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I think that it's time to build a new distribution of Linux, one focused on getting the job done. I think that most distros have basically lost the point of building a linux distro: to have your own unique ecosystem which provides for a specific set of needs.

I'm naming my small, hobby-level efforts to build a distro "nu", as it both provides a very nice logo to work with and because it as a symbol is used to represent "Degrees of freedom" in statistics.

Since this is effectively just a hobby-level of effort, don't expect big things of my distro (unlike a certain Debian fork), but if it works, it should provide a fairly decent starting base for the development of a solid server and development OS.

Some intended features of nu are:
1. nupack, a package manager that effectively just wraps shell scripts and data in a gzip'd tarball.
2. nuinit, an experimental (read: based on random speculation/ideas that I have) that uses makefiles to start and stop the system. If this works properly, it should provide all of the benefits of a certain invasive init system (ie. multithreaded execution) and a model for managing dependencies that is already tried and tested. If this doesn't pan out, I'll likely search for another init system starting with Epoch.
3. nubus. I understand that this was the name of a system bus from the late '80s and early '90s, though I'll likely come up with a better name later. This would start as a re-badged dbus with future revisions actually being their own thing.
4. Either the alsa or jack sound systems.

Because the primary aim of this project is to make a serious operating system, I don't intend to include bloat such as KDE or GNOME. The user is, of course, free to build and install these things for themselves, but they shouldn't expect me to support it.

Project status:
I'm currently trawling through Linux From Scratch, which will provide me with a base system to do various experiments and development on. Since LFS is a very small and basic system in and of itself, it will make it far easier to test out various init systems and implement my package manager.

Future work:
I'm going to implement the package manager first, since it should be fundamentally "easier" than the rest. Thankfully my computer can do the LFS Standard Build Unit in about a minute, so builds have been very fast and straightforward.

NOTE: This is a work-in-progress; read at your own risk/confusion. It is an attempt to gather together bookmarks, tabs, and information pertaining to Unicode, UTF-8, HTML, and 'characters'.

It would seem to be a simple enough question to answer, but things are not always as they seem:

What characters should SoylentNews support?

Motivation: as many of you are aware, one of the early improvements that SoylentNews made to its base source code was to support Unicode characters. (Thanks to the heroic efforts of The Mighty Buzzard.) The underlying code only supported ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters. Which was just fine for as far as it went. It just didn't go far enough for us...

I took on the task of testing our implementation of UTF-8 support. Little did I know what I was getting into! It has been a fascinating journey, indeed!

What is Unicode?

This is taken from What is Unicode?:

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.

These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.

Unicode is changing all that!

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystems, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's entry for Unicode:

Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings, such as those defined by the ISO 8859 standard, which find wide usage in various countries of the world but remain largely incompatible with each other. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing (usually using Latin characters and the local script), but not multilingual computer processing (computer processing of arbitrary scripts mixed with each other).

Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. ...

In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, not a glyph—for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering (size, shape, font, or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor.

A little more background: There are certain code points in Unicode that are of questionable value in the context of a web page; further, there are code points which are defined to be invalid! And then, just to make things even more interesting, I found a list of invalid characters in an HTML document:

Illegal characters

HTML forbids[6] the use of the characters with Universal Character Set/Unicode code points (in decimal form, preceded by x in hexadecimal form)

• 0 to 31, except 9, 10, and 13 (C0 control characters)
• 127 (DEL character)
• 128 to 159 (x80 – x9F, C1 control characters)
• 55296 to 57343 (xD800 – xDFFF, the UTF-16 surrogate halves)

The Unicode standard also forbids:

• 65534 and 65535 (xFFFE – xFFFF), non-characters, related to xFEFF, the byte order mark.

UTF-8; Unicode Transfer Format - 8-bit

Though there are several means by which Unicode characters can be transmitted between contexts, one of the most popular is UTF-8, which is what was chosen for use in SoylentNews.

SoylentNews:

What you see from our site mostly comes via a browser (though we also support Gopher and NNTP; you can have stories e-mailed to you; and we also have an RSS/Atom feeds... wow!)

Our site currently formats web pages as HTML 4.01; here's a representative DOCTYPE:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

At some point in the future we may want to directly support HTML5; ideally nothing should preclude or complicate that effort.

See also:

• What is Unicode?,
• Unicode,
• Unicode and HTML,
• C0 and C1 control codes,
• [20] SGML Declaration of HTML 4,
• Characters not Suitable for Use With Markup,
• HTML, XHTML, XML and Control Codes (Updated 2003-09-06 15:10) Answers the question: How do I handle control codes (ie. the 'C0' U+0000-U+001F and 'C1' U+007F-U+009F ranges) in XML, XHTML and HTML?
• About the Unicode Character Database,
• Unicode Character Database,
• Index of /Public/UCD/latest/ucd,
• http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ReadMe.txt,
• Unicode 7.0.0 (Released: 2014 June 16),
• Articles, best practices & tutorials,
• Serving HTML & XHTML

Obviously, we need not support the invalid code points. (Enumerate them here).

Unicode and UTF-8

So Unicode is a collection of mappings of code-points (numbers) to 'characters'; UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit, used to transmit/encode Unicode code points.

To be continued...

I have been long impressed with Soylentils. We have forked the beast, beat the dead horse, spanked the monkey, and did something to llamas. So now it think it would be a good time to keep track of our contributions to internet culture. As some are aware, these are usually referred to as memes. I believe the term derives from Mimesis, an ability to copy. As such, many things on Soylent news are copies of earlier Slashdotisms.

Here are some examples:

In soviet russia

I, for one, welcome . . . . overlords!

Frost Piss!

(and this one needs to die)

What I am looking for are memes unique to Soylent News, such as that we are made of people, or referring to members as Soylentils, which just sounds so nutritious and healthy. One other example I am aware of the the term "soyled" as a replacement for "slashdotted". Not sure if we actually have this ability, but it is something worth pursuing. Any other memes, trends, recurring expressions, whatever, that are unique to Soylent News? Soylent minds want to know!

Oft times such things are inadvertent. Just yesterday we had a Fine Article that ended up saying that failure to vaccinate dogs lead to many of them parishing from global worming. OK, that may not stick.

Personalities? We have our own ---I will not name names, but everyone knows who they are. The most nortorious gewg_, the slightly less nortorius and more whining _Anti_gewg_!! And of course. . . no, I said I would not name names, and I only named these two because they are not names, only names posted under AC posts, which could be, and probably are, only me.

So chip in! The sooner we identify memes. the sooner they die! Wait, that is not my intent! I want them to live! Live like quotes from "The Princess Bride" or references to "Firefly" or "Serentity", or anything Monty Pythonesque, and possibly mandatorially XKCD. This is what culture is made of, this is what we are, and we need some way to bring the less culturally sophisticated up to speed, besides ridicule and mod-bombing (if such a thing actually exists). What are the uniquely Soylentilish turns of phrase, a Soylent reference, a Soylental dismissal? I will try to keep a record, so that in the distant future, they will know that we were Soylent, and we were mighty!

A recent article posted here reminded me of all of the great FOSS games that I've gotten to play over the years.

To be honest, while FOSS games do feel kind of rough and unfinished sometimes (though it really does depend on the game; BosWars and LinCity feel like very well made games), they tend to be on a level of stimulation and creativity that really hasn't been seen since the 1990s.

1. LinCity (as well as LinCity-ng)
LinCity, while likely to draw a direct comparison to a similarly titled game by Maxis, really is in a league of its own. LinCity is a construction and resource management simulator that actually leads its players to think about how to design and build a city at a far more involved level than traditional city planning games.

2. BosWars
BosWars is an awesome RTS game that is absurdly easy to modify and improve (the game engine interprets plaintext scripts written in LUA). While the AI either lands in the categories of "Lacking" or "absurdly hard", I could see that it would be an awesome multiplayer game.

3. Globulation
Yet another RTS game, except that this one puts you in a far more interesting role. All the player can do is set construction and general goals/waypoints for the glob creatures presented. From there, they automatically go about their work and assign themselves to different buildings and waypoints. I think that this game would also be really awesome in multiplayer, though the AI is geared very well for every level of skill ranging from beginners to advanced players.

4. OpenTTD
OpenTTD is a free and open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. As such, it inherits its parent game's features while adding a wide variety of tweaks and improvements, such as a built-in modding utility/package manager.

5. OpenArena
This is a fork of the classic Quake III Arena, and thus inherits that game's fast paced action. While I'm not really too much of a fan of FPS games, this one is really fun to play. Please note that the character models used have quite a few polygons, so it is worthwhile to roughly double the system requirements listed on their page for a playable experience (though I would expect someone with SLI'd Voodoo 2 graphics cards to do pretty well on the processor listed).

6. KSpaceDuel
This is a clone of Space Duel. Nothing more need be said except that it has quite a bit of customization options available.

These are just the games that I have personally played and enjoyed. Wikipedia has a far larger list, and I encourage anyone reading this journal to check it out and reply if they so wish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

A day that will live in e-fame-y.

This is just a place to hang some UTF-8 character regression tests.

Hello, fellow Soylentils! Please come into my journal, as we prepare to discuss the pertinent issues of our times.

Two issues: Toxic posters. As much as I love Ethanol_Fueled, his charm, such as it is, wears of rather quickly. But he is a prince compared to gweg_troll, the single (if that)-minded racist who is oh so concerned about all rational people modding him down because he is, in fact, indubitubly, a racist. But there is still worse, my fellow Soylentils, MikeeUSA, the wanna be rapist of children, really need to be, well, exiled from our community. I suggest multiple SPAM mods, IP banning, and &*%*%$#$($@%#$^$&*/.

Part of what makes the internet such a tool for progressive politics is that it allows the recidivists to come out and state their positions. Yes, the fact that African Americans commit more crime per capita proves, well, that correlation is not causation. Poor people commit more crime, and African Americans tend to be in that demographic. Gee! I wonder why? See, it's %*^*^%&$&%s racism that creates the conditions that confirm racism. Boy, are you racists stupid! Ever read (excuse me for accusing you of being literate) Huck Finn? Jim was better man that any of you wannabe crackers could ever be.

Second, (notice I actually skipped Eth? That is because he is asleep on a mattress of dubious provenance right now) I want to see MikeeUSA on the Sex Offender Registry, because if he is not already on it, he definitely will be soon. This is one seriously sick person, one of those that cannot be cured by any know psychotherapy or time behind bars. So we, and the rest of the internet, need to find him, identify him to the authorities, and have him put into protective custody. I do not make this demand lightly, I know that Mighty Buzzard and others will defend personal rights to a point, but not to this point. The Bible says, "Blessed are the peace-makers". Never does it say, "blessed are the perverted pedofiles who quote the Old Testament". See?

So there is my "nice" journal, discussing pleasant topic which all might engage at their leisure. And we will just have to accept that modding has a clear "reality" bias, because, as Stephan Colbert put it,"reality has a clear liberal bias". So, as the great! Philosopher Hegel said, "reality's bias is just reality, so it's not a bias at all."

I don't spend much money, and I seldom give any to online people. But - yeah, I'm aware that Soylent is in need of money. Then I saw it - an UNOBTAINIUM KEY CHAIN!! I'll be the first kid on my block to acquire unobtainium! I'll save my pennies and nickles, and discretely order a few more of these over the next months - and I can then build my UNOBTAINIUM BOMB!

Ooooh, I haven't been this excited since I ordered that little battery powered submarine when I was six or seven years old!

For the past yearish, I've bumped into the multitude of thinkpads we have floating around where I work.

Given that many of them are what I'd call "fast enough" (ie. Pentium IIIs of some sort), I decided to install Mint 17 on one of the A21s in order to see if IBM's hardware was really as great as everyone says it is.

At first, I was going to write this journal to call into question all of the rave reviews of the pre-Lenovo thinkpad keyboard that I've seen on this site, but I then proceeded to actually type more than just the minimum required to get Mint up and running. Once I actually started typing, the formerly mushy keys suddenly felt more like small cushions, and I found that I could actually write with impressive speed and accuracy -- no small feat for a laptop.

Another thing I noticed was that the display was awesome. Rather than the, to put it politely, blurry screen door that is my current (cheap toshiba circa 2013) laptop's display, I was met with beautiful 1600x1200 (as soon as I sorted out the driver problems that plague Rage 128 cards). Given that the ThinkPad is already adequately fast for what I need, I have to say that my current laptop is flat-out pathetic. It's uncomfortable to carry, its display looks like a blurry mess (1600x900 will never live up to its older 4:3 cousin), the s*it Apple-clone mouse is painful to use, and the keyboard (yet another fine example of the "hey! let's copy Apple's terrible design but even worse!" mentality that has taken over the PC industry) is a jarring disaster.

All I would like to leave with you at the end of this mini-rant is the following:

What the hell happened to laptops? Even the models as expensive as this one (the A21p cost $3400 new) still have terrible keyboards, the same size batteries (the Thinkpad's battery is rated around 70 watts) and displays with less density (though I will acknowledge that you can get laptops with 4k displays now... finally!) When you factor in the fact that all of the components in these systems have gotten significantly cheaper (for example the 850 MHz PIII in the thinkpad cost $722), our modern laptops are straddling the border of being a regression compared to what we had 10+ years ago.