[Sun Nov 30 16:22:19 CET 2008]

A few days ago I ran into a little technical problem that others may benefit from. A good friend sent an email containing a Word attachment of a few pages that he wrote himself as well as a cover in PDF format that a third person had designed. He had been working on these two different documents for a while now, and was planning to print them out separately before distributing the final version of the project. So, it occurred to me that this didn't make any sense, of course. He ought to merge both files, so that the cover would be the first page of the document containing the full work. But how? Sure, I could use OpenOffice to convert the Word document to PDF. However, that would only solve half the problem: I'd now have two files in the same format, but would still be unable to merge them due to the fact that I don't have access to a PDF editor. It's a proprietary format and the editors are costly. So, what to do? Is there a way to merge two PDF documents without using an editor? As it turned out, yes, there is. Even better, the solution is to use Ghostscript, which is installed by default in all major Linux distributions, as far as I know. I found the answer in a short article titled Putting together PDF files published by Linux.com:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

It worked like a charm. {link to this story}

[Thu Nov 13 14:14:34 CET 2008]

Tech Source From Bohol publishes a piece on several Linux-powered e-book readers that comes to show how much these devices have advanced. The fact that vendors (including Amazon for its internationally known Kindle e-book reader) use Linux is definitely no surprise at all. It just makes sense to use an operating system that is open source, and therefore extremely flexible, free to develop on in order to mold it to anything we may have in mind and royalty-free. But what truly amazes me, as I said, is how much these devices have advanced in the last few years, to the point that it's becoming to look quite probable that they will replace paper in certain fields. Mind you, I'm a book-lover and think that the book will not die anytime soon. Still, e-book readers make perfect sense for warehouses, hospitals and many other fields. There is no doubt in my mind that they are getting to be good enough to replace paper in many instances, especially when one has to read for professional reasons and not just for pleasure. {link to this story}

[Sat Nov 8 17:43:20 CET 2008]

The Royal Pingdom posted a blog entry displaying a hilarious gallery of geeky bumper stickers. Here are my favorties:

{link to this story}

[Tue Nov 4 14:13:25 CET 2008]

I haven't run VMWare in a long time, but since I know that sooner or later I will do again I just wanted to make sure I document a small hint here: easyvmx.com can be used to create VMWare images over the web. {link to this story}

[Mon Nov 3 14:56:22 CET 2008]

While I'm a big fan of Ubuntu (which I have been running since I became quite disenchanted with Fedora several yeats ago), I recently came across an interesting opinion piece written by a Mandrive employee where he argues quite convincingly against Canonical:

What Mr. Shuttleworth did with Canonical and Ubuntu was divebomb the distribution pool. I can't claim to know anything about his personal motivations: I've never met him and we've never interacted. He's on public record as saying his motivation is to promote the usage of Linux in particular and free software in general, and that's a laudable goal and one I can't with good conscience say is not his true aim. However, if I accept that that's his aim, I still question his methods.

Ubuntu is fundamentally in a position of deeply unfair competition within the Linux distribution market. I know Mr. Shuttleworth frequently says its true competition is Microsoft, but that's exactly it —he tends to act as if other distributions were irrelevant at best and a hindrance at worst. Ubuntu is a commercial distribution, with a large staff of paid developers —like Mandriva, Red Hat (and, to an extent, Fedora), or SUSE. However, it is not remotely self-supporting and does not plan to be self-supporting in any reasonable timeframe.

(...)

Okay, so, what's the problem with this?

Imagine you're a guy selling wooden carvings. You're not Wal-Mart, but you've got an honest business going. Sure, the wood's basically free, but you put your own time and effort into it and people like your carvings, so they pay you a reasonable fee for them. You get by.

Then a rich guy shows up in town. He calls a press conference.

"I like wooden carvings. Not enough people have wooden carvings. I would like to give the world of wooden carvings a giant boot up the ass. So, I am opening Rich Guy's Free Wooden Carvings Emporium."

Rich Guy's Free Wooden Carvings Emporium is three times as big as your store, excellently lit, and air-conditioned. It has greeters. There's a workshop with five well-paid and skilled carvers kicking out nicely made carvings —maybe they're not quite as good as yours, with all your years of experience, but their wood is more consistent and higher quality as they can afford to pay a high-class wood supplier. For customers who can't make it out to the Emporium, they'll ship a carving right to their door. And all the carvings are completely free. How does Rich Guy's Free Wooden Carvings Emporium manage this feat? It doesn't have a magic way of making money. No, it loses money, ahdn over fist. But Rich Guy pays for it all.

How do you feel? Pretty fucking pissed off, I'd imagine. How the hell are you supposed to compete with Rich Guy's Free Wooden Carvings? You can't. You're screwed. You find another job, find some kind of wooden carvings niche that RGFWC hasn't figured out a way to cover yet, or you swalloow your pride and go take a job working for Rich Guy. An attractive set of choices there! And what happens when Rich Guy runs out of money, or just loses interest, is never adequately explained.

That's Canonical's impact on the Linux distribution market, in a nutshell. Competition's great, but unfair competition isn't. It's just fundamentally very difficult for a truly independent, properly funded company to compete with Mr. Shuttleworth's Gian Shiny Magic Box of Coins. The playing field is not level.

Adam Will (for that's the name of the author) makes some very good points in this blog piece, I think. Canonical can afford to continue pouring money into the development of their totally free Linux distribution (which is something that other competitors simply cannot afford), at least for as long as Mark Shuttleworth doesn't run out of capital. I can see how this could be frustrating to competitors, to be fair. However, I'm not so sure I share Will's point of view. For starters, the difference between a rich guy like Shuttleworth investing in a company for the long run and a so called angel investor willing to pur a high sum of money into a company whose business plan is far from clear in the short term but that might show a profit in the future (and this happened a lot during the dot-com era) is not as big as he would have us think, really. Yes, in theory the latter has a commitment to show that it is capable of making a profit sooner or later, but then so does Mark Shuttleworth's company, of course. How else will the company be able to survive otherwise? Does that mean that, in the meantime, Canonical has a clear advantage thanks to Shuttleworth's money? Sure. But that also happens with other ventures launched by large fortunes. Heck, it even happen to certain sport teams that are owned by people who have plenty of money to buy the best players! How is that any different?

But there is another issue that is, I think, even more interesting. While reading Will's blog entry, I couldn't help it but to feel a bit of good old deja vu. What does it sound like? Does it remind you of anything? Yes, sure, the arguments used by the small commercial software vendors against open source! You know, the "these are people who benefit from the fact that other people develop products for free" and "the playing field is not level" arguments. Isn't that an ironic outcome of the whole thing?

Now, what I do think is a pretty good point is what Will asks in one of the last sentences quoted above: what will happen when Shuttleworth either runs out of money or loses interest? This is indeed a good question. People like me switched from Red Hat/Fedora to Ubuntu after feeling a bit betrayed by Red Hat's decision to discontinue the product aimed at the home desktop market (mind you, I am one of those people who religiously purchased at least a copy of each major version of Red Hat just to contribute to the cause) but Will's question makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, it could very well be that with Ubuntu we get the same level of unpredictability we got with Red Hat (i.e., a company making decisions based on their own short term commercial interest), which is precisely what drove us away from them. In reality, we would only be able to get rid of this unpredictability by swallowing hard and betting our future on something like Debian, a pure community-based distribution. The problem there, of course, is that the end product is quite rough in the edges, which is precisely why Ubuntu became so popular. One way or another, I am convinced that Red Hat definitely made the decision to pull out of the home desktop market at the wrong time. Seen in retrospect, it was a big mistake. {link to this story}