Maybe I ought to post random and interesting stuff I’ve bumped into in the software world.
Since my absence, I’ve come back with a need to update and sometimes recompile a whole lot of software. The 64-bit experience.. well.. isn’t even a milestone apparently.
Everything I’m turning to is already 64-bit ready. There was one program so far which I needed to do some thinking to get it to work.. and even that wasn’t so hard.
It involved -fPIC, and the error with make even told me how to fix it. Damn, finally error messages are getting around to giving solutions.
for i in *.c; do echo $i; gcc -fPIC -I. -I.. -O2 -Wall -pedantic -c $i ; done
Pragha (0.7.1.1) is a neat Gtk audio player / library manager thing.
Unfortunately, it is completely unusable for me because every time I change a tag in an item in its library, it refreshes the whole library *and* it loses my place in the sidebar. If/when this gets fixed, I think this could be my main everyday player, replacing audacious2 and occasionally cplay.
cplay, if you didn’t know, is one of the best commandline players out there. Written in Python and using ncurses, it’s extremely obvious to use. I could spend some time reviewing commandline players and I probably will for Oldschool Linux. Originally at https://web.archive.org/web/20080223183007/http://mask.tf.hut.fi:80/~flu/hacks/cplay/ but it’s dead, and archived at https://github.com/holizz/cplay/ with various other light efforts out there to fold in the misc. patches that are floating about.
If ncurses wasn’t a horror to use, I would have written my own interface to a headless audacious2 years ago.
Music on Console (moc, 2.5.0-alpha4) had a HELLISH amount of dependencies to track down and install. After all that, it was quite a nice program once I got it working.
I didn’t bother making a post about compiling this one since I’m not really much of a fan of it, but I did save some notes and I can post something up in the future if I’m asked to do so.
All in all, I liked it but I found the blue background reminiscent of .. oh hell I can’t even remember it’s been so many years. Some environment that did use DOS and you had a red border and a blue background when logged in as the admin. Aah, it was Novell Netware.. .. and that one brings back fond memories of Snipes and here’s a YouTube video that even shows the blue background I’m talking about:
[2014-07-26 – this bit seems to have gone missing when porting from wordpress.org]
I had some obnoxious issues getting my Unicode VGA font to work.. and in the end I had to go back to xterm to use the non-unicode one (from an early dosemu). I did notice that there are some new technologies for dealing with this sort of issue, including a wrapper to let me use the original font. Maybe I’ll explore that some time later.
Claws Mail (3.7.3) was trivial to compile from source, and I already posted an entry on that. I haven’t explored plugins, like the barely-adequate RSSyl plugin which I do need to get going or I’ll switch to some other client like Canto or maybe even or sup if it weren’t so obnoxiously complicated and hacker-centric.
I got WeeChat 0.3.0 running, and I can be found on IRC again. They made more drastic changes in this release than I thought they would, and I needed to rediscover the way to do all sorts of things. Once again, documentation could have been done better in this case, because it was non-obvious on how I would change hotkeys.
All the plugins have been outdated now that their internal engine has been changed, but there’s still a good list to go through. For unknown reasons I can’t get Python compiled in.. which is a complete pain since the good plugins will be in Python.
GPicView (0.2.1) rocks. It was trivial to compile. I still wish I could rename a file easily from within it.. argh.
Opera (10.10) was in the Unity Linux repository, and I fiddled with it after learning that it might be possible to change its accesskeys. I was wrong. I want to have simple alt-key accesskeys like I’m able to hack into the configuration of Firefox. This isn’t even remotely possible.
https://web.archive.org/*/www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/
Opera Dragonfly looks interesting for developers.
UNIX 10.50 (Evenes) work in progress
Google has become so convoluted and Evil that they have had to spin off a department to deal with their proprietary nature: Data Liberation (blog). Three thumbs up on that, but I don’t care so much now that I’m stepping away from Google and everything it has.
Google is about as unsettling as the whole AOL + Time Warner thing. I always understood that a content producer and a content distributor could not go to bed. Isn’t that explicitly illegal in US law? Seriously.. Google does searching, advertising, and data analysis for that advertising. Then they give email and various other apps which also get them additional information. Now there’s Google Chrome (see Chromium), a web browser. Seriously.. should I also get a Google Computer and a Google ISP? Maybe I can get Google Glasses and have popup advertising right there to make it simple.
I wonder how Google will make the browser able to FORCE “legitimate” popup advertising, with no ad blocking possible. I guess they’d also need to have some ad-distribution detection functionality to make sure that people aren’t using a proxy to ban certain streams of data. Maybe web pages will begin to have some sort of crc-like hash that’s sent, so that the received and viewed data is what the provider expects. That would be a sort of DRM for the web. This is the kind of shit corporations think of.
/rant
Oh, and I noticed that when searching for “Google Corporate Website”, their URL also passed some data along with the URL. I thought Google already got caught with its pants down on special search results tracking like that.. and now it seems to be selective. Fun.
