the indian wind along the telegraph lines

Slippage

It’s not a good practice to be late. Showing up an hour behind schedule to pick up your prom date usually results in your promexperience being somewhat less than optimal. But there are ways to soften the blow, like having a good excuse or calling to tell someoneyou’ll be late. A key factor in not having your reputation permanently sullied by tardiness is to not make a habit of it. If you’re pereniallylate, you’ll get labelled a flake. If you’re usually on-time, when you’re late people will tend to empathize with you.

That having been said, two popular OSes announced slips in their release dates this week. Ubuntu was supposed to ship their “Dapper Drake” release in April. The new release date is June 1. Microsoft was supposed to deliver Windows Vista in Q4 this year. That release will now happen in January.

As similar as these stories sound, they show a marked difference in corporate style. And that difference makes an impact on how the public views the tardiness (for that is what it is) of the releases.

Ubuntu has prided itself on a clockwork release schedule. Every six months a new version of Ubuntu Linux comes out of the Canonical, Ltd. cooker and is eagerly gobbled up by the masses. Thus far, the release schedule of Ubuntu Linux has all the drama and unpredictability of a Prussian forced march. In short, Canonical has a reputation for release reliability. So people were shocked when Canonical CEO MarkShuttleworth proposed a six week delay on the official mailing lists. And this week that delay was confirmed and made offcial.

On the other hand, Microsoft first told consumers Vista (codenamed”Longhorn” at the time) would be ready in 2003. Then they slipped that to 2005. Then they slipped to 2006. And this week the date slipped to January 2007.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a Linux user and I have no love for Microsoft. But I’m not a zealot. I’m not an apologist.

But dang, the difference here is night and day.

• Canonical is known for meeting release dates. Microsoft has done nothing but postpone for five years.
• Canonical invited users to discuss the issue with their employees so that everyone would understand the reasoning and thus understand that a delay was a good idea. Microsoft makes nebulous claims about “needing time to ensure quality.” Five years wasn’t enough?
• Speaking of five years, MS last released a new version of Windows in 2001. Canonical last released a new version of Ubuntu in October 2005.
• The ISVs and IHVs (e.g. Dell) that depend on Microsoft product releases to drive sales, especially during the holiday season, just got reamed by Microsoft. Nice way to make your partners happy, Redmond.

Ten years ago Forbes magazine couldn’t write a negative article about Microsoft if they tried. MS was the Golden Boy of American business. But this week Daniel Lyons writes:

Microsoft can’t afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell, RedHat, Sun Microsystems and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time. Given Microsoft’s delays I can’t believe open-source stuff still hasn’t caught on for desktop computers. It’s amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.

It’s one thing when competition buries you because they’re simply better. It’s another when your own ineptitude helps make your competition better. And Ubuntu is looking better than anything out of Microsoft these days.

Can You Hear Me Now?

It seems that people that use networks where the admins use SmartFilter are now unable to read Boing Boing. Because of “nudity.”

Insanity. Complete, utter, insanity.

So I decided to make things a little more difficult for SmartFilter and their users, and submitted this to BB.

Are you in the UAE, Qatar, or on a corporate network that uses SmartFilter? Say goodbye to mneptok.com. I’m about to be censored.

And don’t shout at me, shout at the people who decided to put you behind SmartFilter. Make them re-think their policy. Take your business elsewhere. Or use TOR. Maybe that will get you an Internet uncensored by machines.

Shacktagged

Yes, dear reader(s), it has been more than two months since my last post. Just haven’t had anything all that exciting to report, nor have I felt the blogging jones.

The Christmas holidays are pretty much a non-event in our home, so it was laid back with a Chinese dinner with friend Ben. The Oregon winter is in full effect, with rain interspersed with periods of just mist, and an occasional dry day or two. Life is deliciously quiet. That may change soon, but that’s a topic for another post.

What has stirred me from my blogotorpor is a tag from friend Scot. Usually these would get bit-bucketed immediately, but Scot rarely replies to this stuff, so coming from him it’s extremely rare. And he’s on the friends A list, so … here we go …

Four shows I enjoy

• Law And Order: Criminal Intent
• Babylon 5
• Twin Peaks
• Almost anything on the History Channel

Four jobs I’ve held

• Systems Administrator
• Site Manager
• Project Manager
• Technical Support Specialist

Four places I’ve lived

• Hartford/New Haven, CT
• Philadelphia, PA
• Washington, DC
• Portland, OR

Four places I’ve vacationed

• Aspen, CO
• Tucson, AZ
• Enlgand/Ireland/Wales
• My bed

Four cool toys

• 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica
• Smith And Wesson .40
• My Linux desktop
• functional homo sapiens sapiens brain

Four web sites I visit daily

• BBC News
• Boing Boing
• Fedora Forum
• GNOME Foundation’s Request Tracker (private)

Four places I’d rather be

• Lying on a beach in Thailand or Tunisia
• Getting my pilot’s license
• 1970
• In bed

Four bloggers I’m tagging

• Nice try, this ends here

There it is, by the command of the shacker.

Stay tuned. I promise not to be such a dilletante in the future.

Dishwasher Switches

Our kitchen sink faucet melted down last weekend, and as we await our free replacement parts we’re forced to used the dishwasher to clean our dishes. Usually we don’t use it, as there are only two of us in the house.

Last night while setting the options for a wash cycle on the machine, in my head I saw:

–no-water-preheat –no-prewash –no-heat-dry

File under “You Know You’re A Geek When.” *sigh*

Yes It’s No

Evolution threw me this little koan today.

I also like the term “Evolution Error.” I’ve met a few of those people.

Bend Over, Africa!

As if Africa doesn’t face enough problems (massive population explosion, rampant AIDS, widespread poverty, endemic hunger, and ethnic rivalries blossoming into genocide, to name just a few), here comes the world’s richest company telling Africans the biggest barrier to their technological literacy is not cost, but training. That’s right, even though a Windows XP license will cost you a year’s salary, it’s easier to use! So spend that year’s salary! It’s more important you have a GUI installation wizard than you feed those kids!

You know, there are times that words fail to be able to adequately describe my feelings. But I can honestly say I am not surprised. Is it really surprising that Microsoft will ignore the well-being of a continent to protect their market share? It isn’t to me. But until recently I just thought Microsoft was an avaricious corporate behemoth cranking out inferior product and using their dominant position to quash competition. Now I realize they are that, but more importantly, they are bad for humanity.

Think about that. Microsoft is actively trying to get the poorest people on earth to part with what little money they have so that they may become indoctrinated into the Windows monoculture. They would rather see the least fortunate among us pay the equivalent of a year’s salary for an XP license than surrender a small bit of market share.

This is not just aggressive. This is not just monopolistic. This blatant disregard for the welfare and well-being of the least fortunate of your fellow human beings has another adjective to describe it. Evil.

Please think about that the next time you have a software choice to make.

Into Hurricane Alley

Off to Florida for a week to help Mom with her new computer.

Back in June she gave me a chunk of money for my birthday, which I promptly spent buying her a new Mac Mini. She is currently using an x86 machine (PII 450) that she purchased back in 1999. It runs WindowsXP, no SP2, no updates since XP was installed. And knowing the guy that installed it, it might not even be a legit copy of XP.

Since Windows is too big a security risk for the average user to handle, a Mac running OSX is the way for her to go. She was here for my birthday, and we spent some time setting it up, playing with iPhoto, messing with Mail.app, exploring her .Mac membership benefits, and otherwise learning OSX. The Mini was ready to plug-in and go when she got home.

But she resists change. And so, I fly to Florida to spend another week of Mac boot camp. And deprogramming the “millions of people run Windows with no problems” platitude. My response? “Millions of people smoke cigarettes and live to a ripe old age. Why are you so glad I quit?”

She seems excited, though, which is good news. And I think when she realizes how little she was doing with Windows, and how there are far more resources on the Internet than e-mail from her children, she’ll be even more excited. One can hope …

Oh, and anyone want to buy a PII 450 desktop with CentOS pre-installed? It’s only been driven lightly by a little old lady. E-mail me if you’re interested.

GNOME Opera 1.0

In the previous story I mentioned that the Opera web browser, made free (as in beer) last week, lacked a good GNOME skin to provide Linux users with a native look and feel. That is no longer the case.

Opera has the ability to use custom skins to change the UI, and there is a vibrant community of modders that make all kinds of skins. Now, I could sit around whining about the lack of a GNOME native skin, or do something to rectify the situation. So last week I created a skin that provides a consistent, familiar, usable, and clean GNOME UI for Opera. Last night I posted it to the official Opera skins repository. You may preview it here, or, if you are using Opera, you may use this install link.

Due to a PEBKAC problem the skin is currently named incorrently on the site, but Opera staff will be recifying that this week. And my thanks to Brian, Jorunn, and others at Opera ASA for providing feedback and guidance.

And wow, more than 1.5K downloads in the first 24 hours. Awesome.

Opera Becomes Free, Microsoft Becomes Desperate

Two big announcements in the world of computer technology today. First, Opera Software has made their Opera desktop web browser free (as in beer). Second, Microsoft has splintered … sorry, “reorganized” their corporation. One is a very smart move, the other is not. Read on …

First, the Opera announcement. I used to use Opera back in my BeOS days. While their BeOS product at the time was not a paragon of stability, it was still eminently usable and a far better browser for late 90’s surfing than Be Inc.’s NetPositive. Opera, until today, had always been a commercial or adware product. You could download it for free, but ad banners were displayed unless you paid. With today’s announcement Opera makes itself as free to the casual user as is Firefox or other Mozilla products. Safari and Internet Explorer are only free if you pay for the OS, and both are platform specific.

Now I say “as free to the casual user as …” because Opera did not open the source to their browser. But really, how many people are going to download Firefox and immediately start making significant contributions to the codebase? Not many. I will not deny that open source means more eyes on the playpen, but even that has not stopped Firefox from having some pretty bad security bugs recently. I think that time will tell whether a closed, paid developer staff can keep pace with, or outpace, a larger volunteer staff. It will be interesting to watch.

In any event, this was a smart move for Opera. People these days are not willing to pay for browsers, as so many free and viable alternatives exist. It will also act as a tractor for their embedded browser products, which means more revenue. Some might see this as a last ditch effort by Opera, and they may well be right. I don’t sit in board meetings. But I think it’s merely a recognition that they aren’t going to get rich selling a desktop browser, they need more press, interest, and therefore users, and that the more people that embrace the desktop browser the better it is for their more commercially viable embedded solutions.

I have downloaded and installed Opera, have the Flash and Java plugins working well, and am giving it a test drive. Here are my initial reactions:

• It is fast. Faster than Firefox by a good margin. Very nice.
• The rendering engine adheres to standards nicely. Well coded sites work. Broken ones are usually broken in Firefox as well.
• I actually enjoy having a mail, IRC, and NNTP client in my browser. Opera does this well. Mozilla does not.
• Much of the Opera online documentation needs to be updated. The instructions for installing Java just simply do not work. The UI has changed.
• Speaking of the UI, while I’m aware that Opera is written in QT, Opera needs to make a serious effort to provide their own skins to mimic the look and feel of the platforms they support. There is an Opera-supplied Windows skin, I’d like to see the company provide top-shelf skins for GTK+, KDE, and MacOS X users.
• Tabs should be the last toolbar before page content.
• Toolbar bookmarks should not have to be stored in the main bookmark repository as well as the toolbar.

I must say, on the whole my Opera 8.5 experience has been very positive. I may well switch from Firefox if Opera shows themselves willing and capable of delivering bug fixes, UI tweaks, and general quality updates and support. Try Opera. If it’s not your cup of tea you’ll know pretty quickly. If it is, you’ll love it, not just for the speed alone.

And from the “Dumb Business Decisions” desk we have the Microsoft reorganization. Do they really think chopping a turd into pieces makes it not a turd? Do they think this will positively impact their ability to deliver secure, standards-compliant, user liberating (as opposed to user emprisoning), and fault tolerant products? Do they think this will enhance creativity and innovation rather than add more layers of bureaucracy that stifle innovation? Does anyone think this? Granted, I do not like Microsoft. It’s hard for me to see much that they do in a positive light. But I think this reeks of desperation and corp-think to even the most unbiased person.

Today Opera Software executives acknowledged a change in business climate and moved the tiller to compensate. Microsoft desperately clutched at straws. Or, that’s my take on it. Time will tell.

Murphy’s Law Eats My Weekend

This server has, for the past 8 months or so, been running off Fedora Core 3. When Fedora 4 shipped in June I added “upgrade server” to my to-do list. And there it languished.

Last month while visiting a friend the server locked up pretty hard and the drive just sat there spinning. Woo called me to tell me, and I had her hard reset the machine. I became worried about the status of the drive, but apparently not worried enough to actually do anything about it. Bad idea.

Saturday night as I sat in our home office room, the drive started grinding. Not the “death noise” but consistent read/write activity. I could not ssh in. So I ran to the other end of the house, grabbed the spare monitor, and had a look. Lots of errors concerning SELinux vs. ntp. Was it software, or the drive? Who knows!? It’s a crapshoot! Whee!

I reset the machine and waited for it to come back up, which it did. I ran some simple tasks, which all worked. I then asked rsync to sync my mp3 library (which is quite large) to the server. It has done this before, so it only needed to transfer a few songs. But rsync generates ls style file lists, so it is quite an intensive read process regardless of the amount of data that is out of sync.

Boom. Death. The machine … just … froze.

OK, so it wasn’t SELinux vs. ntp. It was the drive. I shut the machine down and powered it back up to ensure that the drive hadn’t died, but was just dying. Sure enough (and thank Jebus) the drive was only on its deathbed, not in the grave. Having travelled this road before I knew enough to shut it down, throw a placeholder page on an alternate apache installation and not touch that drive except to take data off it when a replacement was ready.

I have a spare 250GB parallel ATA drive in my arsenal. I resolved to install CentOS on it. First speedbump. My CentOS/i386 Install Disk 1 was damaged last month, and I had never burned a new copy. And in a fit of insanity I had tossed the ISOs I had downloaded. Duh. So Saturday night as I slept I curl‘ed that image. Again.

Second speedbump. Awake yesterday morning, burn the image, and find it is corrupt. Spent another 2 hours downloading it again (again). This image worked, and I installed CentOS onto the 250GB drive.

Third speedbump. Go to boot CentOS for the first time and only get a GRUB prompt. Try defining root and am presented with the lovely GRUB Error 18 message. The drive is too large for the BIOS in this PIII-550 to recognize, and CentOS has placed /boot outside the range of the BIOS’ view. CentOS can install fine, as Linux does not use the BIOS to get drive information … except during boot. Le sigh.

So now I have 4 options.

• Re-install CentOS making a dedicated /boot partition within the BIOS’ line of sight.
• Pass funky kernel parameters at boot to overcome the problem.
• Buy a drive less than 128GB. Or several if i want more storage and use LVM.
• Get a controller card and bypass the BIOS completely.

Now really the only two sane options are the first and last. Passing kernel params is a major kludge. Buying (perhaps multiple) 120GB drives is cost-inefficient. So I sat contemplating the best approach. I soon realized that the 250GB drive I have is getting old, and has been used quite a bit. In fact, this is the drive that the Mac caused to poop itself a few months ago. I was setting myself up to be right back in this same position in weeks or months, knowing Murphy’s Law. And knowing my luck thus far on this issue …

So off I went to Fry’s. When looking at controller cards I realized I could get a Serial ATA card for the same price as a Parallel ATA card. And SATA is a LOT faster. Not only that, but factoring in a rebate I could get a Seagate 300GB SATA drive for US$119. At least one decision was simple. I came home with a SIIG SATA controller card and that Seagate.

Now, the SATA drive in my desktop is only 250GB. No way I’m getting a 300GB drive and not using it in my desktop. So after a dry run with CentOS and the 300GB drive to ensure the controller card works, I spent a couple hours migrating my desktop from the 250GB to the 300GB. Let me tell you, rsync’ing between 2 local 7200rpm SATA drives is a thing of beauty. Incredibly fast. Jizz-inducing fast. Yum-MY!

So, at around 11pm Sunday night I was where I thought I was going to be at 11pm Saturday night. 24 hours spent spinning my wheels. Great. I finally got CentOS installed, transfered data from the old 120GB drive and began configuration. The server is now about 90% done, and web services have (obviously) been restored. And we’re now traveling on a 250GB 7200rpm Western Digital SATA drive connected to a processor-independent controller card. Whoopee!

My apologies to those that waited for the server to come back online, and my thanks to those folks who are hosted here. Hopefully this will be the last such glitch for some time. And enjoy the speed improvement. I’m off to do that last 10% of configuration.