Kirsle.net
I blog about anything I find interesting, and since I have a lot of varied interests, my blog entries are kind of all over the place. You can browse my tags to sort them by topic and see which ones I frequently write about, or the archive has a complete history of my posts, dating back to 2008!
Besides my blog, I have pages for my creative projects, which are linked to on the navigation bar.
I write a lot about Linux and Android, Minecraft, and I like to rant about stuff. Generally anything that makes me curious. Also check out my Bookmarks for all sorts of cool websites about various topics I'm interested in.
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Internet Protocol version 6Last weekend I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Time Warner Cable already supports IPv6 at my apartment.
They shipped me a newer cable modem/WiFi router combo device earlier this year as part of their plan to upgrade everyone's Internet speeds in Los Angeles. I didn't realize that this modem also supported IPv6, and it wasn't enabled by default.
Today I picked up a Macbook Air (13", early 2015 model) because I wanted a new laptop, as my old laptop (the Samsung Series 5) has a horrible battery life, where it barely lasts over an hour and gives up early (powering down at 40% and not coming back up until I plug it in). This is also my first Apple computer. I'm the furthest thing from an Apple fanboy, but the choices I was throwing around in my head were between an Apple computer and a Lenovo Thinkpad.
I was given a Thinkpad as my work laptop, and it's by far the most impressive PC laptop I've ever used; it can drive three displays and run lots of concurrent tasks and has an insane battery life. Every PC laptop I've owned in the past have sucked in comparison. I hear people compare Apple computers to Thinkpads, so that's why the choice came down to one of these, and I didn't want another Thinkpad sitting around the house. ;)
Months before getting a Macbook I was looking into what kind of effort it takes to install Linux on a Macbook. There's a lot of information out there, and most of it suggests that the best way to go is to install a boot manager like rEFIt (or rEFInd, since rEFIt isn't maintained anymore). I saw some pages about not using rEFIt and installing Grub directly, which were from a Debian and Arch Linux perspective, and it sounded really complicated.
It seems that nowadays, with a user friendly Linux distribution like Fedora, a lot of this works much more flawlessly than the dozens of tutorials online would suggest. I just made a Fedora LiveUSB in the usual way (as if installing on a normal PC), rebooted the Macbook while holding the Option key, so that I was able to select the USB to boot from.
When installing Fedora to disk, the process was very much the same as doing it on a normal PC. I let Fedora automatically create the partition layout, and it created partitions and mount points for /, /boot and /home like usual, but it also created a partition and mount point for /boot/efi (for installing itself as the default bootloader in the EFI firmware on the Macbook). After installation was completed, I rebooted and the grub boot screen comes up immediately, with options to boot into Fedora.
One weird thing is, the grub screen apparently sees something related to Mac OS X (there were two entries, like "Mac OS X 32-bit" and "Mac OS X 64-bit", but both options would give error messages when picked).
If I want to boot into OS X, I hold down the Option key on boot and pick the Macintosh HD from the EFI boot menu. Otherwise, if the Macbook boots normally it goes into the grub menu and then Fedora. So, the whole thing is very similar to a typical PC dual-boot setup (with Windows and Linux), just with one extra step to get into OS X.
Update: I'm keeping a wiki page with miscellaneous setup notes and tips here: Fedora on Macbook
I've spent the last few months porting over the JavaScript version of my chatbot scripting language, RiveScript, into CoffeeScript. I mainly did this because I didn't like to maintain raw JavaScript code (especially after I ran a linter on it and had to rearrange my variable declarations because JavaScript's variable scoping rules are stupid), but I also took the opportunity to restructure the code and make it more maintainable in the future.
For some historical background, the first RiveScript implementation was written in Perl, and I designed it to be one big monolithic file (RiveScript.pm), because then I could tell noobs that they can update to a new version of RiveScript in their bots by just dropping in a new file to replace the old one, and avoid overwhelming them with the complexity of doing a CPAN installation (especially if they're generally new to Perl as well, and all they really wanna do is just run a chatbot.)
First and foremost: this requires the victim to click not one, but two random links sent to them over Pidgin (or any other program that does URL auto-linking the way Pidgin does). So it's not exactly the most severe vulnerability, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
I've created a downloadable Minecraft map that implements "Swampcore" (older blog post about Swampcore). It's a superflat swamp biome preset with a 24/7 thunderstorm, making for an extremely hostile map where you have to scratch and claw your way into having so much as a simple dirt shack to call "home".
It runs on vanilla Minecraft (no mods or anything needed) and was created on Minecraft v1.8.3, but will probably work on later versions too.
I've just spent pretty much the whole day redoing the website for RiveScript.com, and I think it looks pretty nice.
RiveScript.com was the final website on my server that was still running on my legacy PerlSiikir CMS, and it's been on my to-do list for a while to get it migrated over to my new Python CMS, Rophako like what Kirsle.net is currently running on. The old Perl code was clunky and ugly and memory-leaky, and now I'll be at ease if I ever need to migrate to a new web server, as my Python web apps are extremely quick to get up-and-running, whereas it was an hours-long ordeal to get PerlSiikir to run.
So, the bulk of the work actually needed for RiveScript.com was purely front-end. I revamped the whole web design to use Twitter Bootstrap and make it look all hip and edgy like how all the other small software project websites are these days.
Besides the programming language on the back-end, I had other reasons for why I wanted to simplify RiveScript.com: I don't have the motivation or energy to do as much with that site as I did previously.
I used to run a YaBB Forum on RiveScript.com, but it wasn't extremely active and it was getting hit by too many spam bots, so several months ago I shut that down and linked to the RiveScript forum at Chatbots.org.
More recently I had programmed a chatbot hosting service that was on RiveScript.com, but that wasn't very popular either. I know nobody was using it because it had been broken for months and I hadn't heard any complaints. ;) A couple months ago I sunsetted that feature by turning off new site registrations and removing some references to the feature. And now that's officially gone! If you actually had a bot hosted there, contact me and I can get you your bot's reply files back.
So, the new site is simple and minimalistic and is just about the RiveScript language itself. It was an ordeal rewriting all of the pages from scratch (well, most of them) but now that it's done, the site should be very low-maintenance for me.
One of the most fun parts of it was that I ported over my "Try RiveScript Online" page to use JavaScript and run in the browser, whereas the old version had a Perl back-end (because a JavaScript version of RiveScript didn't exist at the time), so that's even one less thing for me to maintain and make sure it doesn't break. :)
And, the front-end pages for the new site are also open source, FWIW.
I jumped ship from GNOME 2 to XFCE when GNOME 3 was announced and have ranted about it endlessly, but then I decided to give GNOME 3.14 (Fedora 21) a try.
I still installed Fedora XFCE on all the PCs I care about, and decided my personal laptop was the perfect guinea pig for GNOME because I never do anything with that laptop and wouldn't mind re-formatting it again for XFCE if I turn out not to like Gnome.
After scouring the GNOME Shell extensions I installed a handful that made my desktop somewhat tolerable:
(Click for bigger screenshot)
And then I found way too many little papercuts, some worse than others. My brief list:
Settings weren't always respected very well, and some apps would need to be "coerced" into actually looking at their settings. For example, I configured the GNOME Terminal to use a transparent background. It worked when I first set it up, but then it would rarely work after that. If I opened a new terminal, the background would be solid black. Adjusting the transparency setting now had no effect. Sometimes, opening and closing a tab would get GNOME Terminal to actually read its settings and turn transparent. Most of the time though, it didn't, and nothing I could do would get the transparency to come back on. It all depended on the alignment of the stars and when GNOME Terminal damn well feels like it.
Also, I use a left handed mouse, and GNOME Shell completely got confused after a reboot. The task bar and window buttons (maximize, close, etc.) and other Shell components would be right handed, while the actual apps I use would be left handed. So, clicking the scrollbar and links in Firefox would be left-handed (right mouse button is your "left click"), and when I wanted to close out of Firefox, I'd instead get a context menu popup when clicking the "X" button. Ugh!
I wanted to write this blog post from within GNOME but it just wasn't possible. With different parts of my GUI using right-handed buttons and other parts using left-handed ones, I had context menus popping up when I didn't want them and none popping up when I did. After a while I thought to go into the Mouse settings and switch it back; this didn't help, instead, the parts that used to be right-handed switched to left-handed, and vice versa. It was impossible to use. I just had to painstakingly get a screenshot off the laptop and to my desktop and deal with it over there instead.
These things just lead me to believe the GNOME developers only develop for their particular workflows and don't bother testing any features that other mere mortals might like to use. All the GNOME developers are probably right-handed, and they have no idea about the left-handed bugs. All of the GNOME developers don't use transparency in their terminals, evidenced by the fact that the transparency option disappeared from GNOME 3.0 and only just recently has made a comeback (in GNOME 3.12/Fedora 20).
XFCE is going back on this laptop.
Today, Fedora 21 was released and I upgraded to it immediately, and decided not to install Skype this time.
Skype for Linux has been poorly maintained, going years between updates sometimes, and who knows what kind of unknown zero-day vulnerabilities are in there. On my previous installation of Fedora, Skype twice showed a weird issue where it replaced some of its icons with Chinese (or Korean, or something) symbols. I posted about it on Reddit and the Skype forum with no responses, as if I'm the only one who's ever seen this. Was I hacked? Maybe.
I took the latest Windows version of Skype and dumped all its icons trying to find these weird symbols but came up empty-handed. And I don't know of any way to pry icons out of the Linux binary of Skype. So... for now I just don't trust it.
In other news, I decided to Google the Skype protocol, and see what the progress is on people attempting to reverse engineer it, to be able to build an open source third-party Skype client (e.g. to have support in Pidgin). The Wikipedia article said something interesting:
On June 20, 2014, Microsoft announced the deprecation of the old Skype protocol. [...] The new Skype protocol - Microsoft Notification Protocol 24 - promises better offline messaging and better messages synchronization across Skype devices.
I wrote previously that the MSN Messenger service was still alive but it looks like it's the future of Skype as well.
The Microsoft Notification Protocol (MSNP) is the protocol used by MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger. I'm reasonably familiar with it from back in the day when I used to work on chatbots that signed in to MSN Messenger to accept their add requests and carry on conversations with humans.
MSNP is a plain text, line-delimited protocol similar to SMTP. There is some outdated documentation up through MSNP10 that we referenced in developing an MSN module in Perl. As an example, this is what you'd see going over the network if somebody sent a chat message to a friend:
MSG 4 N 133
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
X-MMS-IM-Format: FN=Arial; EF=I; CO=0; CS=0; PF=22
Hello! How are you?
The protocol consisted of command lines, typically three letters long (some I remember offhand: NLN--go online, FLN--go offline, BRB--set status to "be right back", RNG--request a conversation with a contact ("ring"), ANS--accept a conversation request ("answer"), and MSG--send a message). The RNG and ANS commands were invisible to the user in the official client, but allowed for some interesting behaviors in our chatbots (like immediately sending you a message the moment you open their chat window, before you even begin to type anything!)
It's interesting that Skype "downgraded" to the MSNP though, given that Skype's old protocol was an impenetrable fortress of obfuscation and encryption that nobody's ever managed to reverse engineer. Even third party clients like Trillian that had Skype support were technically using SkypeKit, a developer tool that allowed Skype to be remote controlled, but which kept all the proprietary bits a secret still. On the other hand, it makes sense for them to make Skype conform to Outlook.com and their other services that used MSNP, rather than upgrade all their other services to use the Skype protocol.
The last version of Windows Live Messenger used MSNP19 (or MSNP21 depending who you ask), so the new Skype protocol is just the next version of MSNP.
In Googling MSNP24 I found this site where efforts are already underway at reverse engineering it. This other site has a lot more details on the current status of the Messenger protocol.
It's only a matter of time now until Pidgin can natively support Skype accounts. It will also be fun to program chatbots for Skype. :)
In an older blog post I mentioned getting Alicebot Program V, a Perl implementation of an Alice AIML bot, up and running on a modern version of Perl, but I didn't go into any details on what I actually did to get this to work (which wasn't very nice of me ;) ).
Unfortunately for me I also didn't even write down any notes for myself, so I had to figure it out again, myself, from scratch. Which I decided to do, only this time I wrote down some notes, and published a new, updated version of Program V which you can check out on GitHub -- or for the lazy, get a zipped release of Program V 0.09.
This blog post is about what I needed to do to get Program V up and running, some of which is also outlined in UpdateNotes.md on the GitHub repo.
These are just some of my thoughts on things that a Minecraft clone should probably do differently to Mojang's (well, Microsoft's) Minecraft, since a clone would be starting from scratch anyway and would be in a good position to fix some of the fundamental problems in the original game that are impossible/unlikely to be fixed by Microsoft.
Some of the Minecraft clones I'm familiar with so far are Terasology, Minetest, and Michael Fogleman's Craft. So far, Craft seems to do the most things "right" (as far as my list of fundamental improvements on Minecraft go) such as only storing changes to the blocks to disk rather than whole entire chunks, but more on that in a minute.
Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer. I am a software developer and have a particular interest in the technology used in games, i.e. I have the knowledge to write code for most given game mechanics and spend countless hours thinking about these sorts of things. I've read a lot about the technical internals of Minecraft and have read some of the source code to these clones, so this blog post is full of my own educated opinions on things. I may, at some point, take on the challenge of creating a Minecraft clone of my own, but until then these are just the things I've been thinking about over the last several months.
0.0018s.
