On Free Software and FSF

WARNING: This entry is somewhat political in nature.

Given the recent controversies about the GPL v3 draft, I thought I’d give my insight on the Free Software Foundation and especially its founder, Richard M. Stallman, better known as RMS. I won’t cover the GPL v3 debate as I haven’t read the license draft, though I think that the kernel developers’ standing must be at least given attention.

September 24, 2006

Cooperation and stupidity

While I was viewing [Yamato Video]({{ site.url }}/www.yamatovideo.com)’s latest Samurai Troopers DVD, I noticed that in the trailers section there was a part showing off some footage of Chrno Crusade. As a few may know, it’s written Chrno and not Chrono for some obscure reason. What it matters though is that Planet Manga already edited the relevant manga with the name Chrono Crusade (same as what AD Vision did in the United States).

September 21, 2006

Kubuntu Edgy Knot 3 artwork

Jucato has some screenshots of the recently released Kubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 3. I like very much the new artwork, but it doesn’t seem that there’ll be Oxygen icons, at least from what I can gather. In any case I will try to play with it as soon as it hits a beta stage. On unrelated news, I still have got some RSI issues, so I’ll have to slow down posting.

September 17, 2006

Another S.T.E.A.L. snapshot

As promised, I got around to write for a while during this weekend and here is the result, a new S.T.E.A.L. snapshot ready for [download]({{ site.url }}/steal/steal.pdf). Notable changes include: New dialogue between Jim and Satsuki at the start of chapter 4. This should show better that Jim is and will be an important character during the story development; Text revisions throughout chapter 4; A whole new part of the chatper 4 story, that can be considered now roughly halfway.

September 16, 2006

S.T.E.A.L. related news

As I checked my messages on deviantart this morning, I got some news from Too. Aside some delay in obtaining the actual artwork he did (not his fault, probably some quirk of the postal system) he provided me with a tentative sketch of the cover. It impressed me a great deal, so I already gave out the “green light” for coloring it. Here is the sketch (watermarked, as usual): 393

September 16, 2006

ATI drivers and Linux

Recently I decided to update the fglrx driver (ATI’s proprietary driver for Linux) to the latest version. I wanted to do that because the old version made switching between virtual consoles and X impossible (X would lose the correct timing of the screen, distorting it and forcing a kill to reset the settings). Also I was hoping on finally solving the hibernate issue that has been plaguing the driver for months.

September 13, 2006

Annotations and Linux

A lot of my bioinformatics work involves performing functional annotation on genes. This means that given lits of genes I need to resolve their known function, or if they’re part or some metabolic pathways and so on. Even with the current trend in our laboratory, that is investigating DNA copy number changes using SNP microarrays (it’s a rather new form of analysis, but some relevant papers are out already), in the end we have to go back to the genes affected by such changes (in order to find interesting/marker genes - we study solid tumors).

September 10, 2006

Kile 1.9.2 for Dapper

I learnt recently that the Kile LaTeX environment had a new release (1.9.2) on 26th August. It is mainly a bugfix release. However no packages for Ubuntu and Kubuntu exist yet, so I decided to fill the gap by building one, as I also use Kile for S.T.E.A.L.. It is based on the packages made by Harald Sitter and Marcus Czeslinski, whom should take most of the credit, as I merely recompiled the already debianized source with the new version.

September 7, 2006

Dynamis-Buburimu

UPDATED: Now a movie showing the run is hosted at Google Video.

On Tuesday there was my second attempt at doing Dynamis-Buburimu with United Dynamis. My first attempt, months ago, was a sore loss because of lack of people (and lack of experience, in my opinion). This time we had close to the 36 people needed for the area, and we were much better prepared.

September 4, 2006

The Black Coffin and merits

I forgot to mention it in the past entries, but my group finally managed to take on the (only) serious fight in the Treasures of Aht Urghan storyline so far. The mission is known as the “Black Coffin” and even if it involves six members it’s not a battlefield (or Burning Circle as they’re also called) but instead is an Assault. Getting to the spot where the Assault takes place was kind of a tricky because we had a couple of deaths on the way: the area is Caedarva Mire on Dvucca Isle and there are a load of undead (Qutrub) and Imps in the way.