pwnt.be

Mijn mening over het feit dat Leterme een tweede keer mag aanrukken, die spreekt intussen wel voor zich denk ik. En daar gaan we dan weer met de “crisettes”, de nachtelijke “onderhandelingen” en de schertsvertoningen voor de camera.

Zoek de fout(en)

De Morgen steekt meteen van wal:

Honderdelf dagen na de verkiezingen breekt een nieuwe fase aan in de zoektocht naar een nieuwe federale regering. Na informateur Didier Reynders, bemiddelaar-onderhandelaar Jean-Luc Dehaene, de eerste poging van Leterme om als formateur een oranje-blauw regeerakkoord in elkaar te boksen en de verkenningsopdracht van Herman Van Rompuy begint de formatie aan een vijfde etappe. Het is zowel voor oranje-blauw als voor Yves Leterme meteen het moment van de waarheid. (onze accentuering)

Excuseert u mij, maar ik dacht dat het de vorige vier keer al het “overleg van de allerlaatste kans” was? Het enige andere spektakel waar de “laatste kansen” zich in dergelijk ijltempo opvolgen, mijne heren en dames, dat is een belspel. En dat wil wat zeggen.

According to Google Analytics information for the past 30 days, visitors of this site are mainly interested in:

• the Numark Total Control, my DJ software controller;
• firmware for the Lite-On DH-20A1S DVD burner;
• messing with the routing table on Ubuntu and DD-WRT.

In addition, my current top referer is this forum post, a poor implementation of the Array.shuffle() function I wrote.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PHP is garbage.

Native session management wasn’t a bad idea, but the session_* functions (and the fugly $_SESSION superglobal array thing) are a fucking terrible implementation. Since this site uses sessions here and there, I went looking for a better alternative a while ago.

Obviously, I started by scouring PEAR, where I was pleased to find HTTP_Session, which claims to be an “object-oriented interface to the session_* family functions”. Excellent! Except that there is nothing object-oriented about the damn thing.

Basically, HTTP_Session is a static class full of wrappers for the session management functions. Granted, they added session containers, so at least I can use MDB2 to store sessions in the database, but come on. At the very least, I’d like the possibility to have two session objects defined simultaneously.

Fortunately, HTTP_Session2 is supposed to bring HTTP_Session up to speed with PHP 5. Except that it can’t do jack and its current source code doesn’t contain a single occurrence of $this, so I’m sure it’ll be a great improvement over its predecessor.

So, as it stands, I’ve got a singleton class providing a session object, whose actual implementation is static. Great.

The majority of the PHP “developers” out there need to get their heads out of the collective rectum. I have spoken.

Wow. If I had to replace my MS-1012 right now, I’d totally go for the newly announced Asus U6S. Just look at that puppy.

The Asus U6S, courtesy of Notebook Italia

(Via Engadget)

… will always be a royal pain in the behind. This afternoon, I decided to give the Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon beta a try—upgrading from Feisty—, and here’s what happened.

I should start by saying that my experiences with upgrading Kubuntu have been less than pleasant. In the past, I’ve had to edit /etc/fstab because it couldn’t find my /usr partition, reinstall kubuntu-desktop and dependencies because apt-get decided I didn’t need a desktop environment anymore after the upgrade, etcetera.

Be that as it may, there has been steady progress in the field of smooth upgrades. Ubuntu and Kubuntu have had a nice graphical upgrade tool for a while now. Consequently, they’ve been downplaying upgrading from a console—replacing every occurrence of feisty with gutsy in /etc/apt/sources.list and running apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. While that process was far from perfect—my problematic upgrades mentioned above all involved these steps—, at least you had some control over it.

Right now, there’s nothing about using the console. They force you to follow these steps instead. And I’m sure that, in select cases, that’s a good thing. The objective is to keep people out of consoles. But this means that the entire process needs to be flawless.

By now, you’ve come to realize that, in my case, the process was far from flawless.

I went through the steps and, surprisingly, up until the proprietary upgrade tool, everything was fine. Then, in the middle of installing updates, it stopped doing anything—or at least, the GUI didn’t change in ages. Obviously, I gave it ample time. Then I clicked on “Show Terminal”. Nothing happened. I waited some more. Nothing.

At this point, I was already assuming that my system was now essentially borked, but I figured I’d try and fix things manually anyway. Hoping the upgrade utility was just a fancy GUI for apt-get dist-upgrade, I fired up Konsole—which still worked, luckily—and entered that command. I got a dpkg error, recommending dpkg --reconfigure -a, which I blindly executed. It installed a load of packages. I figured I’d give Adept Manager another try, but it kept complaining about a lock on the sources and crashing silently. Wonderful. I tried apt-get dist-upgrade again. It installed some more packages, but exited with an error, recommending the -f switch. So I ran apt-get dist-upgrade -f. Again, it installed packages. Then, it was still holding back miscellaneous packages; I installed them manually. Again, I ran apt-get dist-upgrade and it decided everything was up to date. I rebooted.

Rebooting went surprisingly well. Then, just before KDM fired up, I got screen after screen filled with obscure “device lookup failed” error messages. Fun. Luckily, a quick Google search pointed me to this bug, which told me to just remove everything related to EVMS—it won’t be missed. God forbid they’d do that automatically or at least propose to do so, rather than letting users’ error logs fill up. Anyway, I rebooted just in case, and logged in.

Surprisingly, my desktop was intact. Font hinting seemed to have changed a bit, even though now I can’t tell anymore—needless to say, I still say FreeType is inferior to ClearType. Other than that, two of the three hotkeys on my laptop stopped working: somehow, I could still launch Thunderbird with the e-mail key, but I had to re-assign Swiftfox to the web browser key, and I still haven’t figured out how to change the behavior of the search key, which is now recognized and fires up a KDE search GUI, while I want it to open something I actually use, i.e. Konsole I had to log in again to make it apply a new binding for the search key.

As for Dolphin: I don’t like Konqueror that much, but at first sight, I don’t consider Dolphin an improvement. If anything, it’s a Finder clone, and even the fanboys don’t appreciate Finder that much, so.

Other new features? I can’t spot many. I’m not even sure if Compiz Fusion is included. I’m not holding my breath. X.Org is shoddy enough as it is.

You may be wondering why I even bother to use Linux on my laptop. Well, more than anything, I’m just curious about recent developments in the desktop Linux market. For the things I use my laptop for, I could just as easily boot to Windows XP, and my experiences would be largely similar, except that Redmond doesn’t believe in predictable release schedules—this whole post pretty much illustrates why. Needless to say, they both have their flaws.

In conclusion, unless you know what you’re doing, don’t bother to upgrade Kubuntu. And I can only assume the experience is similar on Ubuntu.