This is not your problem sheet

Empathy 2.27.0's Private Mode

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:45:36 GMT

An oft-requested feature in Empathy and Telepathy is support for OTR (Off The Record) encryption of messages, interoperating with the OTR plugin for Pidgin and other popular IM clients. We've been resisting implementing it so far, mainly because we think there are better ways to do end-to-end encryption of messages and audio and video calls over XMPP, which we hope to implement in the not too distant future.

However, a nice aspect of OTR as compared to other encryption solutions is that it allows you to plausibly deny having taken part in a conversation. We believe this to be an example of a wider trend towards deniability on the internet, a position which is backed up by the growing popularity of Tor, and by several modern browsers allowing you to cover your browsing tracks out of the box.

As a result, we've been working hard to help secure your privacy while you're using Empathy. We've had to do this quietly for various legal reasons, but we're proud to announce Empathy's new Private Mode. When enabled, your contact list will be anonymized, as will your entry on your contacts'. Thus, you can conduct conversations with anyone without fear of repercussions from their discovering your identity, or of anyone else knowing the conversation took place:

It's not obvious how to bring these privacy benefits to Jingle video calls. We came up with a technique we refer to as Kitten Secrecy (patents pending in all relevant countries), and managed to integrate it with Empathy with the help of our friends at Collabora Multimedia, who constructed a fantastic GStreamer element using only two leaky queues!

We think the results speak for themselves. The source is not quite ready for release yet, but (lawyers permitting) we hope it'll be public by the end of the month. Hope you can wait until then!

— the Telepathy and Empathy teams

“Tin cans and grapevines growing at our door”

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:47:51 GMT

Teodor Revolution by Mikael Altemark; CC By 2.0.

Yesterday night mostly featured Psapp at Cargo. I was expecting to have a great time, and they didn't disappoint: it was easily the best live show by a *tronica band I've seen. (Though, that's not really a fair comparison: all of their music is readily re-arrangable for a live band, particularly their more recent tracks.) Energetic, accomplished, quirky, etc. etc. Kazoos? With squeaky lobsters duct-taped to the side? Oh yes. Plus, closing on Everybody Wants To Be A Cat was a fun touch.

Meanwhile, back in a different genre, Pure Reason Revolution have just released their new album, Amor Vincit Omnia. Apparently, at some point in the three years since The Dark Third they decided that their largely guitar-based nü prog sound could be improved by, well, replacing it entirely with synth bass and some more synths and heavily processed downtuned guitars. To my surprise, it works pretty well: it's not what I was expecting, and it feels a bit overproduced, but they haven't got rid of the vocal harmonies, and the songs are still interesting. That said, for a band who go in for Latin titles and general pretentiousness, they should really have learned to pronounce all three words of Deus Ex Machina. It should be interesting to see if and how they adapt older songs to their new style live.

Which brings me to a question: dear readers, is anyone interested in seeing them play at Dingwalls on Tuesday? I have come to have a spare ticket, and it would be nice for it to be used. If so, let me know via whatever means you feel is the most appropriate.

The train now standing at platform 32729 is the Git Merge Express to Memeville

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:10:18 GMT

(Hi, I'm at LCA 2009!)

It's lunchtime at Collabora Towers!

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:18:53 GMT

Following the wild success of Telepathy, we're proud to announce our new project:

Bustle: a D-Bus activity charting tool

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:38:55 GMT

When working on Telepathy, I've often wanted to be see which D-Bus methods are being called on whom, when signals are emitted, and so on. Timing information is also handy: I'd like to figure out why cold-starting Empathy takes 12 seconds, and it'd be much easier if I could look at a diagram rather than staring at the unreadable output of dbus-monitor.

Previously, Alban wrote a tool that used a patched version of mscgen, and produced appropriate input with a dbus-monitor-like Python script. I wanted some more D-Bus-specific diagrams, and ended up reimplementing both the monitoring component (by forking dbus-monitor, as its --profile output did not contain quite enough information) and the diagram-drawing component (using Cairo). I'm happy to present an initial release of Bustle:

There's a Telepathy-specific hack in the tool to shorten object paths, but it shouldn't make the tool any less useful for looking at other D-Bus traffic.

I haven't made binary packages yet, I'm afraid, so you'll need to grab the source tarball and build it if you want to try it out. In Debian-land, the dependencies are libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-cairo-dev libghc6-gtk-dev libghc6-parsec-dev; see README in the source tree for how to build and use it.

The astute among you may have noticed from the dependencies that the diagram-building component is implemented in Haskell, using the excellent bindings to Gtk+ and Cairo. I got a prototype going within a few hours, and the strong correctness guarantees that the type system provides meant that I could refactor it mercilessly with confidence. I'm sure that I would have spent many frustrating hours chasing type bugs had I written it in Python, which is a more conventional high-level language for prototyping and writing tools like this. Next time you're frustrated by such bugs, you should give Haskell a try. :-)

Edit: Bustle now lives at willthompson.co.uk/bustle.

Fridays at Collabora Towers

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:18:22 GMT

In what onlookers are already calling “potentially unwise”, our robot overlord ordered various toys from ThinkGeek.

Today — being as it is Friday, always the most productive of all days — they arrived! Apparently appropriate tools to control the missile launchers are not yet packaged for Debian. :(

Spare Cambridge Folk Festival ticket (Thursday 31st – Sunday 3rd)

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:38:26 GMT

I'm going to the Cambridge Folk Festival this coming long weekend (Thursday 31st July–Sunday 3rd August). The person I was camping with is probably not going to make it, having just had an operation; does anyone want her ticket? The face value is a hundred British pounds; she'll take substantially less. Let me know by the medium of your choice if you're interested!

Jonathan Coulton in London in October!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:48:11 GMT

It comes to my attention that Jonathan Coulton is putting his clogs back on and coming back to the UK in the autumn. His first show here was great fun; you should go out of your way to see him this time around! Tickets are on sale for a show at Shepherd's Bush Empire on October 30th, which is the city I'm most interested in going to. I'll buy some tickets in the next day or so, so if you want me to get you one (and thus sit with a mostly-known set of people) let me know!

(Oxford people might prefer to see him there two days later, but I'm moving out in 10 days. Sniff.)

Le coming-out du cochon

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:45:54 GMT

I find the different onomatopoeias used for the same sound in different languages entertaining, not least for the ensuing hilarity when you mispronounce them as English words. When I was in Paris with two of my housemates in December, we found a postcard which serves as a perfect illustration of why I enjoy mispronunciation. According to the back of the card, it depicts “Le coming-out du cochon”.

In the same shop, we found another card featuring a painting of a startled-looking boy playing his accordion, with a monkey dancing on his shoulder. I can’t decide how best to interpret the monkey’s expression.

The near-impossibility of teaching programming to a subset of students

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:59:27 GMT

The camel has two humps^[pdf] was an interesting read; a bit wooly, but believable. One of my favourite paragraphs, tangential to the paper's findings, concerned IDEs:

Programmers, who on the whole like to point and click, often expect that if you make programming point-and-click, then novices will find it easier. The entire field can be summarised as saying “no, they don’t”.

With buddies like these, who needs segfaults?

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:14:03 GMT

or, How to disable Bug Buddy in recent Gnomes

Apparently Bug Buddy is now a Gtk module. This is great because now every Gtk program gets it for free, not just libgnome applications. But it turns out to be kind of annoying when you're hunting a GHC bug using a test case that uses Gtk2Hs, and it keeps popping up in your face, crying that it doesn't know how to report bugs in the test case.

Some rummaging revealed that it's enabled by gnome-session setting GTK_MODULES=gnomebreakpad at login, so you can export GTK_MODULES= to shut it up.

Update: Sjoerd Simons pointed out that setting GNOME_DISABLE_CRASH_DIALOG=1 is probably what I actually mean. There might be other things in GTK_MODULES which you actually want, so blowing them away might be detrimental to your health.

(Brought to you by the why does Google not give me a useful answer to the search disable bug buddy? department.)

First class

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:08:32 GMT

It's kind of a long story, but I have a massive pile of stamps of various denominations. Returning a keyboard to Amazon cost £6.50, so... I used a few of them.

Hidden preferences for useful behaviour

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:28:13 GMT

I took a look at Thunderbird again today. My main frustration with it in the past has been trying to convince it to check all my IMAP folders for new mail; there are lots of tickyboxes that I would expect to do this, but which don’t, and there’s a tickybox on every single folder enabling checking that folder, which is tedious. Today, I decided to keep at this for more than a few minutes, and use the Google, which turned up:

Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just open the Config Editor, search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.

I don’t really think that the word “just” belongs in that sentence. I don’t even really know why this is an option, rather than there being a “no seriously, check my email” setting on the account if people really don’t always want this turned on. I thought the point of using something like this was not to have to learn all the knobs you need to twiddle to make it work, but perhaps I’m wrong?

Boddington Bees

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:41:12 GMT

Have you ever noticed that the Boddingtons logo features a pair of bees? I'd vaguely spotted them before, but until earlier today, when someone pointed it out while buying one, it hadn't occurred to me that they're pretty incongruous. What association with bees does Boddingtons have? The only other beer with bees in its logo I know of uses honey as an ingredient (and is much tastier than Boddingtons).

The boring explanation is probably that the Boddingtons company colours have always been black and yellow, or something. Why those colours? We just don't know. But I'd like to think that it's actually a bad pun on the Poddington Peas.

Grandstream Ringtone Generator

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:31:15 GMT

I have a Grandstream GXP2000 SIP phone, courtesy of a special offer and a parent who likes SIP. It's kind of bulky, and is overkill for my uses of it: I don't actually care about it automatically downloading my address book from an arbitrary server, or running quizzes on its OSD. (Seriously, why would anyone do this?) But once I upgraded the firmware (to 1.1.2.27, which apparently you can get from Grandstream if you whine loudly enough, but I just grabbed it from, uh, GrandstreamSucks.com) to stop it crashing whenever I made or received a call (which only happened on one LAN I tried it on), it is pretty good at making and receiving calls, which is what I want it for.

You can stick custom ring tones on it, but they have to be in some bizarro format. Happily, Grandstream ship conversion tools, both for Windows and for Lunix. So I downloaded the latter; it turns out to be a modified SoX. And, oh look: they don't provide the source, or an offer to provide the source. *sigh* So, I requested the source, pointed out that they're violating section 3, and remarked that they could just throw a tarball into the same place they threw the binaries and never deal with any emails like this ever again.

I got a reply pretty quickly!

Attached per your request.

Attached was a zip file, expanding to:

% ls /tmp/sox
handlers.c  ring.c  sox.c  st_i.h

which is clearly not the complete source, and does not include build scripts.

You did not include the scripts used to control compilation. May I have the Makefile, please?

They sent me the Makefile (in a zip file).

% make
make: *** No rule to make target `Makefile.in', needed by `Makefile'.  Stop.

It appears that you have omitted the autoconf-related foo.
Please may I have complete working build scripts, please?

They sent me Makefile.in (in a zip file. This makes it much faster!!!). Of course, the rest of the build scripts and source still aren't there, so this still won't work. But let's play along:

% make
make: *** No rule to make target `configure.in', needed by `configure'.  Stop.

No double pleases this time:

Is it really too difficult to just zip up the entire directory and send it to me?

And apparently showing some anger did the trick:

We were using sox 12.17.4. You will need to use the patch based on that version.

Lo! A tarball containing the entire modified source tree, which when compiled works identically to the static binary they distribute. They still provide no source offer, but I got bored at this point. Here's a copy of the source in case you don't feel like repeating this process to get it.

(I meant to write this back in September, but never got around to it. I finally got sick of the thread sitting in my Inbox. It turns out that I never actually bothered making a custom ringtone...)

Snatching defeat from the jaws of a phone book

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:36:46 GMT

So you know all those irritating “oh hai i lost my phone” groups that people set up because it’s way too tedious to click through your entire friends list? With any luck, they should become a thing of the past. Behold the Facebook Phonebook!

But wait, what’s this? There’s no “export to VCard” button! Thanks. Thanks a lot.

First person to write a screen-scraper gets a cookie!

Compsoc Lightning Talks

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:25:37 GMT

If you’re not a massive nerd, I was just shown a joke which you might enjoy more than the rest of this post:

What do you call the blood that comes out when teenagers cut themselves?
Emoglobin.

On Thursday, Compsoc had a lightning talk session. Four people spoke:

Andrew, the President, spoke about LastGraph (slides);
I talked about ikiwiki, which we use behind the scenes for Compsoc’s website;
Luke gave a talk about virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular, and gave a demo;
David spoke on “Windows Vs. Linux: Which Is Better?”, featuring a hilarious sketched-and-scanned graph which I would like a copy of.

I’m more impressed with Second Life than I thought I’d be. If only my laptop were speedy enough to run the thing, I’d take a look. (I tried to run it on my i855; the CPU pegged itself then everything died. Hard reset time!) I like the idea of a scripting language where everything is a state machine. It’s a bit of a shame that the only way to get code into or out of Second Life is to copy-paste between the built-in Notepad-alike editor and your proper editor of choice, which presumably does new-fangled things like “version control”. Oh well.

In case you care what I said about ikiwiki, I stuck my slides on the ’tubes. I’ve figured a few things out since the talk, such as how to get post-commit hooks working in Mercurial. Dom has some plans to add branching to Ikiwiki, so that you can make a test instance of the wiki to play with a new plugin just by making a new branch in svn or whatever. I like this idea.

S5 is pretty slick. I’d not used it before. (I didn’t actually use it directly, though: I relied on Pandoc to convert a file written with [Markdown] into an S5 slide show.) Anyway, there’s a lot to be said for having a slide show that you can just fire up in any web browser. (Except Andrew’s Konqueror apparently didn’t understand it. I wonder whether this is S5’s fault or Pandoc’s fault.)

Pandoc is a highly slick piece of software. It converts from any of Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML or L^AT_Eχ to Markdown, rst, HTML, L^AT_Eχ, man pages, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, or S5. It does all kinds of nice things along the way like curlifying quotes, making proper en-dashes, rendering L^AT_Eχ expressions as images so you can use it inline in Markdown and have it exported properly as HTML, and so on. It turns out to be a better Markdown processor than markdown itself, and supports extra things like tables, footnotes and so on. It turns out that the output from a practical I finished today was very nearly valid Pandockian table markdown, so I got a well-formatted project report pretty much for free. Oh, and for extra winning, it’s written in Haskell. I like the idea of being able to write man pages and documentation in something other than raw groff or DocBook XML.

I think the lightning talk format worked pretty well for Compsoc; it strikes me as a good way to get people involved. Nice work, committee!

Spare Oceansize ticket for Friday (and Porc and Astronauts and goths)

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:42:22 GMT

I have a spare ticket for the Zodiac this Friday (19th October). Oceansize are good. You should come see them.

In other news, I'm thinking about going to see God is an Astronaut in London on the 30th. Anyone up for coming along? Also, Porc!

I'm still not sure whether to pretend to be a goth and go see The Birthday Massacre.

lolegg

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:04:04 GMT

While eating brunch, I decided to make a lolegg. May I present:

Compose Key Woe

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:45:36 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

Recently my Compose key stopped working in applications using the X input method (such as rxvt-unicode). Gtk applications using either the default Gtk input method or SCIM work fine; setting GTK_IM_MODULE=xim breaks them. I have Option "XkbOptions" "compose:ralt,ctrl:nocaps" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. xev correctly reports that Multi_key is being pressed when I push the right alt, but rxvt-unicode et al. totally ignore it when I push it at them.

I have no idea why this happens. I asked the #rxvt-unicode people, and they have no idea either. I would love someone to tell me what to examine next!

Edit (2007-10-10): Fixed!

It was all my fault. I had a .XCompose file with an entry for Compose-t-m giving ™, but did not have the magic line include "%L" which makes all the normal compose sequences for your locale be loaded. Thanks to Simon for helping me figure this out!

Using the eject button on a CD drive as a soft eject.

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:17:58 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

My external keyboard has an "eject" button. When I prod it, if the CD in the drive is not in use it is unmounted and the drive ejected; if the CD is in use, nothing happens. This is pretty much the behaviour I expect and want.

My laptop's keyboard does not have an eject button, so when I'm somewhere other than home I have to unmount the disk manually. Is there a sensible way to make the eject button on the drive behave like the software eject key, rather than working iff the disk is not mounted?

This proposes "a fix", which is to not lock the tray while the disk is mounted. This sounds like a really bad idea — "Hey! Program doing useful stuff with that disk when I accidentally poked the eject button! You lose! Ha ha ha!" — particularly since sensible software methods exist.

I remember seeing a program somewhere on the 'tubes that polled the drive every second or so to see if the button had been pressed and if so called eject. Submount exists, but my brief investigation suggests that it polls, too. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of such frequent polling. Surely there must be some file in /proc or something that such a program could block on, waiting for an event?

Love,

Will

Ruse, Sir Borg Ibis!

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:06:38 GMT

(or "Burger, Boris, Isis!")

So last night I saw Isis, Boris and Oxbow at Koko. I say I saw Oxbow, but actually I saw two members of Oxbow performing an acoustic set as "Loves Holiday", which I can best describe as a ridiculous pseudo-cabaret, pseudo-musical y-front experience. Some of the guitar riffs were good the first time around, but got tedious, and a briefs-and-skinny-vest-clad singer storing his microphone with his family jewels is only funny for a limited time. But at least they were "bringing [us] fucking art".

The thirty-second samples on Last.fm don't do Boris justice. They push a lot of cliché buttons: female guitarist (for added mystique); a massive gong behind the drummer; e-bowing; headless double-necked five string bass slash seven string guitar, downtuned a semitone; etc. Also, their drummer is fitted with a boyband-style headset microphone so that he can scream "wooooo!" and "yeaaaaaaaaah!" at appropriate moments while rocking out. Anyway. They kicked off with some melodic post-rock-y joy, then launched into song after song of frantically-picked riffs and screaming solos. Lots of fun. I picked up Pink after their set, and it's pretty good.

After a pair of intense sets, I wasn't sure if Isis would be a bit of an anti-climax. (Wasn't helped by Martin saying they were pretty unremarkable last time he saw them.) Happily, they weren't. The cavernous venue works well for them. It's a shame that their singer apparently feels that in order for them to retain their doom-metal identity he has to occasionally do the whole death-metal growling thing. At no point did it actually add anything to the music --- they don't need some bloke wrenching his vocal chords to sound brutal or whatever, because they already build what might be described as "savage soundscapes" with their music. He should stick to doing the whole low-in-the-mix long notes thing he does elsewhere, because that works really well. Anyway. It took a few songs for the crowd to get really into it, but they played an excellent set. You should go see them at some point. (Also, their drummer was formidable, as seems to be standard for post-something-heavy bands.)

Also, beforehand we went to one of these ridiculous posh burger places. It was okay. Also, they had a wine list. I don't have much else to say about it.

Game creation software

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:15:38 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

So I've just been speaking with some family friends. One of them is a 13-year-old gamer, mostly of the strategy and crazy fantasy warfare variety, and he's interested in making his own games. He isn't, to my knowledge, a programmer, so something like pygame is probably not suitable (although I guess he could learn). Many years ago, I used a piece of software called The Games Factory, which was pretty bad but did the job for making simple 2D games, and I'm aware of Adventure Game Studio, which does what it says on the tin and might be the kind of thing he's after. Can anyone recommend any other game creation software (for Windows, sadly) that doesn't need prior programming knowledge? I guess that some tool that needs you to learn some scripting language for some stuff but is a gentle introduction to it is probably the right kind of thing.

So my housemates got back from Glastonbury...

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:02:47 GMT

Apparently it was a bit muddy there.

/meme

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:16:10 GMT

/me is being returned to the sender
/me is becoming visual whiite noise
/me is the versatile baby bunting bag that accommodates car
/me is replacing system files i delete
/me is awarded highest quality assurance standard
/me is into? a guide by frascella
/me is both game and art
/me is not touched by you
/me is not sharing
/me is actually the next generation of the windows 95/98 line
/me is the safest and most convenient outerwear available
/me is it you? hello you sexy sons o @#$% heh