Planet Open Clip Art Library

How To Cheat at Robo Defense on Android

2009-11-21T04:53:34+00:00

So far, there's only one game on my Samsung Moment that I considered worth paying for. I paid $2.99 to get the full version of Lupis Labs' Robo Defense.

It's a tower defense game with lots of degrees of difficulty, different maps, and you can spend points earned in the games to buy upgrades like increasing the speed of fire of your rocket launchers or increasing the strength of your guns. You play again and again, gradually beefing up your strength so you can complete more and more difficult levels.

But what if you want to get your fire rates or bullet strength up to massive levels without having to spend all that time accumulating the necessary points? I Googled for cheat codes, but all I found were game sites saying they didn't have any yet.

I'm not an Android developer, but I had seen a file on my microSD card with the filename "robo_defense_full.bak". I decided to look at the guts to see if it could be used. Loading it up in a plain text editor showed some odd characters. I wasn't sure what it all meant. So I opened it up in a hex editor (using HexFiend for Mac).

Of course, the "Edit this file at your own risk!" at the beginning was fun, but I decided to poke around. as I did, I noticed that all of the upgrades were listed (as Rewards). On the line marked 456 on the screenshot above, you'll see an entry start: ADReward:Faster Antiair Reloadw.........t. But if you look at the hexadecimal information to the left, those dots are represented as 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 16. The number 16 in hexadecimal is 22 in decimal, which is the level my Faster Antiair Reload was at. As I went through the file, the pattern was the name of the reward, then the 8 dots represented by 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00, then a hex code with the level I was at.

I made a backup copy of the file, just in case I screwed things up, then I changed a number of my levels, randomly picking levels between 55 and 99. I saved the file and then uploaded it to my microSD card, replacing the original. I unmounted the card and ran the game. No dice.

I deleted the game and its internal data files, then downloaded it again from the Android store (using the "my downloads" option on the menu). No dice.

So I tried wiping the file from my SD card and deleting the game, then redownloading the game and seeing if I could get it to start from zero. That worked and it created a new robo_defense_full.bak file. I erased that and replaced it with my hacked version.

When I started the game again, I had bullets at level 154, explosives at 104, antiair reload at 119, etc. I could basically play level 80 with a couple of rocket launchers and a couple of antiair guns because I pretty much killed everything the moment it came on screen. Sadly, now that there was no challenge, the ability to win the game with a handful of towers got old fast. The game I'd spent hours and hours playing was now a bore.

So, if you're bound and determined to cheat, I've just told you how. But hopefully, you'll view this account as a cautionary tale and choose not to do it.

Digital painting

2009-11-20T11:15:00+00:00

When Mo was enthusiastic about tablet improvements in Fedora 12, this made me dust-off my own device, but only a few days later when Kaio pointed to the small and awesome MyPaint I got hooked, liking a lot how it feels like real drawing/painting.

And my first drawing with it, my first digital painting ever, is something I think is not entirely bad:

Speaking about graphic applications, I found somewhat funny (and somewhat sad) to see how Ubuntu is again following Fedora's footsteps, this time by removing GIMP, with a similar line of reasoning ("we" wanted to free space on the Desktop Spin for more apps and ended with a 650MB .iso and 50MB is unused space). At least they got Slashdot headlines with this move and somewhat compensated our own negative PackageKit headlines (wait a bit to see the headlines when they will follow with the PackageKit thing too).

PS: thumbs-up for doing at last (post-release) the right thing with PackageKit in F12.

Kinda like Fedora

2009-11-19T17:44:00+00:00

I admit it, I'm a little jealous of the Fedora feature of being able to install signed packages without a password prompt. I set out to get close on Ubuntu. The way that you edit the PolicyKit practices towards package install is to edit the file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/. If you look at the action for "Install packages" you can change <allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> to <allow_active>yes</allow_active>. Then software center works as expected.

Is there such thing as bad publicity?

2009-11-19T09:01:00+00:00

I know there is a famous quote saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity and one day after the release the news about PackageKit allowing unprivileged users to install packages without root permission made a larger number of [negative] comments than the release announcement itself on such sites as LWN or Slashdot, which I am not convinced is a good thing for publicity.

But surely I am glad I got to keep my public presentations about F12 in advance last week, so I didn't get laughed-out of the presentation for such a "feature", for which I wouldn't know how or care to defend.

Now I promise, my next post will be on a more positive note about the release!

Thusnelda

2009-11-18T14:08:00+00:00

Among the large number of new features in Fedora 12 there is Thusnelda, the new and improved version of the Theora encoder, which is supposed to bring either better-looking videos or smaller files at the same quality.

As the Theora videos I create are mostly screencasts made with gtk-RecordMyDesktop (image quality from Istanbul is unacceptably low), I have no idea how I can take advantage of any of those optimizations (probably one of them is active by default, without any control from me).

But what I can tell, is a decrease in quality: screencasts recorded now are jumpy, the image freezes for a bit, then jump forward, skipping some important frames. No ideea if this is caused by the aplication, libtheora, X.org, video drivers or something else.

Ideas?

Resize BootCamp Partitions using CampTune Freeware

2009-11-17T14:33:14+00:00

After realizing I hadn't given my BootCamp partition enough room on my new humongo-drive (upgraded from 120gb 5400 RPM to 320gb 7200 RPM), I went looking for a way to add a few gigs to it. The solutions were wide and varied. Most had to do with cloning the partition's contents, killing the partition, making a new one with Boot Camp, stopping the Windows install, and then restoring the old Windows install.

That was a lot of work and a lot of hassle.

Then I found someone recommending CampTune. It's a free download and "pre-release" but it works fine. It's a working Linux ISO file you can download and burn to a CD-ROM with your favorite disc creator package (or Disk Utility).

Once it's burned, hop into System Settings, choose the "Startup Disk" option, and set your machine to boot from CD-ROM next time. Boot from the CD you burned and you'll go into CampTune, which has a very simple interface for changing the respective sizes of your Mac and BootCamp partitions.

When you're done, everything should work as normal, although if you created a VM in Parallels or VMWare to use your Bootcamp partition inside OS X, you may need to recreate the VM.

That's it. Pretty simple, huh?

Don't be scared off by the "pre-release" status. It's been that way for over a year now and I think Paragon just decided the market for people wanting to resize their BootCamp partition wasn't big enough to charge for it after all, so they just left a good release candidate up as the free download and moved on to other projects. It worked well for me.

As always, don't mess with the internal structure of your hard drive without having made backups first.

Good luck! Have fun!

Beer 12

2009-11-17T09:02:00+00:00

Fedora 12, Beer, Today, 18:30, La Berbecu, Bucharest, reservation for "Adrian"... 'nuff said

Enough with the previews, let's get to the real thing

2009-11-16T13:36:00+00:00

Even if the release counter still says "Fedora 12 Constantine arriving in 2 days" (one day and a couple of hours by now), we already launched F12 in Romania, taking advantage by the invitations to speak at a couple of local events.

Now the photos are up in the gallery: those from the RLUG meet are a few and more serious, I was speaking and ave played more conservatively with my camera:

Then it was more relaxed to the Firefox anniversary, where the audience was formed mostly by students and we had Mozilla sponsored pizzas, beers and cake:

The slides are available for download in PDF.

Are you generative than consumptive in your field?

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

Anselm just posted what appears to be a random thought on twitter: Are you more generative than consumptive in your particular field? ... Create more than you consume? In open source, I often rephrase this question as "Are you a source, or a sink?" There are many people in the community who contribute ...

WSGI + Basic Auth

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

I use the logged_in_or_basicauth snippet for a lot of my work, and had had some problems with it since I started using mod_wsgi in place of mod_python. Thanks to this post, I now know why my basic auth under mod_wsgi isn't working: lack of WSGIPassAuthorization On in my Apache config. Thanks ...

PowerPoint, in a sentence

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

PowerPoint is a way to make gibberish look important.-- my 12 year old daughter, Alicia

MrSID SDK Improvements

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

For a long time, I avoided MrSID like the plague. After trying to do *anything* useful with it, I finally gave up; the requirement for old versions of gcc, non-working on 64bit, etc. really gave me a negative impression of the SDK for MrSID reading. This was especially painful when ...

Code Sprint: Day 3

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

Yesterday, I got to sit down and do some real performance testing with the MapServer folks. After rebuilding a local copy of the Boston Freemap on my laptop, I was able to share it with Paul, who ran it through Shark to find out where the performance killers are. The ...

Toronto Code Sprint: Day 2

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

Day 2 of the code sprint seemed to be much more productive. With much of the planning done yesterday, today groups were able to sit down and get to work. Today, I accomplished two significant tasks: Setting up the new OSGeo Gallery, which is set to act as a repository for demos ...

Toronto Code Sprint: Day 1

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

I'm here at the OSGeo Code Sprint in Toronto, where more than 20 OSGeo hackers have gathered to work on all things OSGeo -- or at least MapServer, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. For those who might not know, a code sprint is an event designed to gather a number of people working ...

Geodata Cost Recovery: Eaton County

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

I was pointed out to Eaton County's GIS Data Prices last night, and all I can say is how disappointed I am that people can still feel that this is an appropriate way to fleece their taxpayers. The data is collected, reproduction costs for the data are probably in the ...

Yahoo! Maps APIs, aka ‘grr, argh!’

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

I have a love/hate relationship with Yahoo!'s mapping API. It's lovely that Yahoo! believes, unlike Google and other mapping providers, that their satellite data is a suitable base layer to use for derivation of vectors. This openness really is good to see -- they win big points from me in ...

Making a Big OSM Map

2009-11-14T21:00:10+00:00

Mapnik is a great tool. It allows for all kinds of neat toys to happen, and the recent work in SVN has really opened up the possibility that Mapnik might be a potential solution for a rendering engine in a lot of areas that it has previously left alone. (Support ...

Cost of War

2009-11-14T13:36:22+00:00

What if, invested that in education for the more than 60% youth under 20 years old in the arab world…

#costOfWarTotal { text-align: center; width: 270px; font-weight: bold; } #costOfWarTotal_Total { font-size: 1.3em; font-weight: bold; color: #990000; } #costOfWarTotal_Link { font-size: .7em; }

Open Letter To Costco: Enough Italian Salami Already

2009-11-14T08:52:24+00:00

I shop at Costco. You can't beat their prices on diapers, cheese, and some other things my family uses a lot of. It's where we bought my sons matching outfits earlier today (to my great combination of dismay and glee). But there have been two sore disappointments with the Costco in Everett, Washington.

You never know when they'll have Triscuits (my wife's favorite cracker). Sometimes they do, most times not, and this drives us into the arms of WalMart because they have the best prices on Triscuits for normal consumer size packaging.

In 6 years, they haven't carried a decent brand of salami that didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth. I'm just not a fan of Italian salami and they seem bound and determined to keep expanding their selection of Italian lunch meats and Italian-branded lunch meats like turkey breast and pastrami from Columbus meats.

Why is it that they have like 8 types of Italian salami in the Everett Costco, but nothing simple and domestic? I get the worst aftertaste from Italian salami. I'd kill for them to simply carry Oscar Mayer hard salami or the same hard salami I can get in the deli case at Safeway.

I understand that products come and go, but on my last visit, in the premium lunch meat aisle there were the Kirkland lunch meats and then all the other lunch meat and salami were Italian or from Italian meats companies. Even their pastrami and turley breast were from Columbus. What gives?

I love Costco. My dad got me a membership when I went off to college 23 years ago and I've been a member ever since. But this obsessions with Italian meats in the deli section has got to stop. Give us some good old, plain old salami. No fancy imported stuff. I'd love some kosher chubs I could hang to dry in my kitchen, but failing that, just something along the lines of simple, domestic hard salami like Oscar Mayer.

Thanks Costco!

Kindergarden drawing

2009-11-13T12:44:00+00:00

It started today when Kushal told us in #fedora-art about his brand new Wacom tabled and how he want to learn to use it. Obviously, his first drawing was a simple house, drawn in the most traditional kindergarden style. Fun!

Not being able to resist, I cleaned the dust on my old tablet, plugged it in, and drawn my own naive house:

Then, we took the challenge to tatica, who was also on the channel, so she made one too - they should put they drawings online any time now...

Now here is the thing: we know Fedora 12 rocks on tablets, so we have a meme for harmless Friday fun, all of you in the community having a tablet, plug it in, start GIMP and draw a kindergarden style house and post it (at least Mo and Kaio are tablet owners, so I count os some follow-ups).

Syncing iTunes & Samsung Moment on Mac

2009-11-10T21:30:41+00:00

I recently posted my solution to connect the Samsung Moment to a Mac laptop using Snow Leopard via USB. Once that was done, the question was how to get my iTunes music and playlists from my MacBook Pro to my Samsung Moment.

I use iTunes to manage my music collection, both stuff purchased from iTunes as well as my older MP3 rips from CD and MP3s I've purchased or received free from Amazon.com. A while back, iTunes moved to a DRM free format for most new purchases and you could upgrade older purchases for 30 cents a song. The Moment will play the DRM free AAC format (M4A) from iTunes. But there's one problem, the built-in music player on the Moment, as well as two others I tried, will not recognize the information tags in the M4A format. Fear not, though...

CONVERTING ITUNES M4A TO MP3

Go to the Preferences pane for iTunes. In the "General" page (main page), go to the section that lets you specify what to do when you insert a CD. There, it has a button for "Import Settings". The default is iTunes AAC format, but you can set it to MP3. Once you've done that (you can also specify a variety of bitrates and other info), you can go into your music library, right-click on any song that's listed as "Purchased AAC" format ("Protected AAC" still has DRM), and convert it to MP3. You can highlight a large number of songs and perform this right-click action to batch convert them.

After this, I found that the three Android music players (the built-in one, MixZing, and one I can't recall) I tried would not read ID3 v2.x tags as iTunes wrote them. I ended up deciding to use MixZing because it handled the index display of videos as well as music and was better than the "Gallery" built-in video player that just shows you icons with no titles.

To import my music and my iTunes playlists, I found that DoubleTwist worked very well. It recognized my Samsung Moment and imported my iTunes Playlists with ease. It generated .m3u playlist format lists that the Samsung could understand, and dragging the playlist to the Samsung in the program took care of importing the playlist and all the associated music files.

A Playlist Caveat

If you want to import existing playlists, you're going to have to update them with any files you converted, otherwise they'll still sync the m4a version of the song to your phone. This isn't terrible. It still plays. It just comes up as "Unknown Artist" from "Unknown Album" with "Unknown Title". So if you're just shuffling your playlists and never look at the song info, who cares? if you want to know the name of the song/artist that's playing or play a specific song, then you need to convert the songs and fix up the playlists.

Two downsides. One, it will not convert/unprotect videos from iTunes that have DRM. So, for example, the free episodes I got of "Handy Manny" and "WordWorld" on iTunes won't play on my phone without some additional and illegal massaging. On the other hand, the music videos that came with the "Madagascar 2" soundtrack got upgraded to DRM-Free when I did the big batch of upgrades. So the will.i.am "I Like to Move It" music video transferred over and plays beautifully on the Moment's AMOLED screen.

Second downside is the way it handles podcasts. Rather than separating them out, they're incorporated into the music catalog. So, my "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" audio podcasts are found under the album of the same name with "NPR" as the artist. As for my "Sesame Street" video podcasts (for my 4-year-old), they only come up in the "Movies" section under the general "iTunes" heading. They're not in the "Movies" or "TV Shows" lists, so they can be a little hard to find.

On an upside note, if you give a YouTube video URL to DoubleTwist, it will download the Flash .flv file of the YouTube video to your hard drive. Putting the files on your Moment can take a while, though, because it re-encodes the videos into an MP4 format before transferring them. Since the Moment works with YouTube, this is only valuable for being able to watch YouTube videos when you don't have an internet connection (like when you're on a plane) or you're in a poor coverage area. I'd love to know if any of you have suggestions for a quicker method for downloading and converting YouTube videos, or a faster .flv to mp4 conversion method.

It also seems to do the conversion on the fly, so if you're rotating videos in and out and back in again, you may want to use a separate converter to do a permanent conversion from the Flash .flv file format to one your Moment can play. I tried transcoding with VLC and that was difficult to produce a video VLC could play back, much less my Samsung Moment. Quicktime Player's "Save For Web" option in the file menu worked very well. I selected the "save for iPhone" option and it created a good quality m4v file that my Moment would play.

I also copied over some other videos I had in other formats (collected over the years) directly to the card. I was able to play the .wmv and .avi format videos, but not the .mpg. Of course, these formats can have various underlying codecs, so don't take that as a blanket statement, but it's a decent place to start. Of course, if videos won't play on your Moment, but will play in Quicktime, you should be able to use the "Save For Web" function to convert them to a format your Moment will handle.

Hope this information helps you. Cheers!

This time for sure, we are going on air

2009-11-10T11:05:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago I made noise about our series about Linux/FLOSS airing on the national television, but to much disappointment it was unintentional false news. Today I received apologies (which in turn I return to my mislead readers) and a confirmation: it will be diffused this week, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 17:00, in fact they will have two segments about us.

Too bad the date and time is totally inconvenient for me, struggling between day job and a Fedora 12 presentation. After the first failure I am ashamed to ask people to record the show again...

Fedora 12 previews

2009-11-10T09:41:00+00:00

I know the parties are supposed to take place after the event, but this time we got the opportunity to talk about Fedora in general and the goodies in Fedora 12 in particular at a couple of events taking place a few days in advance of the general availability, but the distro is "gold", we are close enough, so will go for it, together with Adrian.

First, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 19:00 we are invited to keep a short (less than 30 minutes) presentation at the first RLUG meeting (this is supposed to become a tradition and I am glad we are one of the openers). Here the audience will be comprised of a highly experienced crowd, so I look forward to a challenging experience.

Then Saturday 14 November 2009 at 14:00, together with friends from the local openSUSE community, who also have a launch, we are guests at a larger Firefox 5 years anniversary, event sponsored by Mozilla. Here we will also have a short presentation and will take advantage of Alex's presence, who is a key contributors in both Fedora and Mozilla local communities.

Is still early for this, so this is not decided yet, but we may also have a beer meeting in the very release day (we geeks are immune to the AH1-N1 hysteria which conquered the city :D). More details about that to be announced at a later date.

Brown explosion

2009-11-09T14:09:00+00:00

I didn't turn Ubuntu overnight, I am the same blue zealot at the core, but I find nothing short of amazing those earthly warm tones of the autumn[*].

[*] I know some people not happy with their distro being brown and prefer Fedora only for its color (yeah, really!), but this is wrong, there are not "good" or "bad" colors, its about how are you using them, you can make bland or beautiful images with any color.

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

2009-11-09T11:20:00+00:00

The running joke in our local community is that not officially being an Ambassador but doing a lot of Ambassador work I should become one, but I refuse to apply for the title - I guess this makes me a half-Ambassador :p Still, the meme is not limited to that, working also for users, so I can join in:

name: Nicu Buculei
nick: nicubunu
IRC channels: #fedora-art, #fedora-design, #fedora-ro
location: Bucharest, Romania

And trying to add to the meme, the most awesome thing I learned today about our community: one of the members of our local (Romanian) community as a day job as a violin player in the Bucharest Philharmonic. How cool is that? I love this diversity and looking forward at chatting and drinking beers.

This is a small world

2009-11-03T10:28:00+00:00

This morning when going to work I somehow noticed (I usually don't look for such things) this small poster glued on the wall of a building close to my office (less than 50 meters away):

Noting out of the extraordinary, some small firm advertising for pet services, but what drew my attention was the drawing in the top-right corner with a dog head. It was looking familiar, as it is one of my drawings published at the Open Clip Art Library and it made my day!

I made it years ago, exercising original drawing made with the mouse, so the result is not great, but I submitted it to the library anyway, as I do with all my drawings which are not made for a specific project. And I found awesome how a little graphic contributed to an international project found its way back to a few meters away of me. Either the world is very small or what we are doing is really useful for the people.

Now to be honest, I can't say for sure if the image is taken from openclipart.org, from my own website, where the images are also available, or from one of the many other websites redistributing, grace to the PD dedication, the openclipart.org content. But this is irrelevant, the goal was achieved.

PS: is not wise to base your company logo on Public Domain clipart, but for very small companies this is not a real problem, they don't have real branding.

StatusNet FollowUp Press

2009-11-02T19:24:37+00:00

What a hyperactive last few weeks! Life keeps accelerating it seems. If you missed this press, a couple of great posts about community advising I’m doing with Status.Net. ReadWriteWeb wrote:

The news is significant as it reflects the interest in open-source alternatives to the proprietary microblogging services that currently dominate the market in the consumer and enterprise communities.

Also, please read the big news about Status.Net closing another round of investment which allows for myself, Brion, Evan and more all work on such a great project.

Clip Art of the Month: Holiday images

2009-11-02T14:28:24+00:00

November 2009 Clip Art of the Month salutes the Holiday Season!

Businesses shut down. Productivity slows to a halt. Shopping malls are so full of people they’re bursting at the seems. These are just some of the ideas brought to mind as the end of the year approaches and a new Holiday Season is upon us.

A source of stress, at times, the Holidays can also be a time of togetherness and unity for people. Clip art images by liftarn (above) and bloodsong (below) beautifully demonstrate how simple and effective imagery can articulate these same feelings.

Vector graphics have also been stylistically implemented by mcol’s Christmas tree in the spirit of the Holiday Season.

The Open Clip Art Library is always evolving and welcomes contributions from everyone around the world.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Autumn bokeh

2009-11-02T12:41:00+00:00

If there is one word to describe the Fedora 12 wallpaper is "bokeh", the miriad of circles of light (and it was even stronger in early iterations), so with this in mind, no wonder I remembered the wallpaper when shooting a beautiful autumn bokeh, even if the composition and tones were entirely different.

Samsung Moment to MacBook USB Connection Problem Solved

2009-11-02T07:29:30+00:00

I posted about my difficulties connecting my Samsung Moment to my Mac laptop. If you want to, you can read those trials and tribulations.

If you just want the solution...

After looking for drivers, doing various experiments, and getting feedback from others with the same problem, I just hunted for any and all settings having to do with USB and one finally worked. It may not be perfect, but this seems to help.

Go into Settings -> Applications -> Development on your phone's main menu.

Turn on USB debugging ("Debug mode when USB is connected"). It will recognize that a USB connection now exists.

A widget will pop up on your Mac saying it's recognized a network device and will want to install the phone as a modem. Don't worry about it. It's a red herring. I never configured that, never connected that.

Go into "Notifications" from the phone's main menu and you'll see a notification under "Ongoing" that says "USB Connected (select to copy files to/from your computer)". Touch it.

You'll get a dialogue with the title "USB Connected" and the text "You have connected your phone to your computer via USB. Select 'Mount' if you want to copy files between your computer and your phone's SD card." It offers options of "Mount" and "Don't Mount". Touch "Mount".

A removeable drive will appear in Finder called "No Name". That's your Micro SD card and you can begin copying files. You'll need to unmount the card for applications on the phone to have access to it. I created a folder called "Music" in the DCIM folder, put a couple of MP3s in there and I'm listening to them now.

Don't know if this will work with Snow Leopard's built-in sync program or third party sync programs, but I'm happily able to move media back and forth which is HUGE for me.

Samsung Moment and MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard)

2009-10-31T00:48:46+00:00

I got my Samsung Moment this afternoon and have been enjoying exploring it. I finally got around to connecting it to my laptop via the included mini-USB cable. While it is getting current via the connection and shows it's charging, it is not, OTOH, seeming to get data. My laptop doesn't see the phone and the phone is not displaying the USB icon to indicate that it's connected to a computer via USB.

I'll be researching this and trying to figure out how to get my Android phone and Mac laptop to see each other. In the meantime, I figured I'd set a placeholder blog post now so it can get indexed into the search engines. Perhaps if anyone else finds a solution before I do, they'll stumble upon this page and leave a comment with some useful information.

Update: The Next Evening:

If you read the comments below, you'll see some of the things I tried. A USB mounting program still required the phone to recognize that a USB connection existed, which it didn't.

I hooked it to a WinXP laptop and got the two to see each other without a problem, transferred some files. So it's a problem with the Mac or some miscommunication with the Mac.

The image above is a screen cap of my system profiler app. It shows that my Macbook Pro is seeing the phone, identified as SAMSUNG_Android, but the phone isn't seeing the machine. I've rebooted the phone with the machine connected to it. I've rebooted the machine with the phone connected to it. Still I can't get the phone to recognize that it's connected to a computer.

It's definitely getting current via the connection. I charged it from 60% to full via the USB connection to my Mac.

I've posted a query to the community forums at Sprint's site. We'll see if we get a a response.

Update: Sunday Morning:

The thread over at the Sprint forums has delivered in part. We've determined it's not the Mac hardware because other respondents in the thread have been able to pair it up with Windows and Linux running in virtual machines on their MacBook Pro laptops. So there's some incompatibility occurring with Android and Snow Leopard.

So the question is whether the phone's software needs to be patched, whether Snow Leopard needs to be patched, or if (as I'm hoping), there's a simple config change you can make on OS X that will solve the problem. We'll see.

Update: Sunday Night:

SOLVED! I was going deep through the Moment's menus and found a kludge/workaround that is at least getting the phone to recognize a connection exists and giving me the external drive functionality so I can transfer files back and forth through the USB connection without having to pull the battery, pull the Micro SD card, and plug the card into a reader/adapter.

How to Connect your Samsung Moment to your Mac

Recipe: Tater Tot Casserole

2009-10-30T16:16:17+00:00

My son has been disappointed recently because I have decided to boycott Taco Time. Think of it as if you created a Mexican restaurant and applied a Northwestern Scandinavian sensibility to its food. We're not talking Lutefisk tacos, but the food is just sort of boring. That's not why I'm boycotting it though. I'm boycotting it because their drive through is the slowest I've ever encountered, and despite the extra time, they have a tendency to get my order wrong. Last time, they gave me a chicken taco salad instead of a beef taco salad, and their chicken is disgusting. It tastes like it's warmed-over canned chicken and it's just terrible. I'm just done with them.

The one thing was, instead of potato chunks (like Taco Bell) or french fries (like just about everywhere else), they served tater tots (calling them "Mexi Fries"), and my older boy loved to get a kid-size quesadilla and tater tots from them. Since he could no longer have Taco Time tater tots, I thought I'd console him by trying my hand at a recipe I'd only heard of in hushed whispers, a dish that can drive a cardiologist to acts of violence... Tater Tot Casserole. It's the holy grail of fat and starch, and I was pretty sure my kid would love it.

Here are the components:

Equipment:

2.5 quart covered casserole dish
mixing bowl
spoon

Ingredients:

2 lb. bag of frozen tater tots
10 ounce can of condensed cream of potato soup
16 ounce tub of sour cream
6 oz can of french fried onions
2 cups of shredded cheese (packed)
3 bun length hotdogs
1 tablespoon canola oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/2 teaspoon onion powder

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Put the oil in the casserole dish and use a paper towel to spread it around the bottom and sides of the dish.

Quarter the hotdogs lengthwise and dice into 1/4 inch bits.

In a mixing bowl, combine the sour cream, soup, half the cheese, half the fried onions, the salt, the pepper, the onion powder, the rosemary, and the hotdog bits.

Create a single layer of tater tots in the bottom of the casserole, laying them lengthwise, and try to fit in as many as you can. Spoon the sour cream mixture over that, creating a fairly even layer.

Cover the sour cream layer with the remaining tots and press them in gently. Cover the tots with the remaining cheese in an even layer. Cover the cheese with the remaining french fried onions in an even layer.

Cover the casserole with its lid and put it in the oven for 1 hour. After 1 hour, remove the lid and let bake for another 10 or so minutes to gently brown the french fried onions on top.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, then serve. It's best if you mash all the bits together once it's on the plate so all the flavors get distributed around. It also stands up well to reheating in the microwave.

Enjoy!

UNetbootWHAT?

2009-10-30T11:57:00+00:00

A friend of mine is using his free time to teach about Linux and FLOSS at a school - he managed to convince the school to do this on Saturdays.

Recently he did an interesting experiment with the kids: got bootable images for a number of distros and they put those on LiveUSB media and tried to boot and play with them. Unexpectedly, only Ubuntu worked and everything else failed to start, including Fedora 12 Beta, so their conclusion was "the school computer only support Ubuntu".

I was shocked to learn this, I had terrible pains with F11, which failed for every install I tried due to the Anaconda storage rewrite, but in my experience F12 was rock solid from this point of view.

But soon I identified what I believe to be the root of the problem, they used UNetbootin to write the live USB media, a tool which is supposed to work with a large very number of distros. I have no idea if Fedora 12 failed to boot because the media was written with a tool not updated for our new hybrid images or due to general suckiness of the tool, but I was really amused to read on UNetbootin web page (emphasis mine):

"Requirements: Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, or Linux. If you are having trouble with the Linux version, try the Windows version, it usually works better."

Hint for my friend Tibi: next time use "dd" on Linux. It will work better (at least for Fedora).

Request for help with Transmageddon

2009-10-29T11:25:51+00:00

One task I been trying quite a few times with Transmageddon is to port it from libglade to gtkbuilder. So far I have always failed for some reason or the other. A big part of it is that I have tons of examples out there for how things are done with libglade, but not so much for gtkbuilder yet.

That said I am also convinced that someone with the right skills could do the port in about 30 minutes or so. Which is the reason for this blog post. Is there anyone out there who would be willing to cook up a patch for me to port Transmageddon to gtkbuilder? (Its written in Python). If so please grab either the latest release or check out git master from GNOME git.

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Update: Multiple patches received, much appreciated. I will use weekend to try to merge

WWGZ Oct 2009 – Jia Junpeng your mother’s calling you to go to WWGZ

2009-10-28T20:16:40+00:00

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

WWGZ Oct 2009 – Jia Junpeng your mother’s calling you to go to WWGZ, originally uploaded by adeh.

Cranking in China on big things! I found at the shanzhai market a stack of stickers used to make knock-off products and had fun converting my phones and other people’s electronics to other devices today.

Web Wednesday Guangzhou massive fun, great work to http://kudelabs.com for great event organizing and more!

Nasty Old People – a great CC-Licensed Feature Film

2009-10-28T14:04:26+00:00

I just downloaded and watched the new CC-Licensed Swedish full length feature film (Nasty old people) and was amazed by the charm and passion of it, you can legally download here.

please consider supporting the producer and the movie http://nastyoldpeople.org

The story of Mette:

Member of a neo-Nazi gang, her day job is to take care of four crazy old people that all are just waiting to die. Her life becomes a journey into a burlesque fairytale, where the rules of the game are created by Mette herself. Mette is indifferent about her way of life, until she one night assaults a man, kicking him senseless. Waking up the day after, she realizes that something is wrong, and in company with the her crazy oldies she longs for respect and love. She can tell that the old folks are marginalized by the modern society, but together they create a world and a voice of their own.

Trailer:

Get the movie:

Nasty Old People is available to download as a torrent file from either THE PIRATE BAY or by using THIS LINK

Movie license:

Nasty Old People has the Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA. This means that you don't need to ask for permission to copy, share or remix this film, as long as you mention the people that have produced this movie (you do this by linking to http://www.nastyoldpeople.org/, as long as you don't use it for commercial purposes and as long as you allow others to remix your remixes. Also, you have to link to the original license.

Mobile linux and the desktop

2009-10-28T10:55:41+00:00

Edward pointed my to this blog today which brought up a point I myself have been making in regards to Android. I spoke to several people at the CE Linux meeting a couple of weeks ago about this for one. To quote from the blog:

Android is an island of its own, and useful code sharing is largely limited to the kernel.

At Collabora Multimedia we are currently working with both Maemo and Android systems and while I can see the appeal of Android from a phone makers perspective I can’t help but be a little saddened by how worthless it is to the general linux eco-system. One of the things I always loved about Nokia’s Maemo effort is that since its using so many of the standard components that we use on the Linux Desktop, it means that when a feature is added or a bug is fixed in Maemo, it directly helps also the linux desktop. Nokia and Maemo has had a strong and direct impact on a lot of open source projects, ranging from GStreamer, D-bus, GTK+, Telepathy, Matchbox, X Window System and more. And Nokia’s work on Qt going forward will of course have a direct impact on the quality of KDE.

Android on the other side has a much more marginal impact. I know they have contributed some patches to Webkit, but apart from that they offer little value to the rest of the linux eco-system. Been even told by some kernel developers that an Android kernel driver is about as immediately useful for the mainstream kernel as a FreeBSD or OpenSolaris driver. Meaning that porting is needed.

So for me personally I can’t help but feel a lot more positive about Maemo (or Moblin for that matter as they too share the same kind of philosophy as Maemo) and getting a N900 is definitely on my TODO list. That said Android is a work in progress and hopefully we can get them to abandon their essentially proprietary stack going forward and instead incorporate more and more shared libraries with the server and desktop. Maemo has proved that for a smartphone these libraries works just as well as Googles homebrew. Some of the efforts we are involved with are pushing in that direction and hopefully Google will realize that the secret to the success of open source is synergy.

Airing

2009-10-28T08:43:00+00:00

I learned the series about Linux and FLOSS will start airing on the Romanian national (public) television, with the first part, where Lucian and me talked about what is Linux, the purpose of distros, a comparison of Ubuntu and Fedora and more being expected tomorrow.

The bad part is the show was moved from Saturday morning to Thursday afternoon, so is hard to catch by someone with a full time job like me, the good part is the show will probably be re-run (again and again, at unknown dates and times) on TVRHD, a channel with smaller audience but better image quality (HD).

So if you have the time, watch TVR2, tomorrow Thursday, 29 October 2009 in between 17:00-17-30 to catch our little segment (I believe around 5 minutes long) in the show called Zon@ IT. I don't own the needed hardware, but if someone have a capture device, please share (I didn't saw the record myself yet, will not be able to catch it directly, so I am curious about it first hand, thanks).

Padding

2009-10-28T07:34:00+00:00

That would normally be a mere comment, but since some people do not like the dialog and close the comment forms on their blog, I had to make it into a full blog post.

I see Matthias is very proud about his 5 tweaks for the F12 desktop (it seems he forgot the 6th, the removal of the "hide all windows" buttons), but as soon as one of them, the padding patch hit Rawhide (post feature-freeze) I started seeing people crying on user forums, wondering if it is a bug and other innocent but clueless people advising to play with the DPI settings or other useless things.

When I point this is a deliberate design decision, people thank goodness the setting can be reverted back to the original value, a sentiment I am totally sympathetic with, since myself also prefer the icons/items grouped close to the corners, not spread all over the panel and making it feel even more busy.

Tip: turn the padding back with:

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel/padding 0

Getting Ready for Trip to Damascus, Amman and Beirut

2009-10-28T04:46:37+00:00

السيرة الذاتية بأربع جمل

جون فيليبس يعمل في مجال التطوير الإجتماعي والإقتصادي. وقد شارك في عام 2002 في إطلاق أداة الرسم مفتوحة المصدر إنكسكيب ( inkscape) وقام بتأسيس مكتبة الرسومات العامة Open Clip Art. وقد قام بين عامي 2005 و 2008 بالعمل كمسؤول تطوير اقتصادي وعلاقات عامة لمؤسسة المشاع الإبداعي ( Creative Commons )، وهو حالياً زميل للمنظمة. كما أنه يعمل على تطوير شركة الإعلام فابيركاتورز ( Fabricatorz )، ومعارض ( Cantocore ) للفن، وأنظمة صوت ليوبان، كما يشارك في إطلاق مشروع بيئة التدوين المصغر (Status.Net). كما أنه مشهور ببناء علاقات عمل دولية من خلال قيامه بتطوير نظم إقتصادية حديثة في آسيا وخاصة في الصين، كما يسوق لمفاهيم التسويق المنفتح.

Oh, if you can’t see the above, you need to install some language packs. Here is how you can do markup right-to-left.

It's raining FLOSS conferences

2009-10-27T08:12:00+00:00

If a while ago I thought there is very little of it, now it seems FLOSS conferences show in Romania like the mushrooms after a rain: first this year was eLiberatica, which this year made some steps in the right direction, towards community and openness, but still remain a commercial event.

Then FLOSSCamp, very fun, open and informal, but still a kind of conference.

Now, this week Bucharest is taking place LOAD, which smells like an incestuous way for some local distributor to milk money from a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.

Next, for December is expected BLUG*OS*CON, which is new, at the first edition, so only the time will tell about it (I will be there, expect a report).

And this is not all, I know at least two other groups having on their agenda a „national FLOSS conference”. Isn't this a bit too much? I believe the natural evolution is supposed to filter this on the long term and promote quality over quantity.

Rubbing Pork Chops With My Son

2009-10-26T05:27:05+00:00

My birthday is coming up, so as part of my birthday present, my wife found a parent-child cooking class through one of the local parks and recreation departments and reserved places in it for me and my older boy (who is 4.5). We told him that he was taking me to the class as his birthday present to me.

When I got there, the class instructor was shocked and joyed to have a "daddy" there. Seems men at these classes are a rare and wonderful thing. Out of 9 parents there, I was the only man, and my son was one of two boys out of ten kids. We had some food related games and then the kids helped spread pepperoni and cheese on a class pizza to eat there, then used various items to turn two pieces of naan into "pizza faces" while the class pizza cooked. We took the pizza faces home and cooked them for lunch afterward.

They put out chopped red cabbage for hair, but they also put out big leaves of basil for ears. I borrowed a knife from the instructor's assistant and cut some basil into strips to use as hair. Much cooler... and more flavorful.

Tonight, I defrosted some pork chops and let my son help me do some of the prep work. They're the super-thick chops you get at Costco, so I butterflied them into a more manageable thickness, then he helped me scoop spices to make a dry rub.

1/4 cup brown sugar
1 rounded tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
1 teaspoon kosher salt

I sprinkled the rub onto the chops to make sure he didn't spill it all over or dump half the mix on one chop, but he helped me pat it into the meat. Then we washed our hands, covered the plate with plastic wrap, and let the rub do its magic in the fridge for 45 minutes.

I fried the chops in just enough butter to coat the bottom of the pan. I saw a thing on "America's Test Kitchen" where they said the secret to juicy pork chops it to cook them over lower heat. Bringing them up to the doneness you desire more slowly wrings less of the natural moisture out of them. I've found it works.

And doing it with my rub and some butter leaves this mixture of butter, sugar, pork fat, and just a little bit of pork juices in the pan that's a perfect medium for cooking up a couple of sliced onions while you let the chops rest. I defrosted and drained some frozen chopped spinach, then threw it in with the onions at the end to warm.

Served the chops on a bed of the onion/spinach mixture with a squeeze of lime. Mmmm. This is the second time I've done this rub on pork chops and my wife tells me it's a keeper. The boy likes it too and he likes being a part of the process.

IMVU = Spammers

2009-10-25T09:31:02+00:00

A week ago, I got two e-mails from IMVU: one welcoming me, and one asking me to confirm my address for registration. I didn't recall ever registering there. They said in their confirmation e-mail: "If you did not sign up for IMVU, ignore this email. We will not continue to send mail to unverified addresses."

That appears to be an outright lie. A day later, at exactly the same time of day, they sent me a notice that I had a private message... from them... offering me a special deal on credits. Four days later, they sent two more e-mails about an hour apart, again requesting that I verify my e-mail address. Each one bore the claim that they will not continue to send mail to unverified addresses.

Since you have to start an account with their helpdesk system just to complain, I sent an e-mail off to their press contact asking if they could help so I wouldn't have to out them as dishonest spammers.

Then the day after that, they sent me an e-mail telling me my IMVU pet missed me. So, apparently they send plenty of mail to unverified addresses and just lie to people.

I guess I have to go on the offensive, so I'm calling them out as spammers. IMVU... FU.

UPDATE: The press contact passed on my mail and I received a response from IMVU stating that the account has been disabled and giving me a person to contact if I continue to receive mails from them. They didn't make it easy to stop the flow of mail, but once I got hold of someone, they took appropriate action.

karmic and log rotation

2009-10-24T18:00:30+00:00

In Ubuntu’s Karmic and and Debian’s Lenny, sysklogd was replaced with rsyslog. This is fine, since rsyslog will have converted your /etc/syslog.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf. However, if you modified the (maddeningly strange sysklogd-specific) log file rotation in /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd or /etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd, you’ll want to review the new (sane) /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog. (Note also that savelog uses .0 as the first rotated file extension, and logrotate uses .1.)

Welcoming new team members to Collabora Multimedia

2009-10-23T13:56:02+00:00

We have recently added 3 new members to our growing Multimedia team and GStreamer consulting business. The first one onboard was Thiago Sousa Santos who I think many of you probably already know as he has been a regular GStreamer contributor for the last few years. He also wrote some important plugins for GStreamer as part of the last two Google Summer of Code projects, namely the Quicktime/MP4/3GPP muxer for GStreamer and this year the ASF muxer and ASF RTP payloader. Having been so impressed with his work as part of the community over the last few years we made sure to snatch him up as soon as he graduated from University

The second person we added to our team was Robert Swain. He might not be familiar to people following GStreamer or GNOME, but he has been an active contributor to the ffmpeg project, working for instance on improving the AAC support in ffmpeg. A lot of the work we do at Collabora Multimedia is of course low level multimedia handling and optimisations and Robert will strengthen our capabilities in that field. Also with his experience with ffmpeg we can hopefully use his knowledge to improve the GStreamer ffmpeg plugin where possible.

And finally we have Arun Raghavan, who will be joining us next Month. Arun comes to us recommended by Pulse Audio maintainer Lennart Poettering and will be part of our effort to officially support the Pulse Audio sound server as part of our portfolio of open source projects we offer expertise and consulting services around. Wim Taymans have been moonlighting a bit as a pulse audio developer over the last year, but with Arun on the team we now have a person dedicated to Pulse Audio development, making sure Pulse Audio works great for our customers on their embedded systems. We also hope his efforts will pay dividends for Pulse Audio users on the desktop too in terms of more features and better stability. The synergy we are able to create between the embedded world and the desktop is part of our core mission here at Collabora and with Arun on the team we hope to continue and deepen the great working relationship we have established with Lennart. As a sidenote Arun comes to us from NVidia so maybe we can even have him help improve the GStreamer vdpau plugins

Speaking of synergies between embedded and desktop work, I hope everyone read Guillaume Desmottes blog post about Collabora’s increased effort behind the Empathy chat,VoIP and video conferencing client

Inkscape 0.47pre4 is out

2009-10-23T12:00:15+00:00

Hopefully pre4 is the final prerelease. Please download the files and let us know if you stumble upon any serious bugs except the infamous crash when undoing changes in live path effects. We probably won't release the final version within next couple of weeks, because we really need the LPE bug fixed.

A Book of Inkscape, by Dmitry Kirsanov

2009-10-23T12:00:15+00:00

A very anticipated book on Inkscape called "A Book of Inkscape", written by Dmitry Kirsanov, finally hit the shelves. The book covers features of the upcoming 0.47 version, while explaining how to effectively use Inkscape for many tasks. Both novices and experienced designers will find the book a great help to start using Inkscape.

Better webcam support

2009-10-23T11:18:00+00:00

One of the features listed at every Fedora release is Better Webcam Support and as it does not sound very sexy, it tends to get overlooked, I don't think I mention it myself when translating a summary of the features in a new release. Shame on me.

More than one year ago I got a "free" cheap and poor webcam (read 'crappy', powered by the sn9c20x chipset)- it was thrown by the store at a bonus when purchasing something (IIRC a scanner). My frustration with grew fast and large, wasn't able to make it work on Linux, so I just gave it away to a colleague to use it with Yahoo Messenger on Windows.

Fast forward today, the webcam returned to me and on a whim I said to myself "what will happen it I plug it into my newly installed Fedora 12 Beta?"

Pleasant surprise: it worked! Sure, not the best image quality (the camera is cheap and not new any more), but I don't really need it for anything.

So yes, there are things to complain in F12, but also there are a lot of enjoyable parts.

TPM as RNG

2009-10-23T06:43:29+00:00

I was reminded about some TPM coding I’d done to get random bytes from the pRNG on my TPM-enabled system from Matt Domsch’s recent post. I’m not fully convinced that the pRNG of the TPM is an appropriate source of entropy, but it does pass my simple FIPS-140-2 test.

I had to find the Intel TPM docs to figure out how to enable TPM on my system. It was under “Advanced / Peripherals”. I was expecting it under “Security”, like every other BIOS I’d seen. After that:

$ sudo apt-get install trousers tpm-tools
...
$ sudo modprobe tpm_tis
$ dmesg | grep -i tpm
[676618.167313] tpm_tis 00:07: 1.2 TPM (device-id 0xFE, rev-id 70)
$ sudo service trousers start
...
$ tpm_version
TPM 1.2 Version Info:
Chip Version: 1.2.2.16
Spec Level: 2
Errata Revision: 1
TPM Vendor ID: WEC
TPM Version: 01010000
Manufacturer Info: 57454300
$ ./tpm-getrand | hexdump -C
00000000 61 07 23 ff 71 3e 25 e8 f0 d5 de a7 a3 07 21 dc |a.#.q>%.......!.|

I could run rngd with a named pipe, but it’d be nice to have a new driver that could run a command instead to get the next 20000 bits.

UPDATE: I’ve implemented this in rngd now.

Vision Forum Shenzhen China October 23 – 25

2009-10-23T02:17:22+00:00

[ Updated Laoban Logo Chinese Stylee ]

This weekend I’m in Shenzhen, China to work on the second part of the Vision Forum project with Per Huttner, Robin Peckham and Venus Lau’s Kunsthalle Kowloon project, and other artists to do projects in realtime. This is the follow-up set of events and performances after the last ones at Vision Forum Melbourne, Australia.

The events start tonite, Friday, October 23 in the evening outside of OCAT with the Laoban Shanzhai Soundsystem composed of knock-off speakers to do live performances in realtime. I’m going to be doing some mixing as Kidproto, live. Robin and Venus will be there, and many more Laoban crew!

On Saturday and Sunday, we will use the Shanzhai Soundsystem for performances and events. On Sunday, we will spend the day doing Urban soccer, but it should be happening the whole weekend. Here are the instructions for Urban Soccer: Buy a soccer ball, Play soccer throughout an urban area with people, Create new games and play old ones, and Have Fun!

Here is the basic schedule for the weekend

Friday, Oct 23

Outside OCAT/C:Union (listen for sounds)
* Xiaoban Shanzhai Speakers, anthem remix (jonphillips as kidproto), other performers to be announced! outside of OCAT/C:Union areas

Neighborhood of OCAT
* Performance by Per Hüttner and others (18 -21:00)

OCAT Loft
* Neno (20.00-21:00) (ask for directions at previous events)

Saturday, Oct 24

daytime, 10:00- 12:00 am, 15:00-17:00 pm
* Natasha (10:00-13:00)- lawn
* Yang Zhifei (all day, few number of places please book in advance)-bookbar
* Dinu (unannounced)- maybe supermarket (let me know what you think about this dinu!)
* Per (unanounced)- in underground/subway
* Neno (unanounced)- in the neighbourhood of OCAT
* Hu Xiangqian (16:00-17:00)

Sunday, Oct 25
OCAT Loft
* Yang ZhiFei, OCAT studio sound with xiaoban speakers with drawings

Daytime, OCAT studio D, 12:00-17:00
* Including documentation/installation of Yang ZhiFei and documentation of unannounced projects from the previous day.
* Jon Phillips presents urban soccer

Here is a bit more text about the event, and you can read the working pages on my IDEA wiki:

Program:

The Invisible Generation
- workshop of the Fourth OCAT International Art Residency

The Invisible Generation: a project by William S. Burroughs filtered through time, Daniele Balit and Per Hüttner.

http://theinvisiblegeneration.blogspot.com/

(Close to OCAT – evening)

Jon Phillips presents Laoban Shanzhai Soundsystem outdoors in the evening and used throughout the weekend in Shenzhen. These will then be used to play a series of contemporary sound pieces, and other realtime performances.

http://fabricatorz.com/laoban

(outside OCAT – evening))

Neno Belchev – Bicycle, Suitcase Performance.

The artist has created a special suitcase with a hidden camera that is connected to a monitor. The artist will be hidden in the suitcase and we can follow his tormented life in the claustrophobic space on the screen.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile//15669.html

Various unannounced pieces will take place Friday night as well.

(Close to OCAT – evening)

Saturday October 24

Hu Xiangqian – The Movement is the Music (Working title)

Hu Xiangqian is engaged in a research where he investigates music as a source for movement rather than sound. He will carry out a performance where either non-musicians play with professional musicians or where professional musicians do movements with their instruments.

(Close to OCAT – evening)

Natasha Rosling – Performative Sculptures – various public spaces in Shenzhen.

Natasha Rosling has since the beginning of her career created structures that break the boundaries of clothing, sculpture and performance. For Shenzhen, she will produce a series of interactive sculptures that she will mount and wear in a series of public spaces.

http://www.natasharosling.com/

(Close to OCAT – day)

Yang Zhifei – Dream workshops

Amsterdam-based artist Yang Zhifei will realise a series of workshops that are open to the public and that investigate the similarities and individuality of dreams. She has been researching the nature of human dreams as a part of her artistic practice for many years.

(OCAT library- day)

5. Per Hüttner – Deja-vu

Per Hüttner’ performance will be realised by a series of young, local actors of similar height and appearance. They will be dressed in identical clothes and will perform the same everyday actions, creating a kind of real déjà-vu.

http://www.perhuttner.com

(Shenzhen Underground – day)

Neno Belchev – Zebra crossing performance

One of the things that Bulgaria and China have in common is the fact that everyone crosses the street anywhere and at any time. Belchev has produced his own rolled up Zebra crossing which can be unrolled anywhere and that allows its user to cross the street anywhere and at any time.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile//15669.html

(Close to OCAT – day)

Dinu Li.

Dinu Li will present a Flash mob-like action on the Shenzhen Underground. He will work with a group of workers from a nearby village in Guangdong. case They will appear to be complete strangers will accuse each other of being “the corrupted one”. The performance is totally unannounced.

http://www.dinuli.com/

(Shenzhen Underground – day)

(Big Dinner)

Sunday October 25

Yang Zhifei – Dream workshop exhibition

The outcome of Yang ZhiFei’s workshops in Beijing and Shenzhen will be presented with drawings and sounds in a one-day exhibition in one of the studios at OCAT, using Jon Phillips and Matt Hope’s xiaoban speakers.

(OCAT artists studios – day)

All artists – documentation

All artists will in a very informal way present their documentation and experiences of the previous two days.

Urban Soccer, Jon Phillips presents Here’s the plan: Buy a soccer ball, Play soccer throughout an urban area with people, Create new games and play old ones, Have Fun!

(OCAT artists studios – day)

Ongoing during the weekend and the week that follows

Josefin Wikström – Deep Inside and artist TBA.

Curator Josefin Wikström is developing a project within Invisible Generation where she invites artists to make work in non-traditional spaces in art institutions: toilets, hallways, offices etc. For Shanzhen Wikström will present soundwork by artists such as Yan Jun.

The Invisible Generation: a project by William S. Burroughs filtered through time and Per Hüttner and Daniele Balit is presented in Melbourne, Shenzhen, Beijing and Kiev in 2009 and 2010.
web: http://theinvisiblegeneration.blogspot.com
mail: vfprog@gmail.com

Organized by: Vision Forum in collaboration with OCAT in Shenzhen.

Supporting institutions: French Embassy in Australia, French Embassy in Kiev, Swedish Embassy in Peking, Swedish Embassy in Kiev, the Swedish Institute in Stockholm, The Consulate of Sweden in Guangzhou, Längmanska Kulturfonden in Stockholm and Linköpings Univesitet in Norrköping and FRAC Île-de-France in Paris.

Jon Phillips (rejon) Joins StatusNet

2009-10-23T01:43:05+00:00

Over at the StatusNet blog, I just announced my role in launching some big things with Evan, Brion and crew! Here is a snippet, but please read the rest over at StatusNet blog:

[ photo by-sa asadal ]

Many of you know me as @REJON, my past endeavours growing the open source drawing app, Inkscape, the Open Clip Art Library, Libre Graphics Meeting, making soundsystems and using Identi.ca as my social playground. Most connect to me here as the Creative Commons Community and Business Development Manager where I hacked, started Creative Commons Salons with Eric Steuer, and served as human inbox for Google, Yahoo, Apple, and other organizations for CC. I still lock-down a title as a fellow at Creative Commons, and am still working on various international initiatives with CC in the Middle-East and Asia. We all love CC!

[ Many of you know me as this disembodied head. I actually smile much more like the photo at the top ]

Without further intro, and as Evan mentioned previously, I’m pleased to announce that I’m immediately taking on a role as Community Consultant for Status.Net to ramp up and help with some large projects Status.Net is building, including an upcoming relaunch and adding capacity to fun roles that Evan had been doing Han Solo. By becoming part of the Status.Net all-stars, Evan will be freed up to be uber-CEO rather than having to wear 50 different hats.

Please read the rest over at the StatusNet blog.

Give back my icons

2009-10-22T12:30:00+00:00

To have the party complete, after you installed Fedora 12 [beta] you most likely will want some eye candy back (it was removed during this release cycle), so the first thing you way want to do is to restore beauty/sanity by changing one or two GConf entries:

So check menus_have_icons and your icons are back, not only in applications but most importantly in Places and System. Being at it, you may consider scrolling up a bit to buttons_have_icons and cancel the uglification of various dialogs.

Then you can enjoy F12.

My own Windows 7 party

2009-10-22T09:35:00+00:00

As those Windows 7 parties hosted all around the world I decided to celebrate by hosting my own party by updating the netbook from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 Beta and sharing the photos:

boot, partitions, software selection, install, multimedia, done
Unfortunately, there was no booze as a) it was too early in the morning and b) I am at the office with some work to do in parallel. And unfortunately no booze this evening either, some of the Fedora guys are out of town and Ceata is caught in a programming workshop. There is time in the following days.

The install was smoother, as the experience with upgrading the desktop last week helped me to avoid wasting time with dreaded experiences GNOME Shell.

I think I may continue the party with upgrading a CentOS box tomorrow.

Take 6: OSM

2009-10-21T14:22:00+00:00

After some pause today went to the television for the sixth part, where following reader suggestions I invited Eddy to talk about Open Street Map, a project I am not very familiar with, but well covered by him.

And there are exciting news: it seems the shows will start airing next week, Thursday 29 October, around 17:00 on TVR2.

Clip Art of the Month: Raulxav’s RSS Music Icon

2009-10-21T13:21:53+00:00

“Clip Art of the Month” honors for October of 2009 go to raulxav for his unique spin on the RSS feed icon.

Regular internet users know that RSS feeds can significantly reduce time spent finding new content on your favorite web pages. With this influx of content flooding users’ RSS Readers, content producers must find ways to attract new subscribers and keep them reading.

While valuable content is the surest way to accomplish this, the importance of catching a reader’s eye cannot be ignored.

Raulxav has demonstrated other ideas for RSS icons, and I encourage you to consider ways in which you might catch a reader’s attention.

Visit the Open Clip Art Library to learn how you can contribute.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Farmville

2009-10-21T11:18:26+00:00

My sister laughs that farmville is what got me onto facebook. But hearing my mom talk about "helping other people's farms", I couldn't resist. I hadn't heard of such a socially-oriented game and wanted to give it a go.

Zynga, the company that makes farmville and a bunch of other games, clearly has a good mind about game balance. If you're a total hard core gamer, you can sort out the cost/benefit ratio of all the items and min/max your farm design to get maximum profit. Or, on the other hand, if you're a socialite and just know a LOT of people, you can just make a bunch of friends and get just as much benefit. That's pretty dang cool.

It's also interesting how they set up their games to provide some stuff in-game for free, and other stuff only for "FarmVille Bucks" - which are available for a purchase in real-world cash. At first, I think this is just a "cheat". As a player, if I open my wallet and get the "FarmVille Bucks" it's like I've paid off the dealer.

Ultimately though, I recognize that Zynga exists to make money. They're a for-profit company that wants to pay their employees for their creativity and hard work. It's a business model not unlike the one of the company I work for. So, if they offer something that *I* value, I don't feel guilt in paying them the money for it. Maybe some of my fellow players will consider it cheating, but I think the company is doing a good job all things considered and they deserve a tip.

Ultimately, I'd have liked to see an even more socially oriented game design. I'm a bit surprised that neighbors can't have more of an impact on your farm. I understand there's probably game balance reasons why (who'd want to come back to your farm to find it rearranged by other people?) but it seems a logical direction to go. So far you can fertilize other people's farms, or write messages on stakes. I think you ought to be able to help with other people's harvests.

The way of the dodo

2009-10-21T07:58:00+00:00

Like many others, I couldn't endure the wait and moved my main desktop from Fedora 11 to 12 a few days ago, in my case using the Beta RC2, so I could take advantage of the install DVD and perform a clean install (BTW, 'ext4migrate' as an Anaconda argument was helpful with moving my /home from ext3 to ext4).

The move to the Beta was the perfect opportunity to get a glimpse of the much hyped GNOME Shell preview, you know, is like going to a road you pass next to a horrible accident but you can't avoid looking at it, you are curious to see what is about. The same with GNOME Shell, from seeing screenshots and reading about it I had a good idea about what to expect and was expecting to dislike it, but I hat to see with my own eyes, try it for a couple of days, leave the first impression settle down and only then write about.

The very first impression is created by the color scheme, which feel originated from someone with a serious Vista envy. Hell, if I wanted a Vista wannabe I would have used ...KDE 4. No, thanks.

Then I tried to do some work done and see hot it feel. As an advanced users, I don't use a single application at a time, I have at least 3-4 windows open at any time and switching from one window to another is a very common operation. Not with GNOME Shell, which make this a pain: you get the desktop zooming and jumping all the time, which is very tiring. And needing additional mouse clicks.

It was so painful that I felt the urge to make it go away as soon as possible. Good luck with that! It was impossible to find a way to kill it (later when I built the courage to try it again I found an ugly and huge 'control panel' and logout buttons are available by clicking on your own name, which I find unintuitive) so I fired a terminal, manually started gnome-effect and said goodbye.

Looking at it my best hope is there is enough time until GNOME 3.0 for this experiment to go the way of the dodo and never make as a default, It may be a pretty toy for some and may have an use case for lightweight usage of your computer (isn't Moblin, also included in the Beta, better suited for the task?) but is far from something I could use for real work.

Job Scam: ProLine Games

2009-10-20T13:50:46+00:00

Just got the following scam spam slipping in through my mail filters. I'll post the e-mail, then point out the red flags after it.

From: Arline Hazel <bhufruau5579@hotmail.com>
Subject: ProLineGames_J0B (700).

Company name: ProLineGames ltd.
Job title: Project Coordinator
Position type: Part-Time/Virtual office
Location: US only

Company overview
Company ProLineGames was founded in 2002.

Our company offers solutions for organization of on-line tournaments and launch of on-line tournaments. The company owns excellent resource base and highly qualified personnel ready to solve tasks of any level of difficulty.

Also ProLineGames ltd. focuses particular attention at conduction of off-line tournaments, because there could be nothing better than the best cyber fighters of the continent gather in one place in order to fight face to face.

Job Description
Quite recently our company introduces a new service for companies hosting own Web projects (MMORPG).
Our service supposes conduction of draws and lotteries with real prizes among the MMORPG users.

ProLineGames ltd. is always looking for skilled and talented individuals to join our company.

Currently we are seeking a part-time Project Coordinator to help the winners of tournaments in receiving information about the award, manage issues with them.

Company's provisions:

1. Flexible working schedule;
2. Commission and Bonus Opportunities;

If you are interested to find more about this position please send your resumes to: marshaproivers@gmail.com

ProLineGames ltd.

The first and most common red flag is the sender/reply mismatch. That's when you get the e-mail from some random person at a free mail service (like Hotmail) and then are asked to reply to a totally different person at another free mail service (like Gmail). If this is a reputable seven-year-old company that specializes in online games, why aren't they sending this from their own domain? I've been contacted by agencies where an assistant sends out the contact e-mail and asks me to reply directly to the recruiter, but both e-mail addresses were from the same domain for a known recruiting company, not throwaway accounts at free mail services. The only job e-mails I've received that do this are scam e-mails.

Second, who comes out of nowhere and offers you a good-paying job opportunity with flexible hours, work-from-home, etc., etc.? Scammers, that's who. As the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Generally the scams fall into one of three categories:

Payment Puppet: They send you forged checks or payments from hacked PayPal accounts. You cash them out and send them to your employer in Europe, Africa, or China by Western Union. A few days/weeks later, the bank or PayPal discovers the forgery/hack, and you're responsible for paying back the money.
Package Reshipper: They use forged checks, hacked PayPal accounts, and other devious methods to pay for purchases from auction sellers and other vendors. Since most won't ship to Russia, China, or African countries because so many fraudulent orders come from there, the buyers have the packages shipped to you, and you re-ship the packages out of the country to them. When the seller finds out theiy got rooked, they call the cops and give them your name and address. Then the cops want to talk to you about where the merchandise went.
Identity Theft: As part of the application/screening process, they need all sorts of information about you. You provide it and they use it to take out credit cards in your name, empty your bank account, etc. When all is said and done, your credit is ruined and you're fighting to get your life back.

In some cases, it's a combination of the three.

This looks like it might be a different scam. Helping winners of tournaments receive information about awards sounds like they might want to use you as a spam proxy or as a shill for an advance fee scam.

Advance fee scams most commonly appear in your mailbox as the Nigerian widow who needs your help to move 25 million in her husband's assets out of the country, the lawyer who believes you're the heir of a deceased millionaire, the European lottery you somehow won without ever entering, or the dying millionaire who wants your help distributing money to charity. The thing they all have in common is that if you bite, they'll run into some trouble disbursing the funds and need you to put up some money to pay a service fee, pay a bribe, whatever, to get the money released.

I'd reply to find out more about the job, but I dont for two reasons:

I never reply to spam.
These people are CRIMINALS. I'd prefer to keep my distance.

My advice is to toss out this e-mail. Don't play detective, don't think you'll have some fun trying to scam the scammers. Again, these people are CRIMINALS. If you want to report it, you can send it to your local cops, but since the scammers are out of the country, usually the best that could happen is that the authorities might run a sting and take down a domestic accomplice.

I know times are hard and jobs seem scarce. I'm job hunting too. But if you fall for a scam, whatever pain you're in now will be multiplied. Stay safe and God bless.

Education,FLOSS, underage contributors

2009-10-20T08:25:00+00:00

We received a contribution in the form of a few (anime style) character drawing sketches for a Free project promoting software freedom, but the contributor is a 15 years old girl who knows about nothing about licenses and freedom, she probably like do draw and consider the teacher to be a cool guy. Wanting to to "the right" thing, we tried to explain clearly what the free licenses are about and asked the parents to agree with the contribution. For this we put our engineer heads together and composed a text along the lines (rough English translation):

"I, ..........(parent) agree for my son/daughter, ........., to participate in the PojectName project with his/her graphic creations. Those creations will de distributed and modified with the author's attribution, according with the site terms of service"

...you can see how we tried to avoid introducing unknown terms as CC-BY, that would have confused further some parents who are not techies, as we avoided putting numbers or exact descriptions of the contributions, since you can't control those in an open project (I weighted a bit about involving the "blogosphere" into grafting the text but ultimately considered what we got "good enough").

Naturally the mother asked about the possible rewards and worried about her daughter splitting learning time with community work and naturally we answered as a 100% volunteer project we can't provide monetary compensation, we can provide some learning and experience, and if needed, some diploma.

Until now, nothing out of the ordinary to deserve wasting a blog post about, what upset me was a mother reaction like:

"If I would know she will be able later to live well from those drawings, icons, pictures... would not kill her so much with math... geometry and everything... there are so many talented kids with useless diplomas and medals they can not do anything with, they smply sell those for nothing..."

Duh! This is not an OR, is an AND, you cannot become a developed individual without art and community. Education is also culture, is finding you passion and developing it. I remember my childhood under the communist regime, when you were supposed to go to school, learn math, become an engineer, work in a factory, have children who will go to school, learn math, become engineers, work in a factory, have children...

Good thing I am a third party in the conversation above, I would have been tempted to stop it abruptly.