Steve Reads

In the interest of fairness (and of making this blog All Linux All The Time), I present one Debian developer’s take on why Debian, Ubuntu, and GNOME are all less usable than Windows.

There’s been a fair bit of talk about whether the Common Development and Distribution License under which OpenSolaris is licensed is “free enough” (where I’d say that the GPL is canonically “free enough”). I’m looking at the OpenSolaris homepage right now, because a friend has come to possess a Sun SparcStation 5 and offered to pass it along to Boston. The homepage says that “The source code for one of the Solaris operating system’s most advanced features — Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available here.” So I wonder: could I take DTrace and incorporate it into Linux without a) paying any fees to anyone or b) breaking the law? That’s the ultimate definition of “open source,” complicated though the answer might be by very legitimate legal concerns (e.g., Adam Rosi-Kessel tells me that a lot of proprietary software packages couldn’t be open-sourced, because they license other proprietary code; your decision to open-source doesn’t just depend on your own code). I wonder whether OpenSolaris is open source in the only sense that really counts.

The American media have largely played this weekend’s French rejection of the EU constitution as opposition to change, opposition to globalization, French imperiousness, and the ignorance of the countryside (apparently those in the provinces were much more likely to vote against it than those in cities). I’ve been reading weblogs belonging to a lot of Europeans (see, e.g., Miguel de Icaza), and I’m getting a rather different sense:

1. That the EU constitution was tailored to corporate interests rather than to those of human beings, and

2. That the document was 150 pages long. Lots of people — including George Will, if memory serves — have pointed out that a constitution is supposed to embody a nation’s highest principles in fairly abstract terms (using the American Constitution, of course, as the prototype); it’s not supposed to be as bureaucratic and legal as an ordinary law.

Obviously if the majority of the French rejected it, there was something the matter with it. Yet the sense I get from reading major media is that the French rejection of the Constitution was a major bummer.

I really know nothing about European unification, and I’d like to. I didn’t understand until a couple years ago why it is that the entire world wouldn’t move to a unified currency, as Europe has. Adam Rosi-Kessel helpfully responded that moving to a unified currency makes it very hard for individual nations to conduct monetary policy to address problems within their own economies. To combat this problem, the EU came up with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, about which I also know nothing. I think part of the idea is that nations which are doing well economically will help support those that aren’t.

Then there’s the Maastricht Treaty. And the Nice Treaty. And somewhere there must exist a treaty establishing that all the European nations are required to pass the Constitution before it’s enacted (perhaps this is part of the Constitution itself).

Basically, I know very little, and I’d like to know more. If anyone can suggest a book that covers the whole bloody business (including the process which led to each of the treaties; I always find that the messiness of the process is as interesting as the product, and more illuminating), I’d love to read it.

A word to the wise: sometimes it’s fun to run your computer at the bleeding edge, but quite often it’s just a pain in the ass. So it is with upgrading my laptop to Breezy Badger, the latest version of Ubuntu. It will be released as a stable version in October after months of testing, but there were certain features I wanted — Firefox 1.0.4, Mono (hence Beagle), OpenOffice 2.0, the ability to choose the subtitling font when watching DVDs in Totem, and so forth — so I decided to upgrade now and help a little with debugging.

I should have remembered that this early in the release cycle, bugs are pretty rampant. They’re annoying bugs, too — like the absence of a symbolic link pointing to the fonts directory, causing the X server to fail very quickly in the startup sequence. Amateur stuff like that. I’m sure all the stupid bugs will be squashed within a few days, but in the meantime they’re just annoying. And I still can’t properly play DVDs or music. Feh.

Remind me to be less of an Ubuntu stud (?) next time around.

P.S.: Well, at least it’s good to see that some sizable portion of the bugs I’m experiencing have to do with a big X.org overhaul. Which is to say: the payoff looks fairly sizable, if they can just get over this first pile of bugs.

P.P.S.: At least some of my problems playing music (and possibly DVDs?) can be fixed just by killing ESD (via the command killall esd). (For the unaware, and for the benefit of Google, ESD is the Enlightened Sound Daemon.) So maybe there’s just something broken in ESD, but nothing too broken overall.

Seems like a laudable goal: GNOME gets 10% of the desktop market by 2010. That would be better, if memory serves, than Apple’s ever done. Fingers crossed that the GNOME team (which is to say, all of us who use it) can make it happen.

It’s moribund for now, but Adam Rosi-Kessel and I have it in our heads to design a replacement for Evite called Freevite . We both find Evite just very scummy, and I at least find the potential for privacy violations pretty rampant. Our (for-now-inchoate) idea is that you’d be able to run FreeVite on your own machine with very limited hardware and software, so that most anyone with a permanently-connected cable or DSL account could run a FreeVite server. And you wouldn’t need to sign into a website to register whether you’re coming; you could simply reply to the invitation email with the words ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’, and possibly an explanation (we’ve not thought it through that far yet).

Someday soon, we’ll find some way to start this. We shouldn’t have to build much of this from scratch; it seems to me that the basic idea wouldn’t be hard to implement atop something like Zope or Plone or  . . .  Mono? I don’t really know the architectures, but soon I hope to figure this all out.

Note to self (and others): LongWind organic tomatoes are goddamned good. The Burlington (Vermont) Cheese Outlet on Pine Street sells them, and my lord they’re tasty. Definitely the best tomatoes I’ve had in recent memory.

(Please ignore the tai chi photo on LongWind’s website. Enjoy the tomatoes, and forget the earth-mother bit.)

I just finished watching Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, Bad Education (La Mala Educación). I’m running off to a wedding-related event, so I can’t write much about it. The long and the short of it is that Almodóvar is great at melodrama. It’s so melodramatic it’s almost campy, but in a good way. (Is “camp” always good? “Kitsch” never is, but I think camp is self-consciously kitsch. Which makes it good somehow.)

P.S.: The movie is NC-17, and I see no good reason why that’s so. Presumably it’s because of a few scenes of gay sex. But these scenes are no more graphic than the standard heterosexual Tender Passionate Love Scene, and it seems like one of the dying embers of homophobia in this country that they bothered to slap an NC-17 label on the movie for this reason alone.

I’m told that I should listen to The Polyphonic Spree’s new album. I’ve never heard their music, but I’d like to. If anyone owns a copy of their album and would like to rip me a copy, please email me and I’ll let you know how to upload it to my machine. Thanks in advance.

Ian Hickson has an interesting report from XTech, the conference dedicated to the future of XML. Birbeck and Pemberton’s talk, in particular, is cool.

OS X and now XP have a nice “Fast User Switching” feature, which allows you to log in as a new user without logging out the current user. Linux, as far as I know, only has this feature for character-mode terminal windows; it’s not possible to have multiple users logged into graphical windows at once.

It would be a damned handy feature, and I hope GNOME (or X  . . .  what’s the right layer to implement this?) incorporates it into a forthcoming version. There’s been a discussion on Planet Gnome about this for a while, and the latest salvo comes from James Cape. I’m not sure what this idea’s status is; perhaps I should ask James.

You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see the GPL re-released under the GPL. That way if I decided that I liked certain parts of the GPL (like the font, say) but not other parts (the requirement that derivative works be governed by the same license as the original), I could release my own fork of the GPL. Then others could choose whether to use my GPL, and may the best license win.

It’s kinda funny: I’m home near Burlington, Vermont right now, and during the day I saw a headline about a local telecom executive that I didn’t bother to dig more deeply into. Now I see (via Slashdot) that the article is about Burlington’s plans to deploy high-speed fiber to every home in town. Rock on, Burlington! I hope this happens.

I include the article below the fold. I think I may do that often now, rather than setting aside a separate cache. I’m not sure which is the best approach, but feel free to chime in.

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I’ve never watched a DVD on my laptop before; now’s my first — Owning Mahowny. It’s really pretty cool to watch a DVD on a laptop; with nice headphones on and the lights turned off, this may actually be more immersive than a theatre.

P.S.: For some reason I couldn’t get the menus or subtitles to work with totem-gstreamer; I had to use totem-xine instead. I have no idea really what either of these do, but I’m sure it’s swell.

Also I had to turn on DMA for my DVD reader, using the hdparm command. Again, this is something that should Just Work — if your DVD drive supports DMA and some hardware list certifies that nothing will break when you use it, it should be turned on. Without DMA, the video was too jumpy; with DMA turned on, it was perfectly smooth.

I think I may have just wine-stained my parents’ cat.

She is now dutifully licking off the wine, which makes me curious whether she’s going to get drunk.

It would be nice if your filesystem kept track of every version of every file you’ve ever written. If you wanted to go back to a 1990 version of something that you keep up to date (say, your résumeé, though I’m not sure why you’d want the old one), it would be nice if you could dig back and find it.

My friends — Adam Rosi-Kessel, Ken Shan, Dylan Thurston, Samuel Klein and others — who run a server together have been doing something like this for a while: whenever anyone changes the configuration of some program, he first has to “check it out” using the Revision Control System (RCS). After he’s done, he checks it back in.

I have literally no experience with any systems like this, but I gather that the next step up from RCS is something like CVS or Subversion. And now I see that Debian Developer Kai Hendry has put his entire home directory under Subversion. He used Joey Hess as an inspiration.

In my ideal, you wouldn’t have any choice whether to check a file out before modifying it: the mere act of modifying the file would entail its being checked out. I need to dig in a bit, but I’m inclined to do the same thing with my own home directory. Hopefully this will make it impossible for me to lose files.

Can someone tell me why Google bought Blogger, and what value they’ve gotten out of it? Have they even brought a very Googly touch to it?

Everyone’s supposed to know everything about New York. Whether or not we live there, there’s a New York thing we’re supposed to be intimately familiar with. The New York sense of rushedness is world-famous. New York is a place that everyone is supposed to want to go to, but that few can actually handle. It’s a place for the toughest of people. It’s a place whose residents relentlessly pat themselves on the back in front of cameras for their supremacy in everything — culture, finance, sports, style, toughness.

Boston needs this. In fact, really any city could use this, but only New York has it. Chicago maybe has a comparable mystique — city of the broad shoulders and all that — but that’s about it. No one is expected to know anything about San Francisco. No one of Woody Allen’s stature has made a movie about New Orleans that’s as good as Allen’s Manhattan, though it has a crazy-party-animal backstory. No one knows a fucking thing about St. Louis. (Though, granted, I grew up in the Northeast, so maybe the middle of the country knows more about its neighbors than I do.)

But Boston seems like it could grow this kind of mythology. It has history, for one thing. It’s filled with brilliant people. It’s a town that tourists, I think, could feel they know fairly well after a day’s walk. (Though of course no one can learn any city that well in that little time — which is why tourism is ultimately unsatisfying to me.) It’s a compact place. It feels like a big city for humans. Plus it has that Northeastern bitterness that everyone loves. (What’s the Kennedy description of Washington, D.C.? “A city of northern charm and southern efficiency”?)

Boston needs a P.R. makeover. It has a lot going for it. It should start capitalizing on its charms. Of course, it also has wretchedly thoroughgoing politics, so the odds of any coherent P.R. strategy coming out of it are fairly small. But a guy can dream.

Even if it’s true that Roe v. Wade will never be overturned, it’s useful to behave as though it will be — because the consequences of acting as though it will be are positive, no matter how Roe itself will turn out.

Suppose that the open-source movement is really doomed to failure. It’s still useful to pretend that it’s succeeding, because the reality — the actual state of open-source in the world — is guided by how likely people think it is to survive and thrive. The more people who act like it’s thriving (and in reality, I think it is thriving — the numbers bear me out), the more likely it is to thrive.

It’s kind of too bad that reality doesn’t bear any necessary correspondence to usefulness, as the above examples demonstrate.

Neat little bit of hackery: some guy has figured out the format of Amazon image URLs. Apparently Amazon doesn’t just keep many different image formats — large, small, red percent-discount sticker, yellow percent-discount sticker, etc. — on its servers. Instead the image URL encodes the format for the image, and parts of the image are generated dynamically. Neat.

(Via Copyfight)

P.S.: Cool. Here’s the cover of a book I was looking at, with a 99%-off sticker attached.