[Mon Oct 30 15:56:08 CET 2006]

Back when Red Hat decided to discontinue support of its entry-level product, the Linux distribution that so many of us ran on our desktops at the time (not to talk about the distribution that many Linux users first ran and served them as introduction to the magic world of open source), it was very clear in mind that I didn't want to be caught by surprise again. Yes, the community based Fedora was there, and chances were it would be as popular as the old Red Hat Linux. Fine. Still, I didn't want to run my home servers on a fast-paced distribution such as Fedora, whose main purpose in life since the very beginning was to serve as the testing grounds for the real, commercial big brother, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Let's be clear here. I do not consider that Red Hat as a company was unethical here, and never felt that way at all since the very beginning. However, I didn't want to (and couldn't afford to) upgrade my home server every few months simply because the distributor wanted to move onto the next phase of its pilot program so that new technology could be incorporated into an expensive product I couldn't pay for. The problem wasn't only the money, but also the lack of time. I just cannot invest hour after hour on my home server. It's just supposed to be there and work without giving me headaches, and that's why it runs on Linux in the first place. So, in the end, I decided to bite the bullet and give Debian a try. I knew of people's complaints about the distribution being too slow to release new major upgrades, but that's precisely what I was trying to avoid. In other words, when it comes to my home server my main concern was stability above all other things. Some of my friends tried to convince me that the Fedora Legacy Project pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn't have to upgrade to the latest and greatest. In theory, I should be able to run older releases of Fedora and install the security patches that the people involved in this project made available to the community. Obviously, one didn't have to be especially bright to realize that, at the rate the Fedora folks were releasing new versions of their distro, there is no community on Earth that could sustain the pace and successfully maintain the older versions too. Now, I read an article published by Linux Weekly News where they call the project an empty legacy:

Fedora Legacy has yet to provide a single update for Fedora Core 4, which was transferred to the peoject in July. In fact, Fedora Legacy has not provided any updates, for any of the distributions it claims to support, since July —an outage of almost three months. During this period, vulnerabilities have been reported in a small number of packages.

Boy, am I glad I chose Debian! And the thing is that, once the switch worked so flawlessly, I sort of liked it and ended up running Ubuntu on my workstation too. In the end, Red Hat lost me completely. I just wonder how many other users they lost too. The interesting thing is that I used to purchase at the very least a copy of a minor release for each one of their major releases (i.e., Red Hat Linux 4.2, 6.1, 7.3, etc.). {link to this story}

[Mon Oct 23 16:13:43 CEST 2006]

Much has been written lately about the negative impact of the Internet on politics, and how the much touted me-experience (i.e., the hyper-customization allowed by the new technologies) is increasing the isolation and intolerance among the citizens. Simply put, where we could all hear (supposedly) multiple and different opinions about the different topics that affect us in our daily life, the Internet (and not only the Internet, since satellite and cable TV as well as talk radio also follows this very same model) makes it possible for us to go on merrily being exposed only to other people who think like we do. The argument sounds reasonable, of course. The problem is that there are quite a few caveats, I think. For starters, as I indicated, it's not just the Internet that is behind this trend, although it certainly is more fashionable to mention the Internet in a newspaper column because it sends the message that its author knows what's in. Truth be told, it's mass media in general that reinforces this trend towards the individualization and customization of news. Actually, it's free market and capitalism that are behind this unstoppable trend. More important though, I think we idealize the past when we discuss these issues. For the most part, people never read more than one newspaper: the one closest to their ideas, most likely. Sure, the educated elites might have read more than one, but that's a minority, and nothing stops them from doing the same today. In any case, all too often we forget about the positive impact new technology may have on all this. All this occurred to me while reading in Wired News that Bill and Hillary Clinton are going to be invited to an online discussion event. As stated in the article:

Opinions are easier to find than ever, but informed give and take has become rare. The goal of Hotsoup will be to look for different takes on major themes often overlooked. Former Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie, one of five individuals featured high on the site on its first day, started a "Hot Issues" discussion with his view that "economic disparity" is a subject too often ignored in debates on the issues —not necessarily what one would expect from a leading Republican.

{link to this story}

[Mon Oct 23 15:36:47 CEST 2006]

Yet another sign of the changing times. I read in ComputerWorld that Sun allows around 2,000 of its employees use access technical books online by using O'Reilly's Safari Books service. As the article states:

By having online access to all of Sebastopol, Calif.-based Safari's books, Sun employees can access topical IT information immediately, and can search across every book in the collection to find the information they're seeking. (...) Previously, Sun employees had to check out books in print from the Sun library or purchase them ahead of time to be able to use them. Then they had to carry them around, which could be difficult if the book was a heavy, 400-page technical manual.

I never used the Safari Books service, but have used online books in the past and are definitely handy. While I wouldn't read a novel or a long essay online, I do think it's the best media for quick reference and that's precisely what I use it for. I don't see the digital text killing the book format anytime soon but the time has definitely come to use a good search engine to do some reference checks. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me either if we all end up reading digital texts in a few years. All we need is a device that's easy on the eyes, not bulky and flexible enough to allow me to download documents to it without a need to become dependent on a given proprietary format. {link to this story}

[Fri Oct 20 10:36:43 CEST 2006]

Human civilization has been around for thousands of years already and, in spite of it all, no matter how much we have experienced, there are certain things that we will never learn. One of them is to stop being alarmist when dealing with new technologies and new social phenomenons. Humans are conservative by nature, reluctant to change, and whenever we see something new we tend to react, first, with delight and amazement at the novelty and, second, with fear. A few weeks back, while I was visiting Madrid, I heard of some international conference where psychologists from all over the world warned us against the evils of Internet addiction. Then, today I read a story published by eWeek about a study that shows (oh, the shock!) that "Internet addicts cover up the habit". I imagine drug addicts and alcoholics don't try to hide it? In any case, such an alarmist headline introduces us to an article that clarifies:

More than one in eight US adults find it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time and about one in 11 tries to hide his or her online habit, according to a study released Tuesday. (...) The survey found that 68.9 percent of respondents were regular Internet users and 13.7 percent found it hard to stay offline for several days at a time. It found 12.4 percent often stayed online longer than intended, more than 12 percent said tried to cut back on their Internet use, and 8.7 percent tried to conceal "non-essential" Internet use from family, friends and employers.

Oh, the shock! I suppose we should assume that we won't be able to find similar figures for people who simply cannot stay away from their TV sets, a cigarette, reading a book, watching a movie, drinking beer, chit-chatting, using the phone or just wanking, right? As a matter of fact, the international conference of psychologists I was referring to above also warned against "the addiction to the cell phone". I'm sorry, but I have a problem with a culture that appears to have an addiction on bad, alarmist news to spread fear all around, instead of making an effort to adapt to the changes, which is what we have always done in the past and will end up happening in the long run. The longer it takes us to realize that certain things are here to stay, the more we are going to suffer about it. Yes, there are dangers, of course. Yes, we can overdo it. Yes, we can become addicted to almost anything, including the Internet and even sex. Still, headlines like these are a bit excessive. Simply because the Internet has become such a central part of our lives and many people haven't gotten used to it yet, that doesn't mean that the end of the world is upon us. After all, how many people out there would be able to carry on with their lives without using the car? And any vehicle? And the TV or radio? Does that mean that there is an epidemic spreading throughout the civilized world that threatens to put an end to civilization? Hardly. {link to this story}

[Tue Oct 17 09:13:32 CEST 2006]

The rumors about Oracle releasing its own Linux distribution have been all the rage lately, to the point that they recently caused Red Hat to lose 7% of its market capitalization. In an interview published earlier this year, Larry Ellison dispelled the rumors about Oracle buying Red Hat while confirming that he would like an operating system to have a "complete stack". I can see how the idea of being in control of the whole software stack, starting from the operating system and ending with the database application itself, may appeal to Ellison, but am not sure the same cannot be accomplished simply by hiring a good amount of kernel developers who contribute to the open source community, like several other companies do (IBM, HP, SGI...). Of course, it wouldn't be the first time Larry Ellison makes a decision based more on his own messianic love for attention than on pure business reasons. {link to this story}

[Wed Oct 11 11:57:06 CEST 2006]

While reading Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming, I've come across a very interesting section titled The Right Size for an Editori that includes a few useful reflections on the complexitiy of the modern vi editor:

... the clutter of vi commands is a relatively superficial problem. It's interface complexity, yes, but of a kind most users can and do ignore (the interface is semi-compact in the sense we developed in Chapter 4). The deeper problem is an adhocity trap. Over the years, vi has had progressively more and more special-purpose C code bolted onto it to perform tasks that Sam refuses to do and that Emacs would attack with Lisp code modules and subprocess control. The extensions are not, as in Emacs, libraries loaded as needed; users pay the overhead for the resulting code bloat all the time. As a result, the size difference between a modern vi and a modern Emacs is not nearly as great as one might expect; in mid-2003 on an Intel-architecture machine, it's 1500 KB for GNU Emacs versus 900 KB for vim. There is a whole lot of both optional and accidental complexity in that 900 KB.

Mind you, I'm probably what Raymond would call a "vi fan", but that doesn't change the fact that he's most likely right. {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 5 13:33:55 CEST 2006]

Google has launched a new search service for computer code today that should prove quite useful. Point your browser to Google CodeSearch and test it. According to the piece published by Reuters:

The service began as a way for Google programmers to search through internal company code. It added a search engine of publicly available code and then recently decided that it might as well open up the service to others.

The results that come back from searches on Google Code also link directly to the compressed data files in which programs are often stored.

Gotta love Google's don't do evil policy! {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 5 12:56:28 CEST 2006]

Linux.com published today a story about a Linux distribution that caters to Christian users. Jeremt Hancock, a 29-year-old bus driver, put together Ubuntu Christian Edition (Ubuntu CE) using the Ubuntu Customization Kit in order to "bring Linux to Christian believers". Among other things, he added DansGuardian for filtering, GnomeSword for Bible study and a scrip that provides a daily Bible verse. Hancock says that quite a few people in the opensource community didn't like the idea, and strongly opposed it. I can also read some negative comments in the Linux.com forum that follows the article but, to be honest, it's something I just cannot understand. While I'm a convinced agnostic, I see Ubuntu CE as a very powerful idea that one can only see in the opensource world: a user (or a group of them) can take on any official piece of software and customized it to their own tastes and needs. I just cannot see anything wrong with that picture. The same opensource license that allows Hancock to build his Christian version of Ubuntu also allows other people to build things like X-Evian or dyne:bolic, inspired by a social and political activism clearly linked to the left. What's to dislike about diversity? {link to this story}