samiam.org and blog comments update

I'm just letting people know I am doing a year-end cleanup of samiam.org, getting rid of a lot of outdated software and what not. As a general rule, I am removed links to versions of programs that are not the last release of a given program. With ObHack, I have made sure the last 002 and 003 releases are available, in addition the the final 004 release, so people can check out the subtly different maps each version of ObHack makes.

I have also deleted all of the Chess Variant-related stuff from the site. I have decided that Chess Variants are simply a waste of time; I have better things to do with my time. People who want to see my work in this area can download my Schoolbook file from the Zillions of Games website (look in "free games", then look for "schoolbook").

In terms of support, the only geek project I have done over the years I still use today is Deadwood (code that will someday be MaraDNS' next recursive resolver). Other projects are not supported and blog comments asking for support for, say, ObHack, will probably not be posted.

MaraDNS, of course, is still supported, but the only changes I will make in 2009 are critical and security bug fixes. I do not support non-security issues in MaraDNS anywhere except on the MaraDNS mailing list. Again, blog comments asking for MaraDNS support in 2009 will not be posted.

Deadwood is the only project I still find useful and support. People are welcome to download and use any other open-source code I have, but please don't ask me to solve your problems for you. Be smart. Learn to troubleshoot and figure out issues on your own. It'll make you a more mature, responsible person.

One font to rule them all

I have started a new Font, called "Solstice". This is my second attempt to make "one font to rule them all". In other words, I want to have a font that is good enough to be used as the only font on a small "embedded" Linux system. This is useful for mini-Linux distributions, for running Linux on older computers, and for having a single general-purpose font suitable for on-screen reading, editing files, and printing.

In 2007, I attempted to make a screen-readable version of the Bitstream Charter font. This project was, looking back, unsuccessful. Bitstream Charter is a font for laser printers; it is not a screen font. In particular, making it legible below "14" in size is nay-to-impossible.

I finally threw in the towel; my mini-linux system that needs a good screen font uses a bitmap conversion of "Verdana" I call "Vorpal". While this is legal in the USA, the legal status in some other countries is still up in the air.

This time, instead of trying to make a font optimized for 300dpi printers screen readable, I'm making a mostly-libre font designed for the screen one that looks good using old-school non-anti-aliased font rendering technology. The goal is to have a font that looks good on the screen, when printed, and, ideally, can be used as both a monospaced and a porportional font.

I am basing this font off of DejaVu Serif, which in turn is derived from Bitstream Vera Serif. The license is not as good as the OFL; in particular, I have some concerns about embedding a font with this license in PDF files. The license states "The above copyright and trademark notices and this permission notice shall be included in all copies of one or more of the Font Software typefaces." Since the preposition "in" instead of "with" is used here, there is some ambiguity about whether, when making a PDF file embedding this font, one merely has to include the license in the PDF file (this is fairly easily done), or whether the license has to be in the part of the PDF file containing the font information (which is more difficult to do).

Right now, I have taken the font, and had Fontforge make bitmap renderings of the font at various small sizes. I am now, by hand, making those low-resolution renderings as readable as I can at various resolutions. Since Bitstream Vera is a screen font, this is easier to do than it was with Bitstream Charter.

I am doing this with Vera Serif instead of Vera Sans because:

1. Vera Serif is about as readible on the screen as Vera Sans.
2. Vera Serif is easier to read when printed out.

Here are my current plans:

1. Make bitmap renderings of Serif Roman at 8,9,10,11,12,14,16 pixel sizes (current work)
2. From the Verily project, make a monospace version of Vera Serif that is both a screen and a printing project. This will only be rendered at 12 pixel size on the screen (and will replace misc fixed when done)
3. Make an oblique version of Vera Serif that only uses the "a" and "f" glyphs from "DejaVu Serif Italic"; I feel the quality of "DejaVu Serif Italic" doesn't have the same quality as "Vera Serif"; so my oblique version will just mostly be a slanted version of V.S.
4. Make bitmap renderings of Serif Italic at 10,11,12,14,16 pixel sizes.
5. Make bitmap renderings of Serif Bold at 10,11,12,14,16 pixel sizes.

This font will only exist in Roman, Bold, and Italic forms, and only in Roman form at smaller screen resolutions.

My work on this project can be downloaded here. In particular, unlike my Charter-derived font, this font is, even without full hinting, about as readable as Verdana on the screen. This is even true in Windows XP (Vista is nice because just about any font looks decent on the screen; older systems like XP need fonts made for the screen).

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This project is part of my project to update MOAM-CD. I plan on holding on to MOAM-CD 20080217 for a while; it is "good enough" for the amount of time I actually need to use MOAM-CD these days (almost never; I lug my laptop around with me, which seems to be helping develop my muscles, making me more attractive with the latinas). The main change I did was to make as much room for music as possible, since the most common use for MOAM-CD is to put it in my roomate's stereo and listen to music I relax to.

There are bugs to be fixed in MOAM-CD, but nothing I can't work around. For example, RXVT seg faults and dies when trying to use aspell in terminal mode; the workaround is aspell -a < file | grep '^&'

I got Dillo to compile in Cygwin

I got Dillo to compile in Cygwin. Basically, I removed all dangling references to i18n libraries (I don't use them anymore), and disabled SSL (which doesn't like to compile. Maybe if I added the OpenSSL development libs). I haven't gotten dpid (a daemon Dillo uses for various purposes), but Dillo works for very basic web surfing. Useful for people who want to make sure their web site looks sane in Dillo, or in my case, making sure my up-and-coming bitmap font project looks good when using Windows.

It can be downloaded here (750k compressed tarball)

I have one pending MaraDNS support email to answer.

ObHack and Dillo updated

Enhas has made some tweaks to ObHack, which can be looked at and downloaded here

I swore off making updates to Dillo last week; however I changed my mind. I have cleaned up the crude utf8-to-latin1 conversion used by my version of Dillo so that it works for most latin1 characters represented in UTF-8; I have also added basic support for the names of the suits in cards (The " Clubs" symbol becomes a " C" and so on).

In addition, I have removed that annoying Bug Meter; I use Dillo for basic web surfing, and I' m not one of those people who gets a smug feeling knowing a given page has 53 or however many errors in its HTML. If you want it back, just define BUG_METER when compiling my version of Dillo.

My version of Dillo can be downloaded here (750k .tar.bz2 tarball). It works pretty well; I using it right now to post this blog.

- Sam

OK, here are my ugly hacks to Dillo-i18n

The ugly hacked version of Dillo-i18n that I hacked together so I would have usable accent support in my mini-Linux distribution can be downloaded here. Note that the code is ugly. For example, the utf8-to-latin1 code is basically broken; it makes certain Unicode quotation marks more barable, but does not correctly convert Spanish accents from utf-8 to Latin 1. Looking at the code, I can see what I did wrong and could even fix it if I were so inclined, but I'm not.

The purpose of this version of Dillo is to have a simple web browser that is usable for my main tasks (Reading and writing email with Gmail; publishing blog entries); since Gmail doesn't use utf-8 for accents when the HTTP "accept charset" specifies to use Latin-1 (you would be amazed how many web sites ignore the accept charset, such as Myspace and the Wikipedia), this bug isn't important enough for me to fix.

Also, the mini-CD also includes the graphical version of Links from Twilight labs, which completely correctly supports accents (but, alas, doesn't allow me to write emails with accents).

I actually almost never use this mini-CD; I have to lug around my laptop for my job, so use that to access the internet; the CD is only used for my afternoon and evening meditations. Even if I did use it more, not having Firefox saves me from having to update the CD every month or so.

Also, it's possible to use a file on a USB memory stick as the root filesystem; this allows me to have a larger file than is possible with a business card CD, complete with multiple updated web browsers (Firefox, Konqueror, a Webkit browser, a flash player, etc). So, this mini-image will only be used when I don't have that file on a USB memory stick.

Anyway, I'm done with MOAM-CD. It was an interesting experiment in how little I could make a basic web browsing system. With my increased work hours, I usually have my laptop with me, and don't often need to use this mini-system to get online. It's still useful for cyber-cafe use when I'm downtown on the weekends, and the occasional day when I don't have my laptop, but, in truth, trying to keep it updated is a real pain; the Firefox security updates often times break more stuff than they fix. It took me two or three days to hack Dillo to have usable accent support, time I could have spent relaxing, translating documents, or with my friends.

So, barring my life getting boring again or a critical security hole, I will not update MOAM CD again. It was a fun project.

Yay! I got Dillo to completely work in my Mini-CD distribution

MOAM-CD is a project I have been working at on and off for a while. I realized recently that I don' t use MOAM-CD that much any more, so my efforts here have been making a version of MOAM-CD that I can burn and forget about. Also, since I use the .mp3 files on the CD for meditating, I wanted to be able to add more songs.

Hence, I have gotten rid of security-hole-of-the-month-club Firefox, and am now using a slightly hacked version of the latest i18n version of Dillo. Ironically, the i18n part of this version was broken, but it has other cool features the last (and probably final) 2006 stock release of Dillo doesn' t have, such as tabs, and the ability to actually use Gmail to read and send mail.

The i18n part was broken; I got rid of all of the iconv-using code and replaced it with a very basic UTF-8 ro Latin-1 converting code that won' t convert text that is already Latin-1. I also changed the HTTP code to not send an " Accept charset" of UTF-8, but send iso 8859-1 instead. And Dillo is run in a wrapper script that sets the environmental variable LANG to " es_MX" (Mexican Spanish) before running Dillo.

Once I did all this, everything worked like a dream for the two languages I speak: English and Spanish. I can not only see all of the accents correctly on web pages, I can also write and send emails that have accents in them.

In addition, there is some hackey code that converts UTF-8 quotes in to ASCII quotes, so I can read pages that use those ugly quotes, such as the WEB Bible.

So now, I have an image that I will burn in a day or two (I' m testing it with a burned CD-RW) that has a web browser I don' t need to update every month, and that I can use for using Gmail and posting blogs.

And, if I do need Firefox, I have changed things so the CD can use a file on a USB memory stick as the root filesystem, allowing me to update Firefox without needing to burn a new CD. So, I get the best of both worlds.

OK, I' ve been obsessed with Dillo for too long (two or three days). Time to go home, text my friends, and rest.

I hope to post some files in a day or two.

MaraDNS snapshot update

I uploaded another MaraDNS snapshot today. In this snapshot, there are no major changes (Read: No new bugs found and fixed. Maybe MaraDNS is becoming 100% bug-free). However, I have added a few more SQA tests, and have updated the zoneserver man page and fixed a couple of typos in the tutorial documentation. After making the release, I realized that the example mararc in the zoneserver man page is a little inaccurate. This will have to wait until my next snapshot of MaraDNS.

The snapshot is available on the MaraDNS webpage.

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In related news, I am also updating MOAM-CD.

I have managed to squeeze out more unused stuff; I got rid of a lot of kernel modules that won't be used on a basic web terminal, such as bluetooth drivers, non-X video drivers and a number of filesystems like reiserfs. This cleanup saved about five megs of space. I also removed some Cyrillic fonts (This CD is only for English and Western European language speakers).

For some reason, the .jar files (which is just another name for .zip) in Firefox's Chrome folder are really poorly compressed; I used advancedcomp to recompress these files, saving 2.8 megs of space there. I also removed the C development environment, saving about 10 megs of space.

Once compressed, the amount of space saved was, in total, some ten megs. Yes, I now have a usable web browsing system complete with Firefox 1.5 in only about 27 megs. Which gives me a lot more space for other stuff, and even allows the system to fit on one of those square 30 megger business card CDs.

I have also updated the variable-width font, and Firefox is updated to be current with Firefox 2.0.0.5's security fixes. The two 2.0.0.6 security updates are not critical; the one critical bugfix is caused by Microsoft Windows' broken security model, and doesn't impact Linux.

In addition, I have added the VIA chipset Unichrome driver. X's auto-probe script is smart enough that, as soon as this driver was compiled and placed in /lib/xorg/modules/drivers, it auto-probes for the chipset. I tested things on a computer that I know uses this chipset, and the driver works like a dream.


I should have a release of moam-cd-0.6 later on this week. I need to make the width of the space "character" a little wider at 14 points with the "Sandals" font, and should make the 12-point "A" a little narrower (not as important, and harder to fix; the space fix is a one-character change in the appropriate .bdf file).

Safari for Windows ; MOAM-CD update

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I think Safari for Windows is a very good thing. Why? Because it is another nail in the "This site only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer" (or, likewise, the "This site is optimized for Netscape" 1990s web sites) coffin. There are people out there who may not use Firefox but will use Safari; as long as more people use web-standard compliant browsers instead of IE, the web wins because people write pages to the standards instead of making them render only on one browser.

And, yes, I do remember the bad old days of 2002, when web sites I had to go to for my school did not work in anything besides IE.

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Two planned updates for the next version of MOAM-CD:

• I will remove the NetBSD FTP client and replace it with the FTP client that (presumably) DeLi has. It seg faults whenever it tries to open up a connection to a remote FTP server.
• I will add the Unichrome drivers, since motherboards that use this chipset are very common in Mexico, and the drivers are, sadly, not part of X proper.
• I am getting a kernel panic when starting the IDE driver on one (AMD-64) system; I will make a special initrd with the IDE driver as a module to try and troubleshoot this.

MaraDNS and MOAM-CD updates

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Well, it's finally possible to get my email address on my contact page again. It was not a trivial project; basically, when the hard disk crashed and we reinstalled the system, the PHP permissions were changed to not run a external programs. Hence, I had to take the encryption core for my email address, and convert the code from C to PHP. This took me about three hours to debug and implement. But, finally, the site is fully up again and I'm looking forward to getting people asking me inane questions already answered by the documentation, or reporting bugs that have long since been fixed.

I also have a new snapshot of MaraDNS 1.3 that I made yesterday and have uploaded today. I have started some unit tests; basically, I have code that triggers the various known memory leaks, in order to verify that these memory leaks no logner exist. It can be downloaded here:

MaraDNS 1.3 snapshots

I will release 1.3.06 tomorrow and 1.3.07.01 on Thursday.

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I have also released MOAM-CD 0.5 today. The changes from MOAM-CD 0.4 are:

• The fonts have been updated to have boldface (attractive) and italics (unattractive but usable)
• I have fixed the problems with the permissions with /tmp
• I have added the editor nano
• I have fixed curses applications so that they can run in X
• I have changed the default home page in Firefox

It is available here:

moam-cd-0.5.tar.bz2 (18 meg file)

MOOF 0.4 released

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Today I release MaraDNS on one CD 0.4. While this version is not 100% bug free, it is a usable system that should, given a stock DeLi Linux system with all packages installed, will make a tiny live CD ISO image. Should one have Firefox for DeLi Linux installed, the scripts will add Firefox to the live CD. The live CD, which is about 35 megabytes/33 mebibytes in size, consists of:

• Comple *nix scripting environment, courtesy of a modified Busybox 1.5.1 that compiles in DeLi
• X11, complete with video card detection scripts
• Dhcp client and network card auto-probing script
• Playback of mp3 files with XMMS
• Video games: Freecell (complete with difficulty levels), Minesweeper
• C development environment for compiling (complete with make) basic non-gui C programs
• DNS server: MaraDNS
• Scripting languages: ash, awk, and sed (Again, from Busybox)
• Text editor: vi (again, from Busybox)
• Window manager: a slightly patched FVWM version 1
• Firefox 1.5 web browser
• Security: Built-in iptables firewall for protecting the system from port scans and other nonsense
• Security: Firefox web browser runs as non-root user
• NetBSD ftp client, that has up-arrow history and tab expansion
• GNU wget, for getting files from remote web sites
• Fast bootup: The system boots up in about 15 seconds, even on older computers

The disadvantage is that there isn't any documentation for this system. So, I will supply some documentation here:

• No need to log in. Just hit "enter" and you will get a root shell prompt
• Since I forgot to do this, after you log in, type in chmod 1777 /tmp so that Firefox can download and save files
• To configure X, type in /etc/Xsetup
• To start X once configured, type in xinit
• To autodetect the ethernet card, type in /etc/probe.ethernet
• To get an IP address via DHCP, type in /etc/get.dhcp.ip. If you don't get an IP right away, you may have to try a few times
• To auto-detect the sound card in your computer, type in /etc/probe.sound
• Once you start X, to get a list of programs, left click anywhere where there isn't a window. RXVT is the terminal emulator; Firefox, of course, is the web browser; XMMS is the mp3 player; and Freecell is a solitaire card game

On a standard "Hockey rink" business card CD, you can fit not only this complete Linux system, but also about 17 mebibytes of other data. I myself have used this extra spce to fit one song I like (Glyder by Jonn Serrie), my private SSH key (encrypted), a bzip2 compressed tarball of the Bible, and a number of English lessons.

It is available for download here:

http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-0.4.tar.bz2 (Warning: 18 meg tarball)

MOAM-CD almost ready

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I finally got past the kernel problems. Basically, it looks like 2.4.34.4 is not happy with zlib_inflate being compiled in to the kernel. The workaround is to have zlib_inflate be a module, and insert the module in initrd before inserting the cloop module.

Once I got past that hurdle, the next problem is that, when the 2.4.34.4 kernel is compiled with devfs support, the modules call devfs routines. Since I don't like devfs; the code was abandoned years ago and the location of devices is different than where they are in newer 2.6 kernels, I have had to recompile all of the modules. They take up a little less space since all the devfs nonsense is not in the modules.

At that point, I was able to boot and run the system. I am very pleased with it. The only final thread I need to wrap up is international keyboard support; looks like I need to add xkbcomp and make sure the directories compiled keymaps go in to is a rewritable directory. I also need to make sure /tmp has 1777 perms.

I'm using the system right now. I haven't tested it yet, but it should be able to, after an hour or two (less time if you have one of those fancy Pentium 4 computers), make an iso image that is only a little over 35megs (about 33mebibytes) in size. Complete with Firefox browser, C compiling environment, *NIX command line environment, and even a couple of small video games.

Anyway, I haven't tested it, but it should compile fine and make an iso image from a stock DeLi 0.7.2 install. If you install the firefox package for deli, the iso image will include firefox.

It's here:

http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-20070607.tar.bz2 (18 meg tarfile)

Moam CD update

OK, I am a lot closer to getting a kernel that works as a DeLi Linux live CD boot CD. Essentially, all I need is DeLi's kernel with initrd enabled, for the CD auroprobing and loopback mounting. The reason why modules weren't working with DeLi Linux was because DeLi's kernel was compiled with versioning information for modules turned off and my kernel was compiled with this turned on. This made my kernel unable to load the modules from DeLi's kernel. So, I can now load DeLi's kernel modules. The problem now is that I can't load the cloop module, even though (as far as I can tell) I added the Zlib compression library to the kernel. It may be, that to include Zlib with the kernel, I have to have both zlib inflate and deflate enabled, not just inflate. I will deal with this tonight.

The Linux kernel is the #1 pain in the ass to deal with when making a distribution.

Moam CD update

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Well, I'm almost at Moam CD 0.4 Last night, I was able to add the C development environment. Since DeLi is based on uClibc, the basic C development was tiny--I was able to get all of the tools and include files needed to compile MaraDNS and still have the entire system fit in under 34 megs. So, it looks like I will very easily be able to fit all of the system on a Business card CD.

The only thing I have to do is get the kernel and initrd to work. The insmod with initrd couldn't even see the printk function in the kernel, so it looks like I will need to recompile busybox in the initrd. My plan is to make busybox static there, so I can have a static busybox which will allow me to unmount the CD correctly when shutting down, which will make getting the CD out after reboot easier.

The latest MOAM cd is here http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-20070605.tar.bz2

- Sam

MOAM-CD and Sandals font updated

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I worked this weekend on the MOAM-CD project. I have finished the roman (non-bold, non-italic) version of the Sandals typeface at three different sizes: 12 point, 14 point, and 16 point. All three sizes are very readable, and allow me to have an attractive readable screen font on the MOAM-CD without having to abuse the non-copyrightable status of fonts in the US.

Here is a copy of the fonts: http://www.samiam.org/moof/Sandals-font-20070603.tar.gz

I have also made an improvment to FVWM, where it can (somewhat) work around problems of laggy servers that don't always do "focus follows mouse". The hack is that there is code to make sure a window gets focus when it is automatically raised.

In addition, a compressed cloop filesystem (as opposed to cramfs) is made when making the CD image. I have updated the initrd to use cloop instead of cramfs. I have not had a chance to test this yet, because DeLi doesn't have mkisofs. So I have gotten the mkisofs code and will set up MOAM to compile mkisofs so the CD image can be made.

The compressed image, with Firefox, Freecell, and the X.org drivers, but without the C development environment, is only about 28 megs in size. When I added C compiling to the old CentOS 3-based Live CD, the image became about 15 megs bigger. Since DeLi is leaner, and doesn't use glibc, I think it will be leaner. I am guessing a Business card CD image with C compiling support will be about 40 megs in size; enough extra space for extensive customizing.

Anyway, I also need to get aumix, or another simple program to adjust /dev/mixer, to work in this system.

Here is a copy of the current code that will soon be able to make a live CD:

http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-20070603.tar.bz2 (13 meg tarfile)

Font update

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I am continuing work on my bitmap typeface. I have finished the typeface at 17 pixel size, and am now working on the 15 pixel version of the typeface. All ASCII and most IPA (Well, the IPA symbols that I will support in this font) symbols are done at 15 pixel size. The only thing I have to do are the accented letters. Then I will work on the 13 pixel size typeface. Once that is done, I will make "Cheap and dirty" bold and italic typefaces by having a program make the leters thicker, and using Fontforge with the DejaVu script to italicize the font.

I, alas, have no sample to show you guys. I should have things ready by Monday. I hope.

Moam-CD update; A new font

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Well, I have updated Ace of Penguins to use the first 32,768 hands for the difficulty levels. Since hands that need four freecells to solve are fairly rare, I have updated the program to have only three difficulty levels; "Hard" is now all of the hands that need three or four freecells to solve. The hands that fc-solve could not solve are now black-listed, and will not be dealt to the user.

I am also working on a screen font that is easy on the eyes. Here is a sample of the screen font:



The name of this font is "Sandals", and it is strictly a screen font.

I am mostly done with the 16pt version of this font; I will then make a 14, 12, 10, and 8 version of the font in the roman typeface. Then I will make bold and italic typefaces.

Anway, Sandals can be downloaded here (Post-May-2007 Fontforge source). Today's snapshot of Moam CD is available at http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-20070531.tar.bz2 (10 megabyte file).

- Sam

Freecell difficulty calculating finished; Vista annoyance

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I have finished calculating the basic difficulty for the first 32768 hands of Freecell using my particular shuffling algorithm. Before I terminated the process this morning, it had calculated 37052 hands. I don't think the calculation is completely accurate, but it's good enough for giving the Freecell that my live CD comes with difficulty levels.

Here is the final breakdown of difficulty

0 75
1 6637
2 21849
3 7756
4 535
5 200

In this chart, the left column is the number of freecells, and the right column is the number of hands solvable with that many freecells. "5" indicates that the hand could not be solved with four freecells.

I am sure a lot of those 200 hands which fc-solve couldn't solve are, in fact, solvable.

Here is the final list of hands solvable with zero freecells:

116 497 1195 1762 2330 3175 3380 3417 4187 4325 4361 5061 5394 6188 6552 6569 6642 7208 7253 7298 9836 10181 10377 10393 11211 12106 12637 12762 12832 13458 13632 13710 14928 15017 15900 16182 16303 16411 16820 17733 17990 18439 18663 18906 19168 20233 20928 21038 21837 21979 22051 22150 23417 24394 25195 25469 26458 27405 27854 28057 30783 30790 30914 31713 31828 33272 33437 33570 34105 34902 35018 35189 35493 35938 37011

And the final list of hands fc-solve could not solve:

30 228 459 508 673 714 1081 1257 1288 1464 1567 1792 2235 2362 2386 2484 2715 2880 3022 3194 3267 3322 3861 4230 4287 4530 4791 4873 4874 4908 5030 5195 5396 5809 5820 6140 6227 6408 6523 6737 6761 6796 7073 7077 7269 7383 7530 7853 8009 8417 9113 9155 9640 10076 10110 10117 10294 10338 10567 10809 10961 11060 11151 11239 11991 12122 12360 12432 12433 12439 12978 13000 13345 13365 13595 13769 14234 14243 14314 14509 14574 14673 14871 14880 15182 15280 15316 15418 15477 15723 15798 15890 16280 16319 16399 17514 17823 17856 18057 18327 18570 18764 18837 19140 19286 19862 19924 19926 19965 20133 20429 21130 21320 21535 21628 21920 22091 22264 22597 23095 23099 23127 23233 23327 23625 24132 24519 24619 24660 24871 25067 25069 25246 26381 26584 26640 26667 26806 26816 26970 27015 27183 27223 27333 27572 27932 27970 28000 28245 28482 28486 28499 28556 28645 28765 28989 29142 29173 29243 29320 29538 29589 29644 30009 30346 30539 30651 30739 30959 30984 31320 31532 31951 32381 32625 32647 32672 33495 33707 33728 33835 34049 34203 34865 34889 35028 35211 35320 35779 35867 35902 35934 36066 36331 36348 36425 36465 36508 36633 36720

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OK, the other night I was teaching English to a student who just put Vista on a new laptop. Everything was enabled: Aero, translucent window bars, the whole nine yards. As you can imagine, this computer was S-L-O-W. Anyway, so we open up Word 2007 so I can start typing a lesson for him (I use client's computers so that I don't have to lug my laptop everywhere, and so that clients can have notes on their computers). After installing my special font with IPA symbols, I get to work and type. Then Word incorrectly underlines something I wrote in Spanish, because the document was in English.

No, problem. Go to tools->set language and change the language. This is how it's done in Word 2000 and 2003. Well, except, Microsoft has completely changed the interface in Office 2007. My client says "OK, let's figout out where it is". With over 10 years of Linux experience, I know to RTFM (read the fancy manual) when I'm lost. We decided to take the RTFM route.

I open up the help, type in the Spanish for "set language" (the client's system, like all computers I see here in Mexico, is in Spanish), and go through until I find the document telling me where it is hidden. The manual said Spanish words to the effect of "Go to tools -> set language to change the language the selected text is in". Well, except there is no "tools" menu item in Office 2007. So I'm thinking that some magic will restore the tools bar. Google searches don't reveal anything helpful. My client, at this point, is calling up a friend and we're trying to figure out how to change the !@#$ language in Office 2007.

We finally found it. Below the text, it tells you what language Word thinks the document is in. You can select text and pull this up as a menu item to change the language. No tools bar in sight.

In order words, the documentation Office 2007 was out of date. To the point where it did more harm than good. I guess Spanish-speaking Microsoft users have too much pride or whatever to RTFM when lost.

Freecell solving update

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As of this morning, the Freecell solver was almost at 32,768 hands. It has lareayd passed that point. There are, so far, 60 hands that can be solved with zero freecells: 116 497 1195 1762 2330 3175 3380 3417 4187 4325 4361 5061 5394 6188 6552 6569 6642 7208 7253 7298 9836 10181 10377 10393 11211 12106 12637 12762 12832 13458 13632 13710 14928 15017 15900 16182 16303 16411 16820 17733 17990 18439 18663 18906 19168 20233 20928 21038 21837 21979 22051 22150 23417 24394 25195 25469 26458 27405 27854 28057. There are also 166 hands that we the solver couldn't solve with four freecells; some of these are undoubtably solvable: 30 228 459 508 673 714 1081 1257 1288 1464 1567 1792 2235 2362 2386 2484 2715 2880 3022 3194 3267 3322 3861 4230 4287 4530 4791 4873 4874 4908 5030 5195 5396 5809 5820 6140 6227 6408 6523 6737 6761 6796 7073 7077 7269 7383 7530 7853 8009 8417 9113 9155 9640 10076 10110 10117 10294 10338 10567 10809 10961 11060 11151 11239 11991 12122 12360 12432 12433 12439 12978 13000 13345 13365 13595 13769 14234 14243 14314 14509 14574 14673 14871 14880 15182 15280 15316 15418 15477 15723 15798 15890 16280 16319 16399 17514 17823 17856 18057 18327 18570 18764 18837 19140 19286 19862 19924 19926 19965 20133 20429 21130 21320 21535 21628 21920 22091 22264 22597 23095 23099 23127 23233 23327 23625 24132 24519 24619 24660 24871 25067 25069 25246 26381 26584 26640 26667 26806 26816 26970 27015 27183 27223 27333 27572 27932 27970 28000 28245 28482 28486 28499 28556 28645 28765 28989 29142 29173 29243 29320 29538 29589 29644 30009 30346 30539

MOAM-CD update

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I am in the process of moving MOAM-CD from using CentOS 3 as a base system (The X server is too old to support modern video cards) to using DeLi Linux. My goal is to have a tarball that is 100% self-contained. Extract the tarball on a full install of DeLi 0.7.2 with Firefox, run "make", and you will get a Live CD iso image the size of a business card CD (50 megs) about an hour later.

I'm not there yet, but I have made the following improvments this weekend:

• Busybox 1.5.0 now compiles in DeLi Linux 0.7.2.
• Freecell (Ace of Penguins) now has difficulty levels.
• Xsetup updated for Xorg 7.X
• Firefox now runs in the live CD envronment (This took hours of troubleshooting).

Anyway, here is a snapshot: http://www.samiam.org/moof/moam-cd-20070527.tar.bz2

- Sam

Freecell solver update

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Well, the only thing I was able to accomplish last night was to continue running the freecell solver on the hands generated by the Freecell shuffler I posted here yesterday.

Here is distribution, as of early this morning, of how hard the hands are:

Freecells       Number of hands
0                 20
1               1361
2               4705
3               1669
4                121
5 or more         48

The left column is the number of freecells needed to solve a hand, and the right column is the number of hands solvable with that many freecells. Here is a list of the hands solvable with zero freecells: 116 497 1195 1762 2330 3175 3380 3417 4187 4325 4361 5061 5394 6188 6552 6569 6642 7208 7253 7298.

And the hands fc-solve (the name for the freecell solver program) could not solve with four freecells: 30 228 459 508 673 714 1081 1257 1288 1464 1567 1792 2235 2362 2386 2484 2715 2880 3022 3194 3267 3322 3861 4230 4287 4530 4791 4873 4874 4908 5030 5195 5396 5809 5820 6140 6227 6408 6523 6737 6761 6796 7073 7077 7269 7383 7530 7853