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So you put off buying a high-def TV for years, because you weren’t sure they had gotten all the standards right. You recently gave in, thinking that the coming shut-off of analog broadcast TV in February meant that they had to have their technology figured out by now.
Of course, you were wrong:
CableCARD devices have generally supported only one-way access to cable systems, but their long, winding journey toward full two-way communications is finally coming to an end. Panasonic has announced that it is at last shipping new HDTVs enabled with tru2way technology to the two US markets where they can actually be used.
So what’s the main thing you’re supposed to get with tru2way?
This means that you can walk out of a retail store with a tru2way-enabled HDTV, plug it in at home, and have immediate access to basic features like an on-screen guide and on-demand content.
In other words, we are just now starting to see HDTVs that can just plug into the cable jack and work, without an add-on cable box and all the limitations that implies, right?
Well, not really.
All tru2way-compatible devices will have a CableCARD slot built into them to facilitate the decryption of protected content, though details are still sketchy as to how this system will work with devices like PVRs. Physical CableCARDs will apparently not be needed to access basic two-way services and non-encrypted channels.
Meaning that, in order to get anything you can’t get already with broadcast TV (”non-encrypted”), you still need a cable company tech to come out and install the CableCARD. And they don’t know how all of this will integrate with the new video recorders like TiVo.
Why is this so hard? It’s producer paranoia. If they don’t play these games, you might watch some show for free, or share it so others can watch it for free, instead of… well, watching it for free live. And you might cut the commercials out, instead of… cutting the commercials out by getting up for more chips during the commercial breaks. (But that’s stealing, so you shouldn’t do that either.)
Our family keeps edging closer to deciding to get a HDTV. But then I see stuff like this, and notice that the old tube TV still works fine…
Ubuntu is now being forced to show a EULA before letting users run Firefox, on pain of losing the rights to the Firefox trademark. (You know, End User License Agreements: those pop-ups Windows and Mac users have to put up with all the time, with the big “I Accept” button at the bottom.) Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu top dog, weighs in on the bug:
Please feel free to make constructive suggestions as to how we can meet Mozilla’s requirements while improving the user experience. It’s not constructive to say “WTF?”, nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla’s rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile.
This is a bit surprising, and a bit disappointing. Both the decision itself, and Mark’s take on it, are quite wrong.
One of the most important benefits of free software is the legal agreement you work in. You don’t have to agree to some long contract every time you need to do something new on your system, or sometimes even when you get a “critical update” to something you’re already doing. You don’t have to read pages of legalese, or go through some long process with your company’s legal department, or just click the “make it go away” button with this vague unease that you’ve just signed your first-born child away to the Devil.
Most importantly, you feel like you actually own your computer when you run free software on it. When you enter a situation where you always have to ask permission to do things, and have to be constantly reminded of the rules, you don’t feel comfortable. Clearly, the thing in front of you is not yours, whatever your credit card bill might say; if it were, there wouldn’t be all this stress over you doing something the real owners don’t like. Free software returns your computer to you, by guaranteeing that you don’t have to enter into all these contracts before you can use it.
Well, unless that “free” software is Firefox 3.0.2 or later, it seems.
It’s “free” by a technical definition (you can strip the Firefox trademark rather easily, and get rid of the EULA as well). But when users fire up Ubuntu, and decide to do some browsing, and get confronted with pages of legal garbage and ALL CAPS, they will ask: “What’s so different about this open source stuff? I thought I was getting rid of all this legal crap.” And, suddenly, they’re slogging through the same drudgery they had to endure with every Windows service pack, and they wonder what they’ve gained.
Perhaps there is a price we should be willing to pay to help Mozilla preserve their trademarks, but this price is too great. Mozilla should never have asked this of us, and Ubuntu should never have decided, on our behalf, that this price was acceptable.
Debian has already turned its back on Firefox, and I have yet to have a problem with Iceweasel (the branding Debian chose for its Firefox-alike) that was caused by the branding change. But I’m tempted to bring it back, in Debian’s “non-free” software repository. Perhaps we could provide Firefox, complete with nasty EULA, but launch Iceweasel instead of Firefox if the user clicks “No”. There are probably all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m still drawn to the idea of illustrating how silly and useless click-through EULAs are.
But it would be much more productive for Mozilla to back down, and not ask us to sacrifice such a large part of our identity on the altar of their sacred mark.
UPDATE: First, I notice I was remiss in not giving a hat tip to Slashdot.
Second, Mark has posted another comment on the bug. I encourage people to read the whole comment, but here’s a telling part:
For example, at the moment, we’re in detailed negotiations with a
company that makes a lot of popular hardware to release their drivers as
free software – they are currently proprietary. It would not be possible
to hold those negotiations if every step of the way turned into a public
discussion. And yet, engaging with that company both to make sure Ubuntu
works with its hardware and also to move them towards open source
drivers would seem to be precisely in keeping with our community values.
In this case, we have been holding extensive, sensitive and complex
conversations with Mozilla. We strongly want to support their brand
(don’t forget this is one of the few companies that has successfully
taken free software to the dragons lair) and come to a reasonable
agreement. We want to do that in a way which is aligned with Ubuntu’s
values, and we have senior representatives of the project participating
in the dialogue and examining options for the implementation of those
agreements. Me. Matt Zimmerman. Colin Watson. Those people have earned
our trust.
On the one hand, yes, I believe that the Canonical people have earned our trust, and I do appreciate the utility of quiet persuasion with a proprietary software company that doesn’t understand our community. On the other hand, I had been under the impression that Mozilla was not a proprietary software company, and didn’t need persuasion and secret negotiations to see our point of view.
Is Mozilla still a free software company, or not?
UPDATE 2: Cautious optimism is appropriate, I think. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla chair:
We (meaning Mozilla) have shot ourselves in the foot here given the old, wrong content. So I hope we can have a discussion on this point, but I doubt we’ll have a good one until we fix the other problems.
The actual changes aren’t available yet, and I wonder how much of this had been communicated to Canonical beforehand. Still, it’s a good sign.
It’s silly season again in America: a Presidential election year. If you don’t know that, you must really be living under a rock.
As I did four years ago, I’ll post my thoughts about how I vote online for all the elections I can participate in: national, Congressional, Indiana-wide, and local. That way, you can do more than curse the ignorant Americans for their choices; you can possibly influence at least one.
Local races look to be more boring than usual this year, because neither of Indiana’s Senators is running this year. Fishers trends strongly Republican, too, which makes a lot of the other local races uncompetitive.
But that’s not why I said the Republicans win. I figured I’d be able to watch the speeches from the conventions at my own convenience online, so just now I tried both sites. Here’s what the Democratic convention site told me:
We’re sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn’t compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:
Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.
That’s because the Democrats chose Microsoft as their official technology provider, and Microsoft chose to deliver all video using their Silverlight technology, which doesn’t work on Linux (yet).
And what are the Republicans using? Good ol’ YouTube.
Yes, I’ll probably be able to find the important Democrat speeches on YouTube. But how easy will that be? And how many of the obscure Democrat speeches will I be drawn into watching just out of curiosity? I’ve already listened to portions of Fred Thompson’s and Joe Lieberman’s speeches–because it was so easy.
Advantage: Republicans.
The comment policy has changed; check the page links for the details. The big change: I’ve turned off the CAPTCHA page that would be presented for comments judged to be “borderline” spam by the spam filter software.
For those not aware, CAPTCHA is the name given to the funny letters and numbers on weird backgrounds that you sometimes have to type in to do things on certain web sites. The idea was that computers couldn’t read those letters and numbers, but humans could; thus, each solved CAPTCHA was proof that a human had done whatever it was that had been done.
CAPTCHA had issues even from the beginning. They present obvious issues for the blind, and were often simple enough to be read by modern OCR software. Because of this, I never turned it on for every comment, and any comment rejected because of the CAPTCHA just went into the moderation queue. But I’m now convinced that CAPTCHA has reached the end of its useful life.
So when a commenter on my last post expressed his dissatisfaction with my CAPTCHA, I decided it was time to turn it off. And so, references to it have been expunged from my comment policy.
The Esperanto translation of my comment policy has also been updated, in the hopes that I might someday post a little more often in that language. It’s also been moved to a page.
Reportedly, the USA is falling behind the rest of the world in bandwidth:
The 2008 median real-time download speed in the U.S. is a mere 2.3 megabits per second. This represents a gain of only 0.4 mbps over last year’s median download speed. It compares to an average download speed in Japan of 63 mbps, the survey reveals.
US also trails South Korea at 49 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, France at 17 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps, and the median upload speed was just 435 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or to transmit large files such as medical records.
But don’t tell Chris Blizzard’s commenters. He writes about Comcast’s annoucement of a 250GB/month bandwidth cap, and gets an earful from commenters from Canada and Europe:
A boo hoo hoo. Major Canadian ISPs have had a limit of 60 GB for months, if not years.
Oh wait… probably the same way as most of the world manages on 10-20GB, for far more money than you’re paying for $250. Not a lot of sympathy from this corner…
Yep, no sympathy from here either — in Australia, with the only _independant_ ISP left, $280 AUD gets you 100GB. $50 with a major telco (the rest of the ISPs here) gets you 5GB.
eg with my current ISP, a 8 MB line with a 300 GB monthly cap costs 20 GBP/month. A 8 MB line with unlimited bandwidth costs 160 GBP/month. Quite a difference!
I pay the equivalent of $40 a month for 30GB, and extra GB on top are $3 each. That’s with Plus Net (http://www.plus.net).
I’m in South Africa paying about $130 for a 10GB cap.
So who’s really better off? By my calculations, if a Canadian ISP provides 7.8 mb/s with a 60 GB cap, that’s about 17.5 hours per month of sustained maximum bandwidth before you’ve blown your limit. By contrast, an American ISP with 2.3 mb/s and a 250 GB cap gives you about 247 hours per month of sustained maximum bandwidth.
Perhaps part of the answer is that only one country–Canada–shows up in the list of “faster countries” and in the comments section of Chris’s post. That could explain the apparent disconnect; maybe Great Britain and Australia are worse off than the USA, while Finland and Japan are better off.
Still, this does bring the question to mind: which is better, raw speed, or the ability to actually use it without fear?
Picking up where we left off last time…
The LSB spec invents things without consulting distros. Like the whole init scripts thing. But that’s not as bad as depending on RPM or requiring a specific layout.
What can be very frustrating is that we do reach out to all the major distros, and a number of the less major ones. But we don’t talk to every single person on every single distro; we can’t. We also try to follow best practices for an open project: open version control, open IRC, open mailing lists.
Part of the problem may be that we also talk to independent software developers, and sometimes, distro people aren’t prepared to hear what developers are saying. So, it looks like we’re pushing things on them, like predictable directory layouts, hooks for working with the user environment, different options for software installation, and the like.
We used to just listen to distros and do what they wanted. Part of the reason there’s still a lingering perception that “the LSB failed” is that software developers saw us as irrelevant. And they were right: we were irrelevant, because we only listened to the distros. So now we listen to both sides, and try to get them to talk to each other, and act as a go-between when they don’t seem able to.
I had an eye-opening experience in Berlin in 2006. We talked to packaging people, and talked about the need for cooperation between package managers and third-party installer tools. A lot of people thought that was a bad idea. So we got them together with some major ISVs in Berlin, and told them to figure it out. And they did figure something out, and surprise! Communication between package managers and third-party installers became a good thing, at least if done right.
And we don’t have a problem with the “done right” part, either. We made a few attempts at proposals for the communication system above, and someone has created an independent implementation. Some of those proposals came under sharp criticism. And we’re cool with that; happy, in fact, that it got attention.
So if you want to find out what’s going on with us, and what terrible things we’re going to make you do in the future, check out our project plan, sign up for our mailing list, or just come by our IRC channel (irc.linuxfoundation.org, #lsb) and ask some questions. We try to be friendly and helpful.
So it looks like the project I’ve been laboring on has been getting some attention:
Ever thought it was difficult to write software for Linux? For multiple distros? InternetNews reports that the LSB is making a push for their next release (due out later this year) that should help make all that much easier.
They even link to our project status page. Cool!
Of course, good publicity invites criticism. This time, there seem to be two themes. William Pitcock seems to have the most succinct summary:
To put things simply, the LSB sucks. Here’s why:
- The LSB spec depends on RPM. I mean, come on. Seriously. Why do they need to require a specific package manager? If package handling is really required, then why not create a simple package format that can be converted on demand into the system package format? Or why care about packages at all?
- The LSB spec invents things without consulting distros. Like the whole init scripts thing. But that’s not as bad as depending on RPM or requiring a specific layout.
(See also Scott James Remnant.)
Let’s take this one part at a time. Today’s topic: packaging.
Part of William’s problem may be that he doesn’t understand the spec. The LSB doesn’t require a specific package manager, or a specific package format. It doesn’t even require that the distribution be set up using package management at all!
The spec only requires that LSB-compliant software be distributed so that any LSB-compliant distribution can install it. That could be tarballs with POSIX-compliant install scripts, an LSB-compliant install binary, a shar archive, a Python script with embedded base64 binaries, whatever. One of the options allowed is an RPM package, with a number of restrictions.
The restrictions are key, because they effectively define a subset of RPM that acts as, to quote William again:
…a simple package format that can be converted on demand into the system package format…
The difference being, of course, that we didn’t reinvent the wheel and create our own; we used a popular format as the basis for ours.
Scott raises another concern:
While much of the LSB can be hacked into a different distribution through compatibility layers and tools, such as alien, what ISV or other vendor wants to provide a support contract against a distribution that has such kludges?
I’m not sure if he’s referring specifically to packaging or to the standard in general. As regards packaging: the reason we specify a strict subset is because we can test that subset, and we’ve tailored it to the needs of tools such as alien. The theory goes that alien isn’t a kludge when it comes to LSB packages.
But, as already mentioned, if vendors aren’t comfortable with supporting RPM, they have a number of other options. As it turns out, most of them are doing just that; the feedback we’re getting from most ISVs is that packaging (whether LSB-subset RPM, full RPM, or Debian) is just not worth the effort.
Coming up: part 2…
JROBI, a chess blogger, on energy policy:
A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what?
If Bio-Fuel is not better for the environment, why are politicians and environmentalists getting behind this growing industry? I think it’s because it seems to be the “trendy” thing to do, and we all know what happens when the media promotes a new trend. We get tons of media coverage telling us why it’s a good thing, and hardly any coverage of the negative impacts. Already people from the Bio-Fuel industry are getting on television shouting out that there are many factors contributing to rising food prices, trying to deflect the fact that their destruction of food to fuel vehicles is the main culprit.
Actually, I suspect the emphasis on biofuels in the USA and Europe has to do with the fact that it’s the only alternative to fossil-based motor fuels proven to be sustainable and scalable:
The success of FFFVs, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil to get more than 40% of its automobile fuels from sugar cane-based ethanol in 2007.
I see no link to the European study in question, but previous studies have suffered from various faults; for example, the assumption that trucks transporting fuel cannot themselves shift to biofuels. I’m sure better analysis of the study is on its way.
But that’s not the most interesting thing, to me. More interesting: my general impression that a lot of the climate-change hysteria is just that.
If we hear what science seems to be telling us about the environment, and we think that something needs to be done, then we should do things that will actually work. One thing that really works is conservation: use less of the bad stuff we’re using. But we’ve done quite a bit on that front, only to hear that much, much more is required to make a difference. I’m not sure there’s much, much more benefit for us to realize in conservation, at least in the short term.
So, to make a real difference, we have to make more radical changes. Can we change our motor fuel? Sure; starting with something that pollutes less, and that even absorbs some of that same pollutant in its production, sounds like a winner.
JROBI, again:
It makes no sense whatsoever to create Bio-Fuel when there are much better options on the table – for instance Hydrogen vehicles. When was the last time you heard someone on the news talk about Hydrogen initiatives?
I hear it every so often. But most talk, today, focuses on the very real problems with hydrogen as a motor fuel. There are many; just look at the discussions of hydrogen fuel tank technology for a sample. But one of the biggest problems is that of developing an infrastructure for delivering fuel to the customer.
No one talks about the problems of setting up an ethanol infrastructure. We already have it. Brazil has demonstrated that the current gasoline infrastructure can easily be adapted to deliver ethanol instead, and that there is a viable migration plan for gradually moving people off fossil fuels.
Now, this isn’t to say that the world of ethanol is hunky-dory. It’s arguable that, while ethanol may be sustainable, the corn-based system the USA has adopted isn’t. Some people are talking about sensible tweaks that may solve the food problems while continuing to support biofuels–removing our silly tariff on Brazilian ethanol, for example, or developing alternative feedstocks for ethanol production.
The problem is that hysteria seems to be breeding hysteria. Global warming is so severe, we are told, that we need solutions, and we need them immediately. So we develop solutions we can use immediately. But no! These solutions cost; we need something else, and we need it immediately, and we need it cost-free.
Practically, this kind of insistence on perfection–that we deploy solutions with no drawbacks, only benefits–has the effect of dampening our enthusiasm for environmental solutions. We tried, our leaders will tell us, but nothing was good enough, so we gave up. And so, rather than do something that helps, or even something that lays the foundation for helping, we continue our use of fossil fuels.
Perhaps ethanol is the wrong solution. But if it is, we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the future, as foretold by science, or fervently hope that the global warming deniers are right, because other solutions will arrive too late to do much good.
Recently, as part of the many antitrust/anti-competition legal actions they’re suffering under, Microsoft released specifications for the old Office binary file formats. As expected, they’re big and complex. Joel Spolsky (a former member of the Excel team) had some thoughts on their size and complexity:
With a little bit of digging, I’ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part, and what you can do to work around it.
The digging turns up reasons that make some sense: the limitations of older computers, feature creep, a complete lack of attention to the future. But it’s hard to see some of these reasons as “why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part”. Carelessness is common, sure, but we don’t call it a virtue because everybody does it.
And these are problems that should have been on someone’s radar at Microsoft. It’s one thing for a grunt programmer to hack a feature to meet a deadline; it’s another for the management to simply go along with it, or to not order a rethink when the problems come to light. When you read about hacks like the following, everything sounds nice and reasonable, until you remember what the end result is: that Microsoft Excel doesn’t have a standard format for storing and manipulating dates!
There are two kinds of Excel worksheets: those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1900 (with a leap-year bug deliberately created for 1-2-3 compatibility that is too boring to describe here), and those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1904. Excel supports both because the first version of Excel, for the Mac, just used that operating system’s epoch because that was easy, but Excel for Windows had to be able to import 1-2-3 files, which used 1/1/1900 for the epoch. It’s enough to bring you to tears. At no point in history did a programmer ever not do the right thing, but there you have it.
It may not have been the wrong decision, in the sense that it enabled them to ship, and shipping is everything in some circles. But as a design decision, how can anyone defend such inconsistency?
Business information technology was able to move forward in the early ’90s because older document formats like 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were simple enough to import easily into Microsoft Office. Today, when we talk about moving to open-source suites like OpenOffice or online systems like Google Docs, detractors left and right cite the pain of document conversion as a reason to hold back. But if Joel is right about the old binary formats, the pain of transition is like the pain of changing your oil: you can pay now, or you can pay a lot more later. Even Microsoft is having trouble opening its own files from long ago, with “long ago” being a period measured in years, not decades.
Maybe you didn’t write anything a decade ago you’d care to read again today; maybe you can’t imagine any of your stuff being worth reading a decade from now. Do you want to take that chance?
Thankfully, I was a geek, and kept most of my documents in plain text. Today, I take care to save important documents in formats and encodings designed for the long haul, like Unicode, ODF, and PDF. It helps that I avoid Microsoft software like the plague. (If you think they’ve changed since the bad old days, just surf the web in Firefox on Linux sometime, and see how many badly-rendered pages look much better when you switch their text encoding from Unicode to “Windows-1252″.)
If you have a lot of Office documents, even if you’re happy with Office, you might consider whether you care about opening those documents ten years from now, and whether you’d rather take the time to future-proof them while you still can.
So it’s a few days after Christmas, and like most of us tech-heads, I’ve got a few more gadgets to play with.
First up: the Creative Zen 4GB. This one was a little bit of a saga.
Last year, we got the kids no-name MP3 players, on the theory that we didn’t want to spend megabucks on something they wouldn’t use. They made valiant attempts to use them, but the little machines just weren’t up to the job. So, it seemed prudent to buy them iPods this year.
Well, except for Apple’s attempts to break all non-iTunes iPod software, which had the side effect of making the devices unusable under Linux. Still, this was what they wanted, and they had been good this year, and very patient with my ever-more-convoluted schemes to get the old players working. So, iPod Nano 3Gs for both of them. My heart sank as I watched some of my hard-earned money go to reward such behavior.
As part of the deal, I vowed to find a non-Apple player that would be good for when the iPods gave up the ghost or became “uncool”. And my dear wife, upon hearing this, went online, did some research, and bought me the aforementioned Creative Zen 4GB.
From a Linux perspective, it’s in the “not quite ready for prime time” mode. Rhythmbox and Banshee are working on support; I tried a prerelease of Rhythmbox, and found its support to be very unstable. The only usable app is Gnomad2, which has a terrible UI and also occasionally crashes, but can manage to upload audio, video, and photos without too much hassle. Still, this is a problem of fine-tuning, and not of a hostile hardware vendor; I’m confident that these devices will be well-supported in the near future.
The Zen is picky about what video files it will play, but I managed to figure it out: DivX or XviD video, 320×200 or smaller image size, encoded at a 480 kbit/sec video bitrate or less. Other video files might work, too, but you’ll have to find them on your own.
My Zen has a little problem with the button locking feature: after unlocking, the screen comes up to all-white, and you have to power-cycle it to get the display back. I’m assuming this is a firmware bug, as the screen is still visible for a short time after engaging the lock. Other than this, the Zen is a delight, and every bit as functional as the iPod.
The other nice gadget: a 24-inch LCD from Envision, bought after Christmas with a combination of gift cards, exchanges, and some of my own money. It was an open-box, and I saved about $80 for that; the only problem turns out to be a single dead pixel in the corner of the screen which is barely visible. It does 1920×1200 in very nice, bright color.
Here, too, an improvement on my life only came after some effort. Debian 4.0’s drivers for the Intel graphics chipset are not capable of driving a widescreen LCD; the best I could get was 1600×1200, a normal-width resolution stretched across the wide display. I booted an Ubuntu Gutsy live CD to verify that the problem wasn’t with the monitor, and then set to the task of backporting everything I needed from lenny. Happily, before I started, I found that someone (Holger Levsen, to be exact) had done the work for me.
Things are now about 90% there. The new drivers still don’t have everything figured out for running both Compiz desktop effects and XVideo acceleration at the same time, so I’ve had to turn XVideo off. My computer can render video without hardware support, but the quality isn’t as high. But, I have my nice wide screen, with crisp fonts and lots of room. I figure I’ll live with what I have until lenny releases, and then see what progress has been made.
I’m very surprised about the popularity of an old post of mine, regarding my experiences with CompUSA. It continues to collect horror story comments, the last one coming less than three weeks ago. While any company has its detractors (especially any company dealing directly with the public), it seems odd to me that people continue to be motivated enough to post to my blog, of all places, their tales of woe.
For me, life has been very CompUSA-less of late. Indianapolis now has a Fry’s, one of only two east of the Mississippi as of this writing, and for someone in the relatively tech-starved Midwest, it is a godsend. (People from the west coast: please stifle your laughter as best you can.) And evidently enough of these horror stories have been passed around that they felt the need to close over half their stores in February.
The Indy store was spared that time, but not for long.
The electronics retailer decided to finish what it had started earlier this year, announcing that it would sell or close the remainder of its stores in the US after the holiday season. The company, controlled by Mexican retail management company Grupo Sanborns since 1999, has been sold to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm that will be responsible for selling off the remainder of its assets.
In an abstract sense, less competition in the electronic retail business isn’t ever good. But it’s arguable that we’ve never had so much competition in the electronic retail business if you count the Internet stores that have sprung up all over. And I’m certainly happy to see an outfit that will slander people for profit go belly-up.
Carver County, Minnesota, is in big trouble. (via buzz.mn)
Eric Mattson was not surprised that the small vacant lot he bought last year near the shores of Lake Waconia was increasing in value.
What shocked him was the $189 million market value the Carver County assessor’s office came up with for the 55- by 80-foot lot, making it the most valuable property in Waconia and possibly the county.
Of the resulting $2.5 million tax windfall, about $900,000 had already been spent by the time Mattson got the bill and came in to complain. They’re now looking at spending cuts and new taxes to pay for the shortfall.
“This is not an ‘oops.’ This is a major error that affects an awful lot of people,” said Mark Lundgren, director of the Carver County division that oversees the assessor’s office.
So how could someone make such an egregious error?
Lundgren said the trouble began in August when a clerk went into Mattson’s file to change the designation of the property, at 233 Lake St. E., from homestead to non-homestead to reflect its change in status after its sale.
The clerk filled in the $18,900 proposed valuation, but then mistakenly hit the key to exit the program. The computer added four zeros to fill out the nine numerical spaces required by the software, thus indicating the value was $189,000,000.
So many thing come to mind, most of which are probably too snarky. But a few observations come to mind:
- Don’t just pin this on the clerk. The major mistake was with the programmers, whose software did such an unexpected thing, and on the auditors, who missed a $2.5 million mistake. (Oddly, given that audit failure was an issue, the only solution worth mentioning in the article was “more auditing”.)
- Programmers, cherish your input. Do not auto-munge it without at least user review! And, I’d argue, don’t auto-munge it at all if the result is at all valuable. Validate it, sure, but don’t change it; force the user to fix his or her own mistakes. After all, if your program was so smart as to know what the user “meant”, why does it need manual data entry at all?
- Use modern tools! What kind of data store today requires zero-padding? MySQL is a free download, and very popular; for all its perceived faults, it can at least store numbers of variable sizes correctly.
Today, we released the first beta of LSB 3.2. If all goes well, this will hopefully be the only beta.
We’ve been working on 3.2 for a while, and we’re really excited about it. We’ve added quite a few interfaces, based on feedback from application vendors and others. There are whole new sections: printing support, Perl and Python, FreeType, Qt 4, and trial use support (our new name for “optional”) for Xrender, Xft, and the ALSA API.
Betas can only be as good as the people participating; more feedback means a better standard. So please go check out the beta. Look at the whole thing, or just parts you’re interested in. Read the spec, or check out the tests, or try building your favorite open-source app with our SDK.
We’re hoping for a release before Christmas, but that depends on the feedback we get, of course. And we’d rather know about that really big issue we forgot about and delay the beta than find out after the release. So get cracking!
Wow. Has it really been that long since my last post?
It occurred to me today, as I upgraded to the latest WordPress and watched the ongoing security nightmares, that going through this effort is only useful if I actually use the darned thing.
And I’ve been busy; yes I have. I’m now the webmaster for my son’s Boy Scout troop, using MediaWiki as a CMS with an eye to encouraging more parent and Scout participation in the site. I’ve been to Montreal and Salt Lake City, among other places. And I’m preparing to upload a Debian package for virtualenv, a cool alternative to OS virtualization in the Python space.
More later.
I was a little surprised to see a message of thanks for me and my old Progeny colleagues. Unfortunately, the news at Progeny’s home page was not good:
We are sorry to inform you that Progeny Linux Systems, Inc. ceased operations April 30, 2007.
It’s always a little sad to see a former employer go away, even when you feel the company brought its troubles onto itself. Imagine how much worse it is to see something die that you thought had a lot of potential, with fabulous co-workers, above-average management, and really good ideas. It’s often been said that competence and vision are not sufficient for success; without getting into the details, Progeny is now Exhibit A in making that case for me.
I am grateful for having worked there, and am proud of what we accomplished. It wasn’t easy surviving the dot-com bust and building a new business model for ourselves. And it’s certain that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the opportunities Progeny gave me.
I wish my former colleagues well as they find new jobs. Nearly everyone who passed through Progeny was top-notch, and would make excellent hires.
A while back, I posted a set of instructions on how to test a Linux distribution for LSB compliance. With the 3.1 update, testing has gotten a lot easier.
The most notable enhancement in the update is the LSB Distribution Test Kit Manager, or “DTK Manager” for short. This is a framework which controls the execution of the entire test suite and collecting the results.
So, it’s time to update the instructions.
First of all, as before, your distribution must ship a few things. There must be a “lsb” package, which depends on everything required by the LSB; if it’s not installed by default, you will need to install it. Your distribution must have a facility for installing RPM packages; this will usually either be RPM itself, or a converter such as alien. (The alien utility is used mostly by Debian-based systems, such as Debian, Xandros, or Ubuntu.) Once those are in place, you should install the “Xvfb” or “xvfb” package provided by your distribution. Since Xvfb is a part of X.org, it is almost always available.
When your system is ready, download and install the “lsb-dtk-manager” package, found on the Linux Foundation’s download page. Several bundles are available; find the one that matches the architecture of the distribution you are testing. You may use the “lsb-dist-testkit-manager” or “lsb-dist-testkit” tarballs. Once the tarball is downloaded, unpack it, change to the directory it creates, and run the install.sh script.
After install.sh is done, start DTK Manager. This is done with the following command:
/opt/lsb/test/manager/bin/lsb-tef-start.sh [port-number]
This will start the manager back end, and attempt to run a browser to present the user interface. If this doesn’t work, point a browser at the port number you gave the script. The port number defaults to 8888 if you don’t give one.
If this has all worked, you will see a welcome page in your browser. Click “Get Certified”, fill in the information it requests, such as your name and the name of your distribution; this information will be stored in the test results. Then click “Run tests”.
And that’s it! The tests will take quite a while to run; the browser will display a status window. You can close the browser and do other things while the tests runs; point the browser back at the DTK Manager port and click “Execution” to see progress.
When the tests are done running, you will be presented with a results page, which tells you how the tests went. You can fix any problems you find and re-run the tests by going back to the “Get Certified” link. If you pass most tests and fail only a few, you can use “Custom Tests” to run just the test suites with failures.
Of course, you can still run the tests the old way if you prefer; the journals are all that we need for certification. Give the new DTK Manager a try, though, to see if it’s easier.
It’s certainly made my job easier. Besides the ease with which the tests are run (meaning fewer requests for help from testers), it’s possible to completely automate test runs, which will ensure that we can test the next release of the LSB more extensively and learn about problems sooner in the development process.
Like what you see? Thank the Insitute for System Programming at the Russian Academy of Sciences. They’ve done an excellent job.
The whole Kathy Sierra incident is coming to a close, with an NPR interview and a call for a blogger’s code of conduct. (Details at the links; basically, Kathy wrote an innocuous blog about software development, and was harassed into quitting her blog by a few nasty commenters.)
The latter item has touched off a rant by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, about the necessity of moderation:
Bloggers can ban anonymous comments or not, as they please. The problem isn’t commenter anonymity; it’s abusive behavior by anonymous or semi-anonymous commenters. Furthermore, the kind of jerks who post comments that need to be deleted will infallibly cry “censorship!” when it happens, no matter what O’Reilly and Wales say.
Anyone who’s read ML for more than a couple of months has watched this happen. Commenters who are smacked down for behaving like jerks are incapable of understanding (or refuse to admit) that it happened because they were rude, not because the rest of us can’t cope with their dazzlingly original opinions. It’s a standard piece of online behavior. How can O’Reilly and Wales not know that?
By coincidence, I got mail from Charlene Blake recently. Back when I bought my current van, I explained some of the reasoning behind my choice: poor customer service from Toyota caused me to decide to buy the Honda. In that post, I linked to a petition and some other information Charlene had put out there. Little did I know that Charlene had her own little “fan club” who liked to search for references to her and troll their little hearts out, trying to stifle any criticism of Toyota by lies, intimidation, fraud, and other nasty stuff. At first, I tried to be civil, but the stalkers got so vile that I was forced to do some “censoring” to keep my site from becoming an anti-Charlene haven.
Well, it’s two years later, and they’re still at it. As far as I can tell, she attempted to get some advice on cyberstalking from counsel.net, and got a lot of abuse instead. Here’s a sample:
If you can dish it out, you have to be able to deal with the
push back. Evidently you can’t. Whining about those who
don’t agree with you won’t get sympathy from myself, and
undoubtedly most other folks who read similar pathetic
moaning from anyone!!
It is clear you are the kind of individual who always blames
others for your problems.
My advice–get a life!
Interesting legal advice, that.
Now, it’s possible that the fine folks at counsel.net just take a dim view of Charlene. You’d expect, though, that if these people were regulars at counsel.net, they’d have more posts on the site than just posts attacking Charlene. So let’s take a look at some of the names of the people who replied to her: Dave Nightingale, Garnet Williams, Roger Francis, Cheryl Martell, Marisa Decker, Vincent Gagnier, Bruce Coristine, Walter Matthews, and Rick Fasan. Right now, not a single one of those searches returns a post that isn’t about Charlene Blake. (Just in case they try to obfuscate the point with irrelevant posts elsewhere: try to find a post by any of those people on counsel.net that was posted before April 24, 2007.)
By contrast, here’s one other poster on that thread: CK in Delaware. The person’s Charlene comment shows up, but so do a number of other posts, some of which predate Charlene’s initial post. That’s what a regular (or something vaguely close to a regular) looks like. If any of the names above really were regulars, they’d have search results looking like CK’s.
(For the sake of completeness, there’s only one poster left besides Charlene: T. Tonary, a defender of Charlene, also appears to be a one-timer. Ironically, “Bruce” above accuses Tonary of being a shill!)
It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
Charlene comes across to me as a tough woman; certainly she has to have backbone to have pursued this for so long and with such opposition. But why do the Charlenes and Kathys of the world have to put up with this stuff? People talk about “censorship” in regard to deleting nasty comments, and I suppose it is. But Kathy is no longer posting, and Charlene can’t seem to post anywhere without vicious stuff following her. It seems to me that Kathy and Charlene are the ones getting censored.
And if we’re going to have censorship, of one stripe or another, better it be the pond scum than Kathy and Charlene.
Sadly, even I have been made to participate in the anti-Charlene campaign, even if by accident. If you search for Charlene Blake on Google, my blog is the second link, and Google’s excerpt from my initial post linking to Charlene’s petition is from one of the troll commenters. If you don’t actually click the link, you get the impression that I’m trashing her in the main article.
Oh, well. Time to make amends.
The old testing release is now Debian 4.0:
The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch , after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.
That last bit needs to be proven, which I’ll be doing this week.
My chess club, in the news:
Sean Hollick and Jim Klee run two different clubs on the same day and time with contrary ideals. Yet the two agree that whether it is for the competition or simply for fun, the game of chess is a joy in which everybody should partake.
The Noblesville Daily Times doesn’t believe in keeping stories available online, so you can’t read more than the blurb at Susan’s blog. Sean’s club (the Circle City Chess Club) is where I play; it’s more intense, requiring membership in the USCF to play in tournaments, and having ratings, dues, and the like. The other club (the Hamilton County Free Chess Club) is more casual, with no dues or memberships, talking during games encourages, etc.
The online story included a picture of Sean playing his son, Maxx; the paper edition had that picture, plus two from the HCFCC.
I was at the Circle City meeting when the reporter came by to do his research. He talked to Sean and a few others of us, and took pictures of several of us playing. Sadly, they decided not to use any pictures of me.
UPDATE: This link may work.
In recent months, I’ve started taking up one of my on-again, off-again passions seriously: chess.
I started playing very young; I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the rules. Growing up, my usual outlet was in reading my dad’s chess books and getting trounced by him in over-the-board play. In my adult life, chess became an occasional diversion. I taught my kids, and played them occasionally, and would sometimes check out new books or play around with portable electronic chess games.
Now I’ve decided to take it a little more seriously. I’ve gotten involved in the local chess club, and joined the US Chess Federation so I can play in tournaments. (You can even see how I’m doing online.) I’ve also joined an online chess site, chessworld.net, which does online correspondence chess. And my wife has been very supportive of all the new equipment purchases and gift requests: a chess table, new set, clock, books…
And, wonder of wonders, the chess world is quite an interesting one, with stuff going on. Unfortunately, a lot of it has been negative of late. The great champion Kasparov has retired from chess (a real loss; his play was some of the most spectacular seen since the Fischer-Spassky championship match in 1972). The world championship has reunited, but under a cloud. Cheating allegations have multiplied since then. Both the USCF and the World Chess Federation (FIDE) have been mired in controversy over leadership issues.
So, it looks like there should be plenty to blog about, both of a personal nature and in general chess news. I have a long road to walk; my current provisional rating after two tournaments is below 800, which means I get beaten easily by talented children. But it should be fun, and should keep my mind sharp, neither of which are bad things.
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