Aleksej aleksejrs@identi.ca

Well, it depends... sometimes it's key to remember certain details from many episodes ago, maybe from another season, and anyone could have forgotten those details.

This is mostly useless if you watch a show as a marathon, but if you watch it at the one-per-week-with-some-weeks-off pace, and watch several other shows, it makes sense that they remind you.

Of course, some overdo it and try to show you the whole series in the "reminder" part.

As for the "next on...", I understand them wanting to "tease" the audience, but often go too far and yes, makes it almost unnecessary to watch the next episode.

Last I checked, the Internet was useful for a lot of things that can't be ruined by April's fools =)

Good things come to those who… wait; Debian jessie will be stable on 2015-04-25!

Entiendo que el titulo esta inspirado en este post de Pump https://identi.ca/colegota/note/79oyS7kuTcu04MUXPhvUzQ, no? xD

Happy 2015, pumpipeople!!

\o/

rustic bug report http://bugs.debian.org/773619

source: http://christycorr.tumblr.com/post/104043867679/madcitypaxie-i-am-to-let-you-all-know-that-this

Hi! It's that time again!

Dianara v1.2.5-dev has all the features I wanted for this version in place, pending some further testing and some polishing, so it's now been tagged as "beta 1" and could use some wider testing from more people.

The main changes are, as illustrated in the image:

• New Mentions and Actions feeds. These are basically the same as the Meanwhile feed, but with only activities addressed to you, and only activities done by you.
• The expandable labels. Some of the information labels such as the "10 minutes ago" or "7 likes" in posts will expand when clicked, to show extra information. Some parts of that extra information was available previously in tooltips, but now that extra information might contain clickable links, too, such as user names.
• A different way of showing when a post got to your timeline via sharing. Clearer and more informative.
• Pasting a link that looks like it's pointing to an image will ask if you wish to insert it as a regular link or as a visible image.
• Option to create basic tables.

Take a look at the changelog for a more detailed list.

You can find the development version of Dianara on Gitorious.org: https://gitorious.org/dianara 

This can be considered as a "string freeze" notice, too. Hopefully there won't be any changes in strings until v1.2.5 is released, so it should be safe for translators to do their awesome job =)

I'm targeting the week of the 15th of December for the final version but, as they say in Debian, when it's ready.

After v1.2.5 is out, I intend to make some breaking changes, so next version will start the 1.3 series.

Happy testing, and thanks for the help! o/

Update: Now it's beta2, with a few small fixes and almost-complete translations =)

Another update: Now beta3, with complete translations and nice fixes for memory leaks by Gregor Herrmann. Thanks!

Hook all 302 worm brain neurons up to a LEGO robot body, and what happens?

Relevant video.

No programming, only the worm's actual responses, apparently.

Also holy shit, programmer interfaces.

A few weeks ago, I got myself a Galaxy S2 and tried Cyanogenmod on it. Here are some of my impressions.

Why the S2?

Simple: It's listed first after the GTA04 on replicant's support list. If replicant supports it, it can't be too wrong. Second it's quite cheap on your-favorite-auction-site. And finally, it's not too far away from my company's S4. And I really consider a custom ROM for my company's phone (knox is another topic).

I could have decided for the GTA04, since I have a GTA01bv03, but really, I wanted a cheap thing to toy around.

Installing CM

Let's go and install CM. The wiki explains on how to get heimdall (I backported the one in debian/testing) and then replacing the recovery with CWM. It worked mostly flawlessly. Except "adb sideload" did not work for me. I have no idea, why. So I mounted the internal usb storage and "adb push"ed the .zip onto the device. That's about it.

General usage / First impressions

Well, the first impression was mostly what I wanted:

• A rooted phone
• No google apps
• No nonsense
• Can install CACert into the system, yeah!
• I was quite positively surprised by the permission restriction system. It's not uber great, but it does a good job.

Finding bugs

Really, as usual. It doesn't take me a few days (usually hours!) to find some bugs in a default install of something. So let's see.

1. I use tripple-tap to zoom into certain areas of the screen, if I have to. This works very good on the S4 with the verndor's 4.2 firmware. On the S2 with CM11-M11 this seems to work at first. But after doing it so many times (I have not counted it, I have no idea, why/what side effects are relevant), it freezes the screen, no taping, nothing works. "adb reboot" is usually my way out. I haven't yet reported this one, because I have no good way to reproduce it yet.
2. I don't have a SIM for that phone yet. So I use the thing in airplane-mode. Guess what: In airplane-mode you can't add contacts. It's a known bug. I have no idea, if someone works on it. davdroid lists it as a third party bug.
3. Trebuchet crashes when setting a higher dpi. The S2 has a default dpi of 240. One can use "wm density NNN" to dynamically set a new dpi and change the virtual screen size that way (the number of pixels is the same, but the screen size must be different, if the dpi is different). This is a common tool to test UIs on different sized devices. I wanted to use it to enlarge fonts/icons/everything, so it's easier to read for me. Well, Trebuchet (the default launcher) crashes when doing so. My bug report findings are listed below.

I probably have found other ones, but can't remember them now.

Reporting Bugs with CM

CM only allows bugs for snapshots. This is a development decision. Most of "my" (where I contribute and/or maintain) projects have a rule of "current master has to be stable. File bugs if it is not." For a super large project like CM other ways might be more useful. Fine.

I wanted to report problem #3 from above. So I upgraded to the latest snapshot (M12), reproduced the bug, created a proper logcat with the relevant data and filed the bug. It's CYAN-5899, if you're interested.

So what happened? It was closed within a few hours as "invalid". Yes, you're reading correctly, "invalid". Why? "CM doesn't support DPIs other than what we set by default." I really don't understand that.

1. This is a nice crash, easy to reproduce, really, something a developer loves! (I know, about what I am talking: I needed days to track down heisenbugs in Samba-TNG–my findings were later ported to Samba classic). So why not go ahead and fix it? Or even look at it for five minutes? If the five minutes have a result of "Well, it's easy to reproduce, but it will take us two weeks of full work time to fix. And well, ${Priorities}" would have been a fine answer. Not to mention that fixing a bug in some not-common situation usually makes things more stable, because one has to make the code better!
2. "wm density" is a standard developer tool. So what this says: CM does not support standard developers. I don't know, what else to write on this item…
3. People might want to use Trebuchet on other devices, for thatever reason. So those people are not supported either, probably. (Haven't yet tried running it on another device with increased dpi and filing a bug). But really, I doubt the bug would get better treatment.
4. Visually impaired people (like myself) really like to play with the dpi settings, etc. And we can happily live with broken layouts (I guess, 5 out of 10 webpages are broken for me). But a crash is just that, a crash. So one could rephrase the statement from above to "CM does not support visually impaired people".

A friend has read the bug report and rephrased the bug's closing statement to "CM doesn´t care about its users".

What next?

I haven't yet found a suitable (supported!) alternative launcher. I am considering to try Launcher3 from f-droid, maybe that one does not crash. I haven't yet checked, if it has any support or not.

I am also considering other ROMs. I haven't yet made up my mind on which ones to try next.

People sometimes forget how important Firefox was. If Firefox hadn't succeeded we might still have mostly pages that require Microsoft IE to function properly. That used to be pretty common.

As counterpoint, software has surprising longevity (too bad video lost in blip.tv purge catpocalypse)