Of course, I still wanted to keep all my games together in one launcher menu, so I went looking for a way to give the manually installed things like Super Meat Boy proper icons. Luckily, Desura turned out to have a pretty simple approach to specifying icons. Just a couple of columns in an ordinary SQLite database.

Here’s a little Python script I wrote which, in theory, should let you set/change the icon on ANY game in your Linux Desura library. I’ve only tested it on local ones though.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Simple script to set icons on locally-installed games in Desura.

--snip--

Requirements:
- Python 2.x
- PyXDG (python-xdg in Ubuntu)

Usage:
1. Place inside the desura folder
2. Run `./set_icon.py GameName icon_name_or_path

Examples:
    ./set_icon.py DOSBox dosbox
    ./set_icon.py "Super Meat Boy" /usr/share/icons/supermeatboy/32.png
"""

__appname__ = "Desura Game Icon Setter"
__author__  = "Stephan Sokolow (deitarion/SSokolow)"
__version__ = "0.1"
__license__ = "MIT"

from urllib import pathname2url
import os, sqlite3, sys

from xdg import IconTheme

DESURA_PATH = os.path.dirname(__file__)
DB_PATH = os.path.join(DESURA_PATH, '.settings/iteminfo_c.sqlite')

if not os.path.isfile(DB_PATH):
    raise Exception("%s must be placed in the desura folder" % os.path.basename(__file__))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from optparse import OptionParser
    parser = OptionParser(version="%%prog v%s" % __version__,
            usage="%prog <game title> <icon name or path>",
            description=__doc__.replace('\r\n','\n').split('\n--snip--\n')[0])

    # Allow pre-formatted descriptions
    parser.formatter.format_description = lambda description: description
    opts, args  = parser.parse_args()

    if len(args) != 2:
        parser.print_help()
        sys.exit(1)

    title, icon_name = args

    iconpath = os.path.abspath(icon_name)
    if not os.path.isfile(iconpath):
        iconpath = IconTheme.getIconPath(icon_name)
    if not iconpath or not os.path.isfile(iconpath):
        print("Could not find icon: %s" % icon_name)
        sys.exit(2)

    if iconpath.endswith('.svg') or iconpath.endswith('.xpm'):
        print("Unsupported icon format for Desura: %s" % iconpath)
        #TODO: At least support converting XPM automatically.
        sys.exit(2)

    conn = sqlite3.connect(DB_PATH)
    conn.execute("UPDATE iteminfo SET iconurl=?, icon=? WHERE name=?", [
            'file://' + pathname2url(iconpath),
            os.path.relpath(iconpath, DESURA_PATH),
            title])
    conn.commit()

Rasputin is a good example of this because his primary motivator is obsession. While that’s a perfectly realistic motivator, it takes a lot of work to make obsession work in a literary context even though it’s actually a fairly simple emotion. (I know people who are at least as obsessive as Rasputin and have hurt others along the way, but truth is stranger than fiction after all.)

If you compare Ursula, she’s actually a surprisingly well-rounded villain for a Disney cartoon. Especially when you realize that, in a setting that seems completely innocent, she sings a “villain song” that hints at prior experience with misogyny and offers a readily metaphorical deal where a young girl can get her man but must give up her voice and her family.

Good characters lend themselves more readily to more constructive adjectives like “cynical” and “misanthropic” (Ursula) which, even on their own, readily imply potential character histories. Rasputin’s descriptors, by contrast (obsessive, evil, undead, basket-case), aren’t as helpful.

In other words, a good villain is someone who could have been a sympathetic protagonist but chose to go about things in a completely unacceptable way.

First, since Half-Life’s story and character interactions were written to imply a mature, serious, respectable silent protagonist, it’s quite amusing to see an immature character with an apparent lax sense of right and wrong slotted into those interactions (As long as it’s done so it still makes sense) …not to mention the inherent humor potential in characters who somehow managed to achieve a university-level vocabulary and understanding of science, philosophy, and history without gaining any maturity in the process.

Second, most of the time, Scott’s Freeman seems to treat his mental tangents with equal importance to the serious, immediate concerns of his surroundings. For example, when he returns to the giant, noise-making alien in the rocket test chamber and, having just been daydreaming about riding a sea turtle to rob cruise ships, comments “Wow. You may be a reptile, but you’re really dangerous. You’re not like a turtle at all. I don’t like that.”

Both are forms of generating humor by denying a person or situation the respect/reverence/seriousness/deference we expect and, by using two or more humorous themes, you reduce the need to have one carry the whole burden of finding something to laugh about in every location or interaction.

Finally, Freeman tends to come to conclusions very notably different from what the designers of Half-Life intended (eg. that the soldiers who are trying to kill him are obviously immature jerks who don’t understand the meaning of “rescue operation”) and occasionally make obvious-in-retrospect comments to support those viewpoints. (Jokes based around not ignoring the rough edges in the immersiveness of the game can also fall into this category.)

Fundamentally, all three boil down to the same core pattern which underlies all humor on the listener’s side: Make sure the audience has expectations, then break them in a way that doesn’t cause them discomfort. (Humor on the joke-teller’s side is generally rooted in empathy and social connectedness since it’s usually impossible to tell a joke properly before you’ve let its effect on you wear out)

Obviously these aren’t magic bullets but, by providing three different “jokes in the abstract”, they make it much easier for someone with a sense of humor to know where to start looking to find humor in any given situation. In other words, they’re excellent as guards against writer’s block or tools for coming up with multiple jokes and then keeping only the best one.

You can even go further and subdivide your themes into more specific areas if you feel it’ll help you to keep better track of which topics are getting overused and which ones might offer alternative jokes.

I’d like to announce that every site I remember running (it’s conceivable I forgot ones on free hosting similar to GitHub Pages) is now free of Google Libraries API and Google Analytics (I use a private Piwik install for stats now and I can assure you I’ve dialed data retention way down). I’ve never had a need to use reCAPTCHA even back when they weren’t owned by Google.

I still need to find alternatives to FeedBurner, FriendFeed (owned by Facebook), and Google Docs and find time to replace GMail and Google Talk with stuff I host myself, but it’s a good start.

(You never really realize how much Google knows about you until you start migrating yourself off them)

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s an up-to-date list of all 3rd-party dependencies in my sites which could theoretically be reworked for abuse:

blog.ssokolow.com

• ProjectWonderful Ad
• FriendFeed sidebar widget
• Flattr buttons (Live counts require external requests)
• FeedBurner feed analytics

Vanished FanFic Archive

• Fic downloads are currently served separately from Dropbox.com
• FeedBurner feed analytics

GitHub Pages: QuickTile

• Ohloh Button
• Flattr button

GitHub Pages: The Procrastinator’s Timeclock

• Ohloh Button

Gender-Bending Index

• FeedBurner feed analytics

Fanfiction Story Ideas

• FeedBurner feed analytics

Until I can come up with a more automatic solution, here’s the simplest way to purge all binned spam in a few seconds using the phpMyAdmin SQL query window (it’s an icon in the sidebar once you’ve picked a database):

1. Delete all comments marked as spam:

   DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved="spam";

2. Look up all newly orphaned comment metadata entries:

   SELECT m.comment_id FROM wp_commentmeta AS m 
     WHERE (SELECT COUNT(c.comment_ID) FROM wp_comments AS c
       WHERE m.comment_id = c.comment_ID) = 0;

3. Click “Check All” at the bottom of the results list. (MySQL doesn’t let you subquery a table you’re deleting from)
4. Click “Delete” to the right of “Check All”.

How much faster is this? In the same time it took me to purge 20 comments via the WordPress web interface, I used this process to remove the remaining thousand or so. The actual SQL statements took fractions of a second.

Still… this is a bit outside my usual area of SQL expertise (I normally work mostly with SQLite and simple INNER JOINs), so I welcome cleaner, more automatic ways to do this without resorting to a little PHP or Python script to pass lists of IDs between statements.

What follows is a lay programmer’s quick overview of the relevant terms, followed by a guide to choosing the most appropriate license. Not all of the terms are exact, but they should be understandable and that’s what’s most important.

Important: Because of the legal consequences of a misunderstanding, it is important to keep things simple by minimizing the number of licenses in use in the wild. This page lists the most popular license for each scenario you might find yourself in and choosing an alternative to the licenses here is strongly discouraged.

Terms

Derivative vs. Aggregate

The law makes a distinction between “derivative” works like modifying an icon, forking a project, or linking against a shared library and “aggregate” works like zip files and DVDs full of things.

That means that you can put two things with incompatible licenses in the same zip file or on the same DVD because that’s “aggregation”. This is a popular way to freely release a game’s engine for any use but restrict the game’s resources (level files, graphics, music, etc.) so only the original creator can sell them.

Licenses can set terms on aggregation, but generally that only happens in the kind you find in commercial software. For example, you’re not allowed to put Flash on a Linux CD. End users have to individually download it from Adobe’s site. (though that process can be automated by Linux package managers)

Free Software

The term “open source” is a fairly weak term and doesn’t encompass all of the freedoms we’ve come to expect in popular licenses. “Free software” is the older, more strict (but less popular) term coined by Richard Stallman to talk about licenses which explicitly grant these freedoms.

It is variously referred to by the terms FOSS, FLOSS, Free/Libre Software, and various others because English doesn’t have a word specifically meaning “free as in freedom”. (“Libre” is French, from the same Latin root as “Liberty”)

Copyleft and ShareAlike

A “copyleft” or “ShareAlike” license is a license which requires you to give others the same rights you received… so if you have access to the source code, you must give others access to the source for any modified versions you make.

Copyleft and “Distribution”

With one exception (The Affero GPL), copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL only require you to share your source if you share something built from it. Keep the binaries to yourself, and you have no obligation to share your changes.

For this reason, requiring end users to click “agree” in an installer is meaningless. Free Software licenses aren’t EULAs.

“Creative Commons License”

The term “Creative Commons License” is practically meaningless in and of itself, much like a “you must be human to ride” sign at an amusement park. The term refers to a large family of licenses with various properties and using the term without being more specific only makes things worse by spreading the misconception that it’s OK.

License Incompatibility

When two licenses require conflicting things, they’re said to be incompatible.

For example, the GNU GPL forbids people from imposing additional restrictions down the line and requires that derivative works also be GPLed. The license for Douglas Crockford’s JSMin contains a line that says “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” (An admirable sentiment, but dangerously ambiguous) Because that counts as an additional restriction, you can’t use GPLed code and code from JSMin in the same program.

Dual/Triple-License

When a piece of software is “dual-licensed” or “triple-licensed”, it means that its creators have granted you permission to use it under your choice of two or more licenses.

While this is a perfectly acceptable option, it generally makes things more complicated and combinations like BSD/GPL should be avoided since, if you’re willing to license under BSD, you’re already GPL-compatible.

Licenses for Code

There are also various community licenses like the Python Software Foundation license and the Artistic License which you might want to use to follow community conventions.

When you are unsure about what a community-specific license entails, convention for large, popular communities is usually safe to follow. If in doubt, either dual-license between the community recommendation and one of the licenses listed here or pick one from this list that’s permissive enough to be compatible with the community preference.

Important:Unless you really know what you’re doing, don’t remove the “or any later version” clauses from GPL-family license declarations. If unsure, keep in mind that 3.0-series GPL-family licenses do allow you to specify a person responsible for making that judgement call on behalf of all contributors at a later date.

Licenses for Resources

As long as you’re not embedding them in your .exe files, your images (eg. icons), sounds, and so on don’t have to share the same license as your code. In fact, it’s better they don’t because someone might want to produce a derivative work and copyleft code licenses are incompatible with copyleft non-code licenses. (You can’t combine a GPLed image and a CC-BY-SA image into a new poster, for example)

Important: The NoDerivs and NonCommercial variants of Creative Commons licenses are not included here because they have non-intuitive consequences, don’t achieve what is generally intended, and their incompatibility with the popular CC-BY-SA variant makes them a deal-breaker for many potential users/fans.

What I just realized is that many of the things we remember from our childhood were actually from a single source, rather than a mish-mash of one-hit wonders like The Swan Princess, Ferngully, and The Nutcracker Prince. (Or the ones like Quest for Camelot which just didn’t shout out that Warner Brothers made them.)

The more aware of you might be thinking I’m going to be talking about Don Bluth, who brought us cartoons like The Land Before Time, An American Tail, The Secret of NIMH, Thumbelina, and Anastasia (among many other less classic ones), but this isn’t about him.

This is about a little company named Rankin/Bass Productions which sometimes published through Warner Brothers, but was quite visibly not them.

Do you remember those old stop-motion holiday films like Rudolph or Here Comes Peter Cottontail? Early Rankin/Bass Productions.

How about the animated version of The Hobbit or things like Flight of Dragons and The Last Unicorn, which, as an adult, I now find deeper than their better-drawn Disney contemporaries in some ways? You guessed it. Rankin/Bass again.

Incidentally, they contracted a Japanese studio named Topcraft to do the animation. The core members of Topcraft would later found Studio Ghibli, (And The Snow Queen was one of Hayao Miyazaki‘s big inspirations, but that’s as far off-track as I’ll let myself go.)

So, is there a point to this ramble? I suppose, if anything, it’s that, nostalgia and re-examining old favorites aside, learning details like these can help to see your past in a new light. I don’t know about you, but I love that feeling of understanding that comes when a new detail finally “clicks”.

For example, If you’ve watched any significant number of Miyazaki films, take a look at The Snow Queen. It’s fascinating to see what thematic and stylistic elements of it he chose to borrow and refine. Sailor Moon wasn’t on the TV channels I got as a kid but, if you watched it, you probably weren’t aware that it basically introduced the idea of magical girls working in a group to fight off large-scale villains. (Up until that point, that was the domain of Super Sentai. Stuff like Voltron and Power Rangers which I also didn’t watch.)

As for comments, what do you find most memorable about these second-tier classics? The song, This Is My Idea, from The Swan Princess? Amalthea’s words from the end of The Last Unicorn? The intro? James Horner’s soundtrack for the original The Land Before Time? Share it.

So far, here are the ones I’ve added:

• gvrun (A partially complete gmrun clone written in Vala and begun as a port of the address_bar.py backend I wrote for IceWM)
• png2pdf (Python script for turning a bunch of PNGs into a PDF, with partial caching on regeneration. Uses PyPDF and ImageMagick. Uses far less memory than letting ImageMagick do the whole process but still has room for improvement.)
• languagetool-fanfiction (In-development set of LanguageTool rules for catching common fanfiction grammar and spelling mistakes)

I should probably also draw attention to these specific, older gists, since they can easily get lost among the ones I’ve already blogged about:

• Shell-like Tab completion for gtk.Entry (Lets you use Tab for both field switching and completion. Changed somewhat since I blogged about it.)
• Python port of Tjb0607′s Minecraft level backup script with minor enhancements
• XDG basedir wrapper for Crayon Physics (Puts the Linux Humble Bundle version’s files in a hidden directory like they should be)

Here are the ones I’ve written:

• Firefox – Un-cluttered, Chrome-like Context Menu
• StumbleUpon – Hide Context Menu Entries (Especially nice since they have eye-grabbing icons)

The one to clean out Firefox-native entries is especially important to me since Firefox devs seem to care more about moving the RSS icon out of the address bar (fix) and hiding behind their toolbar heatmaps than even doing a heatmap study on the context menu. I seriously doubt things like “Send Image…” get used often enough to be in the top level of a context menu without Chrome’s “one entry or submenu per extension” rule. (And why is “Select All” not shown only in text fields in this day and age?)

If you want to make your own, the process is very simple. Use mine as an example and then follow the instructions on Mozillazine’s Menu customization page.

If you want to remove something with a name that changes based on what you select or you want to “do it right” so your script works for everyone, rather than just people who share your locale, follow the “Using ID selectors” instructions rather than the “Using attribute selectors” ones. Finding the ID is a bit technical, but, here’s how I do it:

• locate your profile folder, then go into the extensions folder.
• One of those files or folders holds the code to the extension, so use your favorite archive tool to poke around until you find the right one. (.xpi files are .zip files with a different extension, so use your favorite archive tool)
• Use grep -r "text from the menu item" path/to/unpacked/xpi or a grep-like tool to find the file and line number to start at. (If you get no results, try a smaller fragment)
• Go to that line number in that file using your favorite text editor. The ID should be nearby, either as id="waggawagga" or in a bit of Javascript which looks up the object by ID

The problem is, Google isn’t very helpful if you want to use this tool directly. All the results seem to tell you to read the raw config files or only give you single, purpose-specific examples.

The good news is that your system actually DOES include a single file equivalent to (and probably the source for) the listings you get in the GUI tools:

/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst

For those who haven’t used KDE and need an example, here’s the command I run on login (These can also be specified in xorg.conf via Option directives, but I prefer something I can keep in my roaming profile):

setxkbmap \
  -variant altgr-intl \
  -option \
  -option compose:rctrl \
  -option lv3:ralt_switch \
  -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bkspc \
  -option eurosign:e \
  -option nbsp:level3n

As usual, the backslashes are only necessary if you’re splitting it across multiple lines. Here’s what they actually do when used with a us104 or us105 layout:

-variant altgr-intl

The default variant of the US 104 layout doesn’t have tertiary symbols like ¢ and þ for AltGr to access, so I’m selecting one that does.

You can also use the intl variant here but, for some reason, it maps ² to AltGr+2 and ³ to AltGr+3 but ¹ to AltGr+Shift+1.

-option

An empty -option resets the layout options so I’m starting from a clean slate.

-option compose:rctrl

This remaps the Control_R keysym to Compose, so I can access glyphs like ½, ±, and é by typing “Ctrl 1 2” or “Ctrl + -" or "Ctrl e '“.

-option lv3:ralt_switch

This remaps Alt_R to AltGr, granting access to ¬ (AltGr+\) for making ¬_¬ smileys and giving me simpler key combos for commonly-used glyphs like µ (AltGr+m) and © (AltGr+c).

You can also use ralt_switch_multikey here to make Shift+AltGr the Compose key on compact keyboards but my muscle memory has already settled on Control_R. (Note: Make sure you press Shift first or it’ll just send an ordinary AltGr+Shift)

Note:If anyone knows why ¬ is no longer on AltGr+`, please leave a comment.

-option terminate:ctrl_alt_bkspc

Restore Ctrl+Alt+Backspace as the “Kill X Server” shortcut without relying on a superior but root-privileged and Linux-only config tweak.

(Again, I like settings I can store in my roaming profile)

-option eurosign:e

I’m Canadian, so on the occasions I need to type €, it can take me a while to remember that it has two cross-bars so I know to use “Compose e =“. Since my muscle memory already uses “Compose e '” for é anyway, let’s remap AltGr+e to €.

-option nbsp:level3n

Lets me type non-breaking spaces with AltGr+Space for those times when   doesn’t have special meaning.

Using level3n rather than level3 lets me type thin non-breaking spaces with Shift+AltGr+Space.

The beauty of doing things this way is that you’re unlikely to break things badly. It’s nearly impossible to paint yourself into a corner using variants and options alone (It’s models and layouts you have to be careful with) and, if you ever try to apply your settings to a keyboard they weren’t intended for, an unrecognized variant will abort the process and unrecognized options will simply have no effect.

Have fun and, if you’ve got any other interesting keyboard tweaks, share them in the comments. If I like one that applies to us104 enough to use it myself, I’ll update the example in the post body.