Looking down on him in the baby warmer, amazement and fear dominated my thoughts, clamoring for my attention. I was a father. What would I do now? My life was REALLY not just my own anymore; I had this little one that was counting on me.  Was I up to the challenge?

And what about when he wasn’t a little one anymore? What would he be like as an adult? Would he be a good person? What would he care about? When he turned 18, what would we do, and what would his plans be for the future?

That day was something I thought about often in that nursery all those years ago.  And now, that day has arrived.

Jon is now a young adult.  And looking at the ultimate result of the last 18 years of worry, I feel immeasurably proud.  He has made his mistakes, and no doubt will make more mistakes in the future.  But he has not let those mistakes dampen his confident optimism, or drag down his sense of what’s right.  More importantly, he has a heart for others that expresses itself with everyone he’s around.  Often, the topics of our disagreements center around his fierce protective instinct, and on more than one occasion, he’s challenged me to improve myself.

I have not been a perfect father.  At times, I’ve been far from perfect.  But I am grateful that I’ve been a part of raising a young man I can admire and, yes, even learn from.

Happy 18th birthday, Jon.  Have an excellent life.  I’ll cherish the rest of the time you’re still at home, miss you when the time comes for you to leave, and always be there for you as long as I live.

Your mom and I are your biggest fans; never forget that.

For the longest time, the FHS was cared for by its original editors: Dan Quinlan, Rusty Russell, and Chris Yeoh.  We should all be grateful that they created a useful and well-written standard–one that has been resilient enough to remain useful for six years without changes.  Even though it’s time to move on, we should not forget that we are building on a strong foundation they laid for us.

So, you may be asking: how can I help?  Glad you asked!

• First of all, get the word out!  If you know people who might be interested (developers for Linux distributions, standards people, etc.), point them to this post or to the LSB announcement linked earlier.
• We have set up the usual open-source project infrastructure: a bug tracker, version control (using Bazaar), a mailing list, and a wiki (of sorts; it’s actually a page on the LSB wiki).  Come and join in!  Subscribe to the mailing list, post comments on the wiki, check out the source and submit patches.
• The bug tracker deserves special mention.  We hosted it for the old FHS project, and so we’re continuing to use it.  In particular, we’ll be doing triage on the old bugs there, as well as any new bugs filed.  So go ahead and file bugs, or add comments to old bugs; we’ll be taking those into account for the new update.  If you file new bugs, please file them against the “FHS” product.

We’re tentatively shooting for a goal of releasing FHS 3.0 before July, though that’s not written in stone.  But we don’t want to wait much longer than we’ve already had to.

Unfortunately, Tami didn’t get to experience that ideal world.

About this time last year, she experienced sudden vision loss in one eye while working, which didn’t clear up on its own.  We went in, and found that her eyes had deteriorated to the point that she needed surgery to preserve her vision.  Although only one eye was not working right, the other was on the verge of failing in the same way.

Then came the normally routine pre-surgery checkups.  This time, however, was anything but routine; the cardiologist declared that she had entered the “danger zone” for heart complications.  This would require open-heart surgery to fix.

All ended well.  Five surgeries later (three on the heart, plus one each per eye), she’s back to normal, and even has the best vision she’s ever experienced.  But I don’t recommend doing so much so quickly (four months from the first to the last).

Of course, I didn’t intend to violate this basic rule of blogging.  It just happened–one thing leads to another, and pretty soon you notice just how little your front page has changed in the past two-and-a-half years.  So, I shall begin again.

Quite a bit has changed:

• It’s especially ironic, given the previous post, that our family has given in and replaced the main television with a HDTV.  Not that I’ve changed pmy mind much; it’s just that I’ve decided to live with the limitations of the technology, and have figured out how to work around some of them.
• Although my suspicion of the cloud remains, my participation has greatly increased.  I’m now on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and piles of Google services.
• There’s been a major health scare in the family, which is now behind us.

All of these will get their own posts in the very near future.  In the meantime, enjoy the new look.  (Especially on mobile!)

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…

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.