[Thu Jul 24 15:25:37 CDT 2008]

A good friend just sent me a link to a story that has been going around for a few days now: What Linus Torvalds thinks about OpenBSD. One reads about Linus calling the OpenBSD hackers "a bunch of masturbating monkeys" and cannot help but agreeing with the author of the blog that the Linux mastermind can sometimes be crass and rude. However, when one also takes into account the context of the conversation that was taking place when he uttered these words things suddenly change and start making more sense. Just check the actual email on Gmane:

Btw, and you may not like this, since you are so focused on security, one reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies —and thus encourages— the wrong behavior.

It makes "heroes" out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important.

In fact, all the boring normal bugs are way more important, just because there's a lot more of them. I don't think some spectacular security hole should be glorified or cared about as being more "special" than a random spectacular crash due to bad locking.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

To me, security is important. But it's no less important than everything *else* that is also important!

Yes, the OpenBSD folks have contributed a lot to improving the security of software, and I'm positive Linus will be the first one to acknowledge that much. However, he is absolutely right that they seem to be way too obsessed about security, to the point that everything else (including the mere fact of being able to do useful things with a computer without going through lots of hoops!) takes a second seat. If you doubt me, just install their OS on your regular desktop PC and try to run it as the main system for a while. You will quickly lose whatever hair you have left. I can guarantee you that. And yes, I understand OpenBSD is not such an ideal OS for the desktop but it may be great for a router. However, their developers like to preach security to other projects as if usability shouldn't matter, when that is not the case for these projects. Not everybody out there needs to run a router or a proxy server on a daily basis. People also need to do many other things that are a true pain to accomplish with OpenBSD. {link to this story}

[Thu Jul 24 12:50:13 CDT 2008]

Ubuntu is contributing to make the Linux desktop more and more exciting. A few days ago I met an old friend I had not seen in years (a not particularly technically adept one) who explained to me —all excited— that he had recently discovered Ubuntu, found it to be extremely easy to install —"easier than Windows for sure!", he added—, it worked out of the box for what he does —browsing around and checking email, mainly, but also woking on some documents and spreadsheets— and, overall, he loved it. So much so, actually, that he is now trying to get his kids to use it too.

Well, yesterday we read that Mark Shuttleworth urged the Linux desktop developers to compete against Apple and get a product that's just as much fun to use. It all sounds great, of course. Who wouldn't love to see Linux on the desktop surpass the Mac OS in usability and overall fun? However, as Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out in his ComputerWorld column, "shooting beyond the mac" may be a pie in the sky proposition. Why? There are some powerful reasons:

The Linux desktop is a good, workable one. I'll take any modern Linux desktop over Windows Vista any day of the week, and the better ones do everything that Windows XP SP3 can do and more. Beating the Mac though? That's another matter.

Today's Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, is a work of the user-interface designer art. My wife recently bought a MacBook Pro, and as I've been migrating her data and applications from her elderly XP-powered ThinkPad, I've been reminded of just how smoothly integrated everything really is on a Mac. It's like driving a top-of-the-line Mercedes sports sedan.

There's a price though that you pay for that wonderful integration of form and function, of application and operating system, and it's not just the price-tag: it's totally proprietary. Apple, and Apple alone, controls the Mac experience. Mac clone maker Psystar, lasted just long enough to show that it really could make a viable Mac clone when Apple fell on them like a ton of bricks with a cease and desist lawsuit that one attorney believes is likely to "put Psystar out of business".

For better, and for worse, the Mac, and Apple's other top devices like the iPod and iPhone, are the epitome of proprietary design. Everything fits together; everything works, because everything is under Apple's control. Linux has taken an entirely different course.

Linux distributions start from a common base, the Linux kernel, but then split off as they compete with each other to be the best of the best. Rather than a communism, as Bill Gates would have it, open source is all about Darwinism. It's non-stop competition where only the best survive.

(...)

This competition forces Linux desktops to evolve very quickly. That's why, while Microsoft has been stumbling with its Vista failure, all of the major Linux desktops zoomed by it. Today, I can still see why Windows users would still use XP over Linux, but Vista? Please!

As fast as the Linux desktop evolves though, it's hard for me to see it "catching" up with the Mac OS. Their fundamentally different development approaches lead to quite different desktop experiences. With Linux, you tend to get more choices and more power over your desktop. Mac gives you less choice but a more consistent experience. To me, it's like the difference between a manual and automatic transmission car.

No matter how much the Linux desktop evolves it's not going to turn into an automatic. Even when Linux does move in that direction, as I would argue it does with the GNOME interface, it will never equal the Mac's integration of application, operating system and hardware. To even try to equal the Mac experience, a vendor would need not just to be a Linux distributor, but a software vendor and hardware manufacturer as well.

Absolutely right! I do like Apple's products. My wife loves them. She won't buy anything but their products. I help her with her sporadic problems here and there, and the systems are nicely designed, they definitely do a very nice job of integrating them together and the experience is definitely smooth. Still, the end result is not nearly as flexible as my Linux laptop. Why? Well, precisely because that's the price that you need to pay for a consistent, smooth experience. I just got fed up with the Evolution email client a couple of weeks ago and migrated back to mutt quickly and easily enough. Now, since I prefer to use the command line and curses-based tools (they make my work easier and don't clutter the desktop when I run them within a single screen session), I'm also looking at gaclcli to view my Google Calendar data, among other things. Neither Windows nor Mac can give me this flexibility. Of course, I also have a much broader selection of software and hardware to choose from (including cell phones, PDAs and MP3 players) than any Apple user. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 23 14:14:43 CDT 2008]

Things have been going fine for Apple lately and now we read that the company has sold 2.5 million Macs in Q3, setting a new single quarter record. Overall, the numbers are quite impressive:

The company sold 943,000 desktops and 1.55 million notebooks in April, May and June, increases of 49% and 37%, respectively, over the same quarter last year. In the third fiscal quarter of 2007, Apple sold 634,000 desktops and 1.13 million notebooks.

Overall, Mac sales were up 41% year-to-year, a growth rate even stronger than the estimates published last week by research firms IDC and Gartner Inc. Revenues from Mac computer sales, which totaled $3.6 billion for the quarter, were 43% above over the same period last year, and accounted for 48% of Apple's total revenues of $7.5 billion for the quarter.

To me, what's more interesting is to remember that this is a company that everybody thought it was about to die just 10 years ago or so. What brought about the changes? We all know who brought them about, but what strategy did it? If I were to know for sure, chances are I wouldn't be writing here and would be making lots of money writing business management books instead. Nevertheless, I think I can take an intelligent guess. Steve Jobs made Apple cool again. Consumers are getting all excited about Apple's next move, the next cool product they release. Yes, we all know that too. The question, however, is how they did it. Here is my answer: they avoided the minefield that the desktop and notebook computer markets were and chose to concentrate instead of new and innovative gadgets (the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In other words, they created their own batch of disruptive technologies, rebuilt the brand name and, once they got all that back, all they had to do was design some decent (mind you, not even great, just decent) desktop and notebooks products to start selling like hotcakes. Another article I recently came across of is a good illustration of this point. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, stated a couple of days ago that Linux is set to make a big splash in the market for mobile devices (yes, I know, I have been hearing this for years too), and the same article also tells us about the words of another executive on a completely different topic:

He lauded the capabilities of Apple Inc's iPhone and what it has done for mobile computing. "The iPhone is really the Mosaic of the mobile Web", opening people's eyes to opportunities on the mobile side the way Mosaic did with browsers.

Exactly! The importance of the iPhone goes well beyond of whether we think it's a cool product or we may prefer other cell phones. Its importance is that it is opening a whole new field for future products. In other words, it's showing us the great potential of digital technology applied to the mobile market. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 16 15:34:50 CDT 2008]

Dr. Dobb's reports that Linden Lab and IBM managed to achieve virtual world interoperability. Basically, Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) and IBM have proven that interoperability in inmersive virtual worlds is also possible by teleporting avatars between the Second Life Preview Grid and an Open Simulator world server. Why should this matter at all? As they say in Dr. Dobb's:

...The joint development project represents an industry first of a quantifiable milestone for virtual world interconnectivity...

Teleporting an avatar between platforms has the potential to have a significant impact on the future of virtual worlds. An open standard for interoperability would allow users to cross freely from one world to another in a seamless transfer, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.

It would make it possible for people to move freely between different virtual worlds as long as they used these open standards. This would make it possible, for instance, for a company to have its own internal virtual world (the equivalent of a 3D intranet) and allow the employees to seamlessly flow and travel between this and the wider external virtual world where they can interact with customers. That's just an application. There could be many more. Here is a video of the experiment, in case you are interested. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 16 16:23:39 CDT 2008]

And hardware continues leaping forward. I read in Slashdot that TUL Corporation has just released the first 2GB graphics card. As the submitter of the story to Slashdot says, that's more memory than my laptop has! {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 16 10:42:12 CDT 2008]

der Standard publishes an interview with Mark Shuttleworth where the founder of Ubuntu shares some interesting thoughts about GNOME:

— So you would favor GNOME to switch over to QT?

— Well, I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That's very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.

Whether we'll be able to have the FSF excited about something, have GNOME excited about something, have Nokia excited about something which makes life better for developers —that's gonna be the interesting challenge for me. I'd like to see both desktops focusing more on a common infrastructure. And we've already seen that, a lot of the Freedesktop initiatives have been embraced by both projects —HAL, d-bus for instance.

This also applies to other software projects, if you name your project g-something or k-something you are articulating a very specific user experience. Projects should really look to the whole Linux desktop and see how they can appeal to both sides.

— Recently there was a discussion about "decadence" in the GNOME community, discussing if GNOME is solely in a state of maintenance anhmore. Do you think there have to be some bigger changes to get GNOME innovating again?

— I think GNOME really set the pace about good guidance, good release management and good stability for downstream developers. And that's very valuable, that's one of the reasons why we picked GNOME as the first desktop supported in the Ubuntu platform, that's probably also the reason why the majority of companies that develop for Linux use GNOME. But it's equally important to have a very clearly articulated strategy for how to we will introduce waves of innovation. And I think the KDE guys have a point when they say, if all you do is have an everlasting commitment to a stable API/ABI and do releases once every six months, you can never make big shifts of innovation.

It's not just as easy as saying we'll have GTK+ 2 then GTK+ 3, you really have to plan on how to introduce change into the platform. And I'd like to see more discussion in GNOME about that.

Perhaps GNOME has not been on the leading edge for quite sometime, but one can hardly argue that they are not innovating. I see not only minor improvements towards creating a better user experience on their desktop platform, but also the appearance of new applications that people can feel excited about. Let's not forget that, to the user, the application is the true interface in the end. In any case, as Shuttleworth says, the GNOME guys have figured out a way to provide stability and a regular release, which is something the opensource workd had been struggling with for a long time. I think that's a significant contribution. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 16 10:32:38 CDT 2008]

Well, I'm glad to report that the migration back from Evolution to mutt has been easier than I thought. Since mutt uses the mbox file format and Evolution apparently sticks to that standard too, it was as easy as copying the contents of the local folder from Evolution into the ~/mail folder and remove all the additional metadata files that Evolution uses to clean up things. I already had everything properly configured as far as fetchmail and procmail are concerned. One more item remains though: converting my contacts list from Evolution into an old-style alias file that I can use with mutt. Since I had been using mutt in the past for my personal email account, quite a few of the contacts are still there in an outdated alias file but all the contacts added in the last couple of years are obviously missing. I suppose it's something I can live with in the meantime. There must be a conversion tool available somewhere on the Net. I'll search for it when I find the time and report back. {link to this story}

[Tue Jul 15 10:07:56 CDT 2008]

Evolution has been getting on my nerves for quite sometime now. I just cannot stand how often it shows the "Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync" error. Yes, I know the problem should go away by removing the [folder].ev-summary file as explained both in a discussion in the Ubuntu forum and Ubuntu bug 27014. However, the fact is that it doesn't always work. Not only that, but once you do that (in my case, several times in the last few months), it removes all the color coding you may have configured via filtering, which needs to be redone. Additionally, there are times when it leaves a mess in your inbox (as it just did in my case), duplicating every single message. More manual intervention to clean up after the program! I'm sick of it. I have been using mutt for close to a decade now and didn't have to recover any folder a single time. Yes, it is text-based client, terse, neither fancy nor cool, but it does what is supposed to do, and it does it well. I'm not sure when I will find the time to do it, but as soon as I have a chance I'm migrating all my personal email back to mutt once more, just as I did with my work email about a year ago after unsuccessfully trying to use Evolution for it. It's just not worth the hassle. It looks as if the old and tried KISS principle is proven to be true once more: write small applications that do one thing only, but do it well. Time to look for a calendaring application that works seemlessly with Google Calendar and can also synchronize with my Palm Z22. {link to this story}

[Mon Jul 14 11:28:06 CDT 2008]

Just came across a MySQL Performance Blog that is well worth a look. It's written by the authors of Higher Performance MySQL, published by O'Reilly. The same guys publish some very good presentations on their company website. The one titled MySQL Performance Basics is especially useful, I think. {link to this story}

[Thu Jul 10 12:13:10 CDT 2008]

Not sure how often this happens to you but, every now and then, I have to get a video from YouTube and convert it into MP3 format. Now, how do you do this in Linux? Here's how I did it with my laptop, still running an old version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper):

1. Go to YouTube and find the video you are interested in.
2. Now, copy the URL into your clipboard and head for the Down-Tube website. Follow their directions to download the video from YouTube.
3. Finally, to convert the video to MP3 format, run the following command from the shell:

   $ ffmpeg -i [videofile].flv -ac 2 [audiofile].mp3
   

That's it! That'll do. It works like a charm. {link to this story}

[Thu Jul 10 09:48:30 CDT 2008]

I read in Computer World that Google has launched a new service called Google Live to add 3-D features to social networking.

The platform lets users create and personalize their own character, so-called avatars, and their own rooms, similar to social Web sites such as Second Life.

But a key feature of the Lively platform is integration with the Internet. Users are able to create a chat room and embed it with their Web site or blog, writes Niniane Wang, engineering manager at Google, on the company blog.

Rooms can also be integrated with both MySpace and Facebook pages, and there is also support for playing YouTube videos and showing photos in virtual TVs and picture frames, according to Wang.

eWeek also has an article about it. I must say that, while it sounds interesting, it seems to be nothing more than a Second Life rip-off, to be honest. Sure, it offers some additional features (such as the ability to embed one's own blog as well as pictures and videos from YouTube) but, other than that, it's Second Life all over again, a simple variation of it. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with that. That's what businesses are for. They compete with each other and improve on each other's ideas, trying to make money along the way. I'd just hate to see (or read) anyone in a few years pretending that it was Google who invented and developed this sort of interface. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 9 13:23:14 CDT 2008]

Paul Jackson, one of our kernel developers at SGI, described very well (I think) in an internal email the relationship between the kernel hackers, the vendors that hire them and the Linux community:

Us kernel hackers are sheep dogs ... the code we hack is the sheep. We share an open range, Linux. The sheep owners are the corporations, large (IBM and Intel) and smaller (SGI) who depend on these sheep herds for various reasons. Us sheep dogs co-operate with each other (if one of us started attacking the others sheep, we'd be set upon and torn to shreds.) But we each have some sheep that are ours, in which our masters (the company signing our paycheck) have particular financial interest. And we each care that the open range we share remains healthy for raising our sheep, so will co-operate in keeping out the wolves, and in preventing over grazing and in moving the sheep to good grass near plentiful water.

It is an ecosystem, isn't it? {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 2 10:07:42 CDT 2008]

I'm currently working on a web project written in PHP with a MySQL back end and, since I didn't create a database from a scratch in a couple of years or so, I decided to brush up on the theory a little bit. I searched for articles and tutorials on database normalization and found a good introduction on MySQL's Developer Zone website itself. I'm referring to An Introduction to Database Normalization by Mike Hillyer, which warns us about the so called spreadsheet syndrome:

Over the years I, like many of you, have had the experience of taking over responsibility for an existing application and its associated schema (sometimes frustratingly woven together as part of a Microsoft Access solution).

The most challenging of these to maintain and rework suffer from what one author described as the Spreadsheet Syndrome: a tendency for the developer to lump every possible piece of information into as few tables as possible, often into a single table.

A schema that suffers from the Spreadsheet Syndrome is subject to data redundancies, data anomalies, and various inefficiencias. The cure for Spreadsheet Syndrome is database normalization.

Hillyer is absolutely right. Over the years, I have seen the spreadsheet syndrome in multiple occasions and it is a royal pain in the neck. Once again, people got into a bad habit due to a user-friendly application. I cannot tell how many web applications I've found out there where the data is not normalized at all, lumping the whole thing into a single table as if we were dealing with a spreadsheet and making it quite difficult to handle it once it has grown to a certain size, not to talk about the instances where data has been misspelled or entered erroneously in the database due to this design error. Please, take the time to design your database correctly. {link to this story}