During the break, I completely overhauled my compiled website engine.  Several features, like the sitemap and table of contents, have been removed for now – they simply haven’t been rewritten yet.  The rest is working well, and in many cases much better than before.  That was, after all, the point of the rewrite.

Since I do get traffic to this blog, I wanted to post a reminder here that I’m not actually going to be posting here again unless some odd circumstance comes up.  Some of this blog’s content has already been moved, and the rest is being gradually migrated over to the new website.

I have not written my own blogging engine yet, and I won’t for a while, but I’ll at least be copying things over as regular wiki-style pages.

I now have unlimited drive space and bandwidth and so I’ll be able to both host and review all the software I want.

I use these addons:

- LightHeaded adds the right-hand frame with additional quest details and select comments from WowHead.com. Sometimes the comments are invaluable because Blizzard’s descriptions can be incoherent.

- TomTom is also recommended. It lets you click on links within LightHeaded to get map and minimap waypoints and an arrow that you can follow.

- QuestLog Collapse lets me remember my collapse preferences between sessions.

I can shift-click on any item in my quest log to track it. It is displayed on the right side of my screen:

I can click the quest icon to use that item. I don’t have to hunt for it in my bags! (Incidentally I use Bagnon to colour quest items in my bags.)

I can right-click on a quest title to get a context menu:

I can left-click a quest’s title to view it in my quest log. This does not display LightHeaded, but I can cancel out of the quest list and press my quest list hotkey to summon up the proper modified quest log that includes LightHeaded.

I can shift-click a quest’s title to quickly stop tracking a quest and remove it from that list. This does not abandon the quest.

When I have multiple quests, icons appear on the left.

When I have multiple quests, I can right-click on a title for an extended context menu. I can easily move them up and down in the list.

Notice the circular icons on the left.

- The question mark (?) indicates a quest that can be turned in.

- Quests which are not complete are numbered. In this case you see the number one (1).

- The quest that is “currently selected” has its circular icon coloured yellow. Unfortunately there is no way to change your “currently selected” quest from this list.

When you are not near your “currently selected” quest, an arrow will appear on your minimap to point you toward it:

That arrow disappears when you are close.

When you have trackable quests, your map changes:

- The checkmark to the right of a quest indicates that it is being tracked.

- Shift-click an item on that list to stop tracking that quest. This does not abandon the quest or remove it from this list.

- The bottom shows the quest text of the “currently selected” quest.

- The right shows the list of quests. Click the title or text to view its quest text at the bottom. Click the circle to make a quest your “currently selected” quest.

Since your minimap arrow disappears when you get close, you may want to look at your world map. However your player arrow will be covered by the tracked quest icon. Mapster lets me enlarge my world map arrow.

I wish I could make my world map arrow appear overtop of the tracked quest icons, with maybe 80% alpha so I can see through it a bit. Or maybe just put a dot on my minimap. If someone has given coordinates in a comment, then I can use LightHeaded to create a map and minimap waypoint which is much better than poking around blindly using the world map.

You can shift-click items in your quest log to manually manage your quest tracking, but you can also automate it. Enter into ESC > Interface > Objectives

My preference is to have every new quest tracked. It’s added to the bottom of my list. I then shift-click the title of any quests which I want to remove from my list.

If you have “Automatic Quest Progress Updates” checked on, then any time you do something related to a quest, that quest will become tracked.

Any newly-tracked quest is added to the bottom of your list.

I don’t like where the tracked quests frame is placed by default, so I use rQuestWatchFrameMover

This addon only temporarily moves the frame. To permanently move the frame, edit its core.lua and change the x and y in this line (displayed in red):

local pos = { a1 = "TOPRIGHT", a2 = "TOPRIGHT", af = "UIParent", x = 10, y = -225 }

You can play with those numbers without exiting and restarting the game. Just save the file and then do a /console reloadui to test it.

Now here’s the reason I made this post. That handy icon on the right side of a tracked quest isn’t handy enough. I want a hotkey. Made this macro:

/target [@mouseover]
/click WatchFrameItem1

Drag that out into your action bar. This will let you activate the topmost icon. The quest does not have to be at the top of the list, this is just the top most quest item button.

Personally, I replace my action bars with Dominos, and I have some bars which hold random macros. Those random macros have various hotkeys assigned to them. I then hide those bars. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but I’d rather manage all my hotkeys with my bar addon.

Some tips on power-questing with the above in mind:

- Pick up a bunch of quests at one time.

– To quickly do this, I use Quest-o-matic which skips npc chat and automatically accepts quests.

– Also, since many quest rewards are garbage, I use Greedy Quester and VendorBait help me select the most profitable-to-vendor reward item.

- Look through the list and shift-click on a title to remove any you don’t want to track.

- Look at your world map.

- Find the nearest quest, select it. Exit the world map.

- If that quest makes you use a quest item, then right-click its title and move it to the top of your list.

- Follow your minimap arrow and when needed look at your map. Get to your quest area.

- Use your quest item hotkey.

- Turn in many quests at once.

– To quickly do this, I use Quest-o-matic which skips npc chat and automatically turns in quests. This also works on daily and most repeatable quests.

– Also, since many quest rewards are garbage, I use Greedy Quester and VendorBait help me select the most profitable-to-vendor reward item.

I hope I’ll be able to find the titles I want from somewhere new.

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

But today the traffic became so bad that the server was brought to its knees. I think it’s a popularity issue, but let’s ask Google Trends to make sure:

What do those lines actually mean? I have no idea! Presumably there are some numbers somewhere, but Google doesn’t actually show any of them.

At any rate. Search around for Minecraft-related stuff, and you won’t be disappointed.

So it occurs to me that I’ve never really sat down and talked about Unity Linux. I’ve engaged in bunches of discussions and have even popped in on some early forum posts when Unity Linux was just conceived, so that I could correct things. But I haven’t really participated in any of that (even before my recent break).

Part of the reasoning was that I was expecting a manifesto or at least a good official description to be crafted which goes over anything I would want to say. The rest of the reasoning was that I figured the magazine would sprout up and I’d be able to do interviews or articles within it which would clarify anything not covered by the official stuff.

So seeing as that stuff hasn’t been done, I may as well write up a bunch of stuff from my own personal perspective. So let me emphasize that again this is a blog post written by spiralofhope and it is not an official press release by the Unity Linux team. It is personal opinion, memory, perspective and whatever.. and it may damned well be wrong!. There, hopefully no dumbasses will come along and misunderstand/misrepresent anything I say. Well they’ll probably straw man or quote out of context anyways. Bastards.

What is Unity Linux?

Unity Linux is the name of a project and the name of it’s product. It is a Linux Distribution.

What makes Unity Linux different?

A plainer way to ask this would be “Aren’t you duplicating effort?“

Yes and no.

First I’ll address the notion of duplication. In a free environment, where anyone works on their own projects how and when they like, there is no overriding notion of feature-sets or goals.

That probably won’t make a lot of sense. So let’s go for an example.

Let’s imagine we have ten people. They don’t know one another, but they could find one another, and they could even collaborate if they put forth that effort. But let’s imagine they don’t.

Each of those ten people has a problem. It just so happens that between all ten people the problem is roughly the same. Even so, all ten people will approach their problem differently. No matter how slight, they will each have different skills, different tools, different timings and who knows what else is different.

After some time, three of these projects “go live” and make it out into the world and get some recognition and use. A community forms. Then those three projects each learn about the other. The seven remaining learn about the three.

Now I want you to think about two developer perspectives..

1) My project isn’t done yet. Someone else made something that’s done.
2) My project is done and working. Someone else made something that’s done.

Then think a bit more..

1a) My project isn’t done yet and someone else’s is? Ok, I’ll use that.
1aa) Maybe some of my code would be useful to them.
1ab) Maybe I can join that project.

1b) My project isn’t done yet and someone else’s is? So what, I can do better!

2a) My project is done and working, and someone else is doing the same thing? I give up!
(This is almost never gonna happen. Anyone who invests their time and passion in something will be reluctant to abandon it)
2b) My project is done and working, and someone else is doing the same thing? Hey I wonder if I can use some of their code!
(Open source is awesome)
2c) My project is done and working, and someone else is doing the same thing? Maybe we can merge our projects together.
(This is so extremely unlikely less for social reasons and more for technical reasons. With different tools and even programming languages, trying to do something like this is next to pointless. It becomes easier for 2a to occur)

So let’s get back to the original question of Aren’t you duplicating effort?. The answer is definitely yes – some duplication must exist, because the problem of a Linux distribution is “roughly” the same. The answer is also definitely no – some unique innovation (no matter how novel) exists. That uniqueness gives the project a reason to live. This doesn’t quite answer the “no” fully, so I’ll continue.

Back to “overriding notion of feature-sets or goals”. Let’s imagine our three projects are examining each other to make some decisions on how to act. They all know their projects have significant overlap and a similar goal. However their goals and methods and their entire emergent cultures aren’t perfectly compatible.

Their goals are not “out there”, they are internal and they are also influenced by all sorts of things. If the goal was a particular meal and each project uses a “similar” recipe, then each project has a developer or team with their own flavour to add to their dish. This analogy isn’t right though, because a meal, a recipe and ingredients are all “out there” and can be agreed-upon by different cooks in different kitchens. For our projects and their developers, they have no “shared reference”.

This lack of an external reference, and the fact that projects are a live body, and the harsh reality of technique and technical incompatibility, means that projects can’t simply be merged.

But Unity Linux wasn’t a project developed in the dark. Everyone knew that other projects existed. Hell, everyone used those other projects! So let’s talk about why Unity Linux came to be instead of having all that “duplicated” effort poured into any one or many existing or emerging projects.

One or more Unity Linux project members were contributing to existing Linux projects.
One or more Unity Linux project members had a personal flavour different and incompatible with existing projects.
One or more Unity Linux project members felt that existing and emerging Linux projects did not or would not solve their particular problems.
One or more Unity Linux project members wanted the grass-roots experience of founding a project.
One or more Unity Linux project members followed others.

There are probably lots of other things that can be added to this list, but let’s keep it at this for now. Also keep in mind that there may (or may not) be overlap between the items. Let’s take me for example. I didn’t “feel the groove” for other existing projects. I wanted the grass-roots experience of founding a project. I was strongly motivated by devnet’s involvement.

I’ve got my own distribution ideas, and while I could use existing projects I felt that a future version of Unity Linux would perfectly suit me. What’s better than getting in on that sweet action as early as possible, and contributing to significant conversations to influence the project’s long-term goals? What’s better than starting from scratch and doing things “the right way”? (of course I had no clue what that was and still really don’t, but that’s half the fun)

So regarding the duplication of effort.. yes there is partial duplication with significant project (and project member) incompatibilities.

So what make Unity Linux different from existing and emerging Linux distributions?

Good question me, I’m glad I asked myself.

So let me tie back to the fact that there are non-technical reasons why Unity Linux came together. But for this I’ll get a little more technical.

First is the underlying philosophy.

Unity Linux, at its core, has a different goal in mind than most other Linux distributions. Linux From Scratch is a project whose project is to help a developer build a Linux distribution from source code. That project is the most closely similar to Unity Linux. All others are meant to be end-user distributions.

Unity Linux is meant to be an end-developer distribution. The fact that it’s perfectly suitable for end-users has led to no end of confusion in justifying Unity Linux’s continued existence.

Now let’s talk technical. Sortof. I’m not involved with a lot of the more hardcore technical stuff so it’s difficult for me to relay this sort of information. This is really unfortunate since this is probably the most interesting stuff that needs to be put out there. Seeing as Unity Linux is for developers, and developers want to talk tech, this list/explanation is definitely something that will be worked on in the future.

RPM5 + smart, updated mkisofs, kernel, hardware detection and bootup-related stuff, stronger focus on internationalization and translation, focus on branding and re-mastering.

RPM had drama surrounding it. First, there have been and still are several versions of RPM floating around. Various versions are used by various distributions. The problem is that there was a schism for whatever reasons that I can’t remember and will probably write on later. That rift led to various forks, various revisions in various places and incompatibilities galore. I mean seriously. RPM is this half-working propped-up-with-duct-tape piece of crap.

The RPM5 project was one of those splits. This project had some weight to it and actually got their product working to the satisfaction of enough of the Unity Linux developers for it to be adopted. That adoption itself led to one developer leaving the project. His reasons are still valid to this day, examining both the technical merits of the various RPMs and both the discussion and decision-making processes.

I don’t know enough of the technical side, so I can’t explain that side of things. I do have lots of notes and this is a subject that I definitely want to bring up again. Reading up on RPM5 will explain part of the story, but there is a lot of back-story and other perspectives as well as a shit-tonne of opinion, poor-writing and misinformation. So I’m staying away from this for a while.

The social side was just a matter of how fast and unexamined the decision was. The challenges of communication is a topic for a separate post.

mkisofs was another one of those half-working projects that had to be personally patched and hacked upon by each project that used it. It had no maintainer as such, and the person who was entrusted with one of the versions of it was one of the early members of the Unity Linux team.

Ok, some more juicy drama. See, this is what you get for reading through this wall of text! =) This developer also left us, but damned if I can remember the details. Shit, I thought I could make this interesting. Art-related? I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll write on this in the future, it was quite a loss.

The kernel! Actually we lost an early developer on this one as well but he came back to us. I guess the kernel demanded it. We are extraordinarily lucky to have quality kernel hacking. Some very serious issues existed within our kernel and still exist in those of others. Again there is a lot of brokenness with various kernels various patches and hacks from different projects just “getting by”. Because of our complete break from everything else, we were able to “tear the bandage off quickly” and do away with any need for legacy support.. well since we had no legacy to support.

Choosing to not support the old stuff also meant that we needed to rebuild every package from scratch. Every. Last. One. Originally leveraged on the back of Mandrake, the Unity Linux project now stands completely on its own. Mandrake is like our uncle. We examine source code and get a lot of inspiration, but we don’t have any sort of package compatibility like we did back in the experimental alpha days. PCLinuxOS was also an early influence, and the earlier TinyMe (which was then based on PCLinuxOS) was a development platform for several people including myself.

We had another developer leave over the state of QA. Another seems to come-and-go depending on the state of documentation and organization. Organization is a huge topic and it’s so very difficult to realize implement and enforce. The very fact that this is all volunteering means that people end up doing things however and whenever they want. All kinds of issues with misdirected manpower occur. Wheels are spinning but the car’s not going anywhere.

A documentation-driven project with excellent QA are dreams that are difficult to manifest.

Hardware detection and bootup stuff. Ok I just threw that in there to look smart. I have no clue. Stuff works, that’s all I care about really. I just know that a lot of fiddling on the insides has been done. Me press button, it go. Ugh.

Internationalization, translation and branding are all main focuses of Unity Linux. While internationalization and translation are nowhere near new, and other projects are and will be doing this better than Unity Linux for a good while, it’s the branding and the branching/remastering stuff that will make Unity Linux stand separate from all other Linux distributions.

A developer can really benefit from having complete guides to build a Linux distribution not from scratch but from an already-working base. I can churn something custom out in an afternoon. But when all the other pieces are done right, a team could easily create something targetted to another language or to any special needs.

Remastering is easy with Mandrake, PCLinuxOS, and probably others, but keep in mind the technical differences Unity Linux has. A non-crusty package management system and packages, a kernel that’s actually up-to-date and working, designed from the ground up for remastering not just tacked on with a half-working script.

The guides are things which really need to be worked on, and that’s right around where I come in. I live and breathe documentation.

zomg too much text!

I know. I really just wanted to relay some simple stuff.

- Download the Unity Linux ISO. It’s not small, it’s got all the development, internationalization, language and branding tools on it. No need to download more stuff.
- Add and remove packages. I personally have a couple of scripts that trivially smart remove x y z and smart install x y z.
- Add branding – update pictures using guides that have to get made still.
- Remove unneeded stuff – the various development tools, old configuration files
- Do any custom hacking
- Run the prep script and spit out an ISO
- ???
- Profit!

So Unity Linux isn’t a light distribution?

No, it was never meant to be either. There has been and still is some discussion over the notion of including “just what’s needed”. It started really light but then bloated to where it is now..

- Robust hardware detection
- A basic prompt
- The usual commandline linux tools
- Package creation tools
- Package management
- Software compiling tools
- Enough to get a net connection

X got snuck in because a gui web browser was needed for one developer to access his router and get internet working. A desktop and toolbar were there for a while partly because we were using TinyMe as a base.

I’m actually not sure about what all is there since I’ve been out of it for a while. I don’t think it’s possible to compile stuff from source on the default ISO without downloading some stuff. I should nag to get that included, but I don’t think it matters. The whole point is to have the minimal set of stuff with a net connection to get anything else you need.

The internationalization and other stuff was “cooked in” by default because it was such a challenge to make it external. it was probably impossible to separate some of it out, or it was impossible to have something minimal update to the more robust version of things. Or something.

So I use Unity Linux to make my own distribution then?

Maybe. I just use it as my minimal desktop.

You could also use one of the other projects based on Unity Linux and build off of their work. That would take a bit more branding-work to at least remove their branding.

Basing off of TinyMe for a minimal experience and a small ISO is probably way easier than using the main Unity Linux distribution itself.

Correcting common misconceptions

Based off of is meaningless.
Unity Linux in its current state does not rely on any other Linux distribution at all. Period. Talk about Mandrake or PCLinuxOS is just history. Whatever of them that was used was just scaffolding that has since been discarded.

Split from PCLinuxOS is also wrong.
Yes some Unity Linux developers were PCLinuxOS developers. But some Unity Linux developers were NOT PCLinuxOS developers. Some of those not-ever-PCLinuxOS-developers have expressed offense at the association.

Yes there was some drama and insanity from PCLinuxOS. Yes that was some of the reasoning for some developers to leave PCLinuxOS. Yes some of those developers who left PCLinuxOS under those circumstances ended up on the Unity Linux team. However some developers left far earlier than that split and some probably after. Also, it’s incorrect to think that there was one moment that had a mass of people leave PCLinuxOS and form up Unity Linux.

Detach the association between Unity Linux developers and PCLinuxOS developers. People come and go.

The idea of Unity Linux was seeded in the minds of several people for some time before there was any actual talk about it. Before the aforementioned drama and insanity the Unity Linux project had already begun forming and was being talked about more openly. I’ve always seen that drama (which I wasn’t a part of) as being “the last straw” for some people.

But it literally was..

zomg juicy drama! Share!

Again, I wasn’t there so I don’t know. I’ve heard that open disagreement between active developers and “non-technical leadership” ended with several banishings. Don’t misunderstand this as one event though, I also understand that there was a slope before that drop. I heard about forum posts being deleted and forum bannings.

So if you were a developer and you just got your accounts all locked out so you can’t even continue discussion, what would you do? If you were a developer and one of your friends vanished one day in the heat of discussion and you learned they were banished, what would you do?

Me, I’d haul ass. “What’s everyone else up to? Ooh something new.” Some people came together, as people do, and others came for a while then went, still others are watching and waiting to see where things go, and others went their separate way. Such is life!

fin.

If there’s other stuff I haven’t covered, comment. If this answered a question you had, comment. If this corrected a misconception or misinformation you had, comment. If this was entertaining, comment. If you have a better way to explain something or especially if I’m wrong, comment!

I do actually have 40-50 people a day who read something within this blog. While that isn’t the quarter million a month from the good old days it’s still some people who might care. Or not, I don’t actually know. There’s no real social aspect to blogging like it seems to exist elsewhere. Well that’s something I’ll ponder over sometime later. I’m antisocial anyways, so it’s low priority.

So seeing as there is at least “some value” in this place, I really should be thinking about it more often. So that’s why I’m back and why I’m writing this.

I suppose I may as well do one of my huge essay pieces, since there is just so much background which would need to be understood for a reader to actually “get” what I’m going to try to get across.

—

People like be is a really unsettling phrase. People really aren’t like one another, not really. Humans like to categorize and organize and name. Well maybe it’s mostly men but regardless it does happen. I wish there were a way to use this phrase a little more lightly. Maybe it’s just a limitation of English, or a limitation of my own use of it, or my own era of English, but we don’t seem to me to have a way to associate-without-associating.

So having relayed that disclaimer I’ll try again. People like me do a lot of “stuff”. Curious and imaginative, always tinkering and rearranging, we always have a thousand different projects unfinished yet still open over the span of decades. Perhaps everyone is like this, but I get the impression that there is a non-average smaller-percentage of the population which is a little more extreme with this passion.

I’ve already written on rotating projects and other such stuff, so hopefully I won’t be significantly duplicating any of that with this post. With a lot of stuff on the go, and no real control over inspiration or even a concept of organization life can get complex. People who are passionate and driven with just a few or even one primary goal in life have it easy. They can specialize and get really good at their focus. Distractions are easy to recognize. The goal is always in sight and in mind.

With a passion that goes anywhere and does anything, there is no single-mindedness. There is constant distraction. Some extraordinary people are able to pick one of the passions and pursue it to good effect and then pick up another one and pursue that one, each time having accomplished something valuable. For others like myself there is no “work ethic” for doing anything remotely similar to “completing” any one thing before moving on to another. The value that any one of those passion-items may be seen to have is pretty random.

I hope it’s obvious that I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a long time now. As an example of it in full effect, this topic is just one of several book ideas I have.

So the hobby-aftermath of a passion like this is that there are many ideas with no overall structure. Even the notion of structuring those ideas becomes one of the grains of sand lost within the beach of ideas.

When I say “overall structure”, I mean a number of things. I’m not sure how to organize these thoughts so I’ll just spit out a rough list.

- How can I record all of my past ideas and projects so they can be useful in the future? How do I structure it all?
- What does it mean to have any of my passions be useful to someone else? What of value can I leave behind when I die? This also asks things such as “what do I want to have accomplished in life, or for others?”
- When I am not sure what I want to do, how do I get myself inspired?
- When I am restless and I feel like using a particular mode of thinking, how can I easily pick from a list of my projects?
- When I want to work on a particular project, how can I have myself be reminded of “peripheral projects” which are related, or which use that same particular mode of thinking.

–

When I say “mode of thinking”, I mean things like
- Using existing skills to “do drone work”. Read email and flag stuff for follow-up, shuffle bookmarks around.
- Hacking, mental – Curiosity-driven research.
- Hacking, physical – Toys and more toys. Origami, building things, pulling things apart, repairing things.
- Shopping
- Planning / organizing

There may be some other modes of thinking that I haven’t personally realized. I’d love to do some reading on this or get any feedback on other ideas.

–

So imagine that beach of ideas. Now imagine trying to have a meta-project which manages those projects. It’s like trying to make a Japanese rock garden or a sand mandala.

Many different ideas are all lost in that beach. When gripped by any particular passion, it becomes extremely difficult to think in terms of organization. I’ve built a mediocre ability for recording notes, but structuring it the way it would be most valuable has been out of reach.

So where the hell was I going with all of this? This blog. One of the annoyances I have is that there are multiple different tools to do multiple different things. While this is the Right way to do things, it subtly separates each tool so that they become.. how can I say this? They become like different genres, or they somehow become so distinct and separate that I may be gripped by a passion that would have me use one tool or set of tools and completely forget about and ignore another.

This blog is a separate tool, and just because of my nature I seem to be ignoring it unless I’m passionate about some context which happens to include it. For example, I have a dozen drafts stuck on here, any number of which could have been done since I was interested in their topic. But because I didn’t really have “the blogging mindset” at the time I didn’t even remember there were drafts I may be interested in.

So combining my various different systems together is something I’ve been trying and trying to do for some time now. It’s slowly working, partly because of the need to organize my bookmarks. I don’t even know how many I have, and that’s after pruning out decades-old bookmarks.

So this blog is on the chopping block. I must have said that a couple of times, but now I realize what’s been bugging me about it and why my combining it with my compiled website will definitely bring me peace of mind.

So there.. a fancy excuse for my absence, and another one for the upcoming death of this place. Now all I need to do is get back into programming again and whip up a blog engine. That’ll take me a weekend.

I think I’ll also invent some kind of micropayment concept for what a German friend of mine called “moral support”. I’ll probably just leverage various wall concepts. This sort of thing will allow basic conversation with as few barriers as possible. It’s amazing how far a little “hey thanks” goes on anything I’ve written. This is part of why I like emailing software developers.

Scroogle is just one example of the many search engines which scrape Google‘s results and put them to better use.  A significant change was recently made, breaking all of those users.

Meta Search engines are just one of the effected users.  There are also alternate presentation engines – perhaps just for usability, or in the case of Scroogle, for privacy.  It’s literally been just a few days since I switched over to using Scroogle from Google.  On that note, I was getting pissed off at Firefox’s hidden use of Google with control-k in my configuration.

So when searching, I came upon this notice:

We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we’ve been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we’ve been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.

This interface was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.

That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn’t show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google’s basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched “Universal Search,” which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.

Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don’t hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers, at all.

— Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com

Why would Google do this?  I’m very surprised it wasn’t done a long long time ago.  Many meta search engines act like a parasite by leveraging their host search engines.  They do some work, sure, but the host search engines do all the internet crawling and other heavy lifting.

So aside from Scroogle, which you may never have even heard of, who else does this effect?  Off the top of my head it would include Dogpile, Entireweb (Mamma, ixquick), Pandia Powersearch, Devilfinder and perhaps both Searchii and Clusty.  Wikipedia has a small list of meta search engines which have some more affected users.

I’ve been putting it off for a while now, but I think I’m going to change the way I use the internet and stop relying on search engines so much, especially to stop using Google.

Since Radar magazine doesn’t have it anymore, and Scroogle isn’t showing it, here is the short story which inspired Scroogle:

This short story was published in the October 2007 issue of Radar magazine.  This story is copyrighted Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States (CC-BY-NC-SA)  There is also a list of translations of this story.  I don’t know how many of those links are still good.  Use archive.org if something’s gone missing.

Scroogled

by Cory Doctorow

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I
will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration — Powered by Google.

“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time” — which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.

“Evening,” Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.

“Want to tell me about June 1998?”

Greg looked up from his Departures. “I’m sorry?”

“You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, ‘Are shrooms really such a bad idea?’”

The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he’d been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.

“Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?”

“What?”

“Model rocketry.”

“No,” Greg said, “No, I’m not.” He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”

Greg felt a spasm in his guts. “You’re looking at my searches and e-mail?” He hadn’t touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.

“Sir, calm down, please. No, I’m not looking at your searches,” the man said in a mocking whine. “That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I’ll give it to you when we’re through here.”

“But the ads don’t mean anything,” Greg sputtered. “I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!”

The man nodded. “I understand, sir. And that’s just why I’m here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?”

Greg racked his brain. “Okay, just do this. Search for ‘coffee fanatics.’” He’d been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called Jet Fuel. “Jet Fuel” and “Launch” — that would probably make Google barf up some model rocket ads.

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Halloween photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for “Greg Lupinski.”

“It was a Gulf War-themed party,” he said. “In the Castro.”

“And you’re dressed as…?”

“A suicide bomber,” he replied sheepishly. Just saying the words made him wince.

“Come with me, Mr. Lupinski,” the man said.

By the time he was released, it was past 3 a.m. His suitcases stood forlornly by the baggage carousel. He picked them up and saw they had been opened and carelessly closed. Clothes stuck out from around the edges.

When he returned home, he discovered that all of his fake pre-Columbian statues had been broken, and his brand-new white cotton Mexican shirt had an ominous boot print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. They smelled like airport.

He wasn’t going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. There was only one person who would get it. Luckily, she was usually awake around this hour.

Maya had started working at Google two years after Greg had. It was she who’d convinced him to go to Mexico after he cashed out: Anywhere, she’d said, that he could reboot his existence.

Maya had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient girlfriend named Laurie who’d put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.

Maya reached for her Mace as Greg jogged toward her, then did a double take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under her sneaker. “Where’s the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!”

He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. “Maya,” he said, “what do you know about Google and the DHS?”

She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light pole there; don’t look,” she said. “That’s one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk.”

In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn’t paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public — there’d been a day’s worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.

Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, “You’re joking.”

“Come with me,” she said, turning away from the pole.

The dogs weren’t happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.

“We brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”

Greg felt sick. “Why? Don’t tell me Yahoo was doing it already…”

“No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn’t the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We’re overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we’re doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn’t P.I.I.” — Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age — “It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”

“Why all the intrigue, then?”

Maya sighed and hugged the lab that was butting her knee with its huge head. “The spooks are like lice. They get everywhere. They show up at our meetings. It’s like being in some Soviet ministry. And the security clearance — we’re divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn’t cleared, but no one knows why. I’m cleared. Lucky for me, being a dyke no longer disqualifies you. No cleared person would deign to eat lunch with an unclearable.”

Greg felt very tired. “So I guess I’m lucky I got out of the airport alive. I might have ended up ‘disappeared’ if it had gone badly, huh?”

Maya stared at him intently. He waited for an answer.

“What?”

“I’m about to tell you something, but you can’t ever repeat it, okay?”

“Um…you’re not in a terrorist cell, are you?

“Nothing so simple. Here’s the deal: Airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a ‘person of interest’ — and they never, ever let up. They’ll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches.”

“I thought you said the courts wouldn’t let them…”

“The courts won’t let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you’re in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for ‘suspicious patterns,’ using deviation from statistical norms to nail you.”

Greg felt like he was going to throw up. “How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. ‘Don’t be evil,’ right?” That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he’d taken his computer science Ph.D. from Stanford directly to Mountain View.

Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. “Don’t be evil? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to Swift-Boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago.”

They were quiet for a minute.

“It started in China,” she went on, finally. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction.”

Greg sighed. He knew Google’s reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail — even if you sent mail to a Gmail account — the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.

“They were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn’t illegal in China.”

Greg shook his head. “Why did they have to put the servers in China?”

“The government said they’d block us otherwise. And Yahoo was there.” They both made faces. Somewhere along the way, employees at Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the competition was doing than how their own company was performing. “So we did it. But a lot of us didn’t like the idea.”

Maya sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of her dogs sniffed insistently under Greg’s chair.

“Almost immediately, the Chinese asked us to start censoring search results,” Maya said. “Google agreed. The company line was hilarious: ‘We’re not doing evil — we’re giving consumers access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn’t get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience.’”

“Now what?” Greg pushed a dog away from him. Maya looked hurt.

“Now you’re a person of interest, Greg.

You’re Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? ‘Organize the World’s Information.’ Everything. Give it five years, we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you’re — “

“Scroogled.”

“Totally.” She nodded.

Maya took both labs down the hall to the bedroom. He heard a muffled argument with her girlfriend, and she came back alone.

“I can fix this,” she said in an urgent whisper. “After the Chinese started rounding up people, my podmates and I made it our 20 percent project to fuck with them.” (Among Google’s business innovations was a rule that required every employee to devote 20 percent of his or her time to high-minded pet projects.) “We call it the Googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your Gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it. Greg, I can Googleclean you. It’s the only way.”

“I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

She shook her head. “I’m already doomed. Every day since I built the damn thing has been borrowed time — now it’s just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don’t know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the war on abstract nouns.”

Greg remembered the airport. The search. His shirt, the boot print in the middle of it.

“Do it,” he said.

The Googlecleaner worked wonders. Greg could tell by the ads that popped up alongside his searches, ads clearly meant for someone else: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, the Homosexual Agenda, Cheap Toby Keith Tickets. This was Maya’s program at work. Clearly Google’s new personalized search had him pegged as someone else entirely, a God-fearing right winger with a thing for hat acts.

Which was fine by him.

Then he clicked on his address book, and found that half of his contacts were missing. His Gmail in-box was hollowed out like a termite-ridden stump. His Orkut profile, normalized. His calendar, family photos, bookmarks: all empty. He hadn’t quite realized before how much of him had migrated onto the Web and worked its way into Google’s server farms — his entire online identity. Maya had scrubbed him to a high gloss; he’d become the invisible man.

Greg sleepily mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the flashing toolbar clock: 4:13 a.m.! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?

He shouted, “Coming!” in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went. At the door, he squinted through the peephole to find Maya staring glumly back at him.

He undid the chains and dead bolt and yanked the door open. Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs and her girlfriend.

She was sheened in sweat, her usually combed hair clinging in clumps to her forehead. She rubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined.

“Pack a bag,” she croaked hoarsely.

“What?”

She took him by the shoulders. “Do it,” she said.

“Where do you want to…?”

“Mexico, probably. Don’t know yet. Pack, dammit.” She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers.

“Maya,” he said sharply, “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”

She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. “The Googlecleaner lives. After I cleaned you, I shut it down and walked away. It was too dangerous to use anymore. But it’s still set to send me e-mail confirmations whenever it runs. Someone’s used it six times to scrub three very specific accounts — all of which happen to belong to members of the Senate Commerce Committee up for reelection.”

“Googlers are blackwashing senators?”

“Not Googlers. This is coming from off-site. The IP block is registered in D.C. And the IPs are all used by Gmail users. Guess who the accounts belong to?”

“You spied on Gmail accounts?”

“Okay. Yes. I did look through their e-mail. Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons than I did. But check it out — turns out all this activity is being directed by our lobbying firm. Just doing their job, defending the company’s interests.”

Greg felt his pulse beating in his temples. “We should tell someone.”

“It won’t do any good. They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every e-mail. Every time we’ve been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network…did you know if you have 15 Orkut buddies, it’s statistically certain that you’re no more than three steps to someone who’s contributed money to a ‘terrorist’ cause? Remember the airport? You’ll be in for a lot more of that.”

“Maya,” Greg said, getting his bearings. “Isn’t heading to Mexico overreacting? Just quit. We can do a start-up or something. This is crazy.”

“They came to see me today,” she said. “Two of the political officers from DHS. They didn’t leave for hours. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions.”

“About the Googlecleaner?”

“About my friends and family. My search history. My personal history.”

“Jesus.”

“They were sending a message to me. They’re watching every click and every search. It’s time to go. Time to get out of range.”

“There’s a Google office in Mexico, you know.”

“We’ve got to go,” she said, firmly.

“Laurie, what do you think of this?” Greg asked.

Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. “My parents left East Germany in ’65. They used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotic joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different.”

“Greg, are you coming?”

He looked at the dogs and shook his head. “I’ve got some pesos left over,” he said. “You take them. Be careful, okay?”

Maya looked like she was going to slug him. Softening, she gave him a ferocious hug.

“Be careful, yourself,” she whispered in his ear.

They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he’d imagined they would.

Two men arrived on his doorstep shortly after 2 a.m. One stood silently by the door. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sport coat with a stain on one lapel and a American flag on the other. “Greg Lupinski, we have reason to believe you’re in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” he said, by way of introduction. “Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial…all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters.”

Greg had played this scene in his head for a week. He’d planned all kinds of brave things to say. It had given him something to do while he waited to hear from Maya. She never called.

“I’d like to get in touch with a lawyer,” is all he mustered.

“You can do that,” the small man said. “But maybe we can come to a better arrangement.”

Greg found his voice. “I’d like to see your badge,” he stammered.

The man’s basset-hound face lit up as he let out a bemused chuckle. “Buddy, I’m not a cop,” he replied. “I’m a consultant. Google hired me — my firm represents their interests in Washington — to build relationships. Of course, we wouldn’t get the police involved without talking to you first. You’re part of the family. Actually, there’s an offer I’d like to make.”

Greg turned to the coffeemaker, dumped the old filter.

“I’ll go to the press,” he said.

The man nodded as if thinking it over. “Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle’s office in the morning and spill everything. They’d look for a confirming source. They won’t find one. And when they try searching for it, we’ll find them. So, buddy, why don’t you hear me out, okay? I’m in the win-win business. I’m very good at it.” He paused. “By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first? Takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?”

Greg watched as the man silently took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and carefully rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. He poured the beans out of the grinder and into Greg’s colander, and rinsed them in the sink.

He was a little pudgy and very pale, with the social grace of an electrical engineer. He seemed like a real Googler, actually, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee grinder, too.

“We’re drafting a team for Building 49…”

“There is no Building 49,” Greg said automatically.

“Of course,” the guy said, flashing a tight smile. “There’s no Building 49. But we’re putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Maya’s code wasn’t very efficient, you know. It’s full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You’d be the right guy, and it wouldn’t matter what you knew if you were back inside.”

“Unbelievable,” Greg said, laughing. “If you think I’m going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Greg,” the man said, “we’re not smearing anyone. We’re just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone’s Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy.” He loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. Greg retrieved two coffee cups — Google mugs, of course — and passed them over.

“We’re going to do for our friends what Maya did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That’s all.”

Greg sipped his coffee. “What happens to the candidates you don’t clean?”

“Yeah,” the guy said, flashing Greg a weak grin. “Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be kind of tough for them.” He searched the inside pocket of his jacket and produced several folded sheets of paper.

He smoothed out the pages and put them on the table. “Here’s one of the good guys who needs our help.” It was a printout of a search history belonging to a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to in the past three elections.

“Fella gets back to his hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up his laptop, and types ‘hot asses’ into his search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good man from continuing to serve his country is just un-American.”

Greg nodded slowly.

“So you’ll help the guy out?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s one more thing. We need you to help us find Maya. She didn’t understand our goals at all, and now she seems to have flown the coop. Once she hears us out, I have no doubt she’ll come around.”

He glanced at the candidate’s search history.

“I guess she might,” Greg replied.

The new Congress took 11 working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America’s Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. Theoretically, the contracts were open to competitive bidding, but within the secure confines of Google’s Building 49, there was no question of who would win. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet they would have caught them — governments just aren’t equipped to Do Search Right.

The next morning Greg scrutinized himself carefully as he shaved (the security minders didn’t like hacker stubble and weren’t shy about telling him so), realizing that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent for the U.S. government. How bad would it be? Wasn’t it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted DHS desk jockey?

By the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike racks, he had convinced himself. He was mulling over which organic smoothie to order at the canteen when his key card failed to open the door to Building 49. The red LED flashed dumbly every time he swiped his card. Any other building, and there’d be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe. Suddenly he heard a voice at his side.

“Greg, can I see you, please?”

The rumpled man put an arm around his shoulders, and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It smelled like what his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn’t remember his name. Juan Carlos? Juan Luis?

The man’s arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the herb garden outside the kitchen. “We’re giving you a couple of days off,” he said.

Greg felt a sudden stab of anxiety. “Why?” Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?

“It’s Maya.” The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless gaze. “She killed herself. In Guatemala. I’m sorry, Greg.”

Greg seemed to hurtle away, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, where he looked down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say, “I don’t need any time off. I’m okay.”

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.

The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49, and the door swung shut behind them.

I’ve made some astounding progress in recent days, and it’s now at the point where I can create and edit documents as I wish.  The only critical feature I’m missing is the creation of lists of mixed-type; both ordered and unordered.

I took some time and cleaned up my TL;DR introduction page.  In particular I’ve written my compiled website reasoning.

The compiled website project is pretty much the death knell for this blog.  Useful stuff that’s stuck here is now in line to be imported into spiralofhope.com.

But before that happens, I think I’ll implement a site RSS feed so that people can stay up-to-date as they wish, and I can create temporal posts like blog entries.

Tested 2010-04-29 on Unity Linux 2010 64bit beta1, updated recently.

su
smart install geany-devel lib64enchant-devel intltool
wget http://plugins.geany.org/geany-plugins/geany-plugins-0.18.tar.bz2
tar xvvjf geany-plugins-0.18.tar.bz2
cd geany-plugins-0.18
./configure
make
make install

Then go to `Tools > Plugin Manager` and select what you want to enable, and configure them too.

Does en_GB spell checking, yay!

.. uh, and en_CA .. lolwut?

It’s not very aggressive with spell checking.  It won’t mark up the whole document, but it’ll do the line you’re working on and it’ll remember  previous errors.  So it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for my purposes.

Now I have yet another dictionary that I have to keep manually updated.