Older blog entries for Waldo (starting at number 71)

It bothers me that the open-source backlash is going to start soon. Not one that really matters to most of us, and not one that will actually have an effect on OS (not that I can see, anyhow), but one that makes Microsoft's FUD all the more effective.

A few more Eazles will go out of business in the next few months. Some snide CMP columnist (E-[Buzzword] Weekly) will write a column about how OS is a failure, "obviously," because these businesses keep going under. A couple more months will go by, and yet another columnist will write about how the Linux desktop still isn't usable. Within a few months of that, there will be a general attitude in the press of "that Linux thing sure didn't work out."

You and I, of course, will know how much things have improved in [KDE|Gnome], and that kernel 2.4.X has made a world of a difference, and that Linux is a word ahead of where it was a year or two years ago. But now Microsoft will be able to take this attitude and use it against Linux 's functionality as a server, as well. And gradually, Linux will become known as the little operating system that couldn't. It won't be known as that forever, and, no doubt, it will grow out of that, and people will come around. But the development process is slow, slower than the press is willing to tolerate, I'll wager.

What will set all of this off, I believe, is these various OS-based businesses shutting down. There is no connection, of course, between quality of software and the success of a business. But try telling that to the folks at CMP.

eskil

I saw Sigur Ros in New York at precisely this time last week. The odds of two people on Advogato both seeing Sigur Ros on their brief US tour strike me as rather slim. :)

ObTechBit

Got our new Linksys router today. I swapped it out for our old one, and it no longer turns off when I touch it. But the truly baffling problem continues: I SSH into one of my machines from within the LAN and, within 45 seconds, our entire LAN ceases to work. Systems crash. It's a bad scene. I'm going to assume that it's got something to do with identd.

netatalk is barfing on me after working (relatively) flawlessly for months. It's ceased to advertise itself to querying systems, shuts down for 20 minutes at a time, and the whole Mac OS X dysfunction is really getting to me. I guess I have to upgrade to the oft-recommended pre-release version by Andrew Sun. I'm wary of that, though, since our whole office depends on continuous availability of this server via AppleTalk. I'll wait until we get our new Linksys router to replacee our broken one. (It restarts if you touch it.) It's best, I find, to debug one problem at a time.

I can't believe that Douglas Adams is dead. It's more shocking than sad, though I suppose that sadness will creep in shortly.

Here's his last post.

Handspring Died

My Handspring Visor got erased. I have no idea of how. It didn't work Sunday, so I put batteries in it on Monday, and everything was gone. All of my appointments, my notes, my ideas, my phone book...everything. I haven't been able to get synching working properly with my FireWire PowerBook, which I got in October, so I have no backups from the past 7 months or so. I'm starting to re-enter data, slowly and reluctantly. How do I know this won't happen again?

Bought a Firewall

Yes, that's right, I bought a firewall. Noah's machine, Rez, is dropping about 20% of all packets on eth1. It has two identical NICs. When I swap them, it's still eth1 that's dropping packets. I really can't afford to start buying other PCI NICs to see if that solves things, and I'm just not a TCP/IP expert, so tcpdump doesn't tell me anything sufficiently useful. Not having the time to deal with this anymore, I dropped $100 on an SMC Barricade, a 4-port switch that supports port-based filtering and a DMZ. Best of all, it means that we have a switch, which I would have had to purchase anyhow. Now I can slowly move Brodie's functionality over to Rez, and all will be well.

I just got back from New York. I saw a Peace, Love and Linux billboard while taking a cab from Washington Square up to the Met. It was really, really, really huge. I guess most things in New York are, but I don't see much of that here in Charlottesville. It was a totally non-geeky trip. Maybe my next trip up there will be for the next HOPE or some crypto-fest or something.

That Microsoft dude is so right: I've been wasting the past 7 years of my life. I've been such a fool. Not only will I go out ASAP and buy a Microsoft-approved Wintel machine, but I won't even send back my copy of Windows and demand a refund. Yup, I'm going straight from here on out: Windows ME, the pinnacle of software development.

Dirty Linux heathens...

Thanks, Microsoft dude. I'm a changed man.

phpnuke.org hasn't run my submitted story yet., and I think it's a fair gamble that they're not going to. I guess they weren't interested in an open discussion about the aspects of PHP-Nuke that most need to be improved prior to the 5.0 release. Too bad. I suppose I'll have to switch to Slash. I really like PHP, and I'm just not a Perl fan. Life goes on.

I submitted a (well-written, IMHO) diatribe to the story queue at phpnuke.org, detailing my top five problems with PHP-Nuke. I suspect that if it's not accepted, it will be because my #1 complaint is that the author of PHP-Nuke is unwilling to open source the development model, which I (and many others) believe is crippling the program. I think there's a lot of frustration among PHP-Nuke users right now because the 5.0 release is about to come out, and the code simply hasn't been rewritten. In my world, a new major version number means that the bulk of the code has been rewritten, or at the very least reviewed and updated. I haven't checked them all, but I'm yet to find that a single one of my reported bugs has been fixed. That's to be expected with a two (?) man project, and I don't doubt that they're working their butts off on the program. So open source that puppy, and let me put my money where my mouth is, huh?

Python

Working on getting Python running on OS X. Jeffery Shell has a quite-useful How-to on the topic, though I haven't actually gotten it to work so far. Still, I expect to get it working, and very much look forward to being able to program on my laptop.

Update, one hour later: OK, I'm stupid. I didn't read the changelog for the newest version of Python. It turns out that it supports OS X with some minor deviations from the standard ./configure; make approach, all of which are well documented in the install instructions. Yay, Python.

Discussion Board

I've been working on a project for a few months now, but I've just this weekend figured out what it will be. For several of my sites, I need discussion boards that sprout out of database entries, a la Slashdot. I've noticed that a lot of folks maintain blogs could use the same thing. Nothing fancy -- a multi-threaded discussion board with basic spam protection, cookies, support for MySQL and PostgreSQL, etc. But no user accounts, and that's the kicker. Most users don't want to commit to creating an account. So I intend to create a function library that users can drop into their existing system pretty easily. It's all in PHP, my web language of choice. Maybe I'll have it done in a few weeks