And yes, this meme is the ultimate meme just like 2010 will be the YoLD. Mark my words.

via Linux Hater’s Blog

Laptop:

ragnarok@DragonBoat:~$ vrms

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Oh, NeoOffice, how you disappoint me. Anyone running standard.dic on OpenOffice 2.4 or 3.0 want to test this word and see whether it’s wrong there, too?

If anyone else can confirm, then a bug report is in order. As of right now, Googling for OpenOffice and/or NeoOffice and “unchraismatically” yields no hits, so maybe it’s a custom word I somehow mistakenly added in the four days I’ve been using this computer. (I installed NeoOffice within this period.)

And Googling for it just made things more interesting.

Clicking on the suggested spelling, of course, yields:

The mystery deepens.

Oh, and by the way, the title of the blog post contains a 3 in cuneiform: 𒐈. If it’s not displaying correctly for you, you can use this awesome site to help yourself out.

That is, of course, if you give a damn about having cuneiform display correctly on your computer. Which you probably should.

It didn’t work properly for me at first, either, but since I use Ubuntu, setting it up was as simple as typing in “cuneiform” and clicking a button.

Oh, free software, how you delight me!

You have got to be kidding me.

I was thinking I’d mosey over to their website, as much as I generally decry centralized media repositories, and see whether I couldn’t stream a bit of live coverage of the Olympics. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but the homepage seemed promising:

See that hopeful little tidbit about downloading clips in HD? Unfortunately that’s probably locked down with DRM, or at the very least a proprietary downloading application. Too bad I can’t tell you for sure, because the freaking page won’t load!

Does NBC really think it can keep going like this? This is the freaking Olympics. Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times on the first day of its release, and still NBC doesn’t think it’s a priority that their website work with it.

As of this writing, there are just under 2 million downloads recorded. Given that Download Day extends until 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, I think we’ve only seen the beginning of this. I’d bet on at least 3 million, possibly 4 million, too.

Let’s watch.

Download now.

Update:

OK, I guess I should have looked up some usage statistics before guessing about download numbers, because according to the counter Mozilla has running, they’re already over 7 million downloads. Goddamn!

Let’s hit 10 million, damn it!

However, I was this time fortunate enough to bear witness to a beautifully crafted rebuttal, in which Linux apologists are likened to ditzy whores who are lovestruck with their two-timing beaus.

Every time I hear someone talking about a company pushing Linux on the desktop over windows I think of this woman I worked with who was having an affair with a very financially successful married man. Every few months she would get all excited because the divorce papers were finally coming through and she would be recognized as his wife. Then a few weeks after she would be crying because it was going to be “just a few more months”. Instead of recognizing the situations for what it was; She was just a cheap, easy lay and he was never leaving his wife, she clung onto the idea that she would eventually be his wife. Linux on the desktop is the mistress, windows is the wife, big business is the successful husband and unless the mistress puts a bullet in the wifes head the husband isn’t voluntarily divorcing his wife anytime soon.

Oh, man, burn.

This might be a bad time to bring this up, but have you heard that 2008 is the Year of the Linux Desktop?

If you need me, I’ll be trying to buy a handgun in this ridiculously socialist society I temporarily call home. Although I guess it would behoove me to set up Wine properly, first.

Upon scoping out the package transition resolution list, this was the text I was met with:

Calculating the changes
Installing jockey-common as dep of jockey-gtk
Starting
Starting 2
Investigating restricted-manager-kde
Package restricted-manager-kde has broken dep on restricted-manager-core
Considering restricted-manager-core 1 as a solution to restricted-manager-kde -1
Removing restricted-manager-kde rather than change restricted-manager-core
Done

Do you want to start the upgrade?

81 packages are going to be removed. 197 new packages are going to be
installed. 1217 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 1090M. This download will take about
13 minutes with your connection.

Holy balls that’s fast. Over 10Mb/s, actually. Not quite as fast what I’ve seen before, but it is still damn impressive in my book.

Do I really have to go back to the States, where things are looking a little more grim?

[Improved in Beta 3!] Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

That in itself is fantastically impressive. Maybe we won’t see so much Hungry Hungry Firefox RAM-gobbling in the near future.

While I acknowledge that such massive code cleanups require a considerable number of man hours, I have to ask myself whether that’s really enough to keep Firefox 3 running so late. My theory is that although the code changes might be significant, the real drain on time is the constant reworking of the Mozilla robot for each new beta release.

I mean, don’t you think that’s a bit much for each release? I applaud their focus on presentation, and I’m sure it pays off to treat your beta testers well, but really now. You guys can’t think of anything better to do with all those ten of millions of dollars of Google bucks you’ve been getting annually? The bubble burst, my ass.

At least the newest beta (Beta 5 at the time of this writing) is rock solid and fast as hell.

The first thing was to determine the scope of the “network” I’m referring to. I used the excellent bandwidth analyzer SpeedTest to connect to servers in various parts of the world, and the results were very interesting, if just about what should be expected.

For instance, check out my rate as I connected to a Munich server.

Unbelievable. It was very nearly a record high for the sit, but was short by about 2Mbps. But when I opted to establish a connection with a server more geographically distant, like Saudi Arabia, the results were not as stunning.

Ouch. This was the worst result I could find, actually. I began to sample connections with the Faroe Islands, New York City, and San Franscio, and all went rather well.

Basically I’m on an absolutely monster connection here, but it really depends on what one is doing with the bandwidth available. I’ve already confirmed with friends here that our university ISP is performing traffic shaping, namely strangling connections on protocols like BitTorrent, similar to the affair that recently landed Comcast in hot water. Fortunately, using RC4 encryption gets around this limitation very easily, and ensures the packets flow freely in glorious digital liberty.

But there are definitely downsides to disguising network traffic like this. I’ve noticed that if I have connections open across many different protocol types, basic things like surfing experience slowdown. This is absolutely unacceptable, as I need my feeds. But I tend to max out my number of connections fairly easily.

The solution to keep things like surfing responsive while maintaining functioning connections across other protocols was to configure quality of service settings on my router. Wikipedia tells us:

Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. Quality of Service guarantees are important if the network capacity is limited….

Now, as demonstrated by the bandwidth graphs above, it seems silly to say that my network capacity here is limited. As explained, certain protocols are more problematic than others, and maintaining their solid performance can complicate connections on other protocols. But there’s another issue at work here, which is that I’m running all my traffic through a little Linksys WRT54GL router. This simple piece of hardware can easily get overloaded by hundreds of active IP connections, having only a 200Mhz processor and 16MB of RAM.

Thus the quality of service configuration. By telling the router that HTTP traffic (web browsing) is of utmost importance, my surfing will always be lightning fast, as it HTTP requests will steal bandwidth from other protocols as needed. This is what my settings look like:

Now’s as good a time as any to mention that I’m using DD-WRT, an open source firmware for routers that adds advanced functionality. (Lifehacker covered it in a piece called Turn your $60 router into a $600 router.) Although I’m considering switching to Tomato, I’m still quite happy with DD-WRT, and don’t ever foresee myself going back to using closed, proprietary firmware.

I’m off to partake in a very speedy and responsive Wikpedia clickfest. May Firefox’s tab anxiety be damned.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user’s machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser. But wait, you say: Wouldn’t someone need to know the domain name or Internet address of the Web server that’s running the toolkit? Yes. However, anyone familiar enough with the file-naming convention used by the toolkit could use Google to search for the server.

Frightening, no? Well here’s the clincher, the way to resolving this whole mess:

The University Toolkit is essentially an operating system (xubuntu) that you can boot up from a CD-ROM. The package bundles some powerful, open-source network monitoring tools, including “Snort,” which captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network; as well as “ntop,” a tool used to take data feeds from tools like Snort and display the data in more user-friendly graphics and charts.

Gee, last time I checked, Xubuntu is an open source operating system distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). That means that if the party utilizing the GPL’d code redistributes it without providing access to the source code, they’re in violation of license.

Do you get it? The MPAA is infringing on intellectual property rights. This is pure gold. After years of stamping their feet petulantly, demanding that consumers pay them tons of money, many times over (did you know it’s illegal to play DVDs in Linux?), they go and steal someone else’s work, completely ignoring the written license under which it was offered.

Interested parties were of course notified, and have successfully had access to the toolkit stricken from the MPAA’s website. (That’s a Slashdot summary of the event. Make sure to check out the comment threads for a few laughs.) Evidently, the MPAA was less than cooperative, so the individual—Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett—notified the MPAA’s ISP and forced it to be removed that way.

MPAA don’t fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)

This is a common tactic of the MPAA and the RIAA, to serve ISPs subpoenas demanding IP addresses for individuals allegedly pirating.

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Oops.

I’ve been through two iPods. Neither last a full year. The battery life rapidly deteriorated to an hour or less, and the hard drive in each failed around the 11-month mark. Bullshit, right? Well, about two years ago, a friend upgraded his iPod, and didn’t need his ancient 20GB iRiver anymore. Since I was at the time without a Pod, he gifted it to me, because he’s a bro.

This thing is a tank. I’ve dropped it dozens of times on asphalt, seen it get run over by a car, basically treated it like crap. The battery life is still around 10 hours, and all the buttons work and everything. The backlight is bright as ever.

My favorite thing about this thing, though, is that I’ve installed some open source firmware on it, which lets me do pretty much whatever I want with the thing. Check out the display skin I use with it.

Check out all that information! This is so freaking geeky. Just on the top half of the screen, it has the following details about the current track:

1. artist
2. album
3. track number
4. total number of tracks on album
5. track name
6. genre
7. time remaining in track
8. total time of track
9. track number in playlist
10. total number of tracks in playlist
11. format
12. bitrate

Then, below that, it has information about the next song which is already queued in the buffer. Additionally, it has basic info about current settings on the device. So add these items to the list:

13. artist of next track
14. track name of next track
15. track number of next track
16. total number of tracks on next track’s album
17. volume displayed numerically (so you know how loud it is without testing)
18. mode (“shuffle”)
19. battery life remaining in hours and minutes

Now, let’s compare this with the iPod-esque skin for Rockbox, which a user could of course pick if that suits him better.

Ton of wasted space, huh? This is all the information the user is greeted with:

1. track name
2. artist
3. album
4. track number in playlist
5. total number of tracks in playlist
6. time elapsed
7. time remaining
8. volume displayed numerically (again, so the user knows how loud it is without having to test)

Now, I know that such information overload isn’t necessarily for everyone, but it is for me. And I believe that the user should always opt for the choice between both options.

To this end, I should make it very clear that Rockbox does also run on most iPods, though not the very newest ones.

Rockbox is an open source firmware for mp3 players, written from scratch. It runs on a wide range of players:

• Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
  (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)

Check it.

About a week ago Wal-Mart began selling a $200 Linux machine running on a 1.5 ghz VIA C7 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. The machine is now officially sold out of their online warehouses (it may still be available in some stores). And the product sales page [CC] at wal-mart.com is full of glowing reviews from new and old Linux users alike.

I suppose this is a good time to mention that I’ve gotten an e-mail from the chaps at OLPC, saying that the Give One, Get One program is officially underway, as of yesterday. I still haven’t decided whether I can afford to drop a chunk of change on this, but it’s really important to me to have one.

Hopefully the OLPC is as successful as this Wal-Mart contraption.

“Contraption” is the word of the week.

This summer I read one of the most fascinating articles of my life. It was from Wired, which makes it no small surprise I thought it above the cut. It’s about Hans Reiser and how he’s been accused of murdering his ex-wife.

The article is wonderful because it’s written by a geek, about a geek. So states the author in the first page:

I’m here because his defense lawyer thinks I will understand Reiser. The accused is a 43-year-old geek — he lives in his own world of computer code, videogames, and science fiction books. He spent his early twenties developing a role-playing game to compete with Dungeons & Dragons while writing a novel about aliens invading Earth. By age 30, he’d decided that his talents would be better applied to recrafting overlooked aspects of the Linux operating system. As a technology writer, I frequently meet people like this. Just because he doesn’t behave like the rest of us — and just because he evaded police surveillance and bought a book titled Masterpieces of Murder shortly after his wife’s disappearance — doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I have been asked to try to understand this, to try to understand the man.

(You know what? I suck at quoting. I always try to contextualize the quote by pasting in more of the surrounding text, rather than introduce it better. Please accept this as part of my exuberant, if occasionally ungainly, personality.)

The author of the article proves his mettle by heeding Reiser’s admonition of journalistic indolence and looks to the code. Throughout the article, snippets of the Reiser4 filesystem are pasted in, providing overtones to the discussion sometimes surprising, other times downright haunting.

I dig out this article because the trial for the murder charges against Reiser began this week, and Wired has picked up coverage again. All posts on the subject can be found here, at Threat Level.

The defense doesn’t seem to be going well. Reiser’s own lawyer says he has an extremely abrasive personality, and that his brilliance will alienate the jury:

DuBois said Hans Reiser has memorized thousands of pages of pretrial court documents, and can cite a page by memory — making defending him “a challenging thing.”

“It would be easy if he didn’t testify,” added DuBois, who was flanked by more than a dozen print, online and television reporters in the hallway outside Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry J. Goodman’s courtroom here. DuBois said he was wishful that Reiser’s testimony will be “in a manner that everybody can understand.”

Did he kill her? I haven’t formed even an uneducated guess yet. I know that I believe the man to be one of the smartest men of the twentieth century, and I hope he will never lose the spirit or ability to continue his work.

But he is fucking impossible to understand.

Jesse was along for the trip, as I’d let him know that I’d found word of a 60€ router for sale somewhere downtown. It’s indeed fairly cheap for a router, especially in this city, it seems, but the real clincher was that it was Linksys and so therefore it was entirely open source. This is a very good thing.

Its being open source meant that I was able to take the thing home and flash the firmware on it with an open source alternative, enabling quite sophisticated functionality for a user-grade router. Specifically, I was able to plunk the thing down next to my window and tell it to act as a bridge between my computer and the signal broadcast from the university building 50 meters across the courtyard over which my balcony looks.

This stuff is really, really freaking badass. Check out this article for a brief rundown of neat stuff you can do with it.

So, in short, I have internet now. I’ve dropped once so far from the connection, but that’s in about an hour of use. I usually get disconnected around once every five to ten minutes, so things are looking awesome so far. And by tinkering with the position of the router, I should be able to find a spot with a decent signal. It’s made easy by the dynamically updating “signal strength” graph on the client bridge setup page in the router software. Thumbs up!

As was widely expected, the laptops never did make it under the $100 mark, even after taking advantage of economies of scale. They’ve skidded in at just under $200, still a bargain (according to me) considering the remarkable amount of hardware packed into the device. And now the OLPC committee has decided that for two short weeks in November 2007, it will make the device publicly available to Americans in a “Give 1, Get 1″ program. This bumps the price up to US$400, but means that the person who buys one of the devices will also be paying to have one sent overseas to a student in a developing country.

David Pogue from the New York Times has reviewed the XO-1, the first iteration of the OLPC laptop. Here’s a video of his time with it.

I want one. I’m definitely considering buying one when my stipend comes. I know it’s a real piece of junk in terms of a laptop, and I know that I’d look like a complete fool if I’m ever seen in public with it. But I really, really want one. Buying one in November would also mean that I’d be foregoing money I should be spending in Europe, for example on traveling.

So I’ve some deliberating yet to do. But I have a yearly gadget allowance for myself, and this fits the bill nicely. Thus far it’s shaping up much better than picking up an iPod Touch, though I might change my mind on that if I ever see Linux and/or Rockbox running on a Touch.

The OLPC is the start of something big, whether a soaring success or an utter failure. Either way, given my interests both personal and professional, I think I want to be on board at least in a small way like grabbing one for myself and one for a student far away.

Plus, I could look at porn on it.

[Gartner] stated that open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

Full post here

Those are some pretty impressive statistics, I should think, especially for an industry that’s been repeatedly accused of being the new wave of communism. (Additional coverage of that here.) So open source is profitable, and it’s scaring Microsoft. Both good things!

But there was something that made this news much richer. Let’s keep in mind that Vista is bombing terribly, OK? It’s known for being little more than eye candy, without stability and a decent software ecosystem. Apparently there’s now a new Linux distribution that emulates the Vista interface nearly identically. This is of course especially precious given the precedent set back in the mid 1990s when certain word processors “revamped” their interfaces by stealing ideas liberally. The verdict was ultimately that one can sue over how a program works, but not over how it looks. (Can anyone give me details on this? I googled fruitlessly for links.)

The last point I’ll make on the subject (in this post, that is) is that of evangelism. With sites like Larry the Free Software Guy, Libervis, and of course Free Culture, it’s extremely difficult to defeat the diffusive mentality that wants to create a kind of new world order.

I mean, which do you find more inspiring:

• This silly bastard, who probably died a martyr moments after this video ends…
• Or this silly bastard, who will probably soon die either of a heart attack or from self-loathing.

Anyway, last point. The beta of Gutsy Gibbon, the latest iteration of Ubuntu, was just released.

Sorry that there were so few words in this post that weren’t hyperlinked.