The Grey Shadow

(Click on the image for a much larger version)

It’s been a while. I’ve been busy as usual, with really hectic days. My Christmas was nice, but January was a difficult month. I had to face several challenges, including several (and expensive) repairs to the car. I’m still sitting tight, but meanwhile there are news.

The PC I was using at the office (running an unpatched copy of XP; I don’t manage the IT operation, so don’t look at me) kept crashing again and again. The situation got so bad that one day I experienced > 15 crashes, thus seriously hindering my ability to get any work done. Since the only computer available was a Mac, guess what I’ve got.

The picture says it all. I’ve got an iMac with a nice screen, 300 GB HDD and 2 GB RAM. It is ancient, running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), so you can get the idea. I think this is one of the first Macs running with Intel processors.

So far it’s been a nice experience. A Mac is a wholly different beast than a Windows or Linux PC. Things such as window or application management are done with a different workflow; and some of it could be downright annoying for someone used to a PC. But it gets the work done, and that’s important. All in all, an opportunity to learn something new.

First things first: Merry Christmas! A Christmas post is imminent. Stay tuned

And second: It’s been a looong time! I know, I know… but work and law school conspired to make regular posting impossible. However, I have several writings maturing, so hopefully there’s going to be something for you in these days.

With that being said, I would like to share with you an excellent opinion piece by former programmer and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci on The Atlantic: Wikileaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy. There, and among other interesting points of view, she contends that the whole Wikileaks affair exposes the “dissent tax”, the fact that corporate entities, understood in its widest sense (i.e., agencies, governments, corporations) exert the power to swiftly restricting a pseudo-free speech of anyone who threaten their vested interests.

Some quotations are in order:

Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a “dissent tax” on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one’s ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a ”quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent…

Further, while one may disagree with the particular methods chosen by Wikileaks–and I certainly have my criticisms– [...] It seems to me that states (and corporations) have become increasingly secretive and opaque, while people are increasingly exposed. This divergence was lampooned quite effectively by Saturday Night Live. “I give you private information about corporations for free,” SNL’s Assange quipped, “And I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s the Man of the Year.”…

During these past weeks, [...] I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech…

The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private.  If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power….

The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information. The fact that information is “there” in a torrent, or openly on a website that is not easily accessible or has been vilified, is about as relevant as your right to shout at your TV…

What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet. As a dissident content provider, you might have to fight your DNS provider. You might need to fund large-scale hosting resources while others can use similar capacity on commercial servers for a few hundred dollars a year. Fund-raising infrastructure that is open to pretty much everyone else, including the KKK, may not be available. This does not mean that Wikileaks cannot get hosted, as it is already well-known and big, but what about smaller, less-famous, less established, less well-off efforts? Will they even get off the ground?

Well, that is enough. Go check the article. It’s worth it. Thoroughly recommended as major food for thought.

If you forgive me the obviousness, you may have already heard that somewhere else that “common sense is the least common of all senses”. As far as popular wisdom goes, this saying is usually right; but there are two special corollaries:

1. Proposition is specially true in all commercial/business environments; and
2. Proposition is uniquely true in regards to computing.

I don’t have anything to add now to corollary 1. Why is that common sense is so rare in business? Why is that all kinds of weird nonsense gets respect as “business plans” in the corporate world? I don’t know. Maybe because, as some have pointed out, the skills required by the corporate world border on sociopathy. But I do not want to discuss this, at least not now.

The other corollary, however, deserves some attention. Computing is supposedly an area where the best and brightest would reign, and, therefore, the choices made by IT people would be the best ones given the circumstances, right? Yeah, right. The prevalence of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer alone belies that.

Therefore, I am planning some posts (at least two) where I would like to examine how current choices in computing defy common sense and, therefore, are paving the way for failure, or for more difficulties. And no, I won’t talk necessarily about Windows or IE; that would be just too obvious. I plan to talk about two issues that are the current fad or are being part of it:

• Cloud computing
• System resources

Stay tuned!

Time goes on, and with it, new software releases come and go. So, I think it is appropriate to comment on some software I use. Let’s see:

My GNU/Linux distribution: Slackware. After all these years, I am still a Slackware user. If anything has taught me on Linux distributions during this time, is that Slackware’s stability, speed and ease of use are unmatched. The plus is that is the closest thing to having real Unix running on your box.

In fact, many would be surprised to see Slackware considered “easy-to-use”. Believe me: it is. It is very simple, and while making mistakes might be easy, recovering from the is usually very easy, too. All the defaults are sensible, and almost every software package is untouched and unpatched from the pristine sources upstream. I began using Slackware in version 9.0. The last version I used, version 13.0, was a great one; and right now I am using Slackware-current, the “development” series. Despite being in the cutting edge, -current is surprisingly stable and simple. Slackware is nowhere near perfect, but it is clearly among the best GNU/Linux distributions.

My desktop environment: KDE. I begain to use KDE with the 1.1.x release that came with Red Hat 6.2, back in 2000. I liked it a lot, but it wasn’t adequate to my desktop needs, yet. I took a new look at it when the project relesed version 2.1, and I was instantly hooked. I began to use it as my only desktop environment, and it has been so ever since. When the KDE community released version 4.0, that was a difficult point; I reverted to 3.5 until 4.1 was ready; but then, I used 4.1 and 4.2, and was generally pleased. Now I am using 4.3, and I think it is an excellent environment. Additionally, I began to help the project as a Spanish translator since version 2.2, because I wanted to give back to it.

Screenshot of KDE 4.3 on my computer

My blog software: WordPress. I began to use WordPress back at version 1.2; the latest version I’m using is 2.9, and it’s still a great platform.

I don’t plan to change this stack sometime soon. Right now, KDE SC 4.4 is right around the corner, and I am awaiting it with eager anticipation.

Tim, in a recent blog post, has tackled a subject that touches a sensitive area of Web surfing: ads, and the ethical validity of blocking them. The issue is that an increasing number of Web surfers are taking advantage of ad blocking techniques. For Firefox and Seamonkey there is the well-known Ad Block Plus extension. Internet Explorer can do it with the inPrivate mode. And Konqueror can block ads, too. (And way before, we had Junkbusters). Suffice it to say, the issue of blocking Web ads is not recent.

This is an important question, because advertising is, in many cases, the sole source of revenue for webmasters of many informative and useful Web sites; and even if it is not, it is an important source of income that alleviates the cost of bandwith, equipment, and many other expenses involved in making available online content.

On the other hand, Web ads are clearly annoying to many; that’s why ad blockers are so popular today, and that’s also the reason why many less-than-reputable advertising networks are in a perennial arms race with ad blocking softare, with each one trying to outdo the other.

1. And this points out the main reason why most people try to block ads: they are annoying, yes, written in bold letters. While the initial Web banner ad was generally nice, it began to be annoying because of the cheesy animations… and it has been downhill ever since. The size has changed —they are bigger— and ads became generally more and more and more annoying. We began to see ads in Flash, ads that incorporated sound, ads that broke HTML standards compliance, interstitials, and so on. We have now those stupid moving ads, blinking, appearing in pop-ups, flashing, and making noises. Don’t ever get me started on inappropriate ads, those of the NSFW kind, that too many times have appeared on supposedly safe sites.

2. Another problem with the use of the ads is the ad networks. If ads were just a linked element from the same Web site offering the advertisement, that would not be a problem. However, they usually come from ad networks; and believe me, the enormous lag they add to navigation is, in some cases, unbearable. The pun that says that the World Wide Web became the World Wide Wait is the responsibility, in great part, of ad networks. Just think of it yourself. How many times have you stared to a blank page of a site, supposedly loading? You wait, and wait, and wait… that is, until you decide to enable ad blocking and them all of the site loads like a charm. The ad networks would like to serve ads in your site, right, but the performance of their servers is downright abysmal.

3. Finally, another reason why so many people choose to block Web ads is privacy. By using cookies —third party cookies— Big Ad Network Brother is able to track your surfing habits; they can learn that you have browsed OverthrowGovernment.com as many times as you have browsed MyLocalNews.net. They can learn about your sex, your age, your preferences, and other information that can be potentially all linked back to you. This bulk of data is used to serve ads that are “relevant” to you (yeah, right), and also is sold to any interested party.

I really don’t know why is that the state of Web advertising became so terrible. People is fond of comparing online media to printed media; but you open a magazine and the ads down there don’t blink at you, or require extraneous plugins (Flash), or make annoying noises, nor make a scan of what you read and then phone home… you get my idea? And ad rates in printed mags are usually way higher than Web ads! that’s right: the advertisements pay much less in the Web for the latitude of being more invasive than ever.

Because of all these reasons, I have ad blockers available on all my graphical browsers. Note that I said “available”, not “enabled”. When a Webpage becomes too annoying, I enable ad blocking, and I can continue browsing with no problem at all. However, I recongnize that this is not a definitive solution.

Whan should we do when confronting this reality? Should we move to a “walled-garden” model (i.e., subscription model with no ads?). In my opinion, the walled-garden approach is never a good one. Under this approach, I think a Webmaster would stand a far lesser chance of making decent money from a Web site. In addition, the epic freedom of information and the global exchange of ideas would end, taking with it the chief reason why people surf the Web today. In extremis, the Web would implode and die.

We must recognize, then, that the only way that stands any chance of long-term feasibility is so far the persistence of Web advertising. However, if this alternative is to be fully realized without the widespread blocking of today, Web ads must evolve. They must load fast, should not impose an unreasonable load in system resources (such as is the case with Javascript-laden ads, heavy images, Flash or other plugins, etc.), should not be annoying, should be appropriate, and should be far more respectful of end-user privacy; and all of this, while representing solidly the message the advertiser wants to be delivered. But it looks like we are just too far behind on realizing this dream…

So, what should one do to cope with annoying help ads? Here is some advice taken from my personal experience.

1. Block all plugins by default. Enable them on-demand only. Especially, do not forget to install the Flashblock extension in Firefox, and enable on-demand only loading in Konqueror. Really; Adobe Flash is the scourge of the Web and, besides YouTube, I did not see too many useful examples of it. However, there are valid exceptions and that’s why I am not advising its uninstallation. Keep it around, but restrained. In this way, you will block all annoying Flash-based ads, while still retaining the ability to use the technology when it is really appropriate. Do this with a clear conscience. I feel no pity for advertisers who feel that it is their right to abuse your system resources, annoy you with sound, or put you at risk from Flash malware just for the privilege of showing you an ad. If they want to show us an advertisement, let that be in plain HTML.

2. Block third-party cookies. In this way, you prevent Big Brother advertisers from stealing your personal data while you still allow the parent site to set cookies that might be useful for site navigation.

3. If the animations are becoming just too annoying, disable them. Firefox, if I remember correctly, has a setting where animations are allowed to cycle once and then stop. But Konqueror in this case is the best: animations are allowed; but there is always a right-click setting of “Stop animations”. In that way, animations are allowed until they become too annoying, and then they can be stopped on demand by a right-click.

4. Finally, if all else fails, you may resort to ad-blocking; but remember, the Webmaster depends on the income of the ads to maintain the site. Consider leaving the site if you find the ads unbearable.

The issue of Web ads is really complex, as I have tried to show here. Let’s pray that the advertising industry —an industry known for its lack of values, their ruthlessness and their extreme greed— begin to use some common sense, and choose to behave.

I just discovered a great blogging app: Bilbo Blogger, a blogging app for KDE4. I set it up in its simple config dialog, and presto! it retrieved all my last posts, and automagically set itself up. So far, it looks very promising. We’ll see. Until then, it surely looks like a winner.

For Tim: I plan to post something related to my law studies ASAP. Stay tuned!

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Powered by Bilbo Blogger

There’s a story with sombragris, the trusty laptop that my brother, friend and namesake Ed Hurst graciously gave me. Sombragris is a Dell Latitude D505, and works great with Linux. Great, that is, with the exception of wireless networking, which is furnished by a Broadcom chipset, that never worked, not even in Windows.

Now, whenever I checked /var/log/syslog I began to notice something similar to these lines:

Feb 10 20:32:53 sombragris kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode5.fw" not found
Feb 10 20:32:53 sombragris kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the latest firmware (version 4).

And just because I was tired, I wondered… “what if I go to that website, get the darned firmware, and see what happens? At least I will make these annoying warnings go away…” And I did exactly that.

It turned out that the Linux Wireless Wiki is an excellent resource on all things wireless on Linux. I followed the instructions that it gave me, got the Broadcom firmware, placed it in /lib/firmware, and lo and behold! I am wireless!

Next, I tested the usability of the wireless connection with the wireless network that my sister put up at Mom’s home. It is a network with an encrypted password, and a good speed. Armed with the passphrase, I was granted access in no time.

Now, I am writing this post using wlan0 as my Internet connection. Yikes!

And here I am, working wireless in GNU/Linux, in a machine whose wireless was unusable in Windows. If only I had paid attention to that warning before. Oh well…

And thank you, Lord, for our small discoveries of every day.

Yep. That darned thing left me breathless. After roughly 14-15 h of compiling (that is excluding dependencies, such as Qt which alone took > 4h, and KOffice and Kdevelop as well), I am finally using KDE 4.2. I’m typing this on KDE 4.2, using Konqueror.

After KDE 4.1 I was expecting something good, but, honestly, not that good. The old annoyances are gone and the whole thing seems to have improved by leaps and bounds. And, it’s beautiful.

It might not be perfect, but having a free desktop such as this one is a treat. Kudos to the KDE community!

(click for a larger image)

Wandering through the Web, I found this piece by Linux Canuck: How to Help a Newbie. The writing is full of excellent advice; therefore I am glad to recommend its reading. It is a great resource indeed, and valuable not only for helping “newbies” in the Linux community, but in a whole range of social groups as well.

Meanwhile, I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.7. So far it looks great. Now, let’s download those Slackware 12.2 ISO images…

I finally caved in and enabled the Akismet web service to stop comment spam. I was getting between 250-300+ comments per day, all of them spam. So far, it seems to work well… and whoa! what a relief!

Meanwhile, I’m spending the day at home, doing some errands and pampering my wife, who caught the flu. Tomorrow will be a whole different day, though… Friday, the dreaded Church Bulletin Day. Carpe diem!

I upgraded “phoenix”, my PIII-450 desktop workstation, to Slackware 12.1 over the last weekend. My workstation had Slackware 12.0 running smoothly, and I did the upgrade using the procedure described in the Slackware documentation.

Thankfully, the upgrade went well, and now I have 12.1 running on phoenix. Overall it feels really good, and even faster. The only serious problem I’ve seen so far is that since Slackware 12.1 offered so much more libraries, my tiny hard disk is becoming low on free space. Oh well…

Reading several Internet news media, it is apparent that KDE has gotten a lot of heat recently from several quarters. The main issue seems to be the KDE 4 release and its buggy-incomplete quality, and the fact that several distributions rushed to place KDE 4.0.x as a replacement of KDE 3.5.10, something which clearly was never intended to be.

To get the facts clear, Groklaw put a page explaining several myths about KDE. This is recommended reading, and helps a lot to dispel several criticisms made to KDE in general.

But the best thing is that today KDE 4.1 was released With this release, several concerns were addressed, and in general it looks like a promising desktop. For starters, Kontact (the PIM Suite) and the printer applet are back! However, there are several apps regarded by many people as essential, such as amaroK, Koffice, and Krusader, that are in alpha status yet. Yet, with PIM and printing working, it will be an usable desktop again.

Once again, I had the privilege of helping with the Spanish translation of this release. I plan to download the tarballs and start compiling ASAP. Let’s see if KDE lives up to the hype this time.

This is a sad story of how a state-owned monopoly can hinder the flow of information to the public even in a supposedly free country.

The state-owned Paraguayan Communications Company (COPACO) has a firm grip on the Internet connectivity of most Paraguayans. This is because COPACO acts at two levels: (1) at the “provider” level, COPACO has the monopoly and sole exploitation of all international fiber-optic Net connections. COPACO then sells bandwidth and connectivity to local ISPs; and (2) at the ISP level, because COPACO is one of Paraguay’s largest ISPs. It is the only one that provides decent, cheap and reliable ADSL connectivity.

Presidential elections are just around the corner, on April 20, and the election climate is hot. Yesterday, COPACO began redirecting some pages that are critical of the Paraguayan government and some officials. This redirecting was done as a DNS hijacking procedure, and all ISPs who had COPACO’s DNS servers as authority were victims.

The domains affected were:

www.partidocolorado.org
www.victorbogado.com
Both of them redirected to the official Colorado Party website.

www.bastacar*jo.com
www.patriaquerida.com
Redirected to porn websites.
(Note: I apologize for the language in one of the domains, which contains Spanish profanity)

Forensic evidence, I am told, is available here. I didn’t check the contents, yet.

Finally, some friends told me that the whole DNS hijacking was logged and notarized by a public notary, and ICANN was already notified.

As I said, as sad story, and I hope, a story that would not happen again.

I managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. This is a pretty serious upgrade, and for the first time it comes with native tag support!

Because of this I also decided to change theme. After years of using the excellent and sober Blue Theme 1.0 by Alex King, I am tentatively switching to the Unnamed theme by Xu Yiyang. This is a great theme that greatly resembles the old Blue Theme while supporting the latest WordPress features such as widgets and tags.

Meanwhile, all the info you saw on my previous theme will be gradually migrated to the new, improved theme.

So far, I find the new WordPress very good. Upgrading is recommended.

This has been a challenging week. Things are not going as well as I would have wished in the financial front; but we are holding on. But the most difficult problem is a delicate situation that must be overcome by my local church. Our senior pastor unexpectedly passed away last week, and the outlook for our congregation is delicate because of circumstances I would not like to comment right now.

On other news, I finally managed to upgrade all my WordPress sites to version 2.2.2. The upgrade was simple, and the good WordPress folks reduced the steps in the upgrade process from five to three. So far, it’s good.

Please keep praying for my local church, my family, and this writer. That will be greatly appreciated.

Right now I am immersed in two small writing projects for OfB.biz:

1. A review of the Unicomp Model M keyboard: This is basically an expansion of this post, with more details concerning the acquisition process. The Unicomp keyboard is really outstanding, and I think the public deserves to know the existence of such a keyboard, along with some bumps in the purchasing road they might need to be aware of.
2. A review of Slackware 12.0: I just got Slackware 12 installed on phoenix, my home system. Phoenix was incredibly stable with Slack 11, but Slack 12 brought a host of minor troubles. I managed to fix almost all of them, learned a great deal on the process, and I would like to share my experience.

So, please pray that I might get to finish those articles. It’s not that I have writer’s block; the problem is my limited availability of quality time. I also plan to write with more news soon.

I’m in for some serious fun of the best kind. I just learned that Patrick Volkerding released Slackware 12.0 yesterday. The changes from 11.0 are deep and significant; among the ones worth mentioning are the inclusion of a kernel 2.6.x by default, X11 version 7.2, and support for HAL. These updates prompt Patrick to make a statement saying something that is the whole point of my (yet to be concluded) OfB’s Stealth Desktop series:

Just plug and play. Properly set up, Slackware’s desktop should be suitable for any level of Linux experience.

I’m already downloading the ISOs with rsync… and I can’t wait to upgrade.

Ramkumar Shankar writes on his blog: “The day when Linux will take over the desktop (or at least have a significant footprint in the market) is still not upon us. That’s because there are a number of things the Linux community still doesn’t get, slowing down adoption of the OS in the home and home office.”

read more | digg story

I posted this story because even though it contained some tired-old overgeneralizations and misconceptions, it still raises some good points.

1. Over-generalizations: Mr. Shankar still echoes the old, tired FUD about “the Linux community”, trying to caracterize Free Software advocates as elitist, snobbish religious fanatics with a zealous hatred of Microsoft. It almost looks like it was talking about Mac fanboys! (yes, Tim, I know you use a Mac, but you definitely are not a fanboy).

   When I advocate Free Software, I try not to dismiss Microsoft; I try to present the case for software freedom. And believe me, with racketeers like the BSA breathing under your neck and whispering things like “software audit”, you usually tend to appreciate that.

2. Mis-conceptions: Some of the critiques were made under the assumption that for GNU/Linux to gain some footing in the desktop arena, installation should be done by clueless end users in the most user-friendly way possible. (Please note that I am using clueless in a respectful way here. I am not dismissing newbie or clueless users in any way.)

   This assumption is wrong. The only ones installing operating are nerds, script kiddies, consumers of illegal copies of proprietary operating systems… and computer manufacturers and systems integrators. I said it once, and I will say it again: It is completely unreasonable to expect an end user to install his or her own operating system.

   OS installation-related procedures (such as determining which particular version of the OS is suitable for a particular user) should be performed by a technically savy person—the resident nerd, the ‘whiz-kid’, the tech support representative… you get my drift. If you don’t believe me, try right now to install and configure Windows XP or Vista.

3. Good points: Despite all the shortcomings, Mr. Shankar still has some good points to make. GNU/Linux has very good hardware support, but it still must be better prepared to deal with all the hardware that is out there. Sadly, this is an issue with no easy solution unless the hardware makers get convinced about the value of having their drives ported to GNU/Linux. On the other hand, this is an issue that is mostly out of the community‘s reach, and he was talking about community.

   Another good point Mr. Shankar makes is that we need to keep improving the user-friendliness of our system and applications. Here he’s got a point. And I am not thinking on the command-line. I am thinking on things like the awfully cluttered KDE Control center, the extremely rigid GNOME settings, the stupid package-management tricks, and the arcane settings of many apps. We surely can do better!

Therefore, reading is recommended with a little bit of salt… or two.

Browsing over LXer, the GNU/Linux news site edited by my brother and friend Don Parris, I found this interview with Fred Miller. Fred is an old friend, back from several years ago. I met him at the CS-FSLUG mail list, and I found really nice to learn more from him and to have him featured in such a prominent news site. Go and read it; it’s an excellent interview with a commited Christian brother and Free Software advocate.

Last week I was busy downloading and installing a fairly comprehensive round of upgrades:

• WordPress 2.2: I upgraded all of my WordPress sites to version 2.2. Version 2.2 offers a number of improvements, such as support for widgets and full Atom support; but the changes I cared for the most were the speed improvements.
• KDE 3.5.7: The latest incarnation of the K Desktop Environment in the stable 3.5 series, 3.5.7, was released on May 22, 2007. This is perhaps the last release in the long, stable 3.5.7 series, and the changes are largely bugfixes and minor improvements in Kopete (the instant messenger), KPDF, KMail, and other programs.

  I installed KDE 3.5.7 in both of my workstations (goyeneche at work, and phoenix at home). Overall, 3.5.7 feels a little bit faster, and stable as ever. If you use KDE, this comes as Highly recommended.

• OpenOffice.org 2.2: Yeah, yeah, I know this is old news. After all, OpenOffice.org 2.2 was officially released on March 29, 2007. This release features a big code cleanup, and speed and stability enhancements. There are a number of feature improvements, especially in Impress and Calc (the presentation and spreadsheet modules, respectively).

  All in all, what I like best in this release is the slightly improved speed. I installed in my workstation and in the Win32 partition of goyeneche. This is also recommended.

• Thunderbird 2.0: I upgraded my main office e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird, from 1.5.x to 2.0.x. The new Thunderbird 2.0 feels much better, but has the same defects of his browser sibling, Firefox 2.0.x: botched colorscheme, even less settings to configure, forced (and incorrect) guessing of the screen’s dot density, and so on). However, I still think it is a worthy upgrade. What bugs me is a new dialog I see every once in a while: «This folder is being processed…». Go figure.

I was asked by my church to set up a GNU/Linux box to be used as a Samba file server. The hardware is a rather nice Dell PowerEdge SC440 server with a Xeon processor. They asked me because they knew I have experience with GNU/Linux… but the problem is, I have never ever touched Samba before.

Well, I installed GNU/Linux alright, and then I began to set up Samba with a shared folder. Following the documentation, all the Win98 boxes recognized the shared folder with no problem at all. But, there was a single XP box, and any and all attempts to reach the folder from it were unsuccessful.

After much trying, I found a workaround: I created another user on the XP machine, and this user was able to log without problem in the Samba server, and access the shared folder. However, the original user still cannot access the shares. Go figure…

Oh, boy. They messed up big time. The good folks at WordPress discovered that some 2.1.1 releases contained a trojan horse added by a cracker. Consequently, they prepared a new release, 2.1.2, which also has some minor updates.

Thankfully, close inspection of my WordPress sites (my church’s and this one) did not show anything beyond the usual, but I upgraded it at once. If you have WordPress 2.1.1 in production somewhere, upgrading is strongly recommended.

The WordPress folks released version 2.1 just some days ago. I just upgraded my WordPress sites to it; and so far, so good. Upgrading is recommended, if only for the more than 550 bugfixes. Yay!

I am growing more and more fond of Slax. Slax is a “live” (as in “live CD”) GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, powerful, and flexible. Its worth was evident to me right from the beginning.

As of now, I do not have internet access on phoenix, my new home desktop system. Therefore, when I get online for purposes that are not directly related to my work, I must seek to get online elsewhere: Internet cafés, or even the computer at my parents’. The problem is that all those systems run some incarnation of Windows, and thus they are annoyingly limited in their abilities to do something meaningful. Plus, I need my toolbox to be handy .

For all those cases, Slax lets me have a full, working GNU/Linux system in a USB Memory Stick, and even provides a 4MB boot CD image for use in systems unable to boot from USB. The standard software collection is useful but rather limited; but then, there are a lot of “modules” that work more or less like packages to customize your environment. You can convert Slackware’s *.tgz packages to modules with a handy tgz2mo utility. And all in all, Slax is based on Slackware, the distribution I use on my systems, so everything is familiar territory.

Thanks to Slax, I was able to get meaningfully productive almost everywhere without touching the underlying Windows installation of the host computers. You simply carry your system in your pocket to be used as needed. This kind of convenience is priceless. Don’t leave home without it .

Updated Dec. 26, 2006: minor corrections.

The title tells you all about my lack of recent posting. On November 21, 2006, sombragris, my trusty old Compaq Presario 1200XL-118 laptop, refused to boot. The problem was compounded due to the fact that said refusal happened during a meeting where I was supposed to show a work in progress I was doing for some people who hired me.

After much concern, I sent the laptop to a technician. He examined it with the aid of an electrical engineer, and they gave their verdict: the circuits were over-dried, crusty and fragile, and recovery would be impossible.

Since my budget was already in red figures for that time, I was almost desperate in my worries. How could I get a new computer ASAP? Thankfully, my sister happened to be upgrading her desktop PC, so she graciously handed me over her old desktop system, complete with a 15″ monitor. That solved the problem of a suitable workstation.

The next step was to recover the information on the laptop’s hard drive. Now, there is a problem: While desktop PCs have 3.5″ hard drives, laptops have 2.5″ units. Sadly, conectors for 2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives are different and not compatible. If you want to connect a 2.5″ laptop hard drive to a desktop PC, you must purchase an adapter kit. And believe me, there was not a single piece of that wretched adapter kit available for sale in Asunción! So, I had to purchase the adapter from the U.S. And, to further complicate such things, I had to choose the slowest, standard delivery method since my budget was so low. After more than a week of anxious waiting, the supplies arrived from the U.S. The hard drive got installed and I was set free to take posession of that PC.

I installed the PC at my home office, and prayed with my wife, asking the Lord that the information on my laptop’s hard drive be intact. After that, I booted the Slackware 11.0 install CD 1, and read the kernel output. Sure enough, the drive was recognized as /dev/hdc. Then, booting into my old hard driwe was just a matter of typing in the boot command line:

boot: bare.i root=/dev/hdc noinitrd ro

Piece of cake, right? NO!

I fed those arguments to the boot command line, and surely, the kernel booted… and then panicked.

I cannot even begin to describe you how bad I felt: I had a supposedly failed drive with a work-in-progress inside, and I couldn’t retrieve it! I almost cried, and banged the table with my fist. (Yes, it did hurt. Badly.)

Then my wife told me: “Eduardo, are you sure you did everything right?” and that made me think. I said to myself, “Perhaps I should have fed the partition to the boot command line instead of the drive.” So I booted the Slack 11 CD 1 again, and this time I wrote:

boot: bare.i root=/dev/hdc6 noinitrd ro

and voilá! My old Slack booted like a champ! Yay! PTL!

My sense of relief and gratitude was overwhelming. Everything was there, with no harm in sight. I jumped with joy!

After that, I installed Slack 11 on the PC’s main hard drive, and everything went smooth. The machine doesn’t have a fax-modem, yet, and I am looking for one now.

What about my new machine? It’s a PIII/450 MHz, with 256 MB RAM and a 10.0 GB Seagate hard drive. The video card is a 16 MB Diamond Stealth with the S3 Savage 4 chipset. The sound card is a Yamaha one, with excellent sound. The name I gave it? Well, I decided to call it phoenix. Pretty adequate, huh?

This is big news. Sun put Java under the GNU General Public License (GPL), thus making it officially Free Software. Moreover, it is also considering to put Open Solaris under the same license. What would happen next? I’m scared… the end is near! Looks like GNU might be Unix, at the end…

I am pleased to report that sombragris, my trusty old laptop, was upgraded to Slackware 11 over the course of the last week. Since my time was very limited, and the changes on this new version were very deep, I had to upgrade the system on a piecemeal basis. When everything was over, I was quite satisfied; but a couple of things went haywire in the process. Thankfully, I was able to overcome the problems with the help of the friendly folks at #slackware in irc.oftc.net.

The stuff is amazing. There I was, running a cutting-edge Linux distribution at great speeds in a 500MHz i586 laptop with 189 MB RAM. Slackware truly lives up to its hype: simple, easy, fast, lean, and powerful. I plan to write a review soon.

I saw it on Slashdot. Slackware 11 has been released! Yikes! You can read the announcement, and then you can grab your copy at one of the mirrors . Right now, I’m trying to get mine through rsync, and looks like I’m getting decent speeds considering my available bandwidth. Enjoy!

I got this interesting meme from Tim.

1. What was the first language that you learned/used?
Commodore Basic V2 (the one included with the Commodore 64).

2. What is your favorite language and why?
Ada95/2005. Because is an industrial strength language that is HIGHLY readable and could be good enough to serve as a first language. And even better, you can have an ISO certified compiler for your platform (GCC’s GNAT) that is able to produce binary code at a speed comparable with C (I found it: 16K iterations of Erathostenes’ Sieve had similar times in both C and ADA).

3. What is you least favorite and why?
COBOL; too dense, wordy, and clunky. Another one would be Perl, because it looks like garbled text

4. What language would you like to learn next?
I would like to keep learning Ada95/2005. Then, perhaps Python. Also, I would like to be good at shell scripting and awk.

5. What language do you have no desire to ever learn?
Java! I hate it with a passion because it has a c-like syntax, an thoroughly bloated and inefficient virtual machine, and because it is not Free Software.

Tim: BTW, FORTRAN could be made good with the RATFOR preprocessor employed in the famous Software Tools book.

6. What language do you think is the best to start learning programming with?
ADA. Because you have excellent, industrial class tools, it is reasonably easy, it is readable, and it teaches you good programming habits. Python would be good, too.

7. What method you prefer, functional or OO?
I hate object-oriented programming. I would like a procedural language better.

After a long download that spanned several days, I finally managed to upgrade my workstations to KDE 3.5.4 (information, compilation requirements).

In keeping with my previous KDE upgrade, the boot time in goyeneche is 29.67s: Slightly slower than KDE 3.5.3, but there are compensations for it. For instance, this KDE feels more lightweight to the point that I can begin to use it in the memory-starved goyeneche workstation again. This is truly a great desktop, and the upgrade is thoroughly recommended.