[Sun Jun 27 15:06:03 CDT 2004]

I believe I already explained somewhere else how Netscape, in spite of all its mistakes and ultimate failure, is still quite close to my heart. After all, it is the browser that opened the doors to the World Wide Web for me (yes, I had used Mosaic before, but never on a regular basis and way before the Internet boom of the mid-nineties), and it is also the application that got me into the business (I provided technical support for it via DecisionOne). The excitement of being part of something cool and the exhilaration of being involved in something that was changing so fast is something that I will never forget. Ars Technica publishes a candid interview with Scott Collins, one of the developers involved both in Netscape and Mozilla where he has no problems to acknowledge the errors they committed:

One: There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a Netscape 5 that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. (...)

Two: We made a version of COM, called XPCOM, a fundamental piece of every component of every part of the software. We took COM all the way down to the lowest levels of the system, and I think that XPCOM is a fantastic useful tool. We had great and important places to use it, but we used it too deeply, we allowed it to influence our memory model across the board, and there continue to be costs associated with that which I don't think we need to be paying. I feel bad that I let it go that deep when I continually fought against it, but I am one of the perpetrators —I wrote some of the machinery that made it easy to use COM, and that allowed people to go deeper and deeper, which we knew was a mistake. (...)

Three: I was the head of the team that fought hard with Netscape management to get a system of XML to define the user interface. I named it the XML User Interface Language, or XUL (pronounced zool). David Hyatt is the primary implementer of it, and one of the ideas that we had is that we would have a cross-platform interface, but that you specify native controls with XUL. It turned out that specifying native controls with XUL was hard. They were limited, and hard to write, and we waited a long time. People kept telling us that Mozilla would never be good until we had the native controls, and we knew they were wrong, it is good without native controls, but boy, people really really want their native controls. And they really rewarded us when we gave them native controls. When we gave them things like Firefox, which looks native on the platforms that its on, and Camino, which is native in OS X. They thought it was fantastic.

It is quite refreshing to hear this level of sincerity in an interview with a top notch engineer such as Scott Collins. Check out the rest of the article. It is well worth it. {link to this story}

[Sun Jun 27 14:29:31 CDT 2004]

Criticizing both GNOME and KDE as bloated and Windows-like has become the latest fad in certain quarters. It is something that one could already noticed at the very beginning, back in 1998, but it has done nothing but grow in the last couple of years, at least among Linux veterans. It has reached the point where it almost is a badge of honor to dismiss both desktop environments as ill conceived, poorly engineered and lacking in creativity. I must say I do use GNOME 2.6 on a daily basis and do not have anything bad to say about it. Like any other piece of software, it has its bugs and problems, but I am convinced it does provide an overall nice user environment to do one's work. While not using KDE nearly as often, that is precisely the environment I meet when I boot my company laptop, which is running SuSE 9.1 at the moment, and I have also had an overall positive feeling about it. Now, I must admit that when it comes to old hardware, I run other window managers that are not so resource intensive (the Ion window manager is my latest discovery in this area), but I fully understand that most regular users out there would not even know where to start with the more light-weight window managers. Well, what can I say? This is open source. You have a choice. It may cost you more effort to learn another environment, but you have a choice. Also, if you still want to use one of the two major desktop environments but do not like the direction they are taking, you also have the choice to get involved and work on changing that. Mind you, you do not even need to be a hacker to do that. It is perfectly possible to become involved as a translator, system administrator or someone who writes documentation, and you will already have a say. Yes, all this takes time, but what commercial project offers you the same chance to have a say and influence their future?

In any case, I write all this because I recently read an article making the case for GNOME's Gconf that comes to illustrate my point. There have been numerous criticisms of Gconf as something awful, monstrous, a simple port of the Windows registry to Linux. Yet, as the author points out, these critics disregard some obious points: the traditional UNIX approach of using dot files has its limitations, the Gconf system still maintains the information in pure text so it can be edited with any text editing tool, and finally it also provides some badly needed structured to all these configuration settings. In other words, while the default GNOME tool to edit the Gconf directory may certainly look like the Windows registry editor, in reality it has little to do with it. {link to this story}

[Sun Jun 27 14:13:21 CDT 2004]

It happens all too often that one reads a half-baked, brain-damaged criticism of Linux's user-friendliness out there. One of my favorites is when, in the middle of a review of a Linux distribution, the author starts complaining about how difficult it was to repartition the existing Windows partition and make sure the boot loader managed to boot both the newly installed Linux operating system and the previous Windows installation. Ahem. When is the last time anybody saw Windows managing to accomplish precisely that? When is the last time anyone installed Windows, the installer recognized a non-Microsoft operating system already installed in the disk, offered the possibility to repartition the drive without touching that other OS and then proceeded to set up the boot loader to give a choice a boot up time?. Yet, did we ever hear any complaints about Windows not be "user-friendly" for failing that test so miserably? No.

In any case, this is not to deny that Linux still has ways to go before reaching the masses and being truly user-friendly for the average joe out there, and this is precisely where reasonable, well-balanced criticisms can help. Well, I came across one such criticism when reading an article by Eduardo Sánchez on a tiny hindrance he found in Linux:

The problem is a question of interoperability. Let's say I need to create an organization chart. OK, I fire up Kivio (a flowcharting tool that is part of KOffice, the KDE Office suite). I painstakingly draw the org chart, complete with subtle relationship among different levels and what not. Now I'm ready to use it. I would like to include it in a report that I'm writing on OpenOffice.org Writer. I then select everything in Kivio, copy it, and then paste it in OpenOffice.org. Boink. Real ugly, folks. All I can see in OpenOffice.org is a sort of XML gibberish I don't understand. To make things worse, Kivio is unable of exporting its diagrams in a portable file format (such as SVG). So I have two options: Import the full report written in OO.o Writer (which includes, among other things, embedded spreadsheets written in OO.o Calc) to KWord and feel the pain; or go back to zero with the org chart, and start a brand-new drawing with something like OO.o Draw.

As I said, this strikes me as a reasonable criticism that the open source community should definitely address. It is something Microsoft already tackled many years ago with its OLE and COM APIs but that Linux still has to come to terms with. Sure, the two platforms are quite different. Microsoft can afford to do that because, to a great extent, it is also in control of the largest share of the pie in the office applications market. Yes, the Microsoft solution does not always work smoothly and there are rough edges here and there. Still, they are far closer to meeting the customer's expectations in that respect that either of the two major desktop projects in the open source world. {link to this story}

[Sun Jun 20 18:05:18 CDT 2004]

If, like me, you are one of those Linux users who recently fell in love with Debian, you will like these tools I just came across of. First of all, if you like apt, you will find apt-iselect quite useful. Be warned, it is nothing extraordinary, but follows the old UNIX tradition of improving upon other tools by adding just a little bit of code on top of them. In this case, apt-iselect allows you to interact with the otherwise sometimes unmanageable output of the apt-search command. Just run apt-iselect search_term and you will be prompted with a nicely organized menu of packages that you can easily navigate on the screen. There is also a nice collection of Debian goodies that makes it easier (yes, even easier!) to work with Debian's packaging system by allowing you to search for a file installed by a packge using a string, display information about which are the packages consuming the most disk space, etc. All in all, a nice and useful collection of tools well worth a look. By the way, I suppose you already knew about Synaptic but in case you had not heard of it, give it a try too. It is a nice GUI front-end for apt that works fine under Fedora too. {link to this story}

[Sun Jun 20 17:48:48 CDT 2004]

Until very recently, few people publicly acknowledged any admiration for AMD. After all, everyone knew the chipmaker was just catching up with giant Intel, and had little to show in the form of real innovation. Well, that may be over now. AMD has embarked on a new and promising adventure with the release of its x86-64 architecture, and it may cost Intel dearly in the end. When Intel announced several years ago that it would be phasing out the old IA-32 architecture and moving towards IA-64 in the form of the Itanium processor, many analysts thought customers had little choice but to migrate due to Intel's near monopoly in the processor market. Mind you, the migration path would not be easy, especially since all software from operating systems and drivers to word processors, browsers, email clients and spreadsheets would need to be rewritten in order to work in the new architecture. There was some rumbling, but Intel felt secure enough in their market leading position to ignore the warnings and pull ahead with their plans. Well, that is where AMD came into the story: noticing a serious gap, AMD took on the opportunity to develop a new chip, the Opteron, that would run both 32-bit and 64-bit code, thus providing the easy migration path that Intel had failed to offer. In other words, they stole a page from Intel's book, and realized that one does not need to match 100% of the rival's performance as long as the product offers more flexibility and a better price. The result is that, as AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, states:

For perhaps the first time, we're actually seeing AMD focused long term, not on a skirmish or a battle in a particular quarter. There's a method to our madness in 64-bit computing, and we'll capitalize on the position we've created.

Let us hope so. The processor market, just like the OS market, definitely needs the healthy competition that AMD can provide. There is enough room both for a pricey product that offers performance, and a cheaper one that offers flexibility. {link to this story}

[Fri Jun 18 15:10:57 CDT 2004]

I just came across a very useful document detailing most MySQL gotchas. So, what is a gotcha in this context? Well, according to the author "a gotcha is a feature or function which works as advertised —but not as expected". Overall, it is a list of situations where MySQL differs or it is not completely compatible with the official SQL standard. So, what does MySQL have to say about it? According to Alex Roedling, Senior Product Manager at the company, it is normal for a database to use its own "SQL dialect", but in any case MySQL 5.0 "will give users the flexibility to continue using the MySQL dialect, or to set a strict SQL2003 flag if they want to only use standard SQL-2003". That is good to know. {link to this story}

[Fri Jun 18 14:50:18 CDT 2004]

Curtis C. Hovey blogs about the shortcomings of Java on the desktop. It sure does not come as a surprise to anyone to hear that while Java has proved to be a success on the server it has never lived up to its promise on the desktop. The obvious question is: why? Hovey's short piece seems to answer that question with an argument that makes lots of sense

What is the true benefit of an app that can run on any desktop, if the user must constantly pause to consider what he or she must do to make an app do something? Sure a corporation can switch its users from one desktop to another, and the app runs the same, but that is not common. Productivity will still fall because the user is negotiating more rules while working with the computer.

The average user does not switch desktops/OSes. Users do not need an interface that works everywhere. Users need an interface that works with their desktop. Mac users are notorious for this, but Window's user feel the same way too--Java has not succeeded on either desktop. Users want apps the behave like other apps and play well with the desktop. I don't mean look & feel. Java apps that look like an integrated desktop app just delays the user's frustration when their mouse, menu, or keyboard action doesn't work as it does with other apps.

This sure explains the popularity of the Eclipse project, if nothing else. While the Linux community has been laboriously working towards some sort of unified framework around the GNOME and KDE desktop projects to guarantee some level of consistency in their GUI apps, Java takes us one step back no matter what other benefits it may bring to the table. Sun has a lot of work to do there if they truly want everybody else to take Java seriously on the desktop. {link to this story}

[Thu Jun 17 09:10:40 CDT 2004]

The Munich City Council voted yesterday in favor of migrating all their desktop and servers to Linux. This must be the first such large migration to the Linux desktop, with a total of 13,000 systems switching from Windows NT to the opensource alternative. To start with, the desktops will be running OpenOffice and Mozilla on Windows this year, and then the systems will move to Linux in 2005 and 2006. By that time, only a few applications will be running on Windows application servers, although they estimate that by the year 2008 all applications should run natively on Linux. What I find most interesting about this decision is the fact that they went through a long pilot project already, so it definitely proves that Linux on the desktop does work, at least under certain circumstances. {link to this story}

[Thu Jun 17 08:53:14 CDT 2004]

Havoc Pennington blogged about the dependency hell plaguing opensource applications. Yes, it is ugly. Yes, it is annoying. I find it all the time, especially when attempting to install random applications I get from the Web. However, as Pennington explains, there are only two choices: either we adopt a modular approach that potentially leads to problems with dependencies or we ship our Linux distributions with a large core of libraries and then statically link everything else when packaging other applications. Of course, the latter approach makes it easy on the end-user who rarely sees a problem when installing that random application he just read about on an article, and it is the venue taken by Windows, for example. On the other hand, the end result is a bloated operating system with lots of core software that may or may not even be used, not to talk about the enormous duplication of files here and there installed a thousand times by different applications. Needless to say, this also increases the probability of having security holes or system wrecking bugs that need to be patched separately. So, yes, let us discuss the problem but, please, let us do it in a mature way, fully understanding that this is not an good versus evil fight, but rather an option we have to make after learning about the pros and cons, and no final decision we make will be free from problems. {link to this story}

[Tue Jun 8 19:05:54 CDT 2004]

I am sorry to be picking on Sun Microsystems all the time, but these guys just make it way too easy. I suppose that in the technology world, as pretty much anywhere else, whenever one sees a clear excess of activity in someone there is a reason to be suspicious. In this case, Sun appears to be making extra efforts to dispel the idea that the company is in crisis by making constant public announcements, talking about their future products and promising the moon to everyone. Still, they fail to realize that it is not the amount of press releases that counts, but rather the consistency of their business strategy, and in that respect the more they open their mouths the more worries they spread. For example, last week they talked about Solaris' next-generation filesystem, the possibility of opensourcing Solaris and a whole new sleuth of hardware, software and services accompanied by a colorful statement about how hardware will be free in the near future. So, let me see if I understand this right. Sun managers believe that hardware in the future will be free, and their operating system apparently will be free too. So, how do they plan to make the money? It is just a question. I mean, what is their vision, as most pundits refer to a decent business plan that extends beyond the next quarter? Are they going to become profitable selling free hardware or free software? Which one will it be? Selling services, I hear? Are we sure that alone will pay the salaries of over 35,000 employees the company has? I may sound too harsh towards Sun's management, but I still have to be convinced that they know how to pull out of their current crisis. The clock is ticking, and they still have to figure out how to make money on a sustainable revenue stream. Sure, they still have plenty of cash in the bank, which does give them some room, but why wait until the very end to make some necessary decisions? By definition, it will be then too late and whatever they decide to do will be more out of desperation than out of wisdom. {link to this story}

[Tue Jun 8 18:50:35 CDT 2004]

There are occasions where it seems clear to me why so many managers think of the opensource community as a bunch of fanatic long-haired hippies. This morning I came across an article published by Joe Barr in Newsforge warning Linux users of the evils hidden in the license for Macromedia Flash 7. Let us be fair. The license actually reflects poorly on the company's legal department. It does read like a collection of errors, misrepresentations and stupid legalese. Even worse, the rest of the explanations in their website is even more confusing. However, to warn Linux users that they could be audited and forced to pay Macromedia for the cost of the audits seems quite irresponsible. Is it truly so difficult to believe that the company simply could not get their acts together and committed a few unintentional mistakes? Why do certain people in the opensource community always have to assume, in the best (or is it worst?) populistic tradition) the worst from corporations? Mind you, if the worries about this particular license come from the developers of Debian, Slackware or Gentoo, just to use a few examples, I would understand it. The terms of the license do hurt Linux distributors, but I honestly believe that warning the end users the way Joe Barr does is to take things out of proportion. {link to this story}

[Mon Jun 7 14:12:03 CDT 2004]

If a few days ago I wrote about Mozex, today I come across an an article about several other great Mozilla extensions. As I mentioned somewhere else, those who think that Mozilla is just a decent browser are missing half the picture, for its main strengths is not so much in its browsing capabilities as in the extensibility and flexibility it provides as a development platform. This other part of Mozilla has barely been exploited yet, but it has plenty of potential for uses of the application in intranet environments. So much so that I still do not understand why big corporations are failing to take advantage of it. I suppose it is the old evil: stick to what you know, even though there may be better tools. Oh, well, they do not know what they are missing. {link to this story}

[Sat Jun 5 10:48:03 CDT 2004]

Marc Rochkind has just published the second edition of Advanced UNIX Programming and has taken the time to reflect about what changed in the world of UNIX programming in the last 20 years. The result is a curious article that boils down to the following main changes:

• A much larger amount of system calls
• A larger variety of programming languages being in use in the UNIX world, especially in the realm of interpreted languages
• The existence of more subsystems to which certain programmers code almost exclusively without a need to worry about the underlying kernel (most people will call this a framework, such as GNOME, KDE, Oracle, Apache, Java...)
• Portability has become more central to UNIX coding
• Standards are far more complete nowadays

It is a very short article, but it makes for an interesting read. He makes an insightful comment about the portability issue that definitely shows us how much things have changed in the last 20 years:

Portability was of some interest in 1984, but today it's essential. No developer wants to be locked into a commercial version of UNIX without the possibility of moving to Linux or BSD, and no Linux developer wants to be locked into only one distribution. Platforms like Java help a lot, but only serious attention to the kernel APIs, along with careful testing, will ensure that the code is really portable. Indeed, you almost never hear a developer say that he or she is writing for XYZ's UNIX. It's much more common to hear "UNIX and Linux", implying that the vendor choice will be made later. (The three bigges proprietary UNIX hardware companies —Sun, HP, and IBM— are all strong supporters of Linux).

As for his thoughts on the rise of scripting languages, Rochkind stresses that:

Even if you're working in one of these modern languages, though, you still need to know what is going on "down below", because UNIX still defines —and, to a degree, limits— what the higher-level languages can do. This is a challenge for many students who want to learn UNIX, but don't want to learn C.

To this day, I remain convinced that one can only become a good UNIX/Linux system administrator or programmer (at any level) by at least being able to read in C, which of course also entails at least being able to write some very simple programs in the language. Without that, one can certainly become quite proficient, but not truly knowledgeable of the operating system internals. {link to this story}

[Sat Jun 5 10:32:42 CDT 2004]

I should start this piece with a clear disclaimer: I am a GNOME user since its early days, and for the most part I like what I see. I do like GNOME's looks (especially since they released version 2.0) and fail to see why so many people criticize its overall performance which I find to be just fine, at least on a decently modern system. Yes, I still resort to WindowMaker and other similar window managers for the older, less powerful machines. Why not? I detest any brainless dogma, be it in politics or in technical matters. In any case, I must also say that articles such as the one published by Linux Planet on GNOME 2.6 do rile me up. It reminds me of the FUD one reads every now and then in the mainstream technical media, where a reviewer goes ahead and tries to install whichever Linux distribution in a dual boot configuration, comes across a lot of problems making it work, reparitioning the disk, installing the boot loader, etc. and then concludes that it is all Linux's fault. In this case, Kurt Wall tells us about his misadventures downloading, compiling and installing the latest version of GNOME from source, as if your regular Joe will ever even attempt that. Say, Kurt, did you ever try a similar feat with the latest version of Windows, MacOS or, for that matter, any other OS? How did it go? Let us clarify something: Linux Planet did not publish a review of GNOME 2.6, but rather a review of the GNOME 2.6 build process, which is something quite different. Is it difficult? You bet. Is it something most regular users will not be able to accomplish? You bet. Is it easy to run into unsurmountable conflicts that will make it impossible in the end to install? Yes. What do we prove by doing that though? How many other similar products can you easily download, compile and install out there? How many of those in other platforms, such as Windows or MacOS? It is OK to publish reviews, but please let us try to make them at least a little bit objective and fair. {link to this story}

[Sat Jun 5 10:21:02 CDT 2004]

If, like me, you are one of those vim-addicts who find themselves typing :wq after you are done entering text in a web form, I came across the ideal tool for you. Mozex allows you to invoke external applications for various actions within the Mozilla browser family. Simply right-click in a textarea, for example, select Mozex --> Edit Textarea and get ready to use your favorite editor. Installatin is as easy as in the case of any other Mozilla extension. Simply point your Mozilla/Firefox browser to Mozex's homepage and install from there by clicking on the install link. You will need to restart the browser after that, of course. Also, while you are there, take a look at the screenshots area for an idea of Mozex's other features. You can also configure it to intercept mail, telnet, news and ftp links to launch your favorite app for each one of those applications. Nifty, huh? Well, there are many more similarly cool Mozilla extensions. Check out the Mozdev website for more. {link to this story}

[Fri Jun 4 17:01:09 CDT 2004]

Dave Camp has posted a draft of the GNOME Roadmap for versions 2.8 and higher of the desktop environment that is well worth checking out. Together with a few issues such as the possible incorporation of peer to peer file sharing, blogging tools and more media widgets, he also mentions a couple of issues that could have certain impact in the future of GNOME. First of all, Camp proposes to "work with the Mozilla foundation to settle on a common direction for the web browser", which makes plenty of sense. As he explains in the draft, the Firefox browser is already pretty much what the developers of Epiphany or Galeon have been aiming for in the last few years, so why not agree with the Mozilla Foundation to incorporate their product in GNOME?. I consider the last paragraph of the draft even more important to the future of the whole GNOME project, although precisely because it is at the very end quite a few people may miss it:

GNOME is currently implemented in C, with language bindings implemented for use in third-party applications. There is some consensus in the community that adoption of a higher-level language and runtime would be beneficial to the development of the desktop.

Java and C# have been proposed as alternatives. The community is currently discussing the technical, political, and legal ramifications of adopting these languages into the desktop.

It is an issue I have discussed in these pages before, and it needs to be clarified sooner rather than later. We are still on time, thanks to Microsoft's constant delay of Longhorn, but we need to make a decision soon. It is now that many Windows developers out there are seriously considering a switch to Linux that we need to build the environment that they need in order to do their job. They do not only need IDEs, but also some serious high-level language and comprehensive framework that allows them to write programs quickly. I am convinced that this has always been one of Microsoft's best strengths, albeit one the press has usually not talked much about because it is not as dazzling as desktop improvements. Convince the developers to write for your platform, and you will get the applications that users want and need. That should be our objective now. {link to this story}