jmtd → log → 2007

Last night I saw the Editors perform at the Academy in Newcastle. Tickets for the gig sold out a while ago, but I managed to pick up three for £15 on Ebay. Last minute bargain!

The touts were asking or offering £10 for tickets on the door (I'm not clear on whether they were offering that, I did ask but I think he might have confused me with a buyer). If it was £10 I could have sold both my spares for more than I paid for all three.

I thought the gig was excellent. It was the most packed I've ever seen the venue. I brought my dad along and he enjoyed himself too.

I've just moved into a new flat. It will take a little while to sort out proper 'net access, so I am essentially on vacation from Debian stuff, Doom stuff and everything else, for about a week or two.

In the latest issue of Interzone magazine, author Daniel Kaysen compares being published in IZ as being as significant for an SF author as getting a Peel session was for a musician.

Being a fan of Interzone, Kaysen and indeed Peel, I think this is a pretty accurate comparison.

On the subject of Peel, I was pleasantly suprised to hear him on Radio 1 last night, as part of their 25 year celebration.

Daniel Kaysen appears to have very little work in print outside of genre magazines, but he's very good. I particularly enjoyed "The Comeback Season". He has a website with much of his work on it: http://www.angelfire.com/d20/danielkaysen/.

I moved back to using the ion window manager today (ion2 to be precise). Having tabs in my window manager, I no longer needed them in my web browser, which at the moment is epiphany. I couldn't find a way of disabling them or an extension to do it so I wrote my own.

It's at /code/epiphany/, works for the epiphany in Etch but not in sid: it seems the GNOME people have disabled the "Detach Tab" functionality I was relying on.

I think I can get it working in the later epiphany versions with a bit more work.

Tags: debian

I've been thinking about getting a new freedoom release out for quite a while. It's quite hard to motivate myself to work on it however, as maintaining freedoom is a very thankless task.

Last week, whilst I was away in Edinburgh, I received an e-mail from one "Julian Marchant" asking how FreeDM can be used. This morning I received the following from him:

A week ago, I sent a message to you (see attachment), and I still didn't get a response. I demand that you respond immediately.

Googling around suggests that he's 13 years old and doesn't yet know better. FreeDM is not really designed for 13 year olds, so I didn't offer a helpful reply.

On the subject of FreeDM, I've just adjusted the freedoom Debian source package so that it spits out a freedm binary package, so you should see that hit sid at some point in the near future.

Also this week, someone discovered the origins of the pink fish. The pink fish features in Freedoom as the commander keen sprite replacement.

"Leileilol" informed me on the debian-games channel that freedoom was thus non-free. I contented this point: firstly, Debian's definition of freedom is in terms of copyright, rather than trademark: secondly, the games team had been advised to not be too worried about trademark infringements unless trademarks were being actively enforced (such as disney characters, etc.). Finally, I had not spent a lot of time examining the material so I was yet to be convinced it was a blatant trademark infringement and not just a generic cute fish.

Rather than attempt to convince me that this was a problem, or provide alternatives (that I would have accepted), he opted to part the channel, threaten to set me on ignore, and declare his intent to fork freedoom in another channel.

Forking freedoom is a novel idea. Of course, freedoom is free software, so anyone can fork it at any time they like. However, the problem we've had as a project in the last few years is lack of direction and lack of contributors, neither problem is likely to be fixed by a fork. I'd encourage anyone who has ideas about the direction of the project to get in touch: I don't plan to maintain it after the next release, so the future is very much for the taking.