Welcome back to my irreverent and regular(-ish) look at what I have read online lately.



Evolution is over – F.A.B.



I used to use a highly optimised and customised Gentoo install on all computers, which was really fun and I learned a lot about how a GNU/Linux system operates, but eventually I found I did not have enough time for it. So for my work computer and for computers for members of my family, I install Ubuntu and use as many of the defaults as possible. This way I can get productive on a new computer straight away.



It is also about joining the horde, if enough people use the same applications on the Free desktop, then there will be a critical mass which will lead to new benefits.



For example, it will be easier for hardware vendors and other services to support the Free Desktop. Another example, things potential new users need will become available such as books, advice, web tutorials and so on.



This does not mean that individual choice is removed, it also does not mean that the best of breed cannot rise to the top. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, they replaced Rhythmbox with Banshee as the default music player, but I have not got around to trying Banshee or moving my music across yet.



Reports claim that Thunderbird will (perhaps) replace Evolution as the default mail client in Ubuntu 11.10.



I am interested to see how this works out since I use Evolution quite a lot these days.



Evolution is pretty feature complete, but does sometime randomly decide to be slow in retrieving messages and in performing searches.



One big difference between the two applications is that Thunderbird is an email client, while Evolution is a personal information manager. Email is one of the major features of evolution but there is also a calendar, task list, memos and and so on.



Personally I use the email, calendar and tasks. However, I have not used the memos since started I use Tomboy. Yes I have given up my strike against Mono applications, Tomboy is really good.



Mozilla has a calendar application. It is available in two forms, a stand alone application called 'Sunbird' and a Thunderbird extension called 'Lightning'.



It remains to be seen if Ubuntu include this as the default calender in Ubuntu, or whether Ubuntu will contain a default calender at all. I hope so, as a calender is a useful application to have.



Evolution is plumbed into GNOME applications and frameworks quite deeply, so such a change if it happens could lead to further consequences in the future.



Thunderbird is (un)branded as 'Icedove' in Debian, which sounds rather cool.







Will Gwibber Wibble faster?



Talking of getting rid out slow apps, Gwibber, the social networking client that I use (and is the default), has been rewritten, and from the sounds of it, it sounds like a new codebase with the same name. Also being planned is Google+ support.



Confession Time



I have four pieces of proprietary software on my system: Nvidia driver, Broadcom driver, Flash and Skype. I am hoping they all go away eventually.



On the topic of Flash, Adobe now offers a 64-bit Linux Flash client again with its newly released version 11.



More Love, More PuTTY



As regular readers will know, my favourite Windows program is PuTTY. I use it to quickly access a Linux machine from any arbitrary Windows computer. PuTTY has its first new release in the last four years. New features are listed here.



How long to prepare a talk?



Rusty Russell has a useful article about how he prepares his conference talks and how much time they take. This kind of experience based post is useful for others who may want to give talks in the future.



Let the grass grow



Forbes reports that US government subsidies to give a rural home broadband costs between two and four times as more than the house is worth.



The fact that the government is laying the cable is because rural broadband is not commercially viable.



A farmer has every right to live in the country, and a case could be made to offer him an internet connection of some sort, perhaps based on cheap and efficient mesh networking.



However, the government has no role in subsiding "executive homes" for commuters which encourages wasted carbon emissions. City dwellers should not be forced to subsidise environmentally unsustainable lifestyles.







Other interesting stories



Hostage taker Jason Valdez is reported to have updated his Facebook profile during a siege and chatted with his friends via Facebook messages. The police are now investigating whether any of his Facebook friends should be arrested.



A couple of interesting parallels:



The FBI is rounding up crackers to act as informants, which is how Bradley Manning was caught. Meanwhile of 95% spam relies on their ill gotten payments being processed by just 13 banks. So Soldiers who whisteblow are held in solitary confinement, while banks who make their profits from spam are left alone.



The Economist claims that al-Qaeda is starting to run out of stream and willing volunteers, meanwhile the earth has entered the age of man, where the planet itself is being reformed according to our (unconscious perhaps) plan.

So back to my series on what I have read lately online.



Rullzer is thinking through how a distributed social network could work. In my opinion, there are already decent protocols such as FOAF (Friend of a Friend). The problem is that if some of the people you want to socialise with are not warriors then these kind of independent and open protocols are often not linked to the most popular proprietary social networks. However, one can setup your social broadcast client to post simultaneously to multiple networks, so you can post to both Twitter and to somewhere with decent FOAF support.



Tante outlines the book 'Program or be Programmed' by Douglas Rushkoff. Sounds very much like the theme of this site i.e. you take command of your technology or it takes command of you. I will try to get hold of the book at some point and let you know more.



Tante follows this with an post called Cultural techniques, here he explains that use of the web has become a fundamental life skill and without it, opportunities are extremely restricted. You often hear the term 'Digital Divide' which is really a divide between the educated, working, urban young and the older, less educated and unemployed.



I personally think that in the UK, the digital divide is something that could have been avoided, but due to Thatcherite Corporatist dogma, the digital divide was built in to the British Internet.



Until 1982, all communications in the UK were controlled by the state-run post office. The post office provided communication services to the whole population no matter how rich or poor, how remote or how old. The post was delivered to every house in the kingdom and any home who could afford a phone could have one, while a network of phone boxes was provided for those that did not want or could not afford a phone.



In 1982, the profitable phone part was split off and sold off as British Telecom. In retrospect this was very short sighted. If the post office had been in control when the World Wide Web came along then things could have been very different. Under the post office, a top down plan would have not allowed a digital divide to emerge.



In the same way every house is assigned a post code, every house in the country could be provided with Internet Access and everyone could have been assigned an email address. When Wifi appeared, a national wireless Internet network would be far superior to what we have – a patchy, inefficient and redundant wireless Internet network. There are ten wireless access points broadcasting into my house, consuming electricity 24 hours a day, each providing access to a single house. A national network could have been far more efficient, with wireless routers built into streetlamps, telegraph poles, traffic lights and other existing infrastructure.



The key to a national network is understanding that ISPs are not the important economic benefit of the Internet, they are just the infrastructure, the backbone, the pipe. The really important economic developments are the products and services running on top of the network. A national Wifi network would have allowed legions of more businesses to take advantage of web-based opportunities, filling the missing markets we have now.



Instead we have overpriced and under-investing ISPs, who promise a level of service they know they cannot deliver, who cut you off if you use the bandwidth claimed in the advertisements. We have already talked about how rubbish 3G mobile broadband is. There is nothing 'fair use' about a bait and switch scam, there no technological progress in trying to use content-based rate-limiting and all sorts of scams in an attempt to make the broken fractured system viable.



Moving on, Matija explains the issues involved in leaving various proprietary instant message protocols. Myself I use IRC – read my article about that here – and find that most people for whom I need to chat online with seem to pick it up quite easily.



"Is Open Source under Siege? Let's Hope Not!", one-time Brummie Tx points out that many of the long standing big brand companies within open source have sold out the open source community and its principles. Tx argues that "it reiterates the importance of individual software contributors to protect themselves" especially by getting involved in projects that allow you to keep your own copyright, rather than losing it. Tx also discusses wikileaks and thinks about what (if anything) it will reflect on the open source community.



Screenshots of early versions of Ubuntu 11.04 are on various sites (e.g. this one). The interesting thing about next year's Ubuntu release is that Ubuntu has decided to use its Unity interface (so far used on Netbooks) instead of a standard GNOME desktop. Whether this gets watered down before release remains to be seen. I think it is good to see some innovation, the current interface on all the major operating systems have only seen incremental improvements since the Xerox Alto in 1973.



Python 2.7.1/3.3 has been released, my favourite change being the ordered dict. Already I have been using an ordered dict recipe, but having a proper and optimised ordered dict will be a great plus for Python developers. My second favourite change is by default silencing some of the warnings such as DeprecationWarning for production programs. I hate seeing DeprecationWarning in logs and so on. 2.7.1 is the last major parallel release of Python versions 2 and 3. Now development is being focused on the Python 3.x series.



Even more exciting is the release of PyPy 1.4. PyPy is a new Python interpreter written in Python. It offers lots of performance improvements over standard Python including just-in-time compilation (JIT). Version 1.4 now fully supports 64-bit. Below is a graph (source) which compares PyPy (in orange) to normal Python (in blue). You will see that for most tasks, PyPy is much faster:







The downside is that PyPy uses more RAM than CPython, although the PyPy team are currently working on decreasing the difference in RAM.



Talking of numbers, I see myself as a computing humanist rather than a computing scientist; so precise sweating over numbers tends to leave me a bit sleepy. Luckily, Armin Ronacher tries to put numbers into perspective by comparing them. Well worth a read.



So that is what I have read, if you have read or written something cool lately, please leave a reply and tell us all about it.

Welcome back to my irreverent and regular(-ish) look at what I have read online lately.

Life after Applications

As I have said before, I personally like ‘Applications’ that leave me alone. On Windows, proprietary applications have attention deficit disorder, they constantly demand your attention and cover your desktop with icons and flashing notifications; keeping a high-profile is necessary to make you feel you get value for money and to make you buy the next upgrade/renew your subscription.

In the free world, we don’t cover our desktops with marketing. I just want my computer to do what I want, preferably without asking, and certainly without going to the applications menu and going through the menus.

Jürgen Geuter has been having similar thoughts, he wants to "get rid of the whole application concept", good show ol’ chap. However, what will probably happen is that a load of people will disappear into API discussions for four years and at the end we will have fourteen incompatible partial implementations that can each print "Hello World!" to the screen.

Broadening the mind

Our man in India, Andy Lockran, has been blogging about his work there including helping a children’s charity as a kind of digital Jeeves.

Meanwhile, Dieter’s been off to the Maemo summit 2009, I have to admit I am bit jealous when I hear reports of cool conferences I couldn’t be at. Anyhow so far he is just raving about the freebie he got, hope to see some more posts about his experiences hacking with it.

Martin Matusiak writes a fun bash script for finding dependencies automatically, a nice idea that warrants some more implementations.

Planet Larry has had a trendy template makeover. I am starting to think about how to rejig this site, any ideas or templates gratefully received!

Spam V Ham

Brian Carper talks about the problem of spam and ham, i.e. discerning between genuine email that you want to receive and autogenerated nonsense that you don’t want to receive. I use SpamAssassin, but like Brian, I am always freting about the rate of false positives versus false negatives. Likewise, Mez, while on the run from a 10 year old, finds a Python programmer.

K is learning to love Vim, I still use Emacs, but I am not sure that I ever learned to love it. As very long-term readers know, I once tried to write the perfect terminal based editor. I should probably go back and continue with it, perhaps I can do better next time.

Another fresh look is from Kevin Bowling who looks again at Java, even I am willing to think about it … at some point, there could be some ham in there somewhere.

Wind Power

Dave has some interesting posts about how (not) to power the nation, but what most attracted my attention was a post about some propaganda he received trying to claim that meat is a leading cause of global warming. Almost human activity has some effect on nature, picking out ‘eating meat’ seems somewhat arbitrary, why not just go the whole hog and say that work is the leading cause of climate change, instead we should all be paid to walk in the park and sing Kumbaya.

Hitler was of course the world’s most famous vegetarian, and even today it is surprising how many times I am accosted by evangelistic vege-nazis trying to take away my hamburger. Dave does all the proper maths, but my feeling is that the dinosaurs merrily ate meat without fear of the methane emissions of their quarry, and they dominated the earth for 160 million years – pretty good going in my opinion, we being on the earth for only a couple of hundred millenia, and only dominating the last dozen or less.

In any case, have you seen how Vegetarians themselves, munching through their imported lentils and beans, fart as much as an Aberdeen Angus herd? Maybe we start the methane reductions by eating the Vegetarians, then we would have earned enough methane credits to easily compensate for our hamburger production.

Before you throw a pack of tofu through my window, this is all parody, a joke. Sad I have to say this, but this is the Internet, and you are all mad.

Linux and the end of the world as we know it

A couple of New Year’s ago, I argued that "a global recession may affect the corporate uptake of Linux Desktop", in that article I argued that the Financial Industry, and other similar industries not normally associated with putting ethics as the first priority, would be the first steps in a global corporate switchover to Linux. Well the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange are now there. Red Hat cashes in with a 36.9% year-on-year rise in profits, fantastic considering what a bad year it has been for the global economy.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Computer Crime Investigation Unit warned not to use Windows to access your online banking but to use Linux instead. I probably didn’t need to tell you that, but it is fun to hear some officials with some sensible advice that actually helps people.

What have you been reading or writing?

Well that is enough for now, if you have read something cool online, or have written something cool yourself, then please let everyone know using the comments feature.

Welcome to another installment in my series about what I have read on the web recently.

Daniel has been trying out ZFS on FreeBSD, cool stuff. For those not in the loop, ZFS is causing a big stir in the server world because it can span multiple volumes and allows huge filesystems. It is not available as a root file system in Linux, so I doubt it will be the last word in filesystems.

David has not just been commenting here, he also has a blog as I (re)discovered recently. The latest highlights include some Python tidbits and some Newsnight Review-style music musings, it is good to know that Tammy Baker still has a lot on her plate.

Phill has been blogging steadily, including developing my point that some names are just better than others, he has been discussing polygamy and a remote desktop service which costs £12 a month which can be replaced by ten minutes of reading and no money. Sadly, I think they are onto a winner, sometimes people are not so much ‘technophobic’, it is more that the computer calls their bluff. Often good-natured smart people will assume everyone around them is smart; however in life, some people are just bluffing. Arrogant bluffers just glaze over when actually forced to read something, as opposed to leeching off the good natures of others. It takes one to know one, and the stupidity of the computer exposes the stupidity of the user – garbage in – garbage out.

When about ten months ago I moved commandline.org.uk from specialised blogging software to a more general web framework (Django), I stopped talking about this web site as a ‘blog’, and just used the word ‘web site’ instead.

Andy L asks whether we can define blogging without mentioning technology. Can we define cycling without mentioning technology? This is the wrong question, we are not interested in the verb but in the actor. If we leave the word ‘bloggers’ aside for a moment, and instead use {group A}. A more interesting question is, "Is there anything unique that defines {group A} in comparison to the majority of Web users?".

It does not matter whether {group A} are writing their own site, leaving comments on other people’s sites, posting on a mailing list or forum, or making videos for YouTube or whatever. The main thing is that {group A} are creating, talking, commenting, collaborating; unlike the majority of Web users who are passive consumers of sites and services.

I have been saying for a year or two (e.g. in my crazy new year predictions), that the fast tracking of the half-baked MS OOXML format, whitewashing over valid and serious technical concerns and supplanting an existing, more mature standard (ODF), would have consequences; that the MS OOXML debacle was in danger of undermining ISO itself. If you stack too much on the roof, you will bring down the house.

Andy Updegrove still leads the coverage, on technical standards in general, and the MS OOXML debacle in particular. The latest development is that the state IT organisations of Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have released a statement indicating that they are losing confidence in ISO and that an ISO standard is no longer automatically the default choice for government use.

Science Fiction author and Free Culture campaigner Cory Doctorow has collected his non-fiction articles and essays in Content, which you can buy in print or download for free.

A very short hop to Lawrence Lessig, whose article Defense of Piracy explains why copyright law needs to be updated to enable not smother the digital generation’s outpouring of creativity.

Meanwhile, a Swedish couple have called their child Linux. Poor little thing. Imagine in 30 years time when current computer technology is completely obsolete; imagine being called "System V" or "Windows 95". If anyone out there is stuck for a name, call your child ‘John’ or ‘Zeth’, please do not go surfing through Sourceforge or Launchpad for baby names.

Have you written a post or comment somewhere else that I have not found? If so, then please share the URL in the comments below.

This is my (not very) regular series about what I have read on the web since last time.

Jürgen has written a post asking whether in the age of mobile phones, the need for a wrist watch is diminished?

Are smartphones a complete waste of time? Bug looks into the pros and cons. K thinks the iPhone is a big con, I have to agree. However, Garrick loves his iPhone.

Justin has a cat fight over OS X 10.5 (Leopard) playing up. For my sins, I have had to use OS X a bit in my new job, and I actually found Leopard less annoying than Tiger, mainly because in each version, OS X becomes less like NextSTEP and more like Linux.

Brock tries out XMLStarlet, the command line toolset for XML processing. Daniel looks at Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on Ubuntu and Gentoo. Paul has started to set up a backup server.

Andrew W dug up a nice graphical guide to the system crontab file. I personally am very happy at whoever invented the /etc/cron.hourly and /etc/cron.daily folders which are good enough for me most of the time.

Mez reminds us of the virtues of compressed air. Danux has started a new site called Amarus, there is not much there at the moment, but we wish him well.

Andy L talks about an issue I have been thinking about before, namely, if he current world wide web gets taken over by narrow minded corporate interests, shall we start our own World Wide Web? I have a slightly different suggestion, lets re-invade the forerunner to WWW, gopher.

Recently, at a conference that shall remain nameless, some cynical but funny person made a joke about the great BDFL. He did an impression of a Guido Van Rossum doll with a pull-string in his back, when the string was pulled, the Guido doll would talk half a dozen phrases about Python 3000 (and nothing else). Interestly, Craig Balding managed to interview Guido on a different subject, Google App Engine Security, and true to the joke, Guido says almost nothing.

Django NewFormsAdmin

If you do use Django, then you will want to know that the Django NewFormsAdmin branch has been
committed to SVN. Therefore, if you are running Django from the SVN version, then don’t SVN up until you have changed your code.

Basically Admin functions are now not part of the models.py file but instead are in a separate new file called admin.py. So cut and paste
your admin classes from models.py to admin.py as explained in this guide. This is the last major API change before Django becomes
1.0 in September.

This will presumably keep Christian Joergensen happy, as he recently had a moan about Django’s release schedule, i.e. Django has not made packaged releases that often. I personally disagree with Joergensen. For this type of software, releases are somewhat arbitrary and over-rated marketing tools.

For open source software, the mainline trunk should always be in a releasable state. With distributed development (i.e. when branching is cheap and easy) then there is no need for an old fashioned cycle of plan-develop-freeze-test-release-plan-develop-freeze… The trunk should be constantly tested.

The author admits that web frameworks move faster than some other types of software:

"This is a very long time, when you’re in the market of web frameworks."

So Django is not a GUI WYSIWYG web site creating program. You can’t just casually pick it up and make a website, you have to put time into it. To get the most out of Django, you have to read a huge pile of (mostly well written) documentation. Even for a seasoned Python programmer who knows other MVC frameworks, it will take an evening or so.

After this initial investment, if you decide to make your web applications using Django, then you are already committing yourself to keep up with the developments and improvements in the framework, i.e. keeping up to date with what the Django developers are doing. Therefore, tracking SVN is not unreasonable if you already know what changes are coming. Almost everyone paying even scant attention to Django, would have known about the impending NewFormsAdmin, the documentation page about it that I linked to above was first published on the 14th January 2007.

I do accept however, that Django does seem more suited for teams maintaining the same websites over time, e.g. in-house programmers or contractors on long-term service agreements; rather than one-off, develop and leave type development. However, the former probably does produce better web sites.

This is the latest installment in my regular(ish) series looking at some of
what I have read online since last time.

Pass the note

Andy W. wrote a fab post on on Libnotify, the library that makes little
notes pop up on Gnome-based Linux desktops (e.g. software updates
available).

In passing, Andy mentioned some Python bindings. They seemed quite easy to
use:

> import pynotify
>
> pynotify.init("Warrior")
>
> note = pynotify.Notification("Command Line Warriors", "Taking control of
your own technology")
>
> note.show()

Pretty sweet. Andrew goes on to explain about making notifications appear on
other machines which is even cooler.

I feel the need, the need for speed

I do a lot at the command line, and use a large number of command line
utilities, however I do not write particularly advanced scripts in the shell
language itself, if it is going to be more than four lines then I tend to
write the script in Python.

I know most of the syntax but I don’t yet have a feel for what is idomatic,
or what is efficient in shell. Pushing me in the right direction is Brock’s
site which has a post on shell script speed where he times various ways of
achieving things in shell.

Standardising failure

Unsurprisingly, the last few weeks of online reading has been dominated by
the shambles of a standardisation process that was OOXML. There are far too
many to talk about them all, so here is a random selection.

Rob Weir’s deadpan response made me laugh quite a bit.

Like me, the venerable Andy Updegrove was tracking the results in real
time.

If you are interested in the area, you should really read Andy U’s manifesto
for "Civil IT Rights". If you read TX’s post about Natural Law mentioned
below, I think you will get a flavour of where the freedom in technology
movement needs to go next.

Some coverage on some french forum linked to here. As did Andy L who has
set up another planet and added my blogs to it. Thanks for that.

Boycott Novell rounds up the present situation, arguing that if competing
standards is what they want, then that is what we should give them, we should
rally round the OpenDocument format and blow OOXML out of the water.

It is nice to see that some of the mainstream tech press took an
interest in the OOXML situation.

Security is a process

Justin gives 11 security tips, (yes not a dozen or a top ten, but eleven
. Measuring myself against his tips, I scored nine out of eleven. How many
do you get?

It is good to not understate physical security. I had a laptop stolen from my
house, which was rather horrible at the time. In the end, I got a new laptop
on my insurance and the burglar got 12 months in prison. However, I am making
sure that if it happens again I am totally prepared.

What I am trying to achieve with my laptop is to cover all the bases:

All of which only take a moment to set up, but it is well worth it if my laptop gets stolen again.

Call me Young Gun

Mez has an interesting post about names. People get very touchy about what
they are called in online/offline lives.

My approach from when I first had a home page in 1998 has been to be
mononymous, to only use my first name online, kind of like Madonna, except
without a funny bra.

This went downhill a bit when I got into free/open source software because
mailing list archives contain my full name. However, I am trying to get it
back together.

In real life no one ever really uses my last name either. Wherever I am, I
tend to be the only Zeth.

Newly discovered sites

Talking of names, I noticed a (new to me) site by a guy called K. Mandla in
my incoming links. Lots of interesting posts, especially about testing
forthcoming software. Another nice post was about console-based word
processors. I have not tried them out, but it will be interesting to see
what they can add over a text editor such as Emacs or Vim.

Also in my incoming links was a Swedish site by Ake Forslund. I live with
a Finn who translated the first page of posts to me. Seems good stuff so if
you can read Swedish check it out.

While I am on the topic of incoming links, my review of Torchwood made in
onto some Sci-Fi site which is pretty cool.

The Mighty TX has started writing, with an introductory post pointing out
the connection between natural law and free/open source software.

That is almost it for this time. If you come across something cool, or write
something that has never been covered here, please let me know about it!

Gratuitous Plug

As some of you know, I have a secondary site that takes articles too off-
topic for here. In it I advocate largely abolishing prisons, with work
gangs for those who can be integrated back into society and the death
penalty for those who can’t.

I also discuss feminism, the decline in marriage and whether we should
legalise polygamy.

Discuss this post – Leave a comment

So a couple of weeks ago, I challenged all you warriors, well at least those
of you using Linux on your laptops, to encrypt your /home directory by
Christmas.

Doing everything up to and before the 25th December is of course the modern
way of celebrating Christmas. In older times, it was the other way up, the
25th December was just the first day of Christmas, Epiphany (January 6th) was
the big climatic celebration (where people swapped presents, wore crowns and
got drunk), so it is still a great time to start protecting your home
directory

Some of you are fellow ramblers and have discussed the campaign in your
blogs, thanks for that. Here is a quick run through of the posts that I can
currenly spot in my RSS Reader. There are probably a few more out there, so
if I have I missed your blog, apologies, please let the world know about it
by leaving a comment.

• Andrew Perry mentions that you can also set a master password in
  Firefox to protect your saved passwords, rather than the default which is
  to let anyone who has access to the browser to view and use the saved
  passwords.
• Mike rewrites the instructions according to what he did, a great
  idea. He argues that on Gentoo cryptsetup is the ebuild you want,
  apparently cryptsetup-luks is old hat as the main cryptsetup ebuild
  contains LUKS now.
• Menelkir sails into another minor problem, if you use the Ubuntu
  graphical boot splash then you can’t see when it asks for the password,
  d’oh! His solution is to turn off the splash screen, this is a good idea
  anyway as you can see what your system is up to more generally.

Another approach for those who want to keep the splashiness would be to
change the init scripts so that it doesn’t try to mount /home so early, and
then make it ask for the password when you are at the login manger. There is
a script for this called gcryptmount, and a Gentoo wiki page about how
to use it. It shouldn’t be too hard to fiddle with a few paths so it works on
Ubuntu.

• Albert doesn’t appear to be a believer yet. He argues that he
  never lets his laptop leave his person. However, I would point out that I
  do not either, but you only have to lose it once.

As regulars readers will know, I had my Gentoo-running Macbook stolen from
my digs while I was at work. Even worse, I once heard of a person having
their laptop stolen at knife-point by some crackhead.

Perhaps these are extreme examples but it so easy to setup encryption on
Linux that I think everyone should do it anyway. I have been using the
encrypted /home for a month and I cannot notice any performance impact at
all.

After all, compared to Windows or OS X, the Linux desktop does not actually
use much in the way of system resources in general. I have about 20 programs
open, and about about 40 browser tabs, and it is only using half of my
laptop’s RAM and the processor runs between 5% and 30%. Even in the unlikely
event that I do something extremely intensive that maxes the laptop out,
there will be lots of other bottlenecks that will need to be solved before
the speed of writing or reading from /home becomes an issue.

• As Justin points out (put on your best Marlon Brando Godfather
  voice), "Do it or you may regret it later". So don’t say we didn’t tell
  you!

Lastly, to all you Warriors out there, have a very Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year!

Hello everyone, welcome back to our occassional series about what I have read
online since last time. Without further ado, let’s dive in to the next
installment.

Another reason why Linux is better for the environment

CNN reports that switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-
operated one can slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%, I’m not
surprised.

Five years ago, I built my main home Linux desktop. I did my research well
and I tried to get the best components that I could on a very tight budget,
hoping that it would not be redundant for at least three years when I would
hand it down to someone else; after all someone who is on the computer for a
unusual amount of time needs a responsive system.

Yet after five years, it is still completely perfect for Linux, way over the
system requirements and it runs all the latest desktop effects and only uses
up 50% of the RAM. I do not foresee replacing it for at least another three
years, maybe more; it just doesn’t need any more power. Not at least until
there is some unforeseen major change in Linux. By the way, the computer
won’t run Windows Vista, in the Windows world it is ready for the bin.

Catalogue of cool

The Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons and Wikimedia have put their
heads together and made the GNU Free Documentation licence and the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike licence compatible. Having the two the
biggest licences in free culture become compatible allows far more remixing,
combining and creative innovation with shared community content, really cool!

Phill has written a Battleships game in Javascript, I totally slaughtered
the enemy’s navy, time after time, so the robot hoards are not going to be
invading England by boat any time soon.

I just discovered mod_wsgi, which can host any Python App written to the
WSGI standard. It can even run in daemon mode (i.e. in its own process), my
favourite way to run web apps. So it is a really good idea, when I get to try
it I’ll let you know if it works.

Talking of Python have a look at Andy’s blog for a fun comic.

Bug talks about why he wrote his own blog software, namely so he could
have his posts in files, he wanted complete control and to avoid spam.

This is similar to why I stopped using WordPress and built my own custom
setup over Pyblosxom. I now write posts using a text editor, press save and
then I have a post. Maybe it is just that I spend too much time making
websites that when relaxing I don’t want to see a web interface. It is also
still easier to compose in a text editor than a website text box. I also have
had no spam since moving to Pyblosxom so I think a lot of spammers are
particularly targeting the major blog platforms such as WordPress.

Guns and Bombs

Dallas News reports that Joe Horn watched two men burgle the house next
door, when two men came into his yard and towards his house, with seemingly
perfect aim, he shot both of them with his shotgun. The interesting thing is
that the whole time he was on a cellphone call to the 911 operator. Another
twist is that we can listen to the whole thing online! E.g. here on
Youtube (note the title is incorrect, they were on Horn’s property when
they were shot).

I am not a fan of gun ownership in general, and I have often argued that
there is no reason at all for anyone to own a handgun as they have no
practical use and they can be concealed, while hunters’ rifles can be easily
controlled by licences. However, whether this gun was owned for hunting or
not, and despite my pacifist views, I have very little sympathy for the two
dead robbers, who were also both convicted drug-dealers, meaning two birds
with one shell. If they die while undertaking a robbery, then they have only
yourself to blame. Listen to the recording and make up your own mind.

I am not a fan of time-bombed software or content, I think it verges on the
abuse of the user. However, as Eric You XU points out, nothing stops you
providing different times to different programs and he explains a couple
of ways to do that.

Congrats to PDF

In the brouhaha about the flawed OOXML specification and Microsoft’s somewhat
questionable attempt to make it an international standard, it is easy to miss
that PDF is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard, as James is keen
to point out that PDF is a cross-platform format for communication of
finished documents, not a format for revisable native documents.

Menelkir has hit the problem of people sharing Microsoft Office 2007
documents with him. This is something I should certainly look into one of
these days. How are you finding the MS Office 2007 documents? I have never
received one yet, probably because my University where I work and study has
set the old formats as the default on the install images.

Discuss This Post – Leave a comment

Hello, this is my regular look at what I have read online since last time.

Game performance on Linux vs Windows

I really like the original Enemy Territory game, it has a Linux client and
server (among other platforms) and you run around and shoot your friends in a
second world war setting. I only came to it quite recently, the guys at the
Clan.Lugradio have been teaching me how to play.

A new game came out a few weeks ago called Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It
has a familiar type of gameplay but it is based in the Quake Sci-Fi world so
I am personally less interested in it, however it is massive in the Linux
world, not all commercial games have a Linux port so that builds the hype up
for those that do.

Michael Larabel measured the performance of ATI cards on Linux and
Windows:

> Wow! We were completely blown away when our final results came in and the
Linux 8.42.3 driver had outperformed Windows Vista with Catalyst 7.10 in
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It wasn’t just a neck-and-neck race but Linux
was about 10 frames per second faster when running at 1280 x 1024 and 1680 x
1050.

When given a chance with native ports, Linux can really rock as a game
platform. Expect more major games to arrive on Linux.

Understanding the Linux Desktop

Andrew W argues that Is Linux ready for the desktop isn’t even the right
question:

> A lot of the time the complaints mostly just come down to "Linux isn’t
Windows", where the reviews for some reason expects Linux to be a exact
Windows replacement and any where Linux differs from Windows is seen as a
fault.
>….<br> Currently reviewers look at Linux and it doesn’t work they way they
expect so they cite this as a reason that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop,
so therefore by the same standards I can say with equal validity that Windows
isn’t ready for the desktop. Of course neither is really the case.

Dominic Humphries wrote an article called Linux is Not Windows, something
that I have to remind people often. He is a little more pessimistic than I
would be, his conclusion is basically go away newbies and get a Mac or use
Windows, we don’t want you and we don’t need you. However his reasoning is
quite sound and well articulated:

> It is logically impossible for any thing to be better than any other thing
whilst remaining completely identical to it. A perfect copy may be equal, but
it can never surpass. So when you gave Linux a try in hopes that it would be
better, you were inescapably hoping that it would be different. Too many
people ignore this fact, and hold up every difference between the two OSes as
a Linux failure.

Johan Hartzenberg likewise encourages us to Have faith in Linux:

> People will always compare their experience of Linux with what they are
used to getting from Windows. Unfortunately human nature have us focus on the
negatives, and this means people overlook the great features of Linux and
open source software because of a few small troubles.

New and Improved this month

Don Hopkins, the author of the early X ports of the original version of
SimCity, is rewriting the front end in Python so it will work on the OLPC
XO. Yes, the original SimCity is going open source, how cool is that!

Although given it’s last rights a year ago, proving that you can’t keep a
good dog down, venerable media player XMMS just released a new version,
1.2.11 only 1211 days since the previous release (see what they did there .

The Mozilla.com Firefox build is proprietary software (use Epiphany!), so the
Linux distributors download the source code, strip out the proprietary art,
blobs and (sometimes) trademarks. Well some bright spark had the idea of
adding this to the Firefox build process so this version would be
automatically available from Mozilla. I hope this is implemented by someone.

On Monday, Version 3 of the Affero GPL was published. The AGPL is designed
for software that runs on a server. The regular GPL can be used for server
software quite fine. However, if you want people who use your software as an
online service to share their changes back with you, then you need to use the
AGPL.

The Importance of openness

Andy L talks about why we should look into the Open Rights group.

Bruce Perens still has it, his article The Confusion of Tongues: EIF 2.0,
Standards, and Interoperability. He talks about why we must not compromise
on open standards:

> The reality is that Open Standards are available to use today, and are the
easiest alternative for a vendor to implement unless customer lock-in is the
goal. There is no reason for customers to accept second best and then
"migrate" later.

In the IT business there’s a saying about what vendors want: "Every kid wants
a pony." It means that vendors will want more than is reasonable for us, the
customer, to give to them. For our own good, we need those vendors to have a
piece of the pie rather than the whole pie, with reasonable but not huge
profit margins, and lots of competition to keep them on their toes. Open
Standards and the interoperability that results from them are our main tool
in balancing what our vendors want against what is good for us, the customer.

Pull it all apart

Soledad Penades gently prises her Mac Mini apart, with lots of photos and
videos.

I start up my Windows installs about once a year, usually for testing that
some Python script I have written is cross-platform or something, and I
usually have no any idea what any of the passwords are. Well some anonymous
blogger talks about how to recover your Windows passwords using Linux
LiveCDs.

ASUS have made a little computer called the the EeePC. Brad Linder explains
how to escape from the default point and shoot interface to a full KDE
desktop.

Paul Buchheit has a good rant about Amazingly bad APIs.

Bug explains how to use IMAP on Gmail, even if they haven’t offered it to
you in particular. Bug also recommends you when you make hyperlinks, ditch
the target attribute in your anchor references, advice I would heartily
second.

Andrew Min explains How to completely ditch GUI internet applications for
the command line, as I have mentioned many times before, I myself use
Elinks and Mutt quite a lot.

Bootnotes

Mistaken or out-dated SatNav data is being blamed for trucks crashing into
houses. We of course know that it is really the Terminators.

The English football team lost a very important match against Croatia,
meaning they will not be in the 2008 European Football Championship. Part of
the problem was the goalkeeper Scott Carson, let in three goals on his first
appearance for his country. What is the problem? Well look at the following
images:

He forgot to park his jet in front of the goal.

Discuss this post – Leave a comment

Welcome to ‘This Week’, my occasional series about what I have read recently.
You are encouraged to tell me if you have written or read something cool that
I should notice. Another person to do just that is Rich McIver:

> Hi Zeth,
><br> We recently published "Linux for Business: 50 Apps to Get your Office
on Open Source". I figured I’d bring it to your attention in case you think
your readers would find it useful.
><br>Either way, keep up the great blogging!

Reading through the list I was reminded how much great stuff there is
available from the Open Source community. Are there any businesses of
significant size that do not use at least any free/open-source software
somewhere in the organisation? I doubt it. It just shows how far we have
come. It won’t be long before we will be at the point where no computer user
will be without some free software on their PC, even if they do not realise
that it is there. We are winning, just very subtly and quietly.

Calling all in transit – Radio Free Europe Amarok

Something that should wake us up a bit is a live 24/7 online free music
station. The ever-kinetic Mez is working on ‘Radio Amarok’. It sounds
absolutely fantastic, an idea whose time has certainly arrived. As regular
readers will know, I absolutely love trawling around the web for new Creative
Commons-licenced music to stick on my Rockbox to listen to while walking
around the city.

The webpage (currently just a holding page), explains that the aim to use
only Free Software in the creation of the radio station and only freely
licenced music played on air. It is a fantastic concept. Free Software/open
source is the beginning of us gaining digital freedom, music is one of the
next important steps forward.

The webpage also mentions that it wants to have a talk show about KDE, I’m
not sure how that fits in with free music, the former is quite limited
interest, but the latter is potentially of interest to anyone who likes music
(including GNOME users and real people outside the current free/open source
community), but hey, try anything once (except incest and morris dancing -
Oscar Wilde). They can always change the branding as they go.

Python Web Frameworks

As you know I have started to use Pylons even though it is somewhat poorly
documented right now and it takes a while to get anything actually done in
it.

Well Andrew W has really stepped up to the plate and reviewed all three of
the latest Python web frameworks. Andrew is a professional geek above all
geeks (university programmer/researcher), and even he also found that the
steps into Pylons are significantly steeper than in Django and Turbogears, so
there is hope for the rest of us after all! I still like the ideas in Pylons
and am waiting eagly for the book to come out, I’ll write a review then.

Unbundle the PC

It is the declared policy of the European Commission to make the operating
systems market more competitive, success being measured by the respective
market shares of the various competitors moving significantly back into a
more healthy balance.

The Globalisation Institute is an influential Brussels-based think tank, they
have been researching how to actually do that in practice, this is summarised
in a two-page policy briefing (PDF format). The Globalisation Institute
concludes that the Windows monopoly is bad for business, bad for society and
bad for Europe, and "Windows’ competitors, like Red Hat Linux are cheaper but
locked out by bundling".

They looked at every other possible option, but the only way to restore
competition, the only way that could actually work, is to "simply to insist
that operating systems are purchased separately from desktop and laptop
computers."

So if I buy a DVD player from a shop and take it home, I have to plug it into
my TV for it to actually do anything. Likewise, the idea would be that you
buy the hardware, you buy the software, you take everything home and put
software on the hardware. Before you dismiss this idea, you should really
read the briefing, it answers all the most predictable criticisms:

"We do not believe this would add complexity for consumers. Consumers would
simply be asked to insert an operating system DVD when they first turn on a
new computer, which would then automatically configure itself."

According to the report, the idea is that manufacturers of computers would
compete to make this experience as painless as possible. The recommended
policy allows the hardware manufacturer to include a helpful driver DVD that
can be used after the operating system is installed.

I certainly agree with the findings of this policy briefing. Users must take
control of their own computers. Having users neglect their responsibilities,
combined with the software monoculture, is what has lead to such a fertile
climate for viruses, malware, botnets and so on.

Every user would also have at least two DVDs, one with the operating system
on, and one with the manufacturer’s extras on. So every user would always be
able to reinstall their system to this state. This is far superior to some
current setups where the user gets the computer but without the complete
installation CDs, but rather some watered-down half-arsed restore CDs which
may or may not actually work two years down the line.

On the question of piracy, the policy briefing points out that other
companies manage to successfully sell software on CD/DVD, so Microsoft, which
already has activation for its software, should not get special treatment.

When faced with the choice of trying out alternate operating systems cheaply
or for free, or paying several hundred pounds for Microsoft software, then
many will choose the former: "Unbundling would foster a competitive market,
increase consumer choice and reduce prices."

All good news for us Europeans. It also means that Microsoft will have to
reduce the price that it charges in stores for the unbundled operating system
compared to the OEM price.

Don’t forget at the moment, that you are also heavily ripped off by virtue of
being a European. In America, you can walk into Best Buy and pick up Windows
Vista Ultimate for $379.99 American Dollars, that is £186.41 British pounds.
In England, if you walk into PC World, Windows Vista Ultimate, the exact same
software, costs £369.99 British Pounds, that is $754.19 American Dollars. So
British consumers are ripped of by a further $374.20 dollars or £183.58
pounds. Good thing that no one is rushing out to buy Vista yet anyway.

We have talked about home consumers so far, what about companies? Well how it
works in the moment, is that a company will buy a PC that comes with Windows
(even if you do not need it), and they will then reinstall it with the
corporate image. So the new policy it would not any trouble for them, but
they can save on not having to buy Windows licences if they do not need them.

At the moment there is no financial incentive for many companies to try out
something else, because they were given Windows to start with. Under the
unbundled policy, companies and institutions can choose to try out a cheaper
or free operating system and save the difference, reducing their costs.

Most companies either depend on the state of the economy as a whole or have
their own industry cycles. So every company has ups and downs, it is in the
slump periods when cost-cutting becomes extremely important and the indirect
bother of changing seems less important than the direct cash savings.

If the company is scared of going bust this year, arguments about long-term
and intangible ‘cost of ownership’ studies do not matter, you have just got
to cut the luxuries. If it is a choice between proprietary licences and
salaries, even the most die-hard Windows supporter becomes a Richard
Stallman.

If a company moves to Linux in the low, then when times improve, and if Linux
has equivalent or better functionality, then there is no reason to switch
back to Windows when the good times return, it is just an extra cost.

How to Start in Linux?

Talking about switching to Linux, if you have arrived at this blog randomly
and never used Linux before but you are interested then one place to start
would be to read Menelkir’s post.

One of the interesting points that he raises is about whether you should
bother burning your own install CD or order one online. I have always just
toasted my own and often talked about that on this blog. But thinking about
it, in 2007, ordering a CD online might be a really good way to start,
especially if you are not an IT worker/student and so have pressing
commitments on your time away from the computer. Maximising the time you
spend inside Linux is how to be productive and so feel like you are getting
somewhere.

If someone has never burned a CD before, and all they have is Windows, then
the worst-case scenario is that they have to get decent cd-burning software
and then take a few attempts to actually burn it (i.e. burn it is an image
not a file!). This might take them a frustrating couple of hours if they are
alone (tip: don’t be alone – use online help such as IRC, or real-life help
at your local Linux User Group) and learning as they go. Of course it is
really easy if you already know how, but flying the space shuttle is really
easy if you already know how.

I was a bit indecisive whether I should mention particular options here, but
just saying "order a CD online" is not very practical. When the BBC promotes
it’s own TV guide it says "other programme listings are available", so I take
the same approach here. The following is what I know works, there will be
other great (and not so great) options out there too. If you have used one of
these other options then please tell us about it by leaving a comment.

If you are really patient then you can use the Ubuntu ShipIt system to get
a CD postage and cost free, but they only ship twice per year or something,
so you might be waiting a while. I received one of these and the CD itself
came in a groovy red colour.

Another example is the Linux Emporium who are based here in Europe, they
are a small organisation/company who aim to spread Linux and open source
software in various ways, they have been around in one form or another for a
decade or two.

The Linux Emporium will burn a CD for you and post it to you straight away.
For example, at the current price, a single CD distro to me in the UK works
out at less than a fiver, pretty good considering that most of the cost will
be postage and taxes, even better when you think about the cost of Windows
Vista (see above). Ubuntu and Fedora both have single CD bootable LiveCDs, so
that might be one place to start.

An advantage of that is you get the name of your chosen distribution printed
directly on the CD. I have several hundred home-burned CDs and I have no idea
what is on them!

Another source of premade CDs are magazines sometimes mount Linux
install/LiveCDs on their cover. These days, I only read a lot of computer
magazines when I go on long trips, but one magazine that comes to my head now
is "Linux: User and Developer", but there are many others too.

More expensive options are distributions that are shrink-wrapped in cardboard
boxes with a manual/and or telephone support, you can get this from places
like the Linux Emporium or directly from that distribution. This is one of
the options that Menelkir discusses. I personally have never needed phone
support but again, if you are in a rush and have money, it will be quicker
than Googling for the answer. Again, if you are an IT worker/student, save
the money for beer.

The last option that I can think of is to email your local LUG and say that
you want to try Linux for the first time, and ask whether anyone got a spare
CD that they do not need any more. You never know, you might find someone in
your local who can help you. If someone actually comes around and provides
free computing help, then be sure to give them a beer or make them a simple
meal. Reciprocity is very important, as is being a polite neighbour.

More Advanced Linux

A couple of months ago, I rationalised the Linux distros into ten Linux
Distributions that were worth knowing about if you were coming to it from
scratch. Bruce Byfield wittles it down to seven distributions.

I did a random rant last week trying to understand the computers around me
and how I got here, i.e. that using two different distros is the most
optimal set up for me, there is no single distro to rule them all. Andrew L
has written ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son‘, explaining his setup and
also his latest experience of installing Gentoo.

On the same subject of my own computing setup, I recently started to think
outloud about how I might replace my home server. On that note, Rachel
Greenham explains how to set up the ‘perfect home server‘.

Let’s end this week with this thought from Richard Mason:

> Now I feel that just in the last couple of years, we have started to come
round again with the re-universalization of the geek. All of a sudden
everyone is desperate to be a geek. We have people claiming to be "drama
geeks" and "wine geeks." I say, what the $&#* is a wine geek? Is there a
Doctor Who episode about wine?

Doctor Who, like all true geeks, drinks Real Ale of course.

Discuss this post – leave a comment.