With recent news of AMD acquiring ATI there was some incorrect reporting that AMD would be dropping the ATI brand in favour of tacking Radeon on its own brand name of AMD. According to Ars Technica the name drop was a miscommunication that spread like fire through the blogosphere as well as online news. This is both the advantage and disadvantage of the quick turn-around time of the online media. One would think that serious technical journalists, however, would verify this with AMD and/or ATI themselves before reporting.

In related news Intel revealed a website where they are offering source code for their 965 IGP. And it becomes even more interesting when put into perspective with an article from InfoWorld where it is said that AMD is strongly considering releasing open source at least a part of the ATI graphics drivers. One can only wonder how NVIDIA will react to these developments.

From http://www.schmidp.com/index.php?option=com_files&path=/haiku/images/ download a VMWare file.

Within VMWare create a new machine based on 'Other', name the virtual disk haiku.vmdk. After creating the machine replace the generated haiku.vmdk with the contents from the downloaded tarball from the schmidp website. Next you might need to select VM > Upgrade Virtual Machine.

When you start the virtual machine you will see the Haiku boot screen. After a few seconds you will be greeted with a graphical user interface which has a Terminal 1 window open with the text: Welcome to the Haiku shell.

Welcome to Haiku.

Addition: for those of you with VMWare Player, use VMXWizard to create a .vmx file to use with the downloaded .vmdk.

風が吹いて　痛い　消えない思い
何を持っていこうか　集めて一つ
二度とない　二度とない　捨てるなんて馬鹿みたい
無邪気になって　イメージ
As the wind blows, these painful memories won't disappear.
What were you thinking as you collected the old songs into one?
There is no second chance. There is no second chance. I know how foolish I look
The image of becoming innocent

きっとそれは終わらない
きっとそれは終わらない
This definitely isn't over
This definitely isn't over

愛の胸　焦がせ 線の夢 渡れ
縦横無尽　駆けて　手に掴む世界
雲がちぎれて　日がまた落ちて
ひとりのパレードが　動きだす
The flaming sight of my passion crossing a thousand dreams
passing over the inhuman beasts I seize the world in my hands
The clouds scatter, and the sun sets again.
This one-man parade starts to move

母権 基地術 審判 上昇 明暗 遭遇 生命 相愛
Adventure, Lucky Days, Trials, Climbing, Light and Darkness, Encounters, Life, Mutual Love

もしも言ってしまうなら　あなたの髪を
嗅いで　吸って　もっと　寄せ合う言葉
ワカラナイ　ワカラナイ　うわべだけじゃわからない
だからもっと深くしたい　したい
なんて夢みたい
なんて夢みたい
愛の胸　焦がせ　千の夢　渡れ
縦横無尽　駆けて　巡り逢う奇跡
雲がちぎれて　日がまた落ちて
ふたつのパレードが夜空に溶けて
誰もが持っている　ポケットに沈めた夜がある
そいつを灯すように　手を伸ばしては泳ぐ人
見つけられたならいい　あなたの景色と同じもの
愛の胸　焦がせ　千の夢　渡れ
縦横無尽　駆けて　手に掴む世界
雲がちぎれて　日がまた落ちて
未完成のパレードでどこまでも
冒険　吉日　心拍　上昇　明暗　遭遇　生命　相愛

So, Microsoft intends to submit its Office 12 file formats to ECMA as a proposed standard..

I took a look at the files and they're in binary format. I thought that for most office applications, especially word processing, we were leaving behind the world of binary encoded formats and moving to XML?

Given the fact how the world is massing behind the Open Document initiative this move of Microsoft's seems to be nothing but PR and marketing. Especially given how the OASIS Open consortium and the Open Document community have now pushed this forward to become an ISO standard.

Very interesting article by Eric Sink about comparing teams of programmers to choirs (extension of Joel Spolsky's earlier essay).

I have a 256 colour xterm set up on my DragonFly box.

Works perfectly. Especially for vim.

Now, I use FreeBSD 5.x as a gateway box to ssh into and have irssi and likewise programs screened.

Now, I was surprised to learn that I had only 16 colours. Outside of screen I had a full 256 colour palette (make sure to fix your PuTTY configuration by the way), but inside I was stripped of my colour scheme.

So I set off to find what was causing this. Interestingly enough one of the first emails encountered was from Jeremy Chadwick who had the exact same problem.

Turns out that screen needs to be compiled with 256 colour support (a knob should be in your ports Makefile now).

Since FreeBSD's and DragonFly's termcap is bereft of any 256 colour definitions for xterm apparently, you need to add the following to $HOME/.screenrc:

termcap xterm* 'Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm'
terminfo xterm* 'Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%p1%dm:AF=E[38;5;%p1%dm'

This overrides your termcap settings with the appropriate definitions.

If you now start screen from a shell that has TERM exported as xterm or xterm-color (xterm* wildcard actually) it will fork off to a screen with 256 colour support.

You might need this in $HOME/.vimrc:

if &term =~ "xterm" || &term =~ "screen"
  set t_Co=256
  if has("terminfo")
    let &t_Sf=nr2char(27).'[3%p1%dm'
    let &t_Sb=nr2char(27).'[4%p1%dm'
  else
    let &t_Sf=nr2char(27).'[3%dm'
    let &t_Sb=nr2char(27).'[4%dm'
  endif
endif

Was converting files to proper ANSI C function declarations and a user tripped over the fact that old 4.4 BSD's function prototype of strmode() had int as a parameter, whereas it has been mode_t for a long, long time (read 1994 at least).

This broke buildworld of course.

Also asked Dima Dorfman to fix this for FreeBSD (broken in 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x).

NetBSD is fixed (as was to be expected to be honest).

And OpenBSD made the parameter int everywhere with a XXX comment in the strmode.c file that it should be mode_t actually. Weird.

ZSH in its released forms has no support at all for use of Unicode. In the CVS there are some changes to making this work as it should.

Which means finally able to use Nihongo on the command line. Yay.

The guys at Square are amazing with some ideas.

The Hymn of the Fayth in Final Fantasy X is as follows:

イ エ ユ イ
ノ ボ メ ノ
レ ン ミ リ
ヨ ジュ ヨ ゴ

ハ サ テ カ ナ エ
ク タ マ エ

Or in romaji:

i e yu i
no bo me no
re n mi ri
yo ju yo go

ha sa te ka na e
ku ta ma e

Now, this means nothing in Japanese, but when you read the first part top to bottom, left to right, syllable by syllable you get:

inoreyo ebonju yumemiyo inoriko

祈れよ エボンジュ 夢見よ 祈り子

Pray! Ebon Ju (Yu Yevon in the English edition) Dream! Child of Prayer (Fayth).

The second part is read by reading every other syllable for the first two words:

hatenaku sakae tamae

果てなく栄え給え

In the end, grant prosperity.

After installing the latest K-Lite Codec pack and NVIDIA drivers I found that some video files had weird colours.

After some futzing around I found the issue.

Go to the NVIDIA tray icon, select color correction, at 'Apply color changes to' select 'All'. Then at 'Color profile' select 'Advanced mode' and then 'Restore Defaults', select 'Apply'. This fixed my colour problem. Apparently the new NVIDIA drivers/control panel do something with the gamma, which isn't shown in the panel.

Caused me a few days of head breaking, especially since it only was for some codecs/applications.