Category Archives: Linux

One Bad Apple Spoils the Market

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The tech-news side of the Internet is in an uproar because Apple rejected the official Google Voice application for the iPhone and removed other applications that interacted with Google Voice.  I believe that the blocking of the Google Voice application is absurd, probably violates anti-trust laws, and definitely does violate my belief in a neutral Internet (which is that ISPs and wireless carriers should provide a bit-pushing service and nothing more).  However, I think the bigger problem is that Apple has contol over what applications run on the iPhone in the first place.

The fact that mainstream tech media and knowledgeable users have not railed against Apple from the start for this practice is really a shame.  The practice of a device manufacturer controlling the content that can be experienced through their device is not new, but it is definitely not universal.  For example, all major game console manufacturers have a process by which games are approved for the console by the console manufacturer before it can be released.  This, in my opinion, is just as damaging as Apple’s control over iPhone applications.

Some readers may disagree, saying that the device manufacturers have a right to protect their brand by ensuring that sub-par games and applications are not available on their device, guaranteeing a good experience for the user.  My contention is that it is not their place.  Manufacturers of DVD players do not decide which DVDs can be published so that no one ever sees a bad movie on their DVD player.  Web browser manufacturers do not block web sites that use blink tags.  Radio manufacturers do not limit their radios to only tune-in top-40 stations (thank goodness).

I believe that Apple, game console manufacturers, and others could achieve their desired goal of ensuring a good experience on their device by certifying certain applications that have been reviewed, but not blocking un-reviewed applications.  This would work just like the Certified for Windows Vista program that Microsoft offers.  This way, when buying an app for your iPhone or a game for your Wii you could look for an emblem or seal that would let you know that Apple or Nintendo had reviewed the game and that they recommend it.  But, you would of course still be free to install any app or play any game that you wanted because, you know, the device is yours.  Another option, employed by Linux distributors and carried over to the embedded device space by Nokia on their N770, N800, and N810 Internet tablets is to have a standard repository from which applications can be downloaded that have been verified and reviewed by the distributor or manufacturer.  In addition to the standard repository they allow other software repositories to be added and queried as well.  So, by default any user that doesn’t know or care would only be using certified applications.  But, with a little configuration change they could be running software from other sources, certified by other people, and enjoying applications that otherwise would not be available to them.

To wrap this thing up I just want to repeat that the issue is not with Apple blocking a Google Voice application, but with Apple having that control over your device.  There are alternative models that would let Apple achieve their goal of quality applications without giving them unchecked control over your device.  Apple does not have to like the solution.  We need to give them no choice by making the consuming public aware of the situation.  Maybe this Google Voice uproar will reach enough people so that they’re at least familiar with the problem.  Unfortunately, the slickness of the iPhone will probably continue to win people over, regardless of the limitations.  We should not be okay with this.

Backup to S3 using duplicity

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I recently put a nice big hard drive in my file server.  I got a 1TB drive, which is kind of silly because I don’t have anywhere near that much data.  But, I figured that it’s better to be prepared.  I wanted to backup the data on the drive and Amazon’s S3 seemed like a good choice.  However, I wanted the ability to only send changed files across the wire, and a simple way to encrypt all of the data as well.  I chose to use Duplicity to manage the backups as it was able to only send changes as well as encrypt everything using GPG.

I decided to only backup a subset of my data since it didn’t seem necessary to backup Linux ISOs or the local copy of Wikipedia that I have on this drive.  So, I ended up backing up 31.2 GB of data.  Here’s the stats that duplicity produced:

--------------[ Backup Statistics ]--------------
StartTime 1244688149.16 (Wed Jun 10 22:42:29 2009)
EndTime 1244842521.31 (Fri Jun 12 17:35:21 2009)
ElapsedTime 154372.15 (42 hours 52 minutes 52.15 seconds)
SourceFiles 0
SourceFileSize 33486993762 (31.2 GB)
NewFiles 0
NewFileSize 0 (0 bytes)
DeletedFiles 0
ChangedFiles 0
ChangedFileSize 0 (0 bytes)
ChangedDeltaSize 0 (0 bytes)
DeltaEntries 0
RawDeltaSize 33484666346 (31.2 GB)
TotalDestinationSizeChange 32831751689 (30.6 GB)
Errors 0
-------------------------------------------------

Yeah, just in case you didn’t notice.  The elapsed time was nearly 43 hours.  That’s just under two full days.  The 15/2 service that I’m getting from Cablevision was clearly the limiting factor.  But, I don’t plan on doing full backups very often, and the incrementals will be considerably smaller.

Amazon charges for S3 by the amount of storage you actually use.  They charge $.15/GB/month.  So, for 31.2 GB I’ll be paying $4.68 per month.  Not bad for a remote, redundant backup.  They also charge for bandwidth which is usually $.10/GB, but it’s currently on sale for $.03/GB.  So, the upload only cost $.93.

rPath, Foresight, Conary

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I first started speaking about rPath Linux and their Conary package management tool a little over a year ago.  But, I just want to get it down in writing that I think this is the future of linux packaging and indeed distribution management in general.  They took traditional package management (think rpm w/ yum or dpkg w/ apt) and made it look antiquated.  That’s right, apt-get is not the end of the line for package managers.

Conary really takes the problem of managing the software that is installed on your system and fully maps it out.  I feel like they broke the problem down in to small chunks and solved each one of the problems well.  rPath’s main goal is to create tools and a distribution that can be customized and modified by down-stream distributors to create software appliances.  There are a lot of features designed for this task in Conary, but they can benefit other users who may not feel like they have their own customized distribution.  For example, do you have a farm of machines that are running the same software with your own customized configuration files?  Why not create a package that shadows the upstream apache package for example, but includes your own configuration files in the apache:conf component?

One of the other wonderful features of Conary is that the repository is kept in version control and branches are supported by all of the supporting tools.  Imagine if Debian was using a tool like Conary to track and manage their entire distribution.  All of the Debian derivative distributions would be able to have their own branches of the distribution.  This would make it a lot easier for derivative distributions to use Debian’s existing packages and for them to make contributions back to Debian.

There is one problem with the Conary story.  All of the server-side distribution management tools are closed-source.  I do see this as a show-stopper.  Well, a lot of things are using rPath and Conary, and rPath as a company seems to be doing alright, so maybe ‘show-stopper’ is a bit harsh.  But, this will absolutely keep other major distributions and large chunks of the open-source community from getting on the bandwagon.  All I can say is that I hope this will eventually be remedied by the open-sourcing of the server-side components.  The technology feels like such a good thing for the community and for distributions in general, but it’s the kind of thing that can not be entrusted to one company.  Hopefully someday rPath will be willing/able to release the server-side stuff.

Regardless, the feature-set exposed by Conary is, to me, the clear future of package management.  Whether it ends up being Conary that makes it big or some other (possibly completly open source) implementation is yet to be seen.  But I wanted to get this article out there with a date on it so that when it happens I can say, “I called it!”  If you want to play around with Conary on your desktop I would highly recommend Foresight Linux.  It’s pretty bad ass.

Sticks and Stones are Nothing Compared to Your Words

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Sure, I have plenty of things to talk about, but I might as well start with the most interesting topic. It also happens to be the one topic that I can’t get out of my head. I just figured I’d warn you that this post is going to get more and more boring as it goes along. But, it will hopefully be able to satiate John’s need for input.

I just spoke with Jamie a few hours ago. It’s getting more and more difficult to talk with her. You would think that it would get easier, but it doesn’t. I feel very alone after I speak with her. It’s not the kind of alone that I was prepared for. I mean, I knew she would find someone. And, yeah, that bothers me, but it’s bearable. What I hadn’t prepared for was the loneliness that is resulting from my realization that the Jamie that I dated no longer exists. I don’t know. I guess there is something comforting in knowing that characters from your past still exist. I’m not exactly sure what to do about the current situation. I mean, it’s not my place to really _do_ anything. Besides, I don’t really want to be involved. But, I wish things were working out differently. I apologize for the vagueness of this entry. I just don’t think it fair to really go into detail here. It’s a shame because it’s the details that really hurt.

Moving on. I went to a hardcore show the other day. It was the first one that I had been to in a while. It was nice to go back to one – for many reasons. It’s nice to be around a whole bunch of people who are straight edge. It’s interesting to go from a world where it is so weird to be straight edge to one where it is almost expected. There’s something about hardcore that is different from every other type of music that I’ve come across. It’s not so much about the music, but about the community. There is a real sense of comradery. I think it might be due to the raw emotion that is present in the music. When you see someone put so much emotion into creating (or listening) to music, it can really move you. I’m not saying that this makes it any better than other forms of music, just that I don’t get this kind of feeling from other genres. One of the kids had a shirt on that said, “Suicide Before Betrayal” on it. Now, it was just a t-shirt, but I’ve been thinking about its meaning since I saw it. Why can’t all friendships be that strong. Why does it feel like it’s a common thing to betray someone. I almost got into a fist-fight at the show. That is pretty odd for a few reasons: #1 I don’t get into fights and #2 Who gets into a fight at a hardcore show? Regarding #1, I just don’t ever get into fights. I didn’t get into any fights all through high school or anything like that. With that being said, I’m almost looking forward to getting into a fight. Maybe I just want to feel what it’s like to get punched in the face. Maybe I’ve watched Fight Club a few too many times. Regarding #2, for the most part, hardcore shows are peaceful things. I mean, there’s a lot of rage and emotion, but respect is a major element of the hardcore scene. I don’t really want to get into the “Mark’s mosh etiquette” rant right now, but this guy at the show was being a real dick. Basically, you should only dance with other people that want to dance. All the kids that are standing on the side of the pit don’t really want to dance and they don’t really want to catch your fist in their face. So, keep a respectful distance and everyone will be happy. Well, this guy was swinging his arms and hitting these two girls right on the side of the pit and next to me. So, I pushed him away from the girls. He came back and was swinging his arms again. So, the girls and I pushed him together, except this time he fell over. He got right up in my face and ‘fight mode’ kicked in. All of a sudden there’s a crowd of people around us and we’re staring into each other’s eyes. It was pretty intense. I loved it. Some of his buddies took him outside. His friends told me not to worry about him and that he was just having a bad day or whatever. After a few bands played and a few hours passed, he came over to me and apologized. I thought that was incredibly awesome of him. It must have taken a lot for him to do that and I really appreciate it.

I submitted a patch to sound-juicer. It doesn’t entirely fix gnome bug #153988, but it helps. It basically makes it so you can type a custom genre into sound-juicer before ripping a CD. I think the interface of sound-juicer is very refreshing and is a stellar example of what I like about the feel of Gnome. The CD-ripper is a type of program that everyone loves to throw features and awkward options into. Sound-juicer has resisted this urge and created a program that is just a joy to use. I don’t expect my patch to be accepted, but hopefully someone will find it useful. I know that I’m using it. :o)

This create your likeness as a southpark character thing has been going around the blogs the past few days. I couldn’t help myself. I made two. One of them is me in all of my bald glory and the other one is when I’m wearing my new spiffy EFF hat.
Mark as a southpark character - the bald version
Mark as a southpark character - with a hat on.

Wobbly Windows

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Seth Nickel wrote about some of the 3D-accelerated desktop work that is going on at Red Hat in his blog. He referst to one of the effects as ‘wobbly windows’. There are some videos on his site that will help to get the point across. I compiled all of the necessary packages and was playing around with the wobbly window effect on my desktop. It is freaking awesome. The windows are too wobbly for normal every day use, but that can be scaled down so that the windows just kind of give a little bit when you move them. It’s also neat to have real transparent windows on a linux desktop. I’m going to try and get all of this stuff to work on my laptop so I can show it off at work tomorrow.

I’m going to see Henry Rollins speak at the Zipper Theater tomorrow. He’s going to be there for two weeks and there are plenty of tickets left if you want to try and catch him while he’s in the area. I stronly recommend it.

I’m not sure exactly what happened to me yesterday, but I fell asleep at 7:30pm and woke up at 7:45am. Yeah – I slept for about 12 hours straight. I’m not sure why. I was just going to lay down for a nap at 7:30 and didn’t really wake up until later than I normally get up. It was very weird.

Updated to WordPress 1.5

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I updated the version of WordPress that I use to manage this site. The update process went fairly smoothly. There were a few bumps in the road because I had customized the look of my site a whole bunch, but it was fairly trivial to fix and only took around 10 minutes. This new version has a bunch of neat new features that I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing with. Hopefully these features will make it a little easier for me to avoid comment spam. Every 3 or 4 days I get hit with a piece of comment spam for every post I’ve done so far. Most of them get marked for moderation, but then I have to log in and delete each one. This verison of WordPress should make that a little bit easier.

Novell’s Hula Project looks pretty promising. I’m tempted to install it just to poke it for a bit. Honestly, if it had been released a week ago, I would probably already be using it as my mail server because I redid my mail server just last week. Apparently Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape and Mozilla fame, warned Nat Friedman about slapping Hula with the ‘Groupware’ label. Instead he offered the following advice, “Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” That whole post is really pretty entertaining.

I’m actually going to try and install The Hurd in the next few days. I really don’t expect much from it, but that’s the point. It’ll be interesting to see an operating system in such an early stage of development. I mean, The Hurd has been 20 years in the making and it still doesn’t do much of anything. In fact, they very recently ripped out large chunks of it and started over. That’ll probably add another 20 years to the development time. I hope I’m alive to see version 1.0. Ha!

Spit with Some Authority

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My Mom got back from here business trip today. She was in Orlando for the last few days. I drove my father and brother to pick her up from the airport. On the way my day laid into my brother pretty bad. He got on his case about helping around the house and a few other things. He got on him about how he spits his toothpaste into the sink. Apparently there was some toothpaste on the faucet or something. All through this rant I had Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background. It was a pretty surreal experience to be driving on Sunrise Highway in the rain, listening to Simon & Garfunkel and hearing my Dad yell at my brother for a good 10 minutes.

I found this linux commercial over at Novell’s website to be pretty funny. It’s pretty weird to see all of these big companies pushing linux so much. This was unheard of just a few years back.

Put Up or Shut Up

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Yeah, so I can no longer disillusion myself. Either I’m gonna start contributing code to Gnome or I’m gonna start poking my eyes out. I’ve been living on the fringe here for a little too long. Plus, if I want to go to Guadec, which I do, then I want to actually have contributed something useful. It is always very hard to figure out where to start. I’m deciding to start by implementing proxy support in the gnome panel applets that need web access. That way I’ll be able to get my weather information and other nice things when I’m behind the proxy at work. So, I’ve set up a web proxy (squid) on the server I have here at home and I’m going through it right now. I just compiled gnome-applets from CVS and I’m going to try and add support for this and supply a patch. We’ll see how far I get. It would be pretty nice to get this working because I hate not knowing the weather at work. I guess we do have windows, but who has the time for that? Alright – here I go.
Update: Alright, I’m an idiot. It turns out that they have support for going over a proxy already because they use gnome-vfs. I’m still not sure why they don’t work at work. I’ll have to investigate a bit. Well, at least I tried. I did sift through a bunch of the code and found where it was doing all of its stuff. Another day goes by and nothing to show for it. Time to watch some Family Guy.

PS – I’m one of those people that just don’t get Sifl & Olly.
PPS – That’s right John, I just wanted to do the trackback thing that bad.

Abosultely Nothing at All

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“Do you know, know how it feels, when you go from spending nights with someone to absolutely nothing at all?” — Silent Majority – Cross Crowded Rooms

Yeah – so these last few days haven’t been very easy. Jamie and I split up Monday night. It’s permanent this time. And while it is pretty hard on me and I’m sure it is hard on her, I think we both know that it is for the better. The last week has been rather awkward, and I’m sure the next few weeks will be also. I almost have to learn how to be alone again. It isn’t a nice feeling, but it’s what I’ve got.

I’m thinking about going to GUADEC this year. We’ll see. I’m not the traveling kind of guy. I’ve never been inside of an airport, let alone on a plane. Germany would be kind of far for a first trip. But, I think it would be good for me.

Brandon is coming home from school this weekend. Nak, Steve and I are playing poker tomorrow night. I’m probably going to lose a bunch of money. Maybe I can convince Nak to eat 20 White Castle burgers while we’re playing. That might up my chances of winning.

Good News -They still don’t get it

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An article describing Bill Gates’ most recent visit to Asia further convinces me that Microsoft still doesn’t understand how Open Source Software works. Well, either they don’t get it or they do get it but think that everyone else hasn’t gotten it yet, which of course many of us have. There are just a few sentences in here that really stand out to me. Gates was quoted as saying, “[Open source] doesn’t guarantee upward compatibility or do that kind of integration [for seamless computing to work].” Now, this is a gem. It is true that the open source community doesn’t guarantee any kind of upward compatibility. But, the trick is that we don’t have to. Memories of Chris Farley yelling about ‘guaranteed pieces of shit’ in Tommy Boy are very fitting here. It doesn’t really matter if there is no one to blame. Upwards compatibility is something that the open source community will need to survive. We don’t have the resources to reinvent our systems en-masse every year. Everything is incremental. Besides, Microsoft hasn’t guaranteed anything to me recently, and if they had, I would be very upset. OpenOffice.org v1.1.2 is better at opening old Microsoft Word files than the most recent Microsoft Word. That’s right. The open source community is making up for Microsoft’s inability to provide upwards compatibility.
The other quote that stands out of this article is, “…when it comes to a guarantee or having someone who stands behind your software, [open source] is typically not something done in a capital approach.” Once again, having someone to blame isn’t the point. When software fails, having someone to sue isn’t going to make your life any better. In reality, you just want really reliable software. And on top of all of that, Red Hat, Novell, HP and others are betting that they can make money by making these kinds of promises and guarantees. It’s only a matter of time here.