Ooze Mini-Campaign by SpenceLack (Wesnoth)

The Ooze Mini-Campaign by SpenceLack has to be the best add-on campaign for Wesnoth yet. It's easy, funny and fun, just the sort of the game I like, although replay value is limited. However, "Ooze" stands out for its originality and wit, and I had more fun playing that easy campaign than all the others. I think that other campaign designers could learn a thing or two from SpenceLack about writing and campaign design. I often find the storyline in other campaigns tedious and skip past them after reading a few lines. Typically we have the same old saw along the lines of "I'm a-gonna getcha fer what you dun ta my folks!" "Oh no, you ain't, I'm gunna getchu first!" "Oh yeah?" "Yeah!" That gets old after a few repetitions, although to be sure it's the standard fantasy storyline. "Ooze" made me smile and appealed to my sense of perversity, and I looked forward to the continuing story with anticipation and curiosity. I was also delighted to find a new race, the ooze, a very interesting one, although limited in advancement capability.

Commune with the Dead

When reading Patrick O'Brian, one communes with the dead. The author has been dead for thirteen years now, and all the characters in his novel (some based upon real people and all based upon real history) are dead. I find it very pleasant to enter his world of the imagination, which remains very much alive, even though his body is not. I wonder which is the more real, the imagined reality or the reality we live in. Of course, the imagined reality of a great writer has far more endurance than a frail human body and pleases many more people. Almost all the writers I like are dead or, I'm afraid, soon will be, not that I feel it is a prerequisite of any kind, but each generation reads the work of the preceding generations, because a writer requires a long time to earn popularity and get established among publishers.

Cannabis also allows the shaman to open the door between living and dead and commune with various entities, but I think that great books provide a guided tour, a more interesting journey in many ways, the experience less physical and more cerebral. I have always felt that I would be completely satisfied reading select books by my favorite writers. If I lost the use of any of my limbs, like some of the innocent victims of the Boston bomber, it would not ruin my life unless I were unable to turn pages. I would adapt as long as I could continue reading, perform the basic necessities of life and communicate with others. The health problems that really worry me are ungovernable infection, such as antibiotic-resistant pneumonia, cancer, stones, heart disease, or the worst of all, mental dysfunction such as senility.

Wesnoth 1.10.6 - Northern Rebirth - Stolen Gold - Bug - Can't Win

In Wesnoth's "Northern Rebirth" scenario, "Stolen Gold," the scenario objectives have a bug in the code. The player is supposed to win by resisting until turn 37. Instead, on turn 37, the player is defeated, contrary to the scenario objectives, which clearly state that only the death of the three unique commanders can cause defeat. I gave up on "Northern Rebirth," because there's no defeating the vast troll hordes without many hundreds of gold in one's purse, and mine only had about 200 g.p.

So in Wesnoth Solitary, I am stymied by trolls of one variety, and in Wesnoth Multiplayer, trolls of quite a different kind.

I suppose it's just about time for me to capitalize on having Kubuntu 13.04 by installing the development version of Wesnoth. It wouldn't work on Linux Mint 14, but I have a feeling that it will work on Kubuntu 13.04.

Wesnoth seems about the best game around for Linux. I've tried plenty of others, but Wesnoth is really fantastic. It exceeds expectations for a free open source game. In many ways I like Wesnoth better than Crawl. For one thing, Crawl is handicapped by a design flaw that the developers refuse to remedy--the game restarts at ground zero after a character's death. I coded a batch file to circumvent this undesirable behavior. Wesnoth's developers wisely opted not to go that route. They have an auto-save feature which saves the player a lot of time and trouble and compensates for the inevitable unfairness and arbitrary nature of the game. The point of a game is of course to have fun.

Userstyles.Org Wants Me to Work Harder

I was amused by the recent change over on userstyles.org. All my .css styles have been evaluated by an automatic process for conformance to some standard of coding. Two of them have been highlighted in ugly mustard yellow, with red text warning me of minor anomalies. Well, you know, maybe I'll get around to fixing that next month, next year, or never. The thing is, the styles are useful to me, but I don't get anything for them from all the strangers that also find them useful. Vanity is nice and all, but I've also noticed that nobody posts any reviews or comments on my styles, so as far as I can see nobody else cares. If nobody cares, and the admin expects me to do more work, well, then maybe I don't care either. Maybe the admin over at userstyles.org can pay my hourly fee of $99.99 / hr, and then I might do something about it. Or he can start coughing up a share of his advertising revenue. The styles work great for me, and I could give two hoots about minor anomalies.

I'm reminded of all the work I did for a friend's web site for free. It was just about a full-time job. I worked on just about every aspect of the site, fixing links, refining the html, improving the menu system, even installing cron jobs to update content. Then one day, the owner of the site decides to take it down. Flip the switch. Presto, all gone, ha-ha. I have a backup collecting dust on a dvd somewhere, and one of our users also ripped the site before it went down without so much as a by-your-leave. Other than that, years of work flushed down the toilet with nothing at all to show for it. That has been the story of my life to date. Incredibly difficult work performed with sometimes heroic effort, but without much to show for it in the end. I'm a little choosier about the things I decide to work on nowadays. I also don't believe in hard work anymore. The point isn't to work harder. The point is to work smarter. Choosing the right kind of work and the right people to work for and the right conditions are all the critical decisions. Simply working harder, well, that's what the ants do, isn't it?

Does KDE Test at All?

From the number of problems I've noticed in my Kubuntu install, I'm starting to wonder whether KDE tests their stuff before releasing it. Maybe the end user is considered to be the tester? When Linux Mint 15 gets released, I think I'm going to give Xfce or Cinnamon a try and see whether it can boot up clean. Every boot, Kubuntu 13.04 gives me two empty blnkscrn.kss windows and a buggy error report on Thunderbird. I don't think KDE is ready for prime time yet. Certainly Xfce seems more stable than KDE and less error-prone.

Hooray for Jinkx

I was pleased to see that Jinkx Monsoon won the fifth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. However, I don't flatter myself for predicting her victory. To anyone paying attention, it was pretty clear who the top runner was. I also predicted that Ivy Winters would win Ms. Congeniality, but that too was obvious. One of the interesting little details about the fifth season is that Jinkx had a crush on Ivy Winters. I think that showed good taste. Ivy Winters looks better male than female. However, Jinkx is something else. She is one of many drag queens I would like to see on a regular TV show. She has a great talent for acting. She just needs good lines, although she's competent at impromptu. I think she's pretty amazing, and if Hollywood doesn't have a producer that can imagine her in a television show, then that's Hollywood's loss.

Although I am a bonafide fan, I cringed reading the bio on her web site. I absolutely cringed, and my heart sank. She comes across as too arrogant by half. Every other sentence boasts of her intellect. You know, intelligence is a funny thing. It should be self-evident; there is no need for trumpet-blowing. And also there is the danger, no matter how intelligent one thinks oneself, there is always someone more intelligent, who will laugh at one's boasts. Intelligence is all a matter of perspective. Summa cum laude, indeed. But I may be hypersensitive to a fault I also share, because have I not also boasted of those three Latin words, the finest decoration for a bachelor's degree? After all, did we not work hard in college in order to achieve summa cum laude? Don't we deserve some credit? Is the trophy without value? Yet I have qualms about how it is perceived. I've never gotten a job on the strength of summa cum laude. As far as I can see, no one cares about academic honors besides those in academia. Even a college degree has no value in terms of employment. A bachelor's degree translates into a minimum wage job in today's America.

But perhaps the author, which I assume was Jinkx herself, is worried about being underestimated. I predict the bio will be rewritten within a month's time or whenever Jinkx has a moment to spare.

Having read Jinkx's bio, I know the backstory to a curious remark that RuPaul made to Jinkx after their luncheon late in the fifth season. "You're a bright young star," Ru said, which signalled that Jinkx was favored to win. Ru rarely gives such a strong and undeniable sign of favor, and Jinkx was clearly pleased by the remark. Yet Ru was borrowing the phrase that Jinkx used in her bio--"bright star."

Crest Whitening Toothpaste--Yucko

I've been remarkably healthy for a long stretch, up until I started using Crest Tartar Protection Whitening Toothpaste, at which point all of a sudden I came down with an upper respiratory infection--a cold, a sore throat, and bronchitis, which lingers to this day. Now I am of the belief that that nasty toothpaste had something to do with my bronchitis. I haven't caught bronchitis in a decade or more. I use Crest, and all of a sudden I have bronchitis? The only reason I bought this infernal toothpaste was it was on clearance at the grocery store for something like $1.50 for a 232 g tube, which is a good deal, toothpaste normally being about $2.50 - $3. I should have asked myself why this toothpaste was on clearance. Why do the other customers not like it? Why is it unpopular? These are the questions a consumer should always look into whenever a brand is marked down.

I found out why the Crest toothpaste was so cheap after using it. It has the approximate consistency of baking soda, being powdery and not at all like normal toothpaste. The brushing experience is extremely unpleasant. The toothpaste tastes bad, and I don't feel that it cleans teeth well at all. To make matters worse, one of the ingredients of this Crest toothpaste--and the reason it is supposed to be whitening (I don't care about the whitening effect)--is titanium dioxide, a known carcinogen that causes lung irritation. Now I brush my teeth right before bed, and I am sure that I leave some amount of toothpaste residue in my mouth and subsequently inhale it while sleeping. So I think a connection might well be drawn from using Crest Whitening toothpaste to bronchitis, especially due to the timing of my infection (a few days after beginning use) and the highly unusual color of my phlegm--bright white, the color of titanium dioxide, rather than the yellow one might expect from bronchitis. I stopped using the toothpaste two days ago, and I'm already starting to feel better. I'm not going to buy any more Crest, regardless of variety, ever again, because in my opinion that brand does not know how to manufacture toothpaste.

I'm afraid all the brands have a variety with titanium dioxide, because CEO's tend to be evil and not care about the health of their victims customers. Anyone suffering from an infection in the respiratory tract should not rule out their brand of toothpaste as a possible cause, or for that matter the gum one chews--Trident sells a cheap gum that also claims to be whitening and also has the cancer-causing irritant, titanium dioxide.

A Firewall for the Telephone

My phone has a firewall. If it didn't, I'd disconnect my phone and give it to Goodwill. There are far too many evil scum in the world that call on a daily basis for the purpose of sales, scams, handouts or just pure harassment. Just as every computer should have a firewall, every telephone requires a firewall, and the best firewall is Call Clerk. That program just keeps getting better and better, with an update every few weeks. I would purchase Call Clerk before any other program, including Windows. It is reason enough to own a computer and is far more important than the internet browser or the operating system. Call Clerk transforms the telephone from what it is today, a weapon of harassment against the user, and makes it what Alexander Graham Bell intended it to be, a useful method of communication. The only downside is that it runs on Windows instead of Linux, so one has to use an inferior operating system.

Avast's False Positive on ACDSee 15

Avast Antivirus was giving a false positive on ACDSee 15 today, which was a minor annoyance, because by doing so, ACDSee's automatic camera offloading feature was disabled. I fixed everything and researched the issue, discovering a thread of messages on Avast's forum complaining about the false positive. I disabled all of Avast's shields until the next reboot, which might be a week from now, figuring they will fix their database by that time.

I have a couple of thoughts about this issue. One, Avast does not normally give false positives; this is an anomaly. I recommend Avast for a reason. Two, Avast shows laxity in regards to testing. It may be that they are releasing their database updates far, far too soon, and should test the damn things a bit better than they do. I am not sure virus database updates--or any system updates, for that matter--should be made in such a hellfire hurry. How about slowing down, letting a few systems have it, and seeing what the results are? Three, I'm not a paying customer of Avast, nor are the vast majority, so do we have a right to complain? Yes, because this is a free country, but Avast also has a right not to give a damn. It may be that Avast unleashes a false positive on purpose once in a while to scare the gullible into buying some of their product. Microsoft offers free antivirus, so I do not understand Avast's business model at all. I do not understand why anyone would pay for an antivirus when they can get one for free. At the moment, I am considering uninstalling Avast and installing Microsoft's solution, because Avast does like to be annoying with their little pop-ups and now a false positive.

Middle-Aged Despair

Seems like middle-aged suicide is on the increase, and as usual social scientists don't know why, so they are pointing the finger at drugs. Of course, evil only exists in the world due to drugs. Without the heroin, there would be no shoplifting. Without cocaine, littering would be a thing of the past. Drugs are also the reason for inflation, drought, and water pollution.

I don't know about these social scientists. One would expect they would be a little more perceptive of current events. It's the economy, stupid.

I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out the connection between the lack of good jobs in this country and the suicide increase. Men that have known better times and held responsible positions now find that they can't find any work other than minimum-wage jobs. They fall behind on their mortgages, divorce, go on welfare, lose the hard-earned respect of friends and family, lose their homes, don't have enough to eat, can't afford medical care, and become victims of crime. This goes on for years with no end in sight and no hope on the horizon. No jobs, no money, no respect. And yet they had spent their lives doing all the right things, working hard, attending school. Any surprise they blow their brains out or O.D. on painkillers? Not really. America has always been a very materialist, capitalist society that views people in terms of winners and losers, and nobody likes to consider themselves losers. So death is way of resigning a losing game. Once you're dead, you don't give a damn anymore. Other people can deal with the clean-up of the body and weave crazy theories about how prescription painkillers made you do it.

For my part, I found the adjustment to the modern economy of zero good jobs and no hope to be difficult, but on the bright side, these low-wage jobs are pretty easy compared to the responsible positions I held in the past. I used to work really hard, harder than anybody I know. Now I don't have to use my brain half the time. I use maybe 1% of my intellect on my job. I used to use 100% of my intellect on my job. My job used to keep me up all day, all night. Skull-sweat. I don't think more than two people out of a hundred could have managed my job. But in the new economy, easy jobs are the only kind I will ever get. So I have adjusted to working less, working not nearly as hard, making less money, and trying not to worry about the future, because hey, when you die, you die, right? Other people will have to dispose of the body, and that's that.

I have a good life in some ways, and besides, I've never felt like suicide is a smart move, because one never knows what the morning may bring. The morning may bring something good. I think life has too many possibilities to just give up based on something that doesn't ultimately matter, like money. I could see suicide in the case of someone with a chronic medical condition in addition to not having any money, however, especially if they also feel isolated and alone. Our world just doesn't care. We throw people away. But as long as one has good health, I think it is foolish to throw that away based on something like a bank account balance.

I read in another PBS article that a lot of companies only hire young people, defined as under-30, because they feel younger people are cheaper, easier to handle, and will be with the company longer, and cost less in medical bills. So, I suppose young people may feel smug about things, but the trouble there is that they, too, will get middle-aged soon enough, and then they will find that the same strategy that applies to middle-aged people now will also apply to them. They will get down-sized, right-sized, out-sourced, whatever the case may be, and then they will find that McDonald's is hiring a few good people.

Here's for Jinkx

I expect Jinkx Monsoon to win the fifth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. Jinkx epitomizes what I think drag should be, a performance act with emphasis upon acting, drama, and comedy. I like Alaska too, but as an actor, Alaska seems less refined than Jinkx. I noticed the look on Jinkx's face when RuPaul said she was turning the decision over to the viewers. Perhaps Jinkx suspects that she has captured the hearts of the viewers. She has more cunning than some people have given her credit for. She was the strongest contender from day one and knew it. One felt the same way about Raja, a contender from a previous season who simply demolished the competition--was so far above them as to seem another species.

Some judges and competitors ding Jinkx for her fashion sense. Perhaps I am not a good judge of that sort of thing. My fashion sense is below average, although I've absorbed a good dose by osmosis from my spouse, who has a very great fashion sense. However, I think Jinkx puts her face together very well, and the face is the most important part of the body. As for her costume, I usually like it, and I never understand why judges praise another competitor and criticize Jinkx for her costume. It is never clear to me. There have been times when I felt that Jinkx was the best-looking competitor on the stage by a factor of about a hundred to one, and yet the judges seem to differ from my opinion by a similar factor. To me, the costume is almost irrelevant. I'm more interested in the acting and the presentation, or how a competitor handles herself. There are some competitors that may get their costumes right according to the arcane laws of fashion, but they bore me silly with the same wooden face that never changes and never registers any passion other than naked ambition.

Lemons are Medicine for Sore Throat

I think that lemons have immense medicinal value, in part for their vitamin C potency, but also due to their acidity and perhaps some as yet unexplained qualities. For a sore throat, I like nothing better than fresh-squeezed lemon juice, drunk straight without sugar or water, and swallowed directing the flow over the sorest part of the throat. I think lemon juice is hostile to germs and at any rate the acid should work to dissolve bacterial film. Limes may work in a similar way, but lemons I think are to be preferred, as they contain more vitamin C and greater acidity. For variety, I also like black tea with lemon juice added, because together they seem to have a certain medicinal synergy and should be quite antiseptic, tea having antiseptic properties of its own as well as acidic tanins. With any medicinal preparation, it is important not to add any sugar, because sugar reduces acidity, feeds bacteria, and causes inflammation, but I seldom add sugar to tea anyway.

Scott mentioned in the comments section below that lime juice can be used as a deodorant. At first I was skeptical, but Google finds support for this belief. According to Simply Lovely, lime juice proved an effective deodorant for a runner. It is worth noting, however, that the sweat generated by nervous stress has an altogether different quality about it and produces a more offensive odor than the sweat produced by athletic activity.

For my part, I'm not motivated to switch from the traditional roll-ons, because my skin tolerates Speed Stick Antiperspirant by Mennen, which is cheap and also extremely effective. Typically, I buy 20 coupons on Ebay and then buy 20 units at the local grocery store when they are on sale, thus reducing the price to peanuts. I can get a 76g container for $1.50 apiece or less.

Linux Kernel 3.8 Working with S/PDIF

Last time that I updated my htpc's Linux kernel to 3.8+, S/PDIF fell silent. I had to fall back to Linux kernel 3.7.10, and I wrote about the cliff between 3.7.10 and 3.8. After 3.7.10, silence.

Reading the notes on alsa dev, it was implied that only in systems with HDMI, the new 3.8+ kernel reserved a slot for HDMI, leaving none available for S/PDIF. That suggested to me that if I disabled HDMI in the BIOS, then my S/PDIF would work, even without further modifications to the system. Tonight I confirmed my hunch. Since my htpc does not use HDMI, disabling it was not a problem. I upgraded the kernel in Linux Mint Nadia Xfce to 3.8.11, rebooted, and played a video to test the sound. No problem.

The Trolls of Wesnoth Multiplayer

It's always an eye-opener to note those in the world with less suave and social sophistication than myself. I was reminded of the existence of trolls when I experimented with Wesnoth - Multiplayer, where many players quit games without a word or after citing a quite trivial reason; insulted one another, and booted other players for not understanding the rules, although they are not willing to speak of rules nor much else. They do not seem willing or perhaps capable of communicating in an effective manner. All of their communication is wasted upon name-calling, upon hostile behavior that cannot possibly produce good results. I wonder how these people are going to get by in the real world with attitudes like that. Their behavior should attract other people with similar personality types, and repel people like me that just want to get along and have a bit of fun. Not a friendly bunch. Not people I would want to spend any amount of time with on a voluntary basis.

I was amused by the thought that I could code an AI that would behave in the same manner as these trolls. They are predictable in a certain way; trollish behavior is not complicated. Each turn, there would be a 30% of a random profanity, a 20% chance of a random insult, and a 20% chance that one or more players would quit. If anyone quit, there would be a 1% chance that they would give any notice, and a 99% chance that they would leave without saying a word. I can't tell how many games I've waited thirty minutes for someone to move, only to discover after I quit that everyone had already left the game.

Whatever happened to sportsmanship? I learned at an early age to be both a graceful winner and a loser. What is the purpose of a game, after all? The purpose of a game is not to win, but to exercise the mind. Of course games are a diversion and a way to kill boredom, but they should never be stress-inducing or hostile. I don't see the point in a hostile game for no stakes, when one could be reading a book instead.

The learning I have that gives me the most satisfaction of all are my social skills. To know what not to do and to know what to do, and how to say things and communicate with others in an effective manner is very useful indeed. I'd trade all my knowledge of history for it, although that's not quite a fair trade, because I'd simply enjoy rereading history books to relearn all that I had given away.

I'm rereading Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey & Stephen Maturin books. I like to go through the twenty once every seven years or so, after some of the stories have been forgotten. He is an absolute joy to read. I think I'd rather spend a few hours with Patrick O'Brian than with the trolls of Wesnoth.

Asperger's Syndrome

I have bronchitis and a cold. Illness, especially the communicable variety, brings isolation, and solitude encourages reflection. I thought of my phone conversation with my mother yesterday, which was unusually candid.

Asperger's Syndrome is interesting, and I'm fairly sure my father has it. He has the full-blown variety, no half-measure. My mother agrees with me and also agrees I inherited the trait, which would explain my nerdiness in school. Years ago, such a reflection may have seemed threatening to my ego, but I am not bothered by the working hypothesis, because I like to understand things and get closer to the truth of a matter. Recollections that for a long time puzzled me become clearer when I accept this hypothesis, as though a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, and the complete picture is revealed to me at last. It is not embarrassment I feel therefore, but satisfaction, to find at last the answer to a riddle that perplexed me for years.

What is nerdiness after all? It is below average adaptation to the social environment. Asperger's is a weakness in interpreting subtle social cues. A person with Asperger's may sometimes be mystified at the reactions of other people. He may not be quite as good at nonverbal communication and may not be a very engaging speaker. Lack of facial expressions, lack of physical expression. Disinclined to engage in social events; prefer to be alone. This is the textbook description that I know by heart. Yet, beware. These are rough generalizations, and variations abound, because the subject is not a mineral that can be classified with precision, but a human being. Furthermore, I describe how the subject appears to some from without, not from within. I describe how norms perceive things, or how I may be perceived on occasion. To a certain extent, Asperger's is a box into which shrinks have thrown some of the kids that aren't making enough friends in school or some spouses whose other half has enrolled them in couples therapy. Asperger's is more or less a pseudoscientific euphemism for nerd. The kids on the playground and the shrinks are using different labels that mean really quite the same thing.

After surviving the trauma of school and gaining experience in the world, neuro-atypicals get better at interpreting subtle social cues. When discussing a subject close to the heart's joy, such as computer programming, certainly there may be emotional emphasis and an engaging speech indeed, no monotone at all. The trouble is that most people don't care about the kinds of things that interest a neuro-atypical. The norm's window of curiosity is half-closed. Who has a Syndrome? Who has the weakness? This is all a matter of perspective. Another way of looking at things is that the guy with Asperger's lacks interest in what other people find very interesting. It is difficult for a neuro-atypical to generate interest in other people. Knowledge helps; if the other person knows a great many things, then that can be very appealing, because hunger for knowledge is a very real need. Depending upon the social events in question, a neuro-atypical may be well-inclined to participate. I think of Asperger's as being the equivalent of a learning disability in social engineering, in networking with other people, or perhaps a reluctance to manipulate others, a disinclination to become drawn into the affairs of others. Although learning may be delayed, many skills can be acquired, depending upon the individual.

I made friends in school. I wasn't quite as nerdy as some, but nerdier than the average boy. I was called a "walking, talking encyclopedia," because I knew words with more than three syllables. I thought everybody should know and use such words. What is wrong with the world, that people don't care to learn everything they possibly can about everything under the Sun? This was my first reaction. Compliments and straight-A's fed my ego, but actually this sort of thing is typical with Asperger's. I got more joy sometimes from reading something as mundane as the back of a cereal box than talking with a peer. I wondered what the ingredients were, and sometimes I had to pull up the encyclopedia, my best friend, to find out. I remember that as a boy I was so naive that I believed everything I read, as long as it corresponded to the general sense of reality and wasn't mythology or magic. Now I know that what one reads on the back of a cereal box must be taken with a grain of salt, along with everything else. One must look to the author and his motives. Of course the cereal manufacturer's motive is clearly to sell cereal, so perhaps not everything can be trusted to be completely candid.

My brain was a sponge, although my memory is very far from photographic, and I'm definitely no savant. I think I was wasted on my school, because I was ahead, and the classes were just lagging behind, leaving me bored and with no sort of challenge at all, just brainless makework. School was a punitive environment. By the time eighth grade rolled around, I was completely disengaged from school. I got into trouble because I wasn't reading social cues as well as the others. I was at least a full grade behind in social development, and a couple grades ahead in academics. I don't think schools knew what do with kids like me. Maybe they do now, but back in the day, the chips fell where they may.

Silence was an early coping mechanism. Silence avoided hostile scrutiny. I learned how to be invisible. Almost all my teachers were less informed about the subjects. Those teachers who knew more than I did, I prized. They were my favorite teachers. But most did not. Teachers who had less knowledge nevertheless had the power to wreak revenge upon their arrogant pupil, and I was certainly arrogant. Let us define arrogance. Arrogance is a failure to understand and apply unwritten and undeclared social norms. One such social norm is that we should convey thoughts and feelings in an inoffensive manner that does not appear designed to make the listeners feel small. Appearances are extremely important, the most important thing in fact, and if one cannot speak without seeming arrogant, silence is preferable. It is better to be silent until one learns the social skills one needs to learn. Of course other boys and girls did not like to seem stupid by comparison, so I learned to disengage and stay quiet in order not to offend anyone. My first lesson in school was the power and the virtue of silence. After several betrayals and cruel pranks, I also learned to be suspicious of others and never to accept what anyone said at face value, but to search for hidden motives--and once the search is complete, to keep watching, because some motives are hidden well indeed. I am almost never taken in by anybody anymore. But in order to achieve such invulnerability, perhaps it is necessary that one endure numerous betrayals, which are such valuable learning experiences. I would not have gone without them.

Some people are better at interpreting social cues than others, and they flourish as social butterflies: politicians, actors, business managers. There are great rewards available for those with above average skills of social perception. I think the self-made rich almost always have something of the social butterfly in them. There is great value in networking, and it is the best way to thrive in business. On the other hand, people with Asperger's seem better with computers, engineering, science, and other detailed and complicated skills. In my opinion, they would also adapt well to the military, which is a system much like a computer, very rule-based, with clear priorities and a chain-of-command.

Kudos for Kubuntu 13.04

Getting Kubuntu

I've been working on my spiffy new Kubuntu 13.04 system, which replaced the older Linux Mint Nadia KDE. Kubuntu was released April 25th, 2013. I recommend torrenting any large file like the Kubuntu .ISO, because by torrenting, one is assured of receiving a valid file without errors, and there is no need for comparing MD5 checksums. I used Ktorrent to download Kubuntu, and K3b to burn the install DVD. I installed Kubuntu on my desktop, which has an ASUS E35M1-M motherboard with a sluggish AMD/ATI E350 apu and four gigs of RAM installed, the standard ration nowadays, a cool and quiet Western Digital 1.5 tb Green drive, and an awesome Acer X223w widescreen LCD monitor.

I'm old school when it comes to distros. Unlike some reviewers, I don't play around with virtual machines or live CD or a different partition of the drive. I go whole hog--format the drive to ext4 and let Kubuntu have every last byte. Having a couple of drives to play around with helps. At all times, I have one to three floaters that aren't connected to any system. Their mission in life is to serve as backups. I think this is the best way to go about things, especially with drives so cheap these days. There isn't much reason to be cheap on hard drives, when one weighs their trivial cost against the hassle involved in losing a Windows install or a multimedia library.

Kubuntu 13.04 is not any worse than Kubuntu 12.10, and I think the developers have done a few things better. I was pleasantly surprised that Wesnoth was indeed updated in the repositories to the current stable version of 1.10.6, as that was my main motivation for upgrading in the first place, along with the latest Ktorrent, 2.3.1, which I also found. Very good, Kubuntu! New versions of all the apps is reason enough to upgrade. Also, KDE 4.10.2 is certainly better than 4.9.5, although clicking on a petty option or two in the settings menu, like syncing with the internet time server, triggers an error report, an unpleasantness I first observed in Open Suse 12.3, but it is nothing serious in my opinion, because of course one can avoid clicking on these things. An avoidable bug that does not cause hardship is not a big deal. When I say "error report," I mean just that. KDE does not crash--one merely gets a popup with an error message, clicks "OK" and that's that.

April 28, 2013 Update:

The time bug seems more severe, at least on my system, than it at first appeared. For two days now, my system has been displaying a time four hours in advance of real time. Originally, I selected Eastern Time / New York, which usually works for me, but apparently New York time is based in a Universe four hours ahead of my Universe. I spent about an hour playing around with KDE's settings trying to fix this, because correct time is important. After many reboots, I concluded that New York time actually is broken, although whether this issue will impact all Kubuntu users I can't say, because this problem may be fall-out related to the error reports I mentioned above. Once I changed the time zone to Louisville, Kentucky Eastern Time, all was well.


The New York time zone was four hours ahead of New York time. If you live on the East Coast of the U.S. or at any rate in a region that subscribes to Eastern Time, I recommend selecting Louisville, KY as your time zone rather than New York.

April 30, 2013 Update: The Clock is Still Broken

Once again, the time has regressed to being four hours ahead of local time. I thought this problem was fixed, but apparently not. My display has changed, too. Instead of displaying only the date, it now displays the date followed by "Local."

May 2, 2013 Update: Fifoxtasy's Fix

Fifoxtasy left a comment with a working solution to this problem. I confirmed that the time remains fixed even after a power down and cold start. If your system is impacted by this problem, read on. Otherwise, count yourself among the fortunate ones and enjoy an otherwise superb KDE 4.10.2 experience.

Open a terminal and type the following commands:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org
cat /etc/timezone

The last command merely displays the contents of /etc/timezone. If the time zone noted there isn't right, edit this file via sudo kate /etc/timezone, thus bypassing the buggy GUI. Fifoxtasy also suggests a graphical way of changing the time zone: "KDE's systemsettings didn't let me change anything, but when running as root via kdesu systemsettings, I could at least change the timezone."

I'm pleased that the time is fixed, because I was thinking about replacing Kubuntu with something else. Time is important. I'm sure it's not on the short list of cool things developers want to work on, but to the end user, a computer that can't tell time is a poor old thing. Here is a link to Fifoxtasy's Blog.

Despite this initial teething pain, I'm still a fan of KDE and of Kubuntu, for three main reasons: Dolphin, Ktorrent and K3b can't be beat; KDE offers the best desktop experience under the Sun; and KDE is free, so morally I should have to sweat a little to make things work, or else I'd be witness to a violation of Heinlein's TANSTAAFL principle, which states there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Defiance of such a fundamental law of the Universe might result in the disintegration of the bonds that hold molecules together, ending reality as we know it.

Tweaking, Uninstalling and Installing

Do you find that the mouse pointer is far too slow in KDE? I do. First thing I do in KDE is change the pointer acceleration from 2.0 to 12.0 and dial the Drag Start Time down to zero (look under Input Devices | Mouse in System Settings). As with Linux Mint KDE and Open Suse 12.3, I spent the better part of a day darkening the background and replacing default KDE apps such as Kmail, Kwallet, and so on with Thunderbird, Firefox, and VLC, and installing Jedit, which I consider absolutely essential for its macro support. I would never have a system without Jedit, which I find similar to Notepad++ in Windows. Amarok may be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't think Amarok plays local files as well as VLC, and I don't need Amarok's newfangled features, thank you very much. Rekonq might actually be a faster browser than Firefox for all I know, but I am a Firefox diehard because of Firefox's universe of add-ons. Firefox is the most extensible, the most powerful browser. I chose KDE because of Dolphin, K3b, and Ktorrent, all great programs in the KDE universe and to my knowledge without equal in the Linux world. KDE's settings menu is also great, allowing me to customize just about every aspect of the desktop.

Firefox Sync did not work the way I expected it to do for some as yet undetermined reason, and I can't rule out Ubuntu's little tweaks to Firefox at this stage. I decided not to troubleshoot the problem, but rather to start Firefox afresh, because I've been experiencing a strange problem on Blogger where my text sometimes disappears on me, so I thought a fresh start might not be such a bad thing.

Kubuntu's biggest difference with Linux Mint KDE may be the Muon Package Manager. I find it has a betaish quality at present. Information displayed to the user is not always accurate. For instance, the Install button remains even after an application is installed. Also, I experienced a few error messages with Muon, the precise nature of which I forget now, but I do not think Muon is as reliable as Synaptic Package Manager. However, certainly Muon has more features, and bottomline, it works. I never found a case where Muon did not install (or uninstall) a program as told.

I noticed today that Linux Mint has the firewall icon accessible in System Settings | Network and Connectivity, but Kubuntu doesn't. I prefer Linux Mint's accessible firewall. I don't know why I should have to resort to the command line in Kubuntu in order to configure my firewall. Also present in Linux Mint's System Settings, but not in Kubuntu's, is the Partition Manager, found under the System Administration header. Little touches like that propelled Linux Mint up to #1 in Distro Watch.

KDE 4.10.2's default wallpaper seems pretty good, so I didn't change it, unlike last time. I wouldn't say the wallpaper is better than OpenSuse 12.3's, because it's not. Open Suse 12.3 has the best wallpaper of any Linux distro ever made in all of history, but that's faint praise for a distro.

Kubuntu Introduces More Color Schemes

I love dark backgrounds so much that I coded dark style sheets for my favorite news sites. Color schemes in Kubuntu 13.04 are much improved, especially for the dark side:


Kubuntu 13.04 has six new color schemes, including new dark backgrounds. My choice was Krita - dark.

Comparing my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop side-by-side with my Linux Mint Nadia KDE laptop with backported KDE 4.10.2, I find that Kubuntu 13.04 has six flavors of Krita, a superb scheme with competent dark flavors, whereas Linux Mint doesn't. For dark background fans, Linux Mint offers only Obsidian Coast and Zion (Reversed) schemes, which render some text invisible due to an unresolved black-on-black problem. What I wound up doing in Linux Mint Nadia was spending an hour customizing the Oxygen scheme to be what Krita - dark is out of the box. However, I expect Linux Mint 15 KDE, when released, will also have Krita. The reason Linux Mint Nadia didn't get Krita probably has to do with its KDE 4.9.x origin; backporting KDE 4.10.2 wasn't sufficient to install Krita.

Krita - dark is reason enough to prefer Kubuntu 13.04 above any operating system that does not have it.

Here's a shot of my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop as of now:

Customizing Kubuntu 13.04

There are a couple finishing touches I like to perform on every KDE system I install. One is to adjust the time and date in the lower right hand corner so that it supplies something useful to me. I want military time, none of this PM and AM nonsense. I also want the day of the week, followed by the month, the day of the month, and the year. Right now, all of that is in a tiny font, and I haven't yet found the option to increase the size to something more readable. I do not understand why the KDE developers do not display the date by default, because time has no meaning without a date.

April 29, 2013 Update:

The font parameters, including size, for the taskbar's time and date are found in System Settings | Application Appearance | Fonts, as shown here:


The font used for the time and date is not the taskbar font, but the small font. I think that the time and date is so important that it should have a font that is named "time and date", and that it should be in a class by itself. By increasing the small font from 9 to 12, I produced a legible time and date that can be read at a glance. I increased the taskbar font as well while I was at it. My desktop has 1680 x 1050 resolution, so there is no reason to use tiny fonts.

Adding an Off Button

The other innovation I like to add is an off button, which really is a no-brainer. Every OS should have one. To install an off button in KDE, open Konsole and enter the following command:

sudo chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown

Then create a new link on your desktop called "Off" and copy from the following screenshot:


The "application" being loaded is actually just a command-line program, shutdown.

The Language Barrier

While editing this post in Blogger, I notice that Firefox underlines many words as being misspelled because they deviate from the Commonwealth spelling. I am not sure whether this is related to Kubuntu's installation of language packs. All Ubuntu distros and even Linux Mint install the South African language pack by default, and Kubuntu also installs the GB language pack. I disabled these and installed the U.S. language pack, but the spellchecker remains foreign, underlining common words like "favorite" and "color" because they lack a superfluous vowel.


Unfortunately, adding the U.S. language pack does not fix Firefox's broken spellchecker.

Another KDE Gem: Okular

Unfortunately, for some reason, Krita was the default app in Firefox to print out .pdf files, which cost me about an hour one morning, because whatever its other merits, Krita does not print .pdf documents at the proper scale by default, and I was not in the mood to learn how to use a program I have never used before. Sometimes one simply needs to get things done.

I use my printer for one main purpose, to print out postage either from Ebay or directly from the United States Postal Service's web site. By doing so, one receives a discount of ~ 16%, saves fuel and time, and enjoys the convenience of staying at home. The USPS delivers online postage in .pdf format. In Linux, the application that works best for printing .pdf files is Okular, and it is extremely important that all Linux operating systems default to Okular for .pdf files, because to my knowledge, there is no better app than Okular for viewing and printing .pdf. I have used Okular extensively not just for printing but for searching through long and hairy .pdf files. Okular has proven extremely fast and has a very intuitive interface. Windows does not have a better app for searching .pdf files. Linux has the best app, and it is Okular. People that read .pdf files on a regular basis should erase Windows and install Linux in order to access Okular.

Ensure that Okular is the only app for viewing .pdf files in KDE:



I also advise adjusting the application preference in Firefox itself:

Esoteric Weirdness

Of interest only to fellow geeks, I triggered weird behavior in Kubuntu 13.04, booting up to this screen:



I cannot call this behavior a bug, because intuition led me to suspect my recent changes to fstab were the culprit, as indeed they were. I have gotten into the habit of optimizing every linux distro's fstab in the following manner:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=blahblah / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=blahblah none swap sw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=2G,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=384M,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/run tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=1G,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

I feel that Linux systems, by default, access the hard drive for rather insignificant reasons and behave as though we were still living in a world where memory was measured in kilo- rather than giga- bytes. I have four gigs in my system and I expect it to be used. Let's not run the hard drive ragged, because the hard drive is the bottleneck.

Kubuntu 13.04 does not like the last two lines above, the ones that change /var/lock and /var/run to tmpfs. Commenting out those lines eliminated the weird startup problem. I'm not alone in tmpfs'ing /var/lock and /var/run--I read about this in the ArchLinux wiki--but it is far from mainstream practice. I will never do so again, now that the potential for problems is clear. I discovered through further experimentation that the tmpfs for /tmp causes no problem, I think because it is closer to being mainstream practice now, what with Fedora having adopted the practice a version ago or so.

Conclusion: Kubuntu 13.04 is for Keeps

I am sticking with Kubuntu 13.04 for the foreseeable future on my desktop. It is better than Open Suse 12.3 because I know, with any Debian derivative, that printing will be a no-brainer, as printing should be in 2013, for all love. Kubuntu works out of the box with my wired network, requiring zero adjustments. And Kubuntu does not enroll the install dvd into the library of repositories like Open Suse does. Although I picked at a few things with Muon's package management, Muon seems better than Open Suse's package management, which gives really hairy and I think frequent error messages. Open Suse's biggest problem is that it does not have Debian behind it. Its second biggest problem is that they are preaching to the choir, to users that have used Suse since back in the day, and don't seem very interested in recruiting new users by making the system easier to use.

Comparing Kubuntu 13.04 with Linux Mint 12.10 KDE doesn't seem quite fair, because Linux Mint only has an older version available at present, but I will say that I didn't notice the lack of Mint. I don't miss the Mint menu, and I feel like I can work with Muon Package Manager. Mint always messes around with the Firefox search box, too, so using Kubuntu saved me about five or ten minutes not having to jump through hurdles to revert the search box to Google. I like the right-click options that Linux Mint adds to the file manager, the "Root Actions," which are missing in Kubuntu. Another way that Mint saves the end user time is that the devs are kind enough to install Firefox, VLC and the firewall by default, but like Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE still has the Kmail and Kwallet monsters lurking in the shadows. In the past, I did not have a good experience with Kwallet. For some odd reason, it forced me to enter my email password each and every time that I loaded Kmail. The reason that I use a mail reader in the first place is that I do not want to enter my password. Tweaking Kwallet's or Kmail's settings didn't help. My solution was to permanently uninstall Kmail and Kwallet, and that is the first thing I do every time I install any KDE distro. Overall, I would say that Kubuntu 13.04 is comparable to Linux Mint KDE, and given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Kubuntu, because it is released sooner and does not mess around with the Firefox search box. But the final verdict remains to be seen, because Linux Mint 15 KDE should be released later in 2013.

Kubuntu 13.04

With anticipation, I have been monitoring Distro Watch on a daily an hourly basis, awaiting the release of Ubuntu 13.04, and specifically its handsomer brother, Kubuntu 13.04, which has the elegant KDE desktop. No Gnome for me, thank you very much. I'll pass on Unity, as well. I suspect the lion's share of Ubuntu development since 12.10 has been squandered on Unity, which means nothing to me, but I have other reasons to want 13.04.

The latest development version of Wesnoth, my favorite game nowadays, won't run on my Linux Mint Nadia KDE without segfaulting, and nobody seems to know why. I expect Kubuntu 13.04 will be more compatible with the development version of the game. Also, although I've upgraded KDE to 4.10.2 on my desktop, various KDE apps remain at old versions, such as Ktorrent, and I expect 13.04 to have all the latest versions. If it doesn't have Ktorrent 2.3.1 by now, then that will be a serious demerit indeed. I'm torrenting the 64-bit version of Kubuntu 13.04 right now and aim to install it today.

My desktop is the only computer I plan to upgrade at this time. My laptop works great with Linux Mint Nadia KDE, and I compiled Ktorrent 2.3.1 myself from source and installed KDE 4.10.2 without a hitch, so there is no rationale in favor of overwriting such a perfect install with anything else. My htpc runs Linux Mint Nadia Xfce, which I've upgraded to Xfce 4.10.2 (weird how Xfce and KDE share the same version numbers). It runs well too, and I don't plan to touch it other than to install Linux kernel 3.9 when it comes out. I may even wait until a later edition of kernel 3.9, because it is rather cumbersome upgrading the kernel in a ubuntu-based distro--command-line all the way and much wgetting.

Faith Falters

As a friendly observer, I witness the disintegration of what used to be a fine thriving little church in my community. What strikes me is the lack of intelligence in the higher echelons, the district managers, so to speak. What blockheads they seem. What uninspiring specimens they install as preachers.

Jesus is not going to fix everything. If you want God to help you, help yourself. The trouble with churches has always been that they do not react in realtime but have a delayed reaction to problems due to the shackles around each ankle, one named Tradition and the other named Ignorance. Knowledge is not the serpent. Knowledge is the path to wisdom. Without knowledge, how do we know what is so? Some religionists assume they already know, due to having (mis-)read a book. Some preachers speak as though their audience were uneducated sharecroppers without a nickel to their names and no television, no Internet, no telephone; no way to find out contrary information. To recruit and retain the sophisticated, it is necessary that the preacher be sophisticated, not simple and not bandying about the same old discredited superstitions. Do not speak of what cannot be proven, but speak of what is known to each heart. Too many preachers seem like children. They do not know anything and one doesn't yearn to hear anything they might have to say. It would be better to select a person that knew nothing of the Bible, but had a good heart and knew how to speak, than some of the specimens from seminary, who seem to be guaranteed employment for life, rather than being selected upon personal merit.

Gaining a dozen new indigents is fine for filling out the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but losing a single family that is well-educated and well-connected is a loss that reverses the former gain altogether. For generations, churches have been losing the best and the brightest. Educated people do not go to church anymore. Churches have also been losing the young. I see no end to the trend of mindshare loss. Islam also is losing in the long term, retaining some due to the thread of a shared cultural identity in the face of an overwhelming Western culture, but that faith too is on the wane, and perhaps all others as well, due to the excellent accessibility of information in our times.

Knowledge will defeat faith. Faith I think had its uses and served well another age of Man, as did monarchy and feudalism. In my family tree, I observed there were many preachers as far back as the 1600s. My people used to be earnest believers even in the current generation, but they have all left their various denominations for various reasons. Most left because their churches were stodgy, unscientific, mean-spirited merchants of mumbo-jumbo. I left as a teenager and never looked back. The Church had no answers for me, only hypocrisy and mumbo-jumbo. The time to update and refresh religion was hundreds of years ago. There used to be a narrow window of opportunity. The time has passed when religion could change and accommodate modern man. Now religion will be discarded as an outmoded relic of the past. Philosophy must replace it.

The Three D's

Young people can say things like "We'll be best friends forever," which I said many a time. With age, one sees the three D's dispose of friends: difference, distance, and death. The best one can do is replace those that were lost with better ones and try not to wax nostalgic over the past.

Clonezilla Works With Windows 7

I used Clonezilla again last night to clone my Windows 7 hard drive. It is prudent to keep a clone of Windows, because that operating system takes an enormous amount of time to install and configure. A conservative estimate would be twenty hours in total. I don't want to lose another twenty hours due to hard drive failure or malware infection, so Clonezilla gave me peace of mind by creating a bootable backup. There is no cloning feature built-in to Windows 7, and the backup feature I think is a joke. I don't work with backups, I work with clones. A clone is a byte-for-byte copy of a hard drive. If a drive won't boot, it's not a clone. A clone can be popped right into a computer with a failing hard drive and make it whole again in less than one minute. A clone is what the end user wants and needs. The end user is always right.

I doubt whether a clone could be used long-term to pirate Windows 7, because the operating system binds itself to the motherboard and cpu. Also, Windows phones home on a regular basis to confer with Microsoft headquarters and tell if the user is doing something naughty. My interest is not in piracy, because quite frankly I don't want Windows on any of my other computers--yuck, what a thought. I just need it on one computer to run two specific applications that are not available in Linux, ACDSee and Call Clerk. All the other computers are going to be running a flavor of Linux Mint Nadia, either KDE or Xfce.