While people are agonizing over how compliance will gut websites’ ability to identify and meet user demand, that’s not the problem. The problem is that, in order to have jurisdiction over attempts to weasel out of it by Google and Facebook, it doesn’t set clear boundaries. It’s up to the judge to determine whether cookies like PHPSESSID require prior opt-in from users and not even employees of the UK government are eager to comply.

What’s worse is that it probably won’t even work. Experience with technologies like ActiveX and Windows UAC has shown that people just learn to click “Accept” without reading when constantly bombarded. Even if they don’t nag, the EFF’s Panopticlick has already demonstrated that, with an IP address and a fingerprint of a user’s browser headers, you can track individual users pretty well unless they’re all behind the same NAT and on the same IT deployment image.

A solitary 1×1-pixel transparent GIF from a 3rd-party server is a blatant violation of any privacy laws you might care to craft, but what about a reCAPTCHA? …or a Google Font Library embed? …or that copy of jQuery everyone seems to load off Google these days? Every request for one of those leaks your current location via the Referer header and you can’t turn it off because that will break sites like Snopes.com, Pixiv.net, and many others which use it for hotlinking protection. (Though individual Firefox users can use RefControl to forge a nonsense Referer on all other sites)

User analytics via server logs (eg. /var/log/apache2/access.log) predates Javascript-based analytics and, if anyone has the raw data necessary to design a robust user fingerprint which can survive minor changes like browser upgrades (and an analytics package which uses statistical probability analysis for reliability), it’s companies like Google and Facebook.

Aside from driving companies to implement tracking that’s harder to neuter without companies’ co-operation, my big concern is that some EU company with deep pockets will use this as an opportunity to cripple smaller competitors by forcing them to jump through too many compliance hoops. It’s bad enough that big U.S. companies achieve a similar effect with software patents.

After one of my previous posts, showing off my obsession with flowcharts and how much I overthink buying new games, it occurred to me that I can actually focus on a question other people might care about: How does one comfortably manage their games collection on Linux these days?

The only options I’ve been able to find for getting Linux games online are as follows and only the first three have package management beyond “download this installer”:

• The free packages in your distro’s native package manager and any 3rd-party repositories like PlayDeb.net
• A distro-specific package manager like the Ubuntu Software Center that also offers the option to purchase things.
• Desura
• Gameolith
• Bundles like the Humble Indie Bundles and specific games in things like Indie Royale Bundles
• Individual games like Minecraft which are playable on Linux (free or pay)
• Running GOG.com games inside DOSBox or Wine or using the purchased resources in reverse-engineered engines like ScummVM.

However, when most people think of digital distribution (the buzzword), we think of a unified experience that takes the hassle out of managing our games for us. (In other words, something developers have to support or else like Steam)

Obviously, nothing as comprehensive as that exists for Linux yet, but we can try to MacGyver things up for now. I’d like to hear what your approach is in the comments, but here’s the best I’ve been able to accomplish.

It’s not ideal, but I tried and, since I’m already using TiddlyWiki to manage everything else, it’s quite comfortable.

The key details are:

• The Desura button is a direct link to the client download page.
• The PlayDeb button and the PPA links in the “Package Manager” section are direct links to the lines I’ll need to re-add to /etc/apt/sources.list if I re-install.
• The GOG.com button is a direct link to the “your games” page.
• The non-bracketed links in the “Package Manager” section use apt: URLs to trigger the package installer from the browser.
• The rest are just links to the page where you choose your download type (deb, rpm, installer, etc.)

I’m still working on polishing up and streamlining everything, but I’m already making good progress on polishing up Desura as a general game launcher. Here’s what it looks like once I’ve added a few native Linux games and a few Windows games via Wine and wrapper scripts:

You can do this yourself, if you want, by using the set_icon.py script I wrote. It’ll even extract icons from .EXE files for you.

When I have time, I’m also planning to work on:

• Making set_icon.py work on Windows. (The main issue is using Windows methods to find Desura and extract icons from .EXE files rather than Linux ones)
• A script which will create a wrapper for a Wine application, extract the icon, and add it to Desura with one command.
• A script which will sync all the games in my Linux desktop’s launcher into Desura (both additions and deletions) with one command.

The question for poor saps like me is, who can we trust without paying even more money? Well, here are the cross-platform cloud backup/sync providers I’ve found which assure you that, like Firefox Sync, data is encrypted before it leaves your computer and they can’t recover it if you lose your key:

As an alternative, if you have VPS, co-located server, or feature-rich shared hosting in a country you trust, you can also run your own service using open-source software.

Just keep in mind that most options don’t encrypt data on the server so, if you get hacked or police confiscate your server, they probably will grab copies of your data before someone thinks to power it off and lose your eCryptFS or EncFS keys. (EncFS on the client might work though)

I’d also keep an eye on Syncany. It’s not out yet, but if it doesn’t end up broken or vaporware, it looks like it will be a good hybrid of SparkleShare and duplicity.

Please feel free to suggest further alternatives in the comments. I’ll update the post if they look good.

(Note: further commentary below the diagram)

Why do I require such strict conditions before I buy games? It’s fairly straightforward, actually:

1. I have strong and well-justified feelings about DRM.
2. I’m a student with very little money.
3. I’m a full-time Linux user and have been since I was 16.
4. When you consider all the other ways I entertain myself, I probably have more games than I’ll ever be able to beat. (In addition to the 100+ games I have as downloads, the boxes in my closet contain roughly 500 game CD-ROMs and a CD-R full of disk images made from legally-purchased diskettes)

So, in that case, why do I keep buying games at all? In my own small way, I like to be a patron of the arts, so I try to give at least a little to every game I approve of, whether or not I’ll ever play it.

I still have to get some kind of short-term return on investment with my tight budget, but it’s better than nothing. After all, a little money to a lot of worthy developers is better than a lot to a few quasi-worthy ones… especially when I use every means at my disposal to cost them less in download bandwidth.

Once every month or so, I get called in because “Linux froze”. Almost every time, it turns out that some program XGrabPointer‘d the mouse, then froze, leaving the system live and the mouse moving… but no clicks being received. (The exceptions are when she’s using her laptop and an Intel graphics driver bug freezes the X server)

While not ideal, there used to be a clean workaround for this. Just set the appropriate xorg.conf toggle and teach them to use one of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, Ctrl+Alt+KP_Multiply, or Ctrl+Alt+KP_Divide to recover. However, these days, the old approaches don’t work, the system is in upheaval, and nobody with any significant Google PageRank seems to care enough to keep their documentation up to date.

Despite my loyalty to the platform, I’m not too blind to recognize that this problem, in and of itself, is easily enough to keep Linux on the desktop constrained to households with a full-time geek. (If for no other reason than because it’s an easy PR weakness for Microsoft and Apple to attack if Linux gains any ground)

Wayland could fix this problem if it gains adoption… but it has its own issues:

• It’s still very young
• Some people (me) need high-performance 3D drivers, GPU acceleration for HD video, and professional-quality dual-head support, but I haven’t heard anything on whether nVidia will support it with their binary drivers (or ATi for that matter).
• There is no clear plan for a replacement for ssh -X that’s better than mere VNC.
• I haven’t been promised a compositor which will forbid client-side window decorations (CSD for short).

The others, I can see being solved with time, but that last one is a big issue. The KWin developers have already said they’ll force force-server side window decorations, but…

• There’s apparently nothing beyond “peer pressure will save the world” and “applications which don’t use popular widget toolkits are a myth” to prevent an application from insisting that it also show client-side ones.
• What if I want to forbid CSD but whitelist Chrome and preserve the effect I get by maximizing Firefox and hiding the windeco? (No, not fullscreen. Even with Xinerama hints, Firefox modifies its UI when it detects that.)
• Most important: I run LXDE because I value a useful desktop over a glitzy one. Given current trends, it’ll be at least a decade before KDE 4 is as stable and responsive as KDE 3.5 was. (I used to be a loyal KDE 3.5 user, so nobody was more disappointed by Konqueror 4 and KDE 4.1 through 4.6 as I was.)

Yesterday, I finally found a use for the root http://ssokolow.com domain… I delegated it to GitHub to shorten and professionalize URLs for my projects. (eg. http://ssokolow.com/quicktile)

…but that meant that I could no longer use .htaccess to set up permanent redirects on URLs like http://www.ssokolow.com/ContactMe.

After a little research, it turns out that GitHub Pages doesn’t seem to have a method of declaring HTTP redirects… but Google and Yahoo will treat no-delay meta redirects as if they were HTTP 301.

Here’s what I came up with for a general, thorough way to ensure the least chance of broken links. (including .htaccess in case I switch hosting in the future) The example assumes you’re moving a whole domain (eg. from SourceForge to GitHub), but it applies equally well to specific URLs within a domain.

(Also, don’t forget to use the change-of-address notification feature in Yahoo and Google Webmaster Tools)

# The proper way to HTTP Redirect... but not all hosts listen to .htaccess (eg. GitHub Pages)
# Some hosts also provide a special redirect option in their hosting controls.

RedirectPermanent / http://www.newsite.com/

# Probably never used, but just to be thorough.
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
  <!--
   Custom 404 page. (GitHub Pages version)

   This will provide a last-ditch protection against broken links for actual users.
   However, search engines won't recognize it as a redirect. Hence why index.html is necessary.

   IMPORTANT: You should also activate your old site in Yahoo and Google Webmaster Tools.
     That will allow you to file a change of address notification in their search indexes
     for all pages within your domain.
  -->
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <script type="text/javascript">
      var NEW_HOST = 'www.newsite.com';
      location.replace(location.protocol + '//' + NEW_HOST + location.pathname + location.search + location.hash);
  </script>
 </head>
 <body>
  <noscript><p>This content has moved. Please replace the <code>http://www.oldsite.com/</code> portion of
   the address in your address bar with <code>http://www.newsite.com/</code>.</p></noscript>
 </body>
</html>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
  <!--
   The less-than-ideal way to redirect that relies on the browser rather than the server.

   Requires a browser or other compatible User Agent and only covers the site root, 
   but Google and Yahoo treat it as equivalent to a proper HTTP 301 redirect.
   Source: http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/google-and-yahoo-treat-undelayed-meta-refresh-as-301-redirect/
  -->
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.newsite.com/" />
 </head>
 <body>
  <p>This content has moved to <a href="http://www.newsite.com/">http://www.newsite.com/</a>. Attempting to automatically redirect you.</p>
 </body>
</html>

It’s not that I don’t like the idea. I think it’s a good one. The problem is that the year is 2012 and I’m using Linux. When I left-click an icon, I expect it to toggle application visibility, not display a context menu where I have to use another click to toggle visibility. That’s reserved for right-click.

Just because Apple took so long to accept the reality of the two-button mouse doesn’t mean my Linux desktop should punish me for not using some kind of desktop widget system to glance at things like torrent status. (Though, given how many other matter-of-personal-taste apple-isms Ubuntu has been adopting, like the global menubar and the titlebar buttons on the left-hand side, it doesn’t really surprise me that they’d blindly adopt that design quirk too.)

Now, if AppIndicators gain the ability to relegate the menu to right-click and bind a window handle to left-click, I’ll be the first person to welcome consistency between different applications’ definitions of “toggle a window that’s already shown but is on another desktop or is below other windows”. (Personally, I think it should be “If the window isn’t on this desktop and top of the stack, then raise it on this desktop.”)

Given that lxpanel (and, therefore, anything based on plain vanilla LXDE) doesn’t have a KDE-style “hide these icons” feature and that I couldn’t figure out how to get the messaging menu to work inside the lxpanel appindicator harness, let’s see how much we can polish up the tray.

Goals

• There should be as few tray icons as feasibly possible
• Tray icons should, as much as possible, be activity-oriented rather than tool-oriented.
• Icons must not be a distracting mish-mash of color. (Not even the transient ones)
• Icons should act effectively as indicators that applications require my attention.

Solution (Manual Version)

Step 1: Just a few activity-oriented icons

The first point takes a little bit of thought, but is mostly simple if you pick the right tools. Here’s how my load-out looks:

That’s probably the most compact I can get it for now.

Step 2: Icons shouldn’t be distracting

I’ve chosen to accomplish this by making permanent residents of the tray look like carved indentations without any color and temporary residents look like monochrome glyphs.

1. Fix the Pidgin icon’s ability to display status notifications.
2. Copy icons from Elementary into ~/.local/share/icons/elementary-mono-dark to give Dropbox’s idle icon, Pidgin’s available, idle, and away icons the look of carved indentations.
3. Do the same thing with Elementary’s icon for Tomboy Notes but put it into ~/.trinity/share/icons/ instead and mind the use of “22×22″ form rather than “22″ for folder names.
4. Adjust the Faenza icons for Tomboy Notes and Audacious (use the former for XPad). (And, if you use Deluge rather than Transmission, you’ll need to grab that from Faenza too)
5. Grab the Elementary Parcellite icon and, if you use JDownloader, my quick icon for that.

I’m still working on the best solution for Thunderbird, but here’s what it looks like sans Thunderbird:

Step 3: Icons should act as indicators

The final step is to make icons significantly more noticeable when they need attention. This is actually surprisingly easy for the ones which support changing their state.

For ones like Deluge which blink to get your attention, this is already done. For the rest, just mix and match so the normal icons and the attention icons are from different themes.

• Just use the elementary-mono-dark icons for non-idle Dropbox the way they’re supposed to be used. (White icons that contrast well with the black will jump out at you when you’re used to it being a carved hole in the black)
• For Pidgin, just make sure you don’t have an icon for “message needs attention” and it’ll fall through to the default app icon… which, in Elementary, is a purple speech balloon with an exclamation mark.
• If you want to remind yourself to not leave Pidgin on “do not disturb” or “invisible” grab the icons from Elementary Pidgin 2 and use them as your icons for those statuses.
• FireTray can handle showing a well-contrasting message count when you’ve got mail, so just replace the default Thunderbird icon with something that doesn’t contrast and you’re all set.

The only thing I could think of to make this better would be if Audacious supported showing play/pause/stop icons for its tray icon. Don’t you agree?

Solution (5-minute Version)

Pop over to GitHub (link is to a specific revision) and grab these directories from my profile repo:

• home/.local/share/icons
• home/.trinity/share/icons
• home/.local/share/images (optional)

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how quickly and easily adjust PNG-format toolbar and panel icons from Faenza (another popular, GPLed icon theme) to fit in alongside Elementary’s panel icons. (Good for quickly replacing tray icons from niche applications with less distracting ones.)

Step 1: Faenza icons are too dark

Simply open up the PNG in GIMP and set the layer opacity to 50%. That should match the general icon brightness (at least against the default Lubuntu panel background) but the icon will now feel flat and the edges won’t be as sharp as in Elementary.

Step 2: Sharpen the lines

Using the “Select By Color” tool (and, if necessary, the manual rectangle select), shift-click to add colors and ctrl-click to remove them until you’ve selected only the white outlines of your icon.

Copy the selected pixels, create a new transparent layer above the existing one, and paste them onto it. Set this layer’s opacity to between 5% and 20%. 10% is often correct but you may want to load the icon into the panel to check.

Step 3: Un-flatten the icon

Using the Magic Wand and shift-click, select just the dark inside of the icon. Then create a new transparent layer above the existing two.

Now, select the gradient tool and make sure you’ve got a black-to-white gradient (black foreground color, white background color, and the “FG to BG (RGB)” gradient).

With the new layer and the inside of the icon still selected, you want to  draw a straight, vertical gradient from about 5 pixels above the canvas to about 5 pixels below it. Set this last layer to about 10% opacity and you’re done.

Can you tell which of these are original Elementary Icons and which are modified Faenza ones?

On these Lubuntu Linux versions (and possibly others), the Pidgin tray icon never changes to show your status or notify you of unread messages.

• Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
• Lubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)
• Lubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

Reason

Pidgin uses its own names for status icons (eg. status/22/pidgin-tray-busy.svg) rather than the standard ones (eg. panel/22/user-busy-panel.svg) and doesn’t fall back to its default ones if they are missing… it just uses the application icon for any ones it can’t find.

The default Lubuntu icon theme (lubuntu) is a very minor tweak on the elementary-mono-dark theme and neither elementary nor elementary-mono-dark provide symlinks to offer the filenames Pidgin expects.

Solution

To make the tray icon show status, symlink the standard panel icons to the names Pidgin expects. There seems to be no standard panel status icon for “message waiting”, but since the Pidgin application icon in elementary is a purple speech balloon with an exclamation mark in it, the fallback works perfectly.

I’ve written a little script to automate the process. Run it to fix your lubuntu, elementary and elementary Dark themes. To fix other themes, just edit the two lines near the bottom which tell it where the themes are.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Quick-fix script for Pidgin status tray icon in Lubuntu"""

__appname__ = "Lubuntu Pidgin Tray Icon QuickFix"
__author__  = "Stephan Sokolow (deitarion/SSokolow)"
__version__ = "0.1"
__license__ = "MIT"

import os, re, sys

ICON_RE = re.compile('user-(.+?)-panel.(svg|png)')

def fix_pidgin_icons(src, tgt=None):
    src_base = os.path.join(src, 'panel')
    tgt_base = os.path.join(tgt or src, 'status')

    for size in os.listdir(src_base):
        src_size_base = os.path.join(src_base, size)
        tgt_size_base = os.path.join(tgt_base, size)

        for icon in os.listdir(src_size_base):
            if ICON_RE.match(icon):
                src_path = os.path.join(src_size_base, icon)
                tgt_path = os.path.join(tgt_size_base, ICON_RE.sub(r'pidgin-tray-\1.\2', icon))

                src_path_rel = os.path.relpath(src_path, os.path.dirname(tgt_path))
                dest_dir = os.path.dirname(tgt_path)

                if not os.path.exists(dest_dir):
                    os.makedirs(dest_dir)

                if os.path.isfile(tgt_path) or os.path.islink(tgt_path):
                    os.remove(tgt_path)
                print "Symlinking: %s -> %s" % (src_path_rel, tgt_path)
                os.symlink(src_path_rel, tgt_path)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if os.geteuid() != 0:
        print "Re-calling self via sudo..."
        os.execvp('sudo', ['sudo'] + sys.argv)

    fix_pidgin_icons('/usr/share/icons/elementary-mono-dark')
    fix_pidgin_icons('/usr/share/icons/elementary')
    print "\nIf you still experience problems, try re-running this script after running this command:"
    print "\n\tsudo rm /usr/share/icons/elementary/status/*/pidgin-tray-*.*"

If you want to track the progress of getting this issue fixed upstream, I’ve filed a bug.

UPDATE: The icon theme bug got WONTFIX’d over it being an application-specific thing. Here’s the pidgin bug I filed.

I’ve made sure both bugs reference each other and now I want to try to distance myself from the issue. However, if you happen to read this months later and there doesn’t seem to be any progress made, please give them a polite nudge via the proper channels to let them know people care about it.