Linux Laughter

Once more into week out and looking forwards to ‘hawg’in tabs. And this week has turned out to be a pretty good week in that regard. So the whole prospect of sorting through them is rather daunting and depressing.

This has been a good week for wart recognition in the Linux community. First, it seems that the founder of Gnome has become a minion of the dark side, succumbing to the false placidity of Fruit. [Link] We may only hope that someone puts him out of his (and our) misery before he realizes he has traded his creativity and cognition for their appearance. Not that we gainsay his freedom to move to the dark side, just that he may be in need of some compassion and sympathy. Of course, we rather can’t blame him. After all, all that is left to Gnome is the claim that it is the least horrible and unpleasant of the tile GUIs, an almost workable third behind Unity and whatever Metro is called today.

And while we are on the dark side, out favorite Sith, Mark Shuttleworth displayed his actuality this week, announcing that Ubuntu is an autarky, not a democracy.[Link] I found a couple of bits especially illuminating:

“But while Shuttleworth says he understands that some in the community will be resentful of the “disruptive change” that Canonical has brought to Ubuntu and the Linux world at large, he believes that if you’re not on board with Unity and Canonical’s broader vision, it’s probably because you’re stuck in and old-school geek mentality that has no place in Ubuntu.”

and

“To Shuttleworth, Ubuntu isn’t about catering to hobbyists, but about building an open source OS that is so compelling that free software becomes the norm, rather than the exception.”

Rather obviously, Shuttleworth is all about exploiting all those “hobbyists” who have made Ubuntu arguably the best of the distros. One has to suspect that he has recycled his urine one time too many and become too focused on the dead pixels on his monitor. Part of the problem, clearly, is that the old-school elitist mentality is increasingly necessary to make Ubuntu work by stripping away the new bits inserted by Shuttleworth that do not work – like Unity – and replace them with bits that do, like XFCE and KDE. We do have to ask ourselves and the community how much longer can the hobbyists patch Ubuntu after Shuttleworth’s mucking before it is no longer worthwhile and we leave Ubuntu to the folks who see MegaHard as a larger attack rabbit to be run away from?

History is full of folks who suffered from the same kind of evil that infests Shuttleworth – Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, …. We may only hope, as compassionate humans, that his fate is exile rather than a bunker.

computers, information, Linux, stupidity

In Search of Potential

Yesterday was a great day. After the usual round of downloading podcast episode, editing metadata, and transferring them to player – and charging player – she decided we had to venture out to purchase electrochemical accumulators, what the bogs refer to as batteries. Ayeh, courtesy of the council of thieves politicians in Muntgum this week out is a “tax free” period for the purpose of disaster relief (?) necessities. The list is available on the Alibam income tax web site and is notable more for what is not on the list than what is. If I were making up a list of what I needed in the event of a tornado blitz (e.g.) that list would be a lot longer and more diverse than this “official” one. Once more the council of thieves politicians displays their incompetence, greed, and slavery to corporate interests.

But that’s the nature of living in Alibam, one step away from national socialism or other form of tyranny.

Speaking of which I caught a broadcast from WAFF news last evening on a pro-chocice/pro-life demonstration in Huntsville.[Link] The bigotry was laid on with a bull dozer. Less than five seconds were spent on the pro-choice demonstrators; almost two minutes on the pro-life. And the facial and verbal expression of the news reader were blatant in their bias. So much for objectivity and fairness in Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill.

On a more pleasing note, I see that the Yankee government has finally extended its open access policy to more than biomedical research articles. [Link] This is quite pleasing. It signals that the YG may be actually cracking down on avaricious journal publishers by compromising their autarky. And, it makes more taxpayer supported research available to people who can use it. And from an acute rectal pain standpoint it may also get rid of some of the noxiousness of the Freedom of Information Act that has never been funded adequately and is widely abused by corporations for their own greed. So a small booyah to some unsung staffer in the president’s palace.

A second good bit is an article [Link] entitled “I Can’t Find a Single Productive Use For My Tablet”. That sums it up. A fairly comprehensive, albeit subjective, as such things necessarily have to be, indictment of the slab as work surface. I admit I don’t like the throw-out that W8 may be a mediocre work medium – and ignoring Ubuntu tablet completely – but at least the analysis is not totally whacked. It’s not like the guy will likely discorporate any time for absence of neural activity, even if it is less than we should like. But the points are not bad and it is worthwile just because of the bravery and honesty – well, semi-honesty.

humans, stupidity, government, science, information, computers

The Actual Rock

Ran across this cartoon [Link]

shortly ago. Was engaged.

First, there is the aspect of Rat being the brunt for a change. I support proper disrespect but not when it is not deserved.

Second, I agree with the implied assessment. The internet is not trustworthy. If anything it is less trustworthy than most “holy” books, like the bible, if not by much. And unlike them, it is fairly open. But that openness means that one cannot tell poo from pony. Hence the need for the encyclopedia.

I have numerous – annual – copies of the electronic Britannica. Every year I buy one or more copies, depending on the needs of the few educationalists who will talk to me, and I go through the pain of getting my copy – the one I keep – to run on WINE.

information, computers, internet, encuclopedia

In Search of a Land Fill

Today is sag day. Went to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill yesterday for staff call and food acquisition and that took time, effort, and will. Today is also end of gym for the week, I feel burnt out a bit and the weekend schedule is farcical to insulting. Only in the old confederacy can such religionist discrimination be condoned by the legally elected government.

I have noted in the emails that the repulsians are beginning to sound a bit frantic and strident. Not that I am not amenable to a few of their concerns but there are too many nastynesses about both political parties for me to countenance either. I do not wish the collapse of just the repulsians, indeed that would be a disaster, but rather the collapse of both. At times like this the execution of a Sokrates seems not unreasonable.

I also have to keep children and grandchildren from my mind. Else it would combine with the ineffectualness of the individual and difference from the majority to destroy me faster.

On a more pleasant note I noted an article [Link] this week about the rumor of MegaHard porting Orifice to Linux. Evidently there was a lot of buzz about this because it was perceived to induce a lot of large organizations to switch to Linux given its betterness and the prospect of having their office unproductivity toy. 

Sorry folks, I have to yawn at the prospect. MegaHard Orifice is a rectum. (There, I finally got to use that association explicitly!) In fact it is a rectum embellished with all manner of useless and distracting stercus. And there is no way to keep it clean. From my perspective it has only one positive feature, which is the Visual Basic coding in EXCEL. But if I am running Linux and can actually do number crunch coding with a REAL language, like FORTRAN, then who needs that?

IMHO, LibreOffice is a far better product. The stercus encrustation is much less. Not zero, mind, but low. And several dB easier to use. In fact, LO is an actual productivity tool unlike Orifice. So the rumor for me is much less of an attraction than a repulsion.

But I would like to see them bring Scientific Word to Linux. Lyx is nice but it ain’t SW!

computers, information, client, stupidity, rumor

MegaSplat

Yesterday was another medicalist day, except this time for FD SCP. So I got to do a lot of sit and try to divert myself time. One of the topics was why we find external change so much more stressful than internal change.

That brings me to a pair of articles in the Register. The first [Link] was sent me by my colleague, Magnetic Inductance Force, and has the comforting title, “Every single Internet Explorer at risk of drive-by hacks until Patch Tuesday”. Comforting, at least, to those of us who don’t use Internet Exploder. Of course on a Linux box you can run, I am told, IE on WINE but why? I ask those who tell me this question and they all respond that it’s possible but not preferable. But in my discussion with my contributing colleague we did discuss why anyone still uses IE when there are other, gooder – as some say here in Alibam – browsers. I personally do not like Chromium, passing it by for the actual Chrome, mostly because of the ease of integrating with Gooey. But while I have Chrome installed on all my boxes I really only use it on the Xubuntu box that I use for surfing. FireFox is the browser of choice for serious internet usage.

I have heard colleague argue the merits of almost all browsers, except IE. Somehow there are no proponents of it, only folks who opt for the path of least resistance or are conditioned. I am often surprised by the former. Some of my colleagues, people of good knowledge and mind, who just can’t get engaged with the idea of a better browser. When I wax on the merits of things like ReminderFox and other add-ins, they blink stoically and radiate an attitude of enduring frivolity. When I ask how they get reminded of things like medication schedules they admit to not and missing regularly. They are also the people who use the MegaHard email client – not Outlook, the spayed one – instead of ThunderBird or some other client that does things – and they don’t have a gMail account and don’t understand why they need anything more than their ISP account. And they don’t do gCal or any other calendering, in the main.

There are a few who work in organizations of tight IT control. These are all MegaHard shops. And because they can’t use anything but IE at work, they don’t at home. Some of them are so low on the bog ladder that they don’t even know to complain.

I tend to think of these people as the third world of IT users. They are rather like primitive denizens of some third world country who suffer all sorts of medical maladies because they lack infrastructure and the knowledge to expect it. Just as people in more developed countries expect clean water and sanitary plumbing and …. and are keen to secure these benefits for all, those of us who use other browsers seem keen to secure those benefits for all, preferably by eradicating MegaHard.

Which brings us to article two [Link] about MegaHard’s abysmal sales of their tablets. I have to admit to a bit of surprise here. After all the MegaHard clone of Unity, whatever other name they stick on the GUI, is intended for a slab. It’s the reason they abandoned their established base in hopes of gathering in all the slab slime. And it appears they are failing.

But what took me by the surprise was that the article had as abysmal analysis as an Amerikan one. The article went on to discuss the depressed sales of PCs by folks like Higgledy Piggedly and Dull. But never did they consider in their analysis that part of the reason is that the consumerists are buying slabs. So if the market is dominated by replacement, sales of boxes are going to go down and sales of slabs are going to go up as the consumerists get rid of old box for new slab. Duhhhhhh!

What I haven’t grokked yet is the effect of UEFI. As the consumerists migrate to slabs and abandon their boxes, the box demographic will become more solidly creation users and the OS demographic will shift to Linux and (shudder) Apple OS. But if UEFI won’t work well with Linux – forget the Fruit Folk – then that will further depress sales of boxes.

I won’t even mention yet any views of MegaHard owning a big chunk of Dull and what that will do for the organic Linux box makers.

computers, information, internet, browser, malware, market, stupidity

Corporate GUI

Back to the boundary layer again. It has been a less than optimal week. Numerous glitches and perturbations even excepting the grand farce that is the national election. It has become all too painfully clear that the true decision-making is vested in BIG Gubment and BIG Brands and to a lesser extent their myrmidons,[1] the political parties.

I thus thought it rather appropriate to comment on an article [Link] about how master Linus (Torvalds – for the boggery who might be reading,) is trying KDE again. He sez,

“It still looks a bit too cartoony, and the default widget/plasmoid behavior with mouse-over pretty much immediately showing the controls for it annoys the hell of me. You can lock the widgets down and they calm down and act normal, but it’s some really odd and distracting default behavior.”

which I rather have to agree with. And the graphics engine is often going La La Land.

But I have been walking a similar path. And while I find Gnome Shell several dB more acceptable than Unity, it is cold and lacking in some quality that actually makes one value it.

The problem is that XFCE is rather too Spartan and uncomfortable, due to decorations that I somehow equate with American Primitive artwork. It’s rather like having nothing to sit on but a slat chair of rather geometric uncompromise with human anatomy.

KDE, on the other hand, is rather like one of those over sized, overstuffed recliners that one can enter and tip back, but thereafter is immobilized in constraint but absent support.

The problem is that the middle has disappeared and so we all must exist on the surface of the doughnut (torus.)

One more example of how we are now the slaves of BIG Brands.

[1]  A soldier or a subordinate civil officer who executes cruel orders of a superior without protest or pity; — sometimes applied to bailiffs, constables, etc. –Thackeray. [1913 Webster]

computers, information, GUI, pain, torture, evil

Bathroom Partition

Having bemoaned that we are still, in many ways, an occupied land, I can move on to natter [1] about other things. It being week out and more heated than previously in the week – or, so the weather beavers declaim, than tomorrow, I can happily start with a wonderful article [Link] entitled “Windows 8 Is a Desktop Disaster”. The title is sufficient.

Tile guis are the hallmark of the appliance [2] user. It fails the needs of tool [2] users.
 
Keep tile guis on appliances – slabs and cellular telephones and away from the tools – desk and lap boxes.

[1]  1. To find fault; to be peevish. [Prov. Eng. or Scot.] [1913 Webster]
[2]  An apparatus or device, usually powered electrically, used in homes to perform domestic functions. An appliance is often categorized as a major appliance or a minor appliance by its cost.
[3]  An instrument such as a hammer, saw, plane, file, and the like, used in the manual arts, to facilitate mechanical operations; any instrument used by a craftsman or laborer at his work; an implement; as, the tools of a joiner, smith, shoe-maker, etc.; also, a cutter, chisel, or other part of an instrument or machine that dresses work. [1913 Webster]

computers, information, OS, humans, work

Serial Efficiency

Ah! Back to gym and week in. Rather nice other than waisting twenty minutes of listening time (a segment on a stationary bicycle – 4.2 miles – but I’m an ORF, after all) on a podcast episode that didn’t get deleted, so I defaulted to a shorter series and inlistened an episode of BBC’s “In Our Time” on the early days of the Royal Society. As is almost always the case with organizations, early days are both productive and turbulent.

But this put me to mind of an article [Link] one of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, sent me entitled “10 IT relics I really miss” with a few comments. The article is an annotated list of ten IT “things” from the golden age of desktops. I’ll only reproduce the “thingies”, not the commentary, here:

1. Computer magazines with source code
2. Computer stores
3. True desktop cases
4. Durable keyboards and mice
5. In-person help desk visits
6. Immersive gaming
7. BBSes
8. Shareware subscriptions
9. Software that didn’t have to be installed
10. Easily modifiable code.

My colleague’s comments were largely the addition of compiler-text editor integrations.

I have to say that I find these a mixed bag. The magazine were a lot better then being really technical and not just bad journalism and OS hacks but the computer stores were a real pain since they didn’t want to have anything to do with solitaries and hobbyists. Computer Shopper was a mitzvah and the computer bits buying may be one of the few socially redeeming pieces of the internet. I prefer towers mostly because they are easier to get in and out of albeit heavy – a meaningful matter to an ORF. I still use a Northgate keyboard and select for robust mice. Before I retired we had IT visitation and it was a bit of a pain trying to hold meeting in office with an IT guy bashing the box. Gaming has always been immersive back to when we were playing Star Trek on an IBM 360 at the campus of the Black Warrior; it’s a personality thing, not a computer thing. I recall getting immersed in WRG Modern Armor games. BBSes were always strange and shareware subscriptions were exciting even when you discovered how lame the client was.

And I have to agree with my colleague. The best thing was when Phillipe Kahn brought out Turbo Pascal and the eternal swapping from editor to compiler ended. Even though TP wasn’t the ideal number crunching language.

But what I miss the most of those golden days was how productive they were. You were stand alone; email was a matter of dialing up a mail server. Calendering was purely local; files were transferred via snail mail or shank’s mare. And because you didn’t have multitasking and multiple open clients you had to, and could, plan your work. So you almost never got distracted by administrivia if you had the least modicum of will power. You just scheduled when you were going to do those nit noid things and if you weren’t busy then, they got done. Today they dominate and get done to the detriment of real work.

So yes, those were the golden days when a computer was a real productivity multiplier. Even with FreeCell.

humans, computers, information, golden age, productivity

Welfare Coexistence

Yesterday I ran across an article [Link] about Winders and Linux coexisting on the same machine. I have to admit to viewing this with a great deal of distrust and derision.

I have been trying for a month now to get Winders VII and Ubuntu 12.04 on the same box. I have already related the starting part of this where the Ubuntu install went bonkers and reformatted the whole hard drive. After that, lacking any means of reinstalling W VII, I went and bought a real copy of Winders VII Professional.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

The install was a moderate nightmare. The basic install only took about three hours, which is about an hour longer than installing Ubuntu would have taken. But then Winders VII Pro is a REAL microcomputer OS so one has to expect it to take a while longer.

And it did. Because nothing worked quite right. Seems the basic Winders VII drivers are stercus. And it wouldn’t even talk to my network. It took two hours and three different 802.11n dongles to get one, yes, integer the first, to work.

Then I spent twelve hours installing the updates that had amassed since the DVD was pressed and then. And the hardware still didn’t work quite right. Bad, not right. The 1080p monitor wouldn’t do better than 800×600.  So I went to Hewlett Packard, who made the box. And spent another six hours downloading drivers. Twelve of them. And another few hours installing, and then the hardware sorta worked.

Did I mention that I am getting half the download speed on Winders as I am on the slowest Linux box in the house? That’s part of why it took so long. But another big part of it is that Winders is serious deficient in drivers. I have never had to download more than two drivers under any version of Linux.

Then I spent five days, 2-4 hours per day, installing the five programs that are gotta-haves under Winders for me. And the most important one doesn’t work right.

So let’s see, Winders VII Pro is obese, slow, and won’t run Winders clients. Did I mention slow? This is a six core box with 10 Gb of RAM and a good (too big) sized hard drive and Winders runs about half as fast as the slowest Linux box I have with one core.

And that’s with what Winders calls minimum eyecandy. Not that Winders eyecandy is anything to write home about unless you’re a candy historian and want to illustrate what candy was like before sugar and chocolate. The only part of Linux with less eyecandy is command line. Heck, I have seen terminal clients with better eyecandy than W VIII.

So yeah, I want them to coexist, because I need those programs but I don’t want to waste a box this good just on slime mold like W VIII. I need a good OS to do all the other stuff.

Somehow this reminds me of Amerika. We have people who work, people who seem to work, and people who don’t want to work if the Yankee government will pay them not to. So we have an OS society?

computers, information, OS, stupidity, tyranny, nonsense

Android Whisky

Yesterday was a bit hectic. FD SCP drug me off to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill to be initiated into the twenty-first century, or at least the semi-bog piece of it. We traded in our flip cellular telephones for “smart” cellular telephones. That took the better part of 2.5 hours and were it not for the tender ministrations of the sales clerk I should have departed in dudgeon. After dealing with Ma Bell since my retirement – when I had to tun in the Yankee army issued cellular telephone and get my own, piggybacked on FD SCP’s existing instrumentality – I was pleasantly surprised with both temperament and knowledge.

Not that I am going to make comparisons between Android and Unix other than that the grandchild is more urbane and slow. The boot time for my new phone compares to that of Winders VII. My Zojurishu coffee pot perks a full pot faster than this cellular telephone boots. But I shudder to think what the GUI would be like on a Unix telephone.

I found a manual for the beast and am slowly digesting it and am scouting about for an introduction to Android coding and control. Any trustworthy hacks would be appreciated.

After that we had a decent respite of pasta and sauce followed by a frustrating hour or so at home fixit emporia looking for ceiling fans and toaster oven. All to naught. Our only advance was in the number of bruises from the crowds of other folks looking for stuff that also was unavailable.

I understand from gym this morning that the second week on unentertainment, in the form of the democrud convention, commences today. At least the podcast episodes were good. NPR did a good job last week, especially the interview with Kathy Reichs.

I also noted [Link] that the consumption, alright, the purchase, of ethanol in Scotland fell last year by 0.04, the first time there has been a decrease since records were begun in 1994 CE. This latter is rather more intriguing than the former. The Scots drink well. There is no finer potable than whisky, even the blended muck that is most commonly available here in Amerika. And whisky does not ruin the teeth like sugar, which the Scots also consume in great amount, mostly in pastry. Which we also have only abysmally here in Amerika in common availability. Why is it that Amerikans think vending machine confections are pastry?

But the question still bodes large of why 1994? Was this some English tyrannical innovation? Did the Scots have an epidemic of incurable temperance? Did some form of fungus induced insanity run rampant? The World Wonders.

I am considering the hypothesis that whisky may make my slow booting twenty-first century cellular telephone more efficient. Or at least seem that way.

computers, information, whisky, Scotland, America