dive into mark

Cameron Barrett has stopped being pissed off long enough to write a cogent essay on Online Community Technologies and Concepts. (See what being pissy gets you? A reputation.)

Linux is innovative in many ways, but user interface is not one of them. When Bill Gates talks about open source being nothing but a bunch of bottom-feeding copycats, this is what he means.

Mac OS X is the death of Linux on the desktop. [via Scripting News] About six weeks ago, I went to a meeting of the local Linux Users Group where someone was giving a presentation on running an UNIX-compatible OS on Apple hardware. There’s the Mac port of NetBSD, Mandrake Linux PPC, and, of course, Mac OS X. When you see them side by side, there’s just no comparison; it’s Mac OS X hands down. All over the room, you could hear the sound of fanaticism being deflated.

This begs the question of whether people currently running Linux on Intel-compatible hardware are willing to switch hardware platforms in order to get Mac OS X. I’ve always had Mac hardware in the house, so this is not a question I’ve had to answer.

OTOH, I just bought my girlfriend an iBook with all the trimmings (30 GB HD, 256 MB RAM, DVD/CD-RW, wireless networking, iPod) as an early Christmas gift — because she saw Mac OS X on my iMac and immediately and irrevocably wanted it. She’s never used a Mac before; now she doesn’t use anything else. Her old laptop (running Windows 2000) and old desktop (running Red Hat Linux 7.2 + KDE + all the Linux trimmings) just gather dust. It was the fastest Mac conversion I’ve ever personally witnessed.

You know what they say… “once you go Mac, you never go back.”

Of course, Linux has one distinct and everlasting advantage over Mac OS X: Linux is Free Software, and Mac OS X is not. It’s very difficult to explain to most people why this matters, because they haven’t ever kept computers long enough to fall off the back end of the upgrade treadmill. I have an old PowerMac 8500 which can not run Mac OS X, but it runs Linux with the latest kernel and the latest versions of Samba, Apache, and SSH. I have a Mac IIci which can’t run anything past Mac OS 7.6, but it runs the latest version of NetBSD. My iMac runs Mac OS X 10.1.1 now, and next year it will run X 10.2 and 10.3, and it will probably run 11 and maybe even 12. But eventually, it will run Linux or some other Free Software alternative, because nothing else will run on it. Apple will give up on my hardware long before it gives up on me. Count on it.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 for Mac OS Classic [via mac.scripting.com]. Mac OS X users take note: you already have this; it came pre-installed. Classic users are slowly slipping, becoming third-class citizens. Soon there will be no more upgrades, only open source alternatives.

The Register: Mandrake 8.1 easier [to install] than Win-XP. It’s quite nearly Harry Homeowner-proof.

The Register: Women fail safe text test. One in five people have woken up to discover they had to apologise for drunken messages sent during the night. It’s imperative that you practice safe text every time you message. And that you don’t drink and message. You can drink, and you can message, but if you drink, don’t message. What kind of example are you setting for your children? Won’t somebody please think of the children?

I come to you today to sing the praises of HTML Tidy. Much of the course material for my upcoming class was written in Netscape’s HTML editor, so naturally it looks absolutely wretched in a real editor. The problem here is not even one of accessibility or compatibility, but simply maintainability. Something as simple as auto-indenting and cleaning up stray mismatched end tags can make my life a whole lot simpler as I’m editing. That, and M-x dired-do-query-replace to remove such visual editor artifacts as “  ” between sentences. (When I get lazy and edit this weblog in IE5’s visual editor, it puts in the same sort of crap.)

Of course, if I had infinite time, I would convert the source material into DocBook XML and generate HTML, PDF, and course slides from a single source. Hey, I can dream.

Slashdot has picked up on the story I mentioned yesterday about Al Qaeda hacking Windows XP. I would like to reiterate that this is a completely ridiculous story; anyone with the slightest clue about how software is written would know that random strangers off the street can not simply “pose” as computer programmers and intentionally slip devastating back doors into an operating system. It has nothing to do with Microsoft being bloated or buggy or whatever; the world simply doesn’t work this way. As one Slashdot poster put it, “It screams of a hoax, so let’s put it on the front page. Way to be part of the problem. *sigh*”

Meanwhile, I’ll be changing my tagline to “Tomorrow’s Slashdot, today.”

Today’s Zen quotation comes from The Dhammapada:

Better than a thousand
Hollow words
Is one word that brings peace.
Better than a thousand
Hollow verses
Is one verse that brings peace.
Better than a hundred
Hollow lines
Is one line of the law,
Bringing peace.
It is better to
Conquer yourself
Than to win a thousand battles.

It usually takes me about 3 months to fully customize a new computer. There’s a flurry of activity for about 24 hours, followed by 24 hours of service packs, followed by 3 months of piddly little shit. Back in the dark days of 1997, doing professional development on Windows 95/98, this was just about enough time for the computer to deteriorate far enough that you had to reinstall and start the whole process over. Programs are easy to reinstall, of course; I have a list of where to download each, and my registration keys for those that require them (fewer and fewer these days). But it’s the little things, like remembering to set CVS_RSH to ssh in your Environment variables, or adding c:\cygwin\bin to your PATH, that always bite you when you’re least expecting it.

The screen buffer height on my CMD shortcut. That’s another one. So I can scroll back more than 300 lines in my console windows. Is there any way to script that? Probably not any easy way. I miss Linux already. Everything is scriptable, because everything is plain text. Plain text rocks.

I’ve been forced back to Windows during the day, at least for the time being, because my upcoming training class that I’m teaching is using a closed source product that isn’t available for Linux. The class is based on all open source tools, all Java-based, all completely cross-platform… except one.

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