Technophile Monkey

Mit H1N1 kommt nicht nur die Virusangst in die Schweiz sondern auch ein deutsches Wort ins Schweizerdeutsch: “Z Schwein”. Oder wie erklärt man sich das? Zeigt man auf ein paar Schweine und fragt einen Deutschsschweizer, was er da sieht, sagt er “a paar schwii” und nicht “a paar schweine”. Der Plural auf -e existiert in dieser Form nicht einmal. In Züritüütsch sieht man das besser (“d schuä”, “d tramliniä”, “d bürger und bürgerinnä”) — wenn, dann müsste “schweine” ein Plural auf kurzes -ä (Züritüütsch) bzw. in Khûrertütsch auf kurzes -a oder -e werden.

Das -ä ist übrigens auch nicht ganz korrekt, aber ich beherrsche die Dieth-Schrift nicht und habe keine Ahnung, was für einen Accent dieses kurze ä eigentlich bräuchte. ê? è?

Nun denn. Eine Anatomie des Wortes “schwii”:

schwii (n.) (pl. schwii): Vierbeiniges rundes rosa Ding mit kurzem Rüssel. Frisst alles mögliche.

Warum heisst es dann plötzlich “d schweinegripp”? Ich habe keine Erklärung. Das muss doch wehtun, so ein Wort herauszuquetschen?

Ich boykottiere dieses Wort und bleibe beim Konstrukt “d schwiigrippa”. Da sind wenigstens die Einzelteile richtig.

On the off chance that anyone reads this, I need to find a little more time for real-life things and I’ll be very busy until about the end of 2010. So I thought I’d cut down on the blogging a little. That means this blog and the one at FSFE won’t get much love anymore.

If you’re really interested, I will have time to write short things on Twitter and identi.ca:

http://twitter.com/psyq123
http://identi.ca/psyq123

identi.ca is more for the geeky topics (Free Software etc.), Twitter more for my gaming habits. All dents (from identi.ca) get tweeted as well.

Don’t you love this newfangled net vocabulary? Radical!

See you in 2011 or so!

I’ve been using the new KDE 4.3 for a week now, and I think I’ll stick with it. There are still some issues to fix, but they are small things, I’m sure 4.3.1 will take care of them.

The fun I’ve had so far, and this is why I’d recommend trying KDE 4.3 to any computer user, is in the subtle little helpful things KDE does:

• When you move a file to a folder that already contains that file, Dolphin (the file manager) will ask what to do with it. It even recognizes the file if they have different names! You can choose to skip, auto-skip, overwrite… No more manually trying to find duplicate files to interleave one directory with another.
• In Dolphin, clicking on the filesystem path shown on top of your file list lets you edit it and manually enter paths. Very quick.
• The widgets on the desktop are both silly and useful, depending on which ones you choose. I have the latest lolcats, Penny Arcade, XKCD and Nichtlustig comics on my desktop. But I also have a dictionary widget, the weather, a fuzzy clock (says “half past eleven” in so many words) and the files in my homedir. I can also add the files from my former desktop directory, and they show up in orderly fashion. Compare this to your average desktop, where there’s just clutter and no real useful features. In the worst case, I can glance at the weather and some lolcats. In the best case, I’ll quickly navigate to a file I was looking for.
• Dolphin as file manager is amazing. I can have OS X-style columns in the window, then split the window and have your usual detail view on the right half. I can mix and match view modes as I please and use the one that’s best for each situation. When navigating the hierarchy a lot, column view might be good, but when sorting audio files from left to right it’s better with a side-by-side detail view.
• Alt-F2 (this is freely configurable) brings up a quickstart dialog that is really powerful. If I enter “fire” and hit enter, firefox will launch. If I enter “22+3=” the bottom of the window will show “25″. If I enter “Ruben” and some Rubens are in my address book, one of the choices will be “Write e-mail to Ruben”. If I enter “gmail”, my Gmail opens because I visited that site in my browser once before. This is all done 100% automatically and transparently, without any configuration. I’m sure if I configured this thing, it would be even cooler. Very, very, very fast working is possible this way.
• Kate is a wonderful text editor, it has probably the most beautiful code folding I’ve ever seen.
• Choqok and other social networking tools integrate nicely with the desktop and also make use of the cool notification feature.
• If your machine is doing something in the background (copying a bunch of files), your screen isn’t cluttered up with useless progress dialogs. Instead, all current tasks are summarized in the lower right corner in your notification area. Once the task is finished, you will be notified. If you want to look at the progress, hover your mouse over the notification area.
• I have OS X’s Exposé and other window management features at my disposal, but I don’t need to use OS X for them

Check out this screenshot of my desktop:

The kickoff menu in the lower left is very convenient as well. I think you can see that I’m very happy with KDE 4.3. If some of the issues (like the WLAN network manager that can’t connect to corporate WPA2-TKIP networks) are fixed, I see no reason not to recommend this stuff.

Microsoft is currently trying to sneak changes into their MS-OOXML file format that would break things that had been fixed before, and that would reintroduce a bug involving leap years into Excel and competing spreadsheet software reading files in the MS-OOXML format (.xlsx).

If you’re part of an ISO mirror comittee for ISO/IEC JTC1, please vote NO on these changes. If you believe that this change would not affect many documents because it concerns the transitional class only, be warned! All documents out there right now are transitional. It would break them all (again).

Norbert Bollow has more on what to look for:

This change is well-hidden as the twelfth item in the DCOR 1 (“draft corrigenda 1″) document for ISO/IEC 29500-4, the part of the standard which deals with specifics of the “transitional” conformance class. Currently all OOXML documents which exist in practice are of this conformance class, so regardless of the name, any change which is made there has in practice exactly the same effect as a change which refers to both conformance classes (the other conformance class is called “strict”.)

The sleazy tricks, will they ever end?

If you have Ubuntu, give KDE 4.3 a try or check out some information first.

I’ve followed the KDE development since version 1.0. I remember installing it in circa 1999 on a PowerPC machine with a 200 MHz 603e and 24 MB RAM, and it ran faster than the native OS I had on that box, Mac OS 7.6.

When the KDE team hit version 3.0, I thought development got very slow, KDE as well, and things weren’t looking great all in all. Now that I’m trying KDE 4.3, I’m surprised at every corner. This thing rocks. It’s fast, it’s quite different to any other desktop, but extremely configurable. I can set this thing up to work like Mac OS X, like Windows, like a mix between the two, like none of them. I can add the latest lolcats to my desktop in a widget, with a dictionary and my home dir next to it, and they’re available at the push of a button.

I have a solid copy of OS X’s Exposé, I have UNIX’s own 3D desktop cube, I have Windows Vista’s flip-through task switcher (if I like. I use a simpler one, though). I mix and match all this until it’s my own perfect desktop environment. And if you think it’s hard: I haven’t looked at KDE since KDE 3.x, and that was years back, and I have much more trouble finding things on a Vista desktop (which I also never use) than I had on KDE 4.3. Most settings are where you expect them, and most things do what you’d like them to do. It has the right functionality, and the functionality is right where you expect it.

It’s also the best-looking desktop environment I know, with very clean lines, meaningful icons and widgets and a quick and useful file manager. I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic music player Amarok, but that would require its own article.

And on top of it, all this comes with full source code, runs on Linux, BSD and I think even Windows, and is published under a free software license.

Bravo!

Update: I’ve been using KDE 4.3 now for about six hours, after more than three years of GNOME. I think I’m staying with KDE for now. This is smooth as a baby’s arse. Amarok is integrated into the system so tightly, I have keyboard shortcuts to control all my music, my desktop is full of widgets that are actually useful or entertaining instead of pointless, my file browser works better than ever before… This is the surprise of the year for me.

I use a bunch of Google services, but what if the whole thing comes crashing down and I lose my data? That’s why I back up everything I can back up. I have scripts to automatically pull my calendar data out of Google and stick it in my incremental backup, I’ve set up mail systems that route my mail so that I always have a local copy of whatever has gone through Google and I even back up my RSS reader subscriptions.

Here’s a small thought, though: If Google offered a guaranteed service, where they would be required to provide a certain level of safety for my data, I’d pay something for that. Maybe USD 100/year would be the sweet spot.

They offer similar things for corporate customers where e.g. Google Apps (and associated calendar and mail functions) cost USD 50/year per person, but I’d like this sort of thing for private users.

I have the honor of being in the jury of the CH Open Source Awards 2009, organized by /ch/open.

If you’re a Free Software/Open Source/FOSS/FLOSS (you get the idea) project from Switzerland, apply for the award!

Whee, I got into the closed beta for Dawntide.

It might not look that fantastic, but it’s made by some of the former Shards of Dalaya developers, and they’ve proved that they have a good hand balancing stuff and creating solid gameplay.

I’m looking forward to having a try, especially because they’re going a slightly different route with skills and all.

Update: In case you’re wondering if it’s okay to talk about the Dawntide beta, the devs have a down-to-earth, refreshing opinion here as well:

You may be wondering where the NDA that comes with most beta tests is. There isn’t one, because fundamentally we want people to talk about Dawntide and show things off, and we need to know when something is broken. If people find something wrong with the game, they’re going to tell other people it’s a bad game regardless of any NDA. Feel free to take and post screenshots and discuss the game with your friends.

Nice.

Like everyone else and their pets, I’ve been playing a bit of Aion this weekend. If I had to summarize the first 11 levels: Very nicely done MMO, everything done by the book. You find a lot of elements you know from other MMOs, but they have provided a very streamlined experience. If you’ve ever played some other MMO, the game fits like a glove (just with cheesy cutscenes). If you’ve played multiple MMOs, here’s how they compare in my opinion:

• The combat system is like Runes of Magic with a little dash of EverQuest II. Fights are over faster than in EQII, roughly as fast as in Runes of Magic. The combo opportunities are interesting and tactically valuable even early on in the game. For example, you open with Ferocious Strike II which simply does extra damage but opens up some damage mitigation shield skill. So you use that in order not to lose too much HP in the beginning of the fight. Next you do some defense removal skill on the enemy, and follow up with a shield bash that stuns. This way you’ve already mitigated or prevented a lot of damage. Now that your Ferocious Strike II has recharged, pick it again. The shield isn’t back up yet, so just follow up with a plain extra damage hit. Fun! And more intuitive than Runes of Magic because your chaining possibilities are actually listed right on the screen, like in EverQuest II.
• The chat system seems fundamentally like WoW’s. For some weird reason, unknown /-commands are not filtered out, however, so you’ll be standing there like a complete fool saying things like “/away” to everybody.
• Travel system: It’s a mix of Runes of Magic’s teleporters and WoW’s flight paths. You can fly from town to town, but to get from some continents to some others, you need to use direct teleportation. It just costs in-game money, no teleportation reagents like in RoM.
• The story and cutscenes are cheesy like something out of Creative Writing for Beginners. Even the names of places and people are stolen from a wide variety of mythologies and sagas. There’s “Brunthild” who is surely Brünhilde from the Nibelungenlied, there’s “Vifrost” which is Bifrost from Norse mythology, you’ll find Daevas, you’ll find Balder (Balder or Baldur from Norse Mythology), you’ll encounter Boromer (Boromir? Geez). This sort of mixing and matching is something you see often in Japanese games, it seems that Koreans like a similar style.
• Item socketing and upgrades is almost exactly copied from Runes of Magic. Of course Diablo II did it first, but Aion’s implementation is similar to the one in Runes.
• Travel speed is pretty slow if you’re not using a flight path, I’d say about the same speed as WoW. Your wings are nearly useless as travel aid, you can only fly for 60 seconds at a time.
• The art style is somewhere between EQII and WoW. Glittery armor and devilish-looking characters, water effects, less comic-ish look than WoW.
• You will do a million fetch and kill quests. Every single quest I’ve encountered had unimaginative text and was of the fetch this item/kill 10 rats variety.

That sounds like it’s a bad game, but it’s really not. You just won’t encounter anything new in the first 10 levels. I’m very much looking forward to aerial combat and the oft-advertised PvPvE battles that apparently start midgame and continue on into endgame.

It’s a very beautiful looking game, it feels solid and it seems to have an interesting melee combat system. Could be worse. With Runes of Magic being so similar and continuously improving, I wonder if the big battle of MMOs will be between Aion and RoM. American players are still sceptical of RMT systems in general, but RoM’s is very well executed and RoM is successful in Asia and Europe, so I think the Americans have nothing to fear. Aion, on the other hand, demands a monthly subscription. At this point, I can’t say if it’s worth the subscription, I’d probably have to reach endgame. For the price of an Aion subscription you can get one hell of a lot of gadgets and useful stuff in RoM, though.

The fact is that if you’ve played some other MMOs, you’ll have a very easy time getting into Aion. There is nothing radical in the first ten levels that would force you to rethink any of the concepts you know. You have your basic classes (Tank/Melee DPS/Magic DPS/Healer), but now they’ve got wings. You have your basic play mechanics and fast and entertaining battles. You have your basic series-of-quest-hubs (SOQH?) progression system that leads you around the world, from place to place. That’s all I could see in the first 11 levels.

Let’s finish this off with a screenshot. After 50 seconds of flight time, I was warned that I would soon fall out of the sky, and so I had to find somewhere safe to sit in Altgard Fortress: