Dragonsept Arts & Publishing Blog

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is currently involved in the case of Christopher Hadley, a manga collector who is facing up to 20 years for the possession of manga that prosecutors say represents child porn.  Setting aside whether or not the comics in question actually do depict under age sex, and whether or not it should count, as there were no actual children involved, this is the first time thi CBLDF has been called on to help defend a comic reader.

In addition, Neil Gaiman, a well known proponent of the CBLDF, wrote a marvelous post in his blog today about why he defends speech with which he personally does not agree.  He makes some very good points.  I personally am familiar with the ethical and philosophical parts of his argument, but even so, the anecdotes he shares are worth reading for their own sake.  I particularly loved this little summary of why it’s important to defend those we disagree with.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made.

This sort of question is very near and dear to my heart.  I lived for a long time in an area of the United States where people seem to have a serious problem with the idea that what their religion says is right and what’s legal don’t necessarily have to be one and the same.  As I was frequently one of the few people I knew espousing different opinions at the time, I felt a similar (though less dire) pressure to the one being fought my Mr. Gaiman and the rest of the CBDLF.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Evelyn Hall

This weekend, I posted part one of this tutorial about setting up VPN connections and routing to allow one to access the local network and internet without using the VPN tunnel.

In part 2, I will discuss setting up a local DNS server using BIND9 to avoid sending all your DNS queries to your remote DNS server.

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At my day job, I am allowed to telecommute one day per week.  This is nice, because I need to save as much money on gas as possible.  However, I was left with a bit of a conundrum.  If I used my desktop PC, it was cut off from the rest of the internet (and local network).  On the other hand, the work-supplied laptop I have it old, doesn’t have enough ram, runs Windows, and has a 14″ screen.

I felt certain there must be a way to finagle the routes and DNS to make this possible, so I started investigating, and here is what I came up with:

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Wordpress has been successfully upgraded to 2.6.3!

I should keep this link and show it to people who ask me why I want to write and draw comics.

Today on her LiveJournal, Ursula Vernon¹, the author of Digger, and creator of some of my favorite whimsical fantasy drawings, wrote a post called “The Power of Comics.”  If you like comics, or even if you just wonder why some of your friends do, you should go and read it.

Here’s a guy who slept with an AK-47 next to his bed, in anticipation of somebody breaking into the house at any moment to kill him and his family. Here’s a guy who has seen more death and ruin come to his home than any human should see in a dozen lifetimes.[...]  And he was excited to be doing a comic.

Yeah.  That.

¹Caution. Some material NSFW.

I am a Dvorak keyboard user.  I am really pleased with how much more comfortable my keyboard use has been since I started using it.  Linux and Windows both support it really well, so I haven’t really had any problems at work or at home.

Until tonight.

You see, I am the only Dvorak user in the house, so the computers that I share with the family (read: all of them) have to be QWERTY friendly, too.  After a short bit of searching, I found some xorg.conf configuration settings that told the computer to use both layouts, and to switch with the shift keys.  That worked great for the last year or so, until the Intrepid upgrade.

Ubuntu 8.10 now does almost all of its hardware configuration through HAL and hot-pluggable input support in the new versions of X.  That’s great news in my opinion, because xorg.conf can really be a nightmare.  And the upgrade even remembered that I use Dvorak and set it that way.  It just didn’t import my second layout or my switch option.

Tonight I spent a LONG time searching for the location of the default x settings so I could change them.  Strangely enough, I never did find them.  If you know where they are now, please drop me a line.  I know they have to be somewhere, because Dvorak is not the default keyboard for the world, and my system always uses it.  Despite this failure, I did manage to find out how and where to override the settings.

in /etc/hal/fdi/policy there resides a file called preferences.fdi.  You can add additional device rules there, or create new .fdi files in this location.

To set my keyboard up the way I wanted, I had to add the following device block:

<device>
<match key=”info.capabilities” contains=”input.keys”>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.XkbRules” type=”string”>base</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.XkbModel” type=”string”>pc105</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_driver” type=”string”>evdev</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.XkbLayout” type=”string”>dvorak,us</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.XkbOptions” type=”string”>grp:shift_toggle</merge>
</match>
</device>

It was really pretty trivial, once I figured out that I wasn’t going to have to change the existing repository of information.

The two main sources of information that I used were the Ubuntu Wiki page on X input configuration and the freedesktop.org exemplar x11-input.fdi.

Something tells me that HAL and I are not yet done with one another.  I haven’t tried my Wacom tablet, yet.

ubuntu intrepid hal xorg

Jim Ottaviani and Sean Bieri have released the settings and characters of their Better Zombies Through Physics comics under the Creative Commons license.

BZTP is an amusing web comic released through Tor.com for Halloween.  It features a company using the Schrodinger’s Cat problem to create animals that are neither alive nor dead - zombie kitties for Halloween!  The material has been released under an Attribution/Share Alike license, except for the QTI logo.  If you find yourself inspired to use it, be sure to send it to Tor Comics to see if they want to post it on Tor.com.

Celerity has lost its artist.

Levi hasn’t been able to devote the time to it he wanted to.  I don’t blame him - we’re both pretty busy with work and personal lives, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to rearrange your life for someone else’s project.  He’s been a great resource, though, and helped me finalize a lot of the desired visual style of Celerity and her enemies.

Unfortunately, that leaves me back almost where I started.  I finished the script, so that’s a good thing, for sure, but I still don’t have an artist.

The way I figure it, I have a couple of different possibilities.

1. Give up.  This isn’t really on the table, but it is an option.
2. Find a new artist.  This would take a long time, at best.  My friends tend to be technical and/or language oriented people, for the most part.  The visual artists that I know are largely photographers.  Once you get to people who draw and/or paint, most of them are very busy, uninterested in comics, or both.
3. Use this as an opportunity to practice my character drawing and do the art myself.

Of the options, I think I like 3 the best.  I want to get back to drawing again, and this would be a great motivator.  I also have a couple of other ideas that I could use.  So, hopefully I will start inflicting some drawings on my friends and readers in the near future.

Probably not until the floor is done, though.

At Chez Songwind, we have a couple of laptops running Ubuntu.  We like them a lot, but when CraftyG33k upgraded her HP system, the wireless completely stopped working.

The log messages made it seem like the problem was with scanning for SSIDs, so the first solution tried was to set up the network manually so no scanning was necessary.  That didn’t help, either.

Finally, we found that there were release notes related to the Atheros “madwifi” drivers for 8.10.  That helped a lot, but they aren’t quite complete.  The notes say:

If you have an Atheros device that does not work with madwifi, you will want to install the linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic package, which includes an updated version of the ath5k driver. While not installed by default, this linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic package is included on the Ubuntu 8.10 CD and DVD images for ease of installation.

However, they fail to mention that you need to blacklist the ath_pci driver to get the new ath5k driver to load.  That’s where Christer came to the rescue.  He had run into the same issue with this Asus EEE PC, and posted about it on Ubuntu Tutorials.  I had started to have some suspicions in that direction, but it was a great help to see that someone else had conquered the same issue (without resorting to compiling bleeding edge CSV driver code).

Ubuntu Atheros madwifi Asus EEE intrepid ibex

Ubuntu 8.10, “Intrepid Ibex” launched today.  It’s ready for download, and if you are already using an earlier revision of Ubuntu, it’s in the software repositories for upgrade.  If you need a tutorial for this process, I recommend Christer Edwards’ site, Ubuntu Tutorials

Since 8.04 is a Long Term Support edition, be sure to go to System->Administration->Software Sources and choose to show “Normal Releases” under the Updates tab.

If you do the upgrade over the wire, consider downloading the Bittorrent image of the CD anyway.  Not only is it terribly useful to have a physical copy of the CD in case of emergencies, it will make downloads that much faster for anyone coming to Ubuntu new.