)
- 2009-04-08 Confirmed everything was a perfect fit
Which totals to a week.
Only issue I’ve had so far when ordering from Bike24 is that the local delivery is done via DHL, which was not-so-good experience on the first time. They tried delivering the package when I was not at home (instead of calling me beforehand to ask when it’s okay to deliver – like our postal service Itella does). When I called them back, negotiating a time was, uh, not easy. They couldn’t say exact time that they can deliver (not even within an hour – if I recall right the span was three hours or something like that), and I didn’t manage to get a delivery after working hours, so I had to ask them to bring it to my workplace.
But, apart from that “no good delivery after working hours” issue with DHL, my experiences with Bike24 have been good.
rant cycling
In a somewhat unexpected move (even to me), Encreecia is going be run using “Pay to Play” model in the future. What this means is that the players need to subscribe with a monthly payment – the amount is open at this point.
In the first stage, the aim is to cover costs for a dedicated server hosted by Nebula. If we can’t get enough subscribers to offset the costs, another possibility is selling in-game items and goods for the players. This model has been well-tested in various online games and should prove to be effective.
In the second stage, when the server costs are covered, the plan is to fund the development with the income. This includes graphics artists, background music composers, UI designers, etc. Depending on the amount of money left, I may consider working part-time on the project myself (unlike working on it at evenings on my free time now).
The game will still remain free software in the future. The only change to that is that the Pay to Play server will be always running the newest software, and the free software releases will lag a bit behind that. So you need to subscribe to see all the bells and whistles.
Subscribers will also get priority whenever bugs and in-game issues are being looked into.
More info coming soon…
Update: Note the date 
projects encreecia, projects
I happened to find some good reading on C++’s virtual tables, their implementation (on g++) and dynamic_cast. Nothing too special, but somehow I’ve always managed to neglect thinking about this. The Wikipedia article “Virtual method table” is a good starting point, followed by a more detailed explanation on dynamic_cast, courtesy of carcino.gen.nz. Don’t miss the conclusions!
tips c++, tips
I just noticed that the ViewGit release announcement I submitted almost two weeks ago is still pending on Freshmeat. Maybe they are busy rounding the corners on the new site look?
rant rant, viewgit
I find it quite funny that Gmail seemed to tag mail from Google Reader as spam. To be exact, it tagged a news item I sent to myself using the [x] Send me a copy of this e-mail feature. I don’t think this is the first time Gmail has been marking mail from other Google services as spam, so I guess they really don’t exclude their own services
rant gmail, google
ViewGit 0.0.4 has been released.
Freshmeat announcement is pending:
Added support for optional authentication methods and a simple plugin framework (including an example plugin for Google Analytics).
Fixed various minor bugs as well & improved error handling and reporting.
It was about time to gather the changes into a release.
releases projects, releases, viewgit
Have you attended a peaceful protest recently? The Guardian reported at the weekend that the Metropolitan police are storing the details of protestors on the criminal intelligence database, in some cases even where the person concerned has no criminal record and is not suspected of any offence.
via Corinna Ferguson: Public trust eroded by police surveillance of protestors | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
[ Just a few days after Yvonne Singh: Why are we fingerprinting children? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]
newspicks 1984, newspicks, yro
Looks like Microsoft’s web spider is crawling sites repoting fake (spam) referrals coming from live.search.com. These referrals are completely bogus and if you look at the keywords, it’s quite obvious.
Read more…
rant rant, site
