Planet Compsoc

Hearing consistently bad economic news at the moment, I thought I’d share some of Noel Coward’s words.

They’re out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They’re dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent,
They’re nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They’re filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,
In Dublin they’re depressed, lads,
Maybe because they’re Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Misery’s here to stay.

There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it’s no good whining
About a silver lining
For we know from experience that they won’t roll by,
With a scowl and a frown
We’ll keep our peckers down
And prepare for depression and doom and dread,
We’re going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.

A little while ago I completely rewrote the #debian-devel-changes IRC bot so it was actually maintainable. At the same time I added some commands suitable for developers, but I didn’t really advertise them anywhere. Here goes.

!bug <bug-number>

Print a one-line synopsis of the specified bug. The parser is fuzzy and will find the bug number embedded in URLs, etc.

!madison <source-package>

Print a colourful rmadison output for the specified package.

!qa <source-package>
!overview <source-package>

Prints the URL of the Debian PTS entry for the specified package.

!changelog <source-package>

Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/changelog file for the specified package.

!copyright <source-package>

Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/copyright file for the specified package.

!bug_graph <source-package>
!buggraph <source-package>

Prints the URL of the bug graph for the specified package.

!buildd <source-package>

Prints the URL of the non-experimental buildd status of the specified package.

!popcon <source-package>

Prints the URL which contains the popularity-contest data for the specified package.

!dehs <source-package>

Prints the URL which contains the Debian External Health Status of the specified package.

Some notes:

• Using these commands is easy: “/msg BTS <command>” on irc.debian.org or simply “<command>” on a channel that the bot is lurking on.
• Please don’t spam channels with data from the bot – use a private message. This particularly applies to #debian-devel-changes.
• If you are communicating with the bot in a private message, the leading exclamation mark is optional.
• If you would like the bot to lurk on other channels, please ping me on IRC after gaining a consensus on the channel in question.

As always, patches and suggestions welcome. (Source).

You can now try the “Nouveau” free software nVidia video drivers from Debian experimental.

If you would like to try them:

• Ensure you are using Debian sid.
• Add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
• Run:
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo m-a update
  • sudo m-a a-i drm
  • sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
• Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and specify the nouveau driver in the Device section.
• Restart X. You will need to remove the binary nvidia kernel module.

Editing your xorg.conf may be as simple as the replacing nvidia or nv with nouveau; nouveau won’t be chosen automatically over nv yet. If your xorg.conf has collected a lot of cruft over the years, see this wiki page for some pointers on what you can remove.

For the status of the drivers with your particular card, please see upstream’s compatibility matrix. My experience has been positive; I have been using them for about two months on my dual-head 8600GT (NV50) setup with only a few small issues and a generally superior Gnometris experience.

Some notes:

• If you find bugs (unrelated to the packaging), please report the problem upstream and not in the Debian bug tracker.
• At request of upstream, we are not providing 3D support. Please do not ask for it, as a wontfix tag often offends.
• Bonus points are awarded for removing the non-free nVidia driver; although installation of xserver-xorg-video-nouveau will remove nvidia-glx, purging nvidia-kernel-common and nvidia-kernel-source should remove all the module-assistant generated kernel modules. rms would be proud.

Many thanks to:

• Matthew Johnson (mjj29) for uploading.
• Julien Cristau (jcristau) for advice.
• Christopher Halse Rogers (ROAF) for his Ubuntu packages.
• The rest of the XStrikeForce, who do rather a lot of work you don’t really notice.

So, it's only been 5 months since my last blog post? That's actually less than I thought it was, and yet scarily a rather long time. Still, nothing like WoW to get things going again, right?

As anyone who actually plays WoW will no doubt know, Blizzard recently won their case against MDY, the makers of the WoWGlider botting software. I was particularly intrigued by a post made by Donnelly (the guy who originally wrote the software) in which is refers to William Patry (author of this here blog post) as "Google's Senior Copyright Counsel and pretty much accepted to be The Man when it comes to copyright". If Patry is "The Man", why do his arguments make no sense?

Although Patry's post is an interesting read, there are a few points that I really do have to wonder about. The first thing that started to ring alarm bells was his assertion that "WoWGilder did not contributorily or vicariously lead to violating any rights granted under the Copyright Act". While he's certainly entitled to that opinion, one feels compelled to point out that, given that the court just ruled that the exact opposite is true, he probably shouldn't so forcefully state it as a fact, especially when he makes no attempt to address the specific points of law on which the ruling was based.

He then continues: "To get to its result, the court had to first find that WoW, even though sold over the counter, was licensed not sold." As much as I might disagree with it, it has been so long established that software is licensed that by now it's almost beyond questioning. Thankfully, this time he does provide a basis for his argument, the recent Vernor v. Autodesk case. (I'll confess that I was only peripherally aware of the Vernor ruling until now, but I made a point of reading up on it.) Regardless of the specifics, I found it somewhat baffling that Patry would express surprise at the court's decision to follow a well-established (tried and tested on numerous occasions) Ninth Circuit precedent instead of an apparently contradictory ruling from a lower court. Even if we were to consider the specific nuances of the Vernor precedent, that case dealt specifically with distribution, whereas this case (bizzarely, considering the claim of copyright infringement) deals solely with usage, so it's entirely possible that the decision would have been the same.

Lastly, I was all about ready to disagree with his assertion that "there was in fact no provision in the license that barred use of WoWGlider", except that I discovered, to my surprise, that it's true. The provisions barring the use of automation software lie solely within the ToU agreement (arguably where they belong), and not in the EULA. Given that the ruling so unexpectedly relies on such software being a breach of the EULA, one can't help but wonder if a future update will correct this oversight. And yes, I actually read the sodding EULA.

So, recently I was playing around with building a server for a Half Life 2 modification using Valve’s instructions on their wiki. The instructions all seem quite simple, you take the VC++ project file, a makefile that you customise slightly with some locations of things certain libraries (like the xerces ones) and then some libraries from the official Linux dedicated server.

All sensible enough so far, until you find out that the only way to get the libraries that it needs from the server is to download the whole server and install that using their application for this (which takes two passes at the same command to do that for some reason). This pulls about 780MB of stuff down onto the machine, including all of the HL2MP maps, textures, models and sounds (apparently it needs some of these in case you want to run a pure server without people having their own custom sounds and whatnot). All in all the libraries that I wanted were no more than 35MB of this, so it was a little bit frustrating.

You then get to the build process, which first compiles a util (vcpm) to read the vc++ project file and use that to make a makefile for the mod itself. This is all well and good and all done in one fell swoop with a simple ‘make’. Unfortunately if, for some reason, you want to do a clean build of the mod - ‘make clean’ won’t help you. That just cleans up vcpm, leaving the server objects there waiting for you to do it manually.

The whole compile process was also very slow, although that could be my machine (it is 4-5 years old now) and produces one hell of a binary. I’m pretty sure that this is down to it linking statically with a lot of libraries, including some of the c/c++ ones, although I have yet to verify this or follow the guide on the wiki that suggests you can cut 5MB off the binary with some magic. Perhaps in future builds I’ll look at getting that done, but for now I’m just happy that it compiled.

Having done this with gcc-4.1 (4.2 just plain doesn’t work, but then isn’t claimed to on the wiki) I found that crashes occured for other people, hardly good. So I dug out gcc-3.4 and had a bash with that, only to find that errors were soon the scourge of my life again, some of them seemingly in the Valve code - great. Fortunately a bit of digging around in the documentation turns out that it’s a known thing where gcc-3.4 won’t inline functions unless you give it a -O option. This fixed it was clean sailing and I had a nice compiled version.

Unfortunately this version also segfaulted, so it was off to the debug build and to see what was going on with it. This proved rather useless, as the engine produces a stack trace without any symbols (even after the mod is compiled with them) so I’ll need to have a rummage around what’s going on at some stage, probably something to do with my system configuration compared to that of the server. Nothing is ever simple eh?

OK, since no-one even replied to that prisoner's dilemma, I guess it's time to produce some clues. We'll name the prisoners P1 through Pn and boxes B1 through Bn. We'll also, to avoid complications, assume the warden is going to arrange the boxes purely at random (so we don't need to cope with the warden just putting P1 in B2 and P2 in B1 for the 2 prisoner case, for example).¹

How do two prisoners play our game? If they both pick randomly, their joint chance of success is 1/4. However, if P1 picks B1 and P2 picks B2, they're either both correct or both incorrect, each with a 1/2 chance. This must be optimal or there'd be some one-prisoner strategy which is better than just picking one box.

What does this tell us?

1. The prisoners each need to pick different strategies.
2. The prisoners could do with knowing each other's strategies.

What follows is a description of the 3 prisoner optimal strategy and big clues on optimal strategies, so stop reading if you don't want to know more.

OK, so let's try that knowledge on 3 prisoners. The 'obvious' strategy for prisoner Pi is to pick box Bi, then B(i+1 mod 3). If he gets any wrong the prisoners fail no matter what they pick, so they may as well assume he was right and the remaining arrangements are:

• (1, 2, 3)
• (1, 3, 2)
• (2, 1, 3)
• (3, 1, 2)

Referring to "prisoner i succeeding" as Si, this tells us that P(S1) = 2/3 and P(S2|S1) = 3/4. (3 of the 4 possibilities have a 2 in B2 or B3). However, we're left with the following:

• (1, 2, 3)
• (1, 3, 2)
• (3, 1, 2)

In other words, P3 has no more information than P1 did, so P(S3|S2,S1) = 2/3 and the overall success probability is P(S1,S2,S3) = P(S1) * P(S2|S1) * P(S3|S1,S2) = 1/3. Can we do better?

The first box P1 picks doesn't matter (you can just re-number the boxes so that it's always B1), but for his second box, he's able to give information about the contents of his first box. How? By picking a different box depending on its contents. Let's say P1 picks B1, then if B1 = P1, stops, if B1 = P2, picks B2 and if B1 = P3, picks B3. There are once again 4 'sucess' arrangements:

• (1, 2, 3)
• (1, 3, 2)
• (2, 1, 3)
• (3, 2, 1)

Taking into account that P1 played this way, can we improve P2's strategy? We can see B2 is clearly a good box to start with as 2/4 of the remaining arrangements boxes have P2 in them. Also, if B2 = 3 then B3 = 2 and if B2 = 1 then B1 = 2. This means following the obvious strategy, P(S2|S1) = 1. P3 can follow a similar strategy so that P(S3|S1,S2) = P(S3|S1) = 1 and P(S1,S2,S3) = 2/3.

So, what do we know now?

3. Each prisoner's second (and presumably subsequent) box picks had better depend in some way on the contents of what he already picked.
4. Slightly deeper, looking at the results above, if one prisoner gets it wrong lots of prisoners should.

¹ You can get around any strategy the warden produces by simply numbering the prisoners randomly after the box order is chosen, so that the warden doesn't know the prisoners' chosen ordering. (It doesn't have to be the same numbering as the warden used to call them in.)

On Thursday and Friday, I took time off work to visit Bristol for the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008. Around 20 people attended - obviously these were all people contributing to GNU, but (surprisingly) I didn't feel too much like I was surrounded by giants. Instead, it was all quite relaxed; most people there seemed rather like me - with a mild caffeine addiction, permanently short of spare time, and just trying to improve their small projects as best they could.

The impression I have of the GNU project after this meeting is one of a disparate organization with many small contributors; it is clear we have massive communication problems, both internally and externally. From the outside, I suppose GNU looks like a monolithic, perhaps US-centric project, with the strong leadership at the top controlling the direction of all these sub-projects. In reality, these sub-projects are more or less autonomous. There may be some checking at the centre that no two GNU programs are directly competing to solve the same problem, but the maintainers are largely on their own, struggling to build up whatever community of contributors they can. The feeling of isolation is much greater than in Debian, for instance - there, although package maintainers generally have some sort of authority over "their" packages, you will get bug reports filed if you are not following Debian policy, and you are expected to observe common freeze periods around releases. There are no real equivalents in GNU.

So naturally, considering the amount we had in common, this meeting was always going to be a success. It was very well run by Brian Gough, and there was just the right amount of structure versus "corridor time" (although everything took place in a single room, except for lunch/pub). There were a few talks from people about the projects they were working on - for instance, a nice game called GNU FreeDink, although I need to fix a segmentation fault to progress any further in level 2, and a very impressive sound generation program called Psycosynth.

It was suggested that a UK-only GNU hackers' meeting could be organised sometime, which I think would also work very well. Simply meeting up like this every once in a while was quite inspiring; I much prefer developer-oriented meetings over user-oriented meetings, and this was one of the best.

After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well.

Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications. There is a reasonably performant implementation now available in most distributions, that will receive security updates, has a good team of developers behind it, and already has a large community of people with skills in the language. If static versus dynamic typing becomes an issue, Jython might offer a nice competing implementation of Python. We might one day get to see what this `Groovy' thing is all about. In terms of GUI applications, Andrew Cowie's new java-gnome 4.x bindings will allow truly native integration with the rest of GNOME - or stick with plain Swing for cross-platform portability.

This also brings the Java/.NET competition to free software. Mono has been playing catch-up with both Microsoft's implementation of .NET and with Java - it has enjoyed some success with Gtk#, which has provided much more compelling rapid development than the old java-gnome bindings and gcj. MonoDevelop is trying to compete with Eclipse and NetBeans, and probably has a better-integrated GNOME UI editor. Still, if the potential for rapid application development is as great as is claimed, it can't be very long before the various successful Gtk# applications (banshee, f-spot, tomboy) have Java counterparts (unless people are happy with the C equivalents). The most difficult part of the process is finishing off any required library bindings (such as to gstreamer and libgphoto2).

It will be interesting to see whether Java free software developers bring with them the same bad habits that have been seen with many Windows-based C# free software developers. When you want to use a library, bundling a binary-only copy of an unstable version is not really the right thing to do. At least many Java .jar archives also contain source code, and there are quite a few home-grown Java hackers who might understand about how to play nicely with distributions using proper dependency-management systems.

One thing that strikes me is that, while Mono has been around for quite a few years now, I can't think of any big non-graphical applications that are built on it. (Beagle is perhaps the exception - it does make use of a Gtk# GUI, but the main program is the indexer.) Java might benefit from a network effect, as projects such as Apache Tomcat are also widely used. (Let's not mention Choob at this point.) There are a few non-GNOME graphical apps waiting in the wings (like freecol and robocode). The scaremongering over possible patent infringement in Mono (or the Windows.Forms libraries), while probably unfounded, cannot help its cause.

But of course, ruling out something catastrophic like a patent infringement suit, free software projects very rarely die - they just fade away into obscurity. Both platforms are likely to be around for some time yet.

I've just been attempting to play a game I've had sitting in my stack of disks for a while now - Heroes of Might and Magic V.

Heres the thing... Ubisoft have not made this easy. At all. People constantly whine that PC gaming is so much more of a hassle than console gaming, and after an experience like this, I totally agree...

Ok, so here is my experience of patching and playing Heroes of Might and Magic V.

1. Inserted disk and installed the game.
2. Aware that there have been several patches with balance and crash fixes etc, I was eager to get these applied asap.
3. Go to official Might and Magic website
4. Download latest 1.5 EU patch (why do you we need a Direct Download, EU collectors retail and EU retail patch for each version?)
5. Attempt to install patch, it tells me I need to install 1.41 first. *sigh*
6. So I attempt to download the correct '1.4' patch out of the EIGHT possible 1.4 patches.
7. The official download link gives me a server error.
8. I bring out google, gamespot obliges with the patch.
9. I download it and attempt to install it. It tells me the game is not installed.
10. Oh look, how foolish of me, I've downloaded the US version of the patch - gamespot didn't label the file as being region specific.
11. Another quick google search and 3 different sites later I'm downloading the 1.41 patch
12. Attempt to install 1.41 patch, and it tells me I can't do this because 1.4 is not installed
13. Google for 1.4 EU patch (I'm not falling for that again)
14. 2 sites later I'm downloading the significantly larger 1.4 patch. 15 minutes later I have the file.
15. Install 1.4
16. Install 1.41
17. Install 1.5. Incidentally, all the patches are badly named. 1.5 actually has the filename 1.05, 1.4 -> 1.04 etc. CONFUSING!
18. Wait about 20s for the games copy protection to verify my disk (silently of course...)
19. Launch the game.
20. Create a new custom game (I've played some of the missions before), setting the difficulty to Easy (I'm a little rusty)
21. Notice that the game is taking several seconds on a turn based game per AI. I launched task manager just to check - no its not using my 4 cores, it's using one. Come on guys. Single threaded apps are /so/ last week.
22. Die within 4 turns.
23. Try again on a smaller map, doing better this time.
24. Vista BSODs.
25. I'm bored. Off to do something else.

There are two ways they could have made patching easier (in order of preference)

1. An auto patcher. Simply have an option on one of the menus to check for updates. The tool goes online, grabs the patches required and installs them, no user interaction required. Oh and at a decent speed please... It should also be noted that an auto patcher could also inform the user of new patches when you launch the game, if I was your typical gamer I would not be aware I even needed to patch it, and therefore miss out on all the extra hard work put in by the games developer.

2. Combined patches not just incremental patches. Incremental patches are all well and good if you are on top of them, but if you are new to the game, downloading 3-4 patches and installing them in a particular order is a nightmare, especially when the official site does not work properly.

While we are at it, the game has been out for about 2 years now, isn't it about time you patch the game to make it not need the CD to play. Come on, all the cool kids are doing it. CDs are ANNOYING, especially when it adds a long delay to start playing!

Anyway. Yes, who made 'Easy' 'Hard' all of a sudden. Easy is supposed to be Easy. As in Hard to die. Or does 'Easy' suddenly mean Easy to die? I must have missed that memo.

Follow-up to Election Update from True Contradictions

Mississippi

The elections here are somewhat complicated by the resignation of former senate, Trent Lott, which results in two elections happening simultaneously.

The normal election will be fought between Republican incumbent Thad Cochran and Erik Fleming. Both of these men have made mild position switches. Fleming used to support Lyndon LaRouche, but has since rejected such notions. Cochran originally states of McCain, “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.” He now supports McCain. Fleming is currently a Mississippi House of representatives member, and has previously unsuccessfully run for the Senate seat of Trent Lott. Polls have Cochran ahead 60:35.

The other election is being fought as a result of the resignation of Senator Trent Lott last year. The republican governor, Haley Barbour, appointed former house of representatives member Roger Wicker as his temporary replacement. His Democratic opponent, Ronnie Musgrove, was the former lieutenant Governor and Governor of Mississippi, during whose time in office he banned Gay and Lesbian adoption, the pay of Mississippi teachers fell to 49th lowest level of all the states and claimed that there was, “no freedom from religion”. The polls have these two politicians in a tie.

North Carolina

Elizabeth Dole has been sitting senator since a 2002 special election. A former member of the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, challenger for the Republican nomination in 2000 and wife of former Senator and republican candidate Bob Dole, she has excellent connections, name recognition and fundraising potential. Her opponent – Kay Hagan is a Lawyer and member of the State Senate. Dole is currently enjoying a 10 point lead in the polls.

Nebraska

Centrist Republican incumbent and opponent of the Iraq war, Chuck Hagel, has decided not to seek reelection. In a fascinating piece of trivia, courtesy of wikipedia, “Hagel has a tradition of wearing costumes to work on Halloween, usually masquerading as colleagues or other notable political figures. He has arrived at work dressed as Joe Biden, John McCain, Colin Powell, and Pat Roberts in past years.” This leaves the field open between the two candidates both running for the position.

Mike Johanns is the republican candidate – a former governor who stepped down to act as US secretary of agriculture. He is highly popular in the state, having won the gubernatorial election in a landslide. Scott Kleeb (tagline: “Nebraska’s brand of change”) is a rancher and ironically professor of history and provides the democratic contender. Johanns, as one might expect, is polling 15-20 points ahead.

New Hampshire

Currently New Hampshire is represented by the father-sun duo of John H. Sununu and John E. Sununu. It is the father, a former 3 term governor and White House chief of Staff, who is up for re-election. His opponent is Jeanne Shaheen, also a former governor. This is a re-run of the 2002 election, in which Sununu narrowly won, however, the political momentum has swung away from the republicans and towards the democrats in subsequent years. Consequently Shaheen leads in the polling by 10-15%.

New Jersey

Dick Zimmer is a former US House of Representatives member, and former member of the New Jersey legislature. He had unsuccessfully run for the Senate in 1996, and was drafted for the current race after Anne Estabrook withdrew, having suffered a mini-stroke. Frank Lautenberg currently holds the seat up for election, and has held 4 non-consecutive terms of office. He is one of the most liberal members of the Senate. Age is an important issue in this election, with Lautenberg having passed his 84th birthday, but its a double edged blade for the republicans, due to their presidential candidate and the relatively high proportion of electorate who are over 65 in New Jersey.

New Mexico

Another republican incumbent retiring leaves the door open for more democratic gains in New Mexico. With the support of popular Governor Bill Richardson and a rising democratic tide the party is confident of making gains here. Their candidate is Tom Udall, a former member of the House of Representatives for the state and cousin of Mark Udall mentioned earlier. The taking of this seat is another test of the Western strategy pushed by Howard Dean. His opponent, Steve Pearce, has a similar background in the House, but is sitting 15-20% behind in polling.

Oklahoma

Incumbent Jim Inhofe is skeptical on global warming, cites the Bible as backing for his position on everything and has claimed that 9/11 was devine retribution for the US failing to defend Israel. He is also one of only 12 senators who opposed cutting interest rates on student loans. His opponent Andrew Rice is a member of the state Senate and largely behind in the polls, albeit with a large percentage yet to make up their minds.

Oregon

Republican Senator Gordon Smith is up for re-election, his moderate view may continue to hold their appeal in these hard times for the republican party. The democratic challenge comes in the form of Jeff Merkley, the second cousin of the Udall cousins. Gordon Smith is currently the only elected Republican official in the state, and is currently holding onto a narrow lead in the race – which is considered highly competitive.

South Dakota

Tim Johnson is the Democratically aligned sitting senator from South Dakota, who holds quite a conservative voting record, such as repealing the ban on semiautomatic weapons and welfare reform. The 2002 election saw him claim a very narrow victory in a republican leaning year, and is a pretty strong candidate for re-election. His opponent, Joel Dykstra, is currently sitting in SD House of Representatives, and not a big name candidate. Trivia: Johnson was the only member of the senate to have a son in the military at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Texas

Single term republican incumbent John Cornyn has been ranked as the 4th most conservative US Senator. His democratic challenger is Veteran Rick Noriega, a member of the Texan House of Representatives. The low approval ratings of Cornyn make this a potentially interesting election, despite him being ahead of Noriega, that has potentially a large number of undecided voters. Obama is also looking at campaigning with the Texas senate and house challengers who are competitive.

Virginia

Incumbent republican John Warner is retiring, leaving an open race between two former Governors: Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner (no relation). This is generally considered the Senate seat most likely to change hands from Republican to Democrat. Polling puts Warner 25% ahead of Gilmore, and with a widening gap as polls become more recent. As well as national momentum – the state is slowly swinging democrat, they have won the last two gubernatorial elections in 2001 and 2005, and Jim Webb took George Allen’s senate seat in 2006.

A few things have come to mind this week, all to do with Inconsistency.

1. All the people/newspapers who a few years ago were outraged at the imprisonment of Tony Martin are now backing imprisoning everyone who carries a knife. So apparently you shouldn’t go to jail if you shoot someone with a gun, but if you just carry a knife you should.
2. On last week’s Question Time the audience appeared to clap everything people said. This meant that they would clap a point by one of the commentators, and then applaud an exactly opposing argument by another panelist. This suggests both that the panelists were making strong arguments, and that the audience was full of idiots.
3. It was commonly noted that during the G8 meeting politicians undertook an 8 course meal, whilst simultaneously talking about Global food shortages, and in Gordon Brown’s case telling people not to waste food. The latter isn’t hypocritical, assuming Mr. Brown finished his meal.

I haven’t blogged in a while, and haven’t blogged about US politics in ages, so here we go.

Presidential Election

Obama finally put Clinton to bed. This has been inevitably basically since super Tuesday when Clinton blew her load and didn’t really get much of a win. Whats interesting has been the national polling of Obama against McCain. During the latter phases of the primaries Obama was heavily campaigned against by Clinton and also was undergoing Wrightgate, and consequently fell behind McCain in the national polling. This was up to 5% and over 100 EC votes at some stages.

During June, the month following Obama’s primary victory, he made a considerable comeback. Polling showed him gaining against McCain nationally, taking tracking polls averaged from key pollsters late last month had him over 150 EC to the good. Since then coverage has been more negative towards Obama, commenting on his movement towards the centre, and polls have fallen back.

Senate Elections

Since primary season is over, a lot of senate races have become clear, so here’s a brief summary of a few of them.

Alabama
Two term senator Jeff Sessions seems to be strongly leading (65-35) his democratic opponent, Vivian Figures, in nearly all polls. Despite democratic strength in the current electoral cycle, some places are still out of reach for them.

Alaska
Ted Stevens (whose claim to fame is being the oldest republican in the senate and stating that, “The internet is like a series of tubes”) is having a hard time, despite his position as a longrunning incumbent, against Begrich. In some polls he’s still ahead, others behind. Steven’s senility is probably a campaigning drawback, hopefully he’ll be out of office come November.

Colorado
Mark Udall is looking to take this seat for the democrats, and is polling about 10% ahead against Republican opponent Schaffer. This fits in well with Howard Dean’s strategy of hitting hard in the western states, traditionally a republican stronghold. There might be some synergy between this campaign and Obama’s national effort in Colorado.

Iowa
Tom Harkin will retain his senate seat, continuing Iowa’s swing to the democrats over the current election cycle.

Kansas
Two term incumbent Pat Roberts has a 10% or so margin above his democratic opponent, Jim Slattery. I don’t really know much about the candidates or polling issues here.

Kentucky
Mitch Mcconnell, current senate minority leader, holds a narrow lead over his democratic challenger, proving that even high ranking republicans aren’t impossible targets. He’s a stalwart conservative on nearly all issues. Interesting the libertarian party candidate is Sonny Landham who is a former porno actor who also starred in Predator. Despite his high profile, I doubt that he will really impact Mcconnell’s re-election bid too much, and Mcconnell is apparently fundraising well, so will probably be re-elected.

Louisiana
Incumbent Mary Landrieu is being challenged by a defectee to the republican cause, current State Treasurer John Kennedy. Landrieu is currently maintaining a razor-thing lead. I imagine the result of this will go down to the wire.

Massachusetts
Early on in the election season it looked like John Kerry was going to be strongly challenged, but the polls have slowly slipped his way, as one would expect of a leading democrat in a democratically leaning state in a democratically leaning year. He’s currently miles ahead of his republican opponent Jeff Beatty and his re-election looks like a sure thing. Part of Beatty’s problem is that few locals even know who he is, polling data suggests that 44% of them have no opinion of him.

Michigan
Jack Hoogendyk, Michigan house of reps member, is running against 6 term incumbent Carl Levin. He’s behind in the polling, and was the only republican running for the position. In 1996 Levin was opposed by Ronna Romney, who is Mitt Romney’s sister in law.

Maine
Susan Collins, centrist republican incumbent, is leading democratic challenger Tom Allen in polls, but by a narrowing margin. Joe Lieberman has stated that he might campaign for her.

Minnesota
If you thought the pornstar running in Kentucky was interesting, this is a minefield. The incumbent is Norm Coleman, a strong Bush supporter was one of the people who accussed Galloway of abusing his relationship with Saddam Hussein. Al Franken, well know comedian, SNL alumni, author, etc. is running against him, with a strongly leftwing agenda, note the title of one his books, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”. Currently Al Franken is behind in polls, though I’m sure his campaign is entertaining. On 9th July Jesse Ventura, former professional wrestler and governor, announced that he may run for office. Now Ventura bear Coleman in his 1996 election campaign, his entrance into the the campaign makes what the wrestling community might call a ‘3-way dance’. On his previous election effort Ventura won on the back of the Reform party ticket, its unknown who would back him this time. Ventura claims organised religion is a shame, has made numerous comments about drunken Irishmen, heavily invested in mass transit during his period as governor, is now massively bald, supports gay and abortion rights. He is generally fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Its already amusing, and if Ventura runs it will become hilarious.

I’ll leave it at that for now. Perhaps I might get round to finishing off the rest of the alphabet at some point in time.

As of Monday, I'm now working for Mendeley (with Mike Arthur), a startup in London with a C++/Qt4 client app. Unfortunately, it's not open source yet, but it's due to be once the code has been cleaned up.

The work is mostly fun (well, as much as working on someone else's code can be :p ), and the atmosphere is great (they're also still recruiting).

At the moment, I'm staying with Antz and Acehole in Hammersmith, and travel to the office is only around 35 minutes each way - and:

Additionally, thanks to Antz's nagging^Wpursasion, I now have a Jabber/"GoogleTalk" account: jabber@fredemmott.co.uk.

So, many people know that rather than using RAID on my fileserver (primarily because speed is of little importance, and data I care about is replicated), I just have a /mnt/media directory with 10 mounted drives in it. I then have a nightly "union" script which creates a softlink-based directory structure for all items in these discs, assuming each has a common structure and no overlaps.

I then share this as a read-only share "media". This causes one important issue with Samba - it defaults to enabling "UNIX extensions", which share softlinks as-is, hence enabling me to access no files. Therefore, I have to turn them off.

Of course, in doing so Samba was bound to break. In this case, I found that it was unable to share files with UTF-8 in their filename on cifs mounts correctly (they would give "file not found" even though they were listed or just not list at all). More annoyingly, smbclient would be able to access the files fine.

The solution I finally found was to set under global in smb.conf:

dos charset = UTF-8

And for the client, pass the iocharset=utf8 to the cifs mount command. All now seems happy.