Outrigger: 4

Posted on May 26, 2010 by ehurst

Rounding a leg of the ridge-line, the switchback revealed a broad valley sweeping down to a much broader one. It was this latter which was their destination. The haze, smoke and dust hanging in the air could not fully obscure the ancient city. As their snaking descent showed them ever wider views of it, they saw it was clearly never subjected to the stagnation of urban planning. It was living and growing, and somehow the phrase “random development” did not convey the full impact of what they saw.

Krumm ticked off in his mind the list of things he remembered from the official guide they were required to read during orientation. The city hosted numerous neighborhoods, each with its own cultural biases. Even the police uniforms were different. It might not have mattered so much, but in the hurried scrambling for vacant building space, the Human Terrain offices ended up planted inside a rather strict Muslim enclave. While during the course of this interminable war, the HTS had botched more than they got right so far, one thing they understood clearly was the utter necessity of having only men hired to run the place.

This crew was essentially mid-level management for a support facility which would hire local workers. As with every business there not catering directly to women, the whole operation would be entirely men. The contracts were ostensibly set for four years, which in practice meant little. These were typical middle-aged American guys.

Krum was the exception. He had mentioned being a widower. “So, how old are you, Krumm?”

Another guessed, “You look about 45 or possibly 48.”

Krumm actually laughed. “How flattering!” Completely deadpan, “I’m 57.”

To their exclamations of shock, he presented his official ID card, showing a birth date nearly six decades ago. “That’s almost twice my age… all or our ages.”

“How did you get this job? They told us we had to be under 40 to apply.”

Krumm shrugged. “They hunted me down. I had written a bunch of articles online about running modern software on ancient hardware, and the recruiter mentioned how important that was to this operation.”

“Do you reckon being a veteran made any difference?”

Krumm had turned back to gazing at the city they were approaching. “Obviously. That’s how they knew where to find me. At the time I thought it was a mistake to have used the veterans’ medical system, because it meant they had my current address. I really didn’t need much care once they fixed my shoulders, but I was worried about something and couldn’t afford private treatment. Turned out to be nothing. At any rate, they knew all about my age and health.”

“You must have had a good military record.”

Krumm turned and relaxed in his seat as the truck reached the valley floor. “Good enough, I suppose. They must have been pretty hard up, because they surely knew of my other articles criticizing everything about the government.”

“Maybe you can tell us why they didn’t fly us in. If I’m not mistaken, that’s an airport right there.” The man pointed out the back opening as the truck followed a curve around toward a bridge.

Krumm half-smiled. “New technology discovery. Someone came up with a missile tracking system smart enough to make passive use of electronic noise from aircraft. Then they found a way to do it cheaply. Problem is, they lived in China, which in turn licensed it to our nation’s enemies. Just a couple of months ago someone fielded a batch of hand-held anti-aircraft missiles among the southern tribes with this passive tracking, and our military hasn’t come up with a counter-measure yet. Flights are restricted to air lanes we fully control.”

“Where did you hear that? We couldn’t get any answers when we asked.”

Krumm’s smile twisted a little farther. “Unregulated news sources on the web run by crazies who spout wild conspiracy theories.”

“Sarcasm. I like that.” The future office manager, Ripley, hadn’t been the most chatty on their journey. “I’ll need a regular dose of that, I’m afraid, to maintain my sanity here.”

The city swallowed their truck, which was one of the few large and motorized vehicles in a place apparently run by mere muscle power, gaging by the traffic.

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KDE 3 and User Care

Posted on May 25, 2010 by ehurst

One of my associates at Open for Business has said far better the same complaint I’ve made for years, proving why he’s the one who actually gets paid to write stuff:

One perennial problem with free software is that, because they give it away, developers have no real reason to pursue a user base. This enables them to develop what they want in the way they want to develop it.

He goes on to discuss how KDE serves as a primary example. The new 4.x series gets lots of hobby user hype, with all the gee-whiz eye candy, but does so at the cost of any usefulness to the vast majority of ordinary computer users, folks for whom a computer could never be a hobby. Dare I say it comes close to a cult of self-congratulatory devotees who castigate anyone daring to suggest things might be a little better? The tight circle of developers and fans get all the attention, but anyone who doesn’t kneel in tearful awe is marginalized, at best. Such is the nature of far too many Open Source projects.

I recall one brief moment when KDE was truly useful within the parameters of things Open Source in general, and that was the 3.1.5 release. Though it benefited from the increasing automation and integration of the software, it still worked quite beautifully on FreeBSD 4, where it simply ran on top of the system. The handy user-friendly features like auto-mounting removable media didn’t work, but there was no real hassle in creating a desktop icon which would try to mount if you clicked it. I wrote for others instructions on how to make that work. Meanwhile, KDE at that staged managed to gather and solve a host of usability issues which had once plagued those of us who actually wanted Linux and BSD to serve as a daily work system.

That was the pinnacle of my experience with KDE, because while many parts of it continued to progress nicely, breakage kept popping up here and there, and too often it was something which simply needed to work or it was not worth the trouble to use it at all. Thus, while SUSE managed to integrate it really nicely into the system, the underlying flaws of SUSE bloat took it all away. Other distros simply didn’t bother to take advantage of that same potential (among distros I was willing to try) and FreeBSD zig-zagged on several issues, so I gave up when the home desktop thing became too low a priority for its developers.

Like Powell, I was thrilled to discover the willingness of Timothy Pearson to carry the fire for the one best hope to keep KDE 3 viable for Ubuntu base. I followed the instructions, added his repository, and installed. It’s functional, but I’m afraid I found a few parts not too well integrated where it really has to be. I won’t take Pearson to task over them, since he managed a monumental task just getting the packages built and functional on any level without much assistance. Rather, I commend him heartily for doing something so very rare among Open Source developers: He wants to serve the user.

That in itself is something to celebrate.

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Outrigger: 3

Posted on May 25, 2010 by ehurst

It seemed endless, a pattern repeated hour after hour. The truck lumbered across some valley floor, through hamlets, villages and towns. Then their path would struggle up some ribbed ridge, serpentine roads cut into the face of the mountains. Once the initial crest was made, the truck would alternate for a while between laboring up steep climbs and rolling madly down declines. Then a long snaking descent into a another wide valley.

The truck was a military castoff, the bed too high for comfortable passenger use. But then, at least it was intrinsically bottom heavy. The men with their baggage, which they used to cushion their ride, was a light load, so only the mechanical limitations of the beast kept it from moving faster. Still, the suspension was painfully stiff, and they could have counted every single stone larger than the thickness of a thumb which passed under the tires.

Krumm always sat where he could see out the front opening in the tarp. They all had sunglasses, mostly the trendy aviator type. His were sturdy full wrap-around safety glasses, so the dust hardly affected his vision. He also wore a wide-brimmed straw hat which somehow stayed put despite gusting winds, and seemed to keep far more dust from drifting onto his face than their baseball caps did for them.

Six men and baggage, with supplies, made for fairly cramped riding. Yet, for all the close quarters, Krumm was never quite in the same world as the other five.

“Why did you sign a contract with the military if you are so much a pacifist? Did you get hungry enough to compromise your principles?” It was gentle mocking.

Krumm remained typically unruffled. With a gentle smile, he answered, “You’ll save yourself a lot wondering if you simply write me off as insane. Logic is hardly a high priority in my calculations.”

Another broke in. “Crazy like a fox. At this rate we’ll be long dead while you rise from the ashes of whatever disaster. Yet it’s obvious you aren’t afraid of dying.”

Krumm’s smile broadened. “I look forward to death.”

“But you don’t use logic, so suicide is out?”

“I don’t get to choose.” Krumm braced himself and they followed his lead. A sudden jolt as they crossed a small crater in the road, the vehicle rocking heavily. The usual swearing could be heard from some of the men.

“Your philosophy sounds a lot like the local stuff.”

Krumm turned with eyebrows just visibly arched above his shades. “Perceptive! But I don’t share their philosophy so much as the underlying mystical approach.”

The first one said, “A mystic! That explains a lot. You act like you’re on a different planet half the time.”

The truck entered one of the long winding declines as the vista opened onto yet another broad valley. The HTS himself was driving, since his cadging with the chieftain in that last village got them a replacement guard, but hardly a teenager. The HTS had promised in exchange to teach the boy to drive, but apparently it was lie. The HTS was quite poor at it himself, so hardly stood to teach anyone else, but regulations forbid anyone without the proper driving credentials. Those came from a prolonged bureaucratic tangle few would endure, and the men in the back had only just arrived in country a few days ago.

The long downslope meant a change in the engine pitch, one which actually made conversation easier.

Krumm shifted to get a better view. “I consider myself under command from God, and there is no way to explain how He communicates his orders to me. I struggle myself to understand, much less implement them. I’d rather starve than work for the government, particularly the military, but I have orders from On High to be here.”

The other man cocked his head to one side. “I’ll bite. Any idea why?”

Krumm shook his head. “Not yet.”

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Outrigger: 2

Posted on May 24, 2010 by ehurst

Harold Krumm, Jr. lay on this back, staring straight up. The others were still trying to catch up. In the light of the fire, they were doing their best to match his rigging on the old military cots. Most of the end stretchers were missing, so the folding cots would have been hard to use. The military had come and gone, moving their deployment lines repeatedly, and there were tons of such equipment all over the countryside. So Krumm had scrounged around the abandoned forward base and found high tension plastic strapping which had once bound the contents of military cargo pallets. Using reverse tension, he simply tied each foot of his cot to the frame member above it. Then he shoved his two A-bags under the thing to make a fairly usable bunk.

If the old barn had ever been roofed, it wasn’t much now. The gentle breeze caused the ragged woven plastic tarp to billow just a bit. Several years of sun and wind and had frayed the fabric to the point he could see some of the stars through it. Their truck was parked outside, and beyond it was the old house where the HTS slept among the local guard force. They had a roof, of course.

One of the guys turned to Krumm, and asked, “So, where does a fellow learn such effective tactics?”

He barely finished when Krumm asserted firmly, “I hate war.” The others looked at each other. Krumm never failed to mystify them. He was the only one who seemed utterly unconcerned with hardship, always able to adjust and find ways to make things work on this long and convoluted journey to their destination. He was obviously older, very mild tempered, but seldom engaged in their typical chatter. It was as if he had no interest at all in the typical guy things they enjoyed, yet suddenly acted like the warrior none of them could ever be.

“It always kills far, far more innocent folks than combatants, and the people responsible for starting wars never have to suffer.” They could taste the bitterness of his words. Yet it was war which had provided them all with high paying hazardous duty contracts, when precious few back home had any jobs at all. From what they knew, Krumm had the plum job of the group as a computer technician.

The man went on. “You didn’t seem to have any trouble turning back the attackers. Why did you even get involved? They weren’t coming at us in the first place, were they?”

“Nope.” Krumm paused a moment. “They were headed for the fuel tankers.”

There were at once several versions of “What?!”

Krumm turned to face them. “One of the guys I shot had an RPG strapped to his back. One good shot and whole village would be smoking rubble. I figure the death of a handful of tribal warriors ain’t nothing compared to a couple hundred women and children.”

The others shared quizzical expressions. “We didn’t see any tankers.”

Krumm answered, “Just as we came around the far eastern side of the village, I spotted at least a half dozen rigs behind a row of houses. Looked like they were saddling up to move.”

“Just as the sun is going down?”

Krumm turned his head back to face the tarp overhead. “Tribal warriors don’t have night vision equipment; the military has lots of it. They even have enough for the local national contract drivers who take all the risks on those fuel convoys. So those guys lay up during daylight hours, then run all night.”

“Why wouldn’t the attackers hit during the day when the drivers are asleep?”

Krumm rubbed his face with one hand. “I overheard the HTS chatting with a village elder. The attackers weren’t from around here. Probably traveled all day trying to catch the convoy before it left. They almost succeeded.”

They considered this as they tried to finish rigging their cots. Krumm closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep for a long time.

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Outrigger: 1

Posted on May 23, 2010 by ehurst

The barren landscape rippled off to the north. At least, he was pretty sure it was north, because the sun was going down more or less to his left, in the same direction the truck was facing.

They had ridden in the back of that beast all day over a variety of packed, rutted, sandy and sometimes rocky, but always dirt roads. The back of the truck was only partially enclosed, and he was covered with as much dust and grime as the others. Given their issued gray-green coveralls, they would have been well camouflaged if they had gone out into the open.

But they were huddled between the truck and wall of the building where the HTS officer had gone to arrange their accommodations for the night. The only other member of their entourage was the driver/guard, standing to the rear of the truck, watching something they had passed as they came into the village.

Suddenly the guard collapsed and began bleeding profusely as the sounds of gunfire came from the nearest ridge, on the other side of the truck. His companions dropped instinctively where they were, but he carefully chose to shield himself behind the dual wheels on the rear axle of the truck, and peered out underneath the curvature of the filthy tires.

His companions were swearing, but he began to crawl toward the guard’s body. He kept himself down in the rut created by the passing of many vehicles in the same track. His head was down on one side, dragging the loose sand in the bottom of the rut, his face toward the probing attack. His arms out almost directly overhead, he would plant his palms and pull himself forward, his left leg cocked and pushing with the edge of his shoe, while his right leg was dragged along.

It seemed forever, but he knew it was only seconds. Reaching the guard’s body, he pushed it up out of the rut, then reached past to retrieve the rifle. Making sure it was charged, he raised a very low profile to aim over the dead body.

Shots were still ringing out, and debris flying, as few weapons in the village behind him answered with more than random and frantic automatic fire. It was typical of the low paid allied guards to fire blindly over walls, holding their lightweight assault rifles at the ends of their arms. Unlike them, he took careful aim — pop-pop — and someone who had ventured to charge across the open space between the village and ridge-line actually screamed when he fell. He sighted on another, but the target dropped out of sight. Another popped up and dirt puffed up in front of him. Unflinching, he fired back, dropping that one.

Much bigger puffs in rapid thupping sounds popped up just off to his right and worked toward him in short bursts. He turned some ten degrees to the right, taking time to aim more carefully at someone quite farther away, and fired once. The short bursts stopped.

Then there was some strange rolling, high-pitched call echoing from behind the ridge. A few other voices joined in a similar sound, and the firing from the ridge stopped. He pushed the rifle aside like it was poison, dropped his face in the dirt and clasped his hand behind his head.

His companions were considering whether it was safe to recover their feet, when the HTS office came out of the building. He checked each man, then noticed the one out by the guard. “You alright, Krumm?”

The man dropped his right hand, turned to face the HTS and barked back in a clear and commanding voice, “Unharmed, sir!”

After scanning the horizon, he slowly rose up, grabbed the rifle in his right hand, carrying it backwards and grappling with the guard’s body. Finally grabbing a wad of cloth in the center of the back, he was able to drag the somewhat smaller body back to the truck. He passed over the rifle butt first to the HTS, as if he had no idea how it was properly handled.

The HTS busied himself dealing with some locals regarding the body. Krumm sat down against the wall, very clearly saddened and distressed. One of his companions started, “Man that was…”

“Stop!” Krumm demanded. His steely cold gaze pierced the other. After a pause, he pointed at the knot of men chattering as they began wrapping the guard’s body in a shroud, while the HTS talked intensely with a pair of obviously important figures who had come from inside the building. “That man was a hero. He died defending us. I simply went out the check and see if he was still alive after he drove the attackers off.”

The intensity of his words cut the dusty air. He rose quickly to his feet. Then his face softened. He motioned the others close. “Guys, please. I can’t make you do anything, but don’t tell anybody. Tell the story I gave you, because I can’t afford to deal with what would surely follow.”

They looked at each other shrugging, and seemed to agree with is request, but were clearly baffled.

He relaxed a bit more and sighed. “Thanks.”

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Ubuntu Karmic and Your fonts.conf

Posted on May 22, 2010 by ehurst

I find it worthwhile to fight with fonts. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about how Linux handles fonts, and the only constant is change. Within Ubuntu, the developers keep making all these wonderful decisions, sometimes to counter to the upstream Debian developers, and on and on. These days, while the Freetype thing is pretty well whipped, we have this awful boondoggle called FontConfig and I wish it were possible to physically confront the folks who created this overly complicated mess. As a pacifist I wouldn’t hurt them, but at least they would likely be intimidated (I am big and ugly) and be forced to explain just what in blue blazes a mere user can do to tame their idiocy.

So while they refuse to condescend to inform us mere mortals with simplified instructions, I have poked and prodded and read webpages until falling asleep. You can configure things any way you like to suit your tastes, but you might need to know a few things before you get started.

A great deal is controlled by what is linked between your /etc/fonts/conf.avail and your /etc/fonts/conf.d. This where the Debian world has tweaked the basic FontConf for the whole system. These days using the old dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config has been essentially disabled, and you don’t get to make adjustments that way. Fortunately, most of it is not entirely too obscure. More on that later.

First, in Karmic the whole thing is broken. So even if you know how to write your own ~/.fonts.conf it might not work until you change something in the system files. If you can understand this bug report you might need to try the work-around suggested by YW Sing, which is comment out a portion of the file at /etc/fonts/conf.avail/44-wqy-zenhei.conf. Using the XML standard notations, simply comment out the bottom half of the file. So here’s what mine looks like:

<edit name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
<!-- <alias>
<family>serif</family>
<prefer>

….

<family>WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono</family>
</prefer>
</alias> -->
<alias>
<family>WenQuanYi Zen Hei</family>

I’m not able to show indentation properly on this blog, but I wanted to point out the red colored notations I added according to the suggestion in the bug report. Once I saved this and closed the editor, it took immediate effect. Suddenly my personal fonts.conf worked.

I found suggestions by Martin Ankerl perfect for my needs. However, this is 9.10, and things are different. I notice that turning on autohinting fattens the fonts, and I don’t like that at all. So while I duplicated his suggestions for my fonts.conf and Xresources files, I also went into the system settings and changed a few other things, removing some symlinks and adding one.

Here’s the list of what shows up in my /etc/fonts/conf.d/:

10-antialias.conf
10-hinting.conf
10-hinting-full.conf
10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
11-lcd-filter-lcdlegacy.conf

….

70-yes-bitmaps.conf

Aside from editing that one file noted above, I didn’t change anything else in the other numbered sets. Thus, I removed the autohinting, changed bitmaps from no to yes, and added the lcdlegacy switch. Here’s what it looks like:

<!--  Use lcdlegacy as default for LCD filter -->
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
<const>lcdlegacy</const>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Again, this blog software has a problem with indentation (AKA “leading whitespace”) so simply note I changed what was in the 11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf file and renamed it. By removing and adding symlinks between conf.avail and conf.d you get what you want from the options. By the way, I use the MC console file manager for this, since it’s the quickest way. (sudo apt-get install mc)

The result works well on my wide-screen LCD. You should test for your own use the differences between autohinting on and off; whether you have hintnone, hintslight, hintmedium or hintfull; and lcdnone, lcddefault, lcdlight and lcdlegacy. You can learn about other options here.

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Spidermonkey on Ubuntu Karmic

Posted on May 21, 2010 by ehurst

There is a noteworthy conflict on Karmic if you try to install libmozjs-dev because it conflicts with anything based on xulrunner 1.9. I can’t begin to explain why the Mozilla developers hold Spidermonkey to 1.8, but because of how the upstream Debian crew package it, this breaks things.

We all know I am hardly smart enough to have my hands on a keyboard in the first place, but I think the underlying issue is Debian folks insist on building all the xulrunner libraries with the name “libmozjs” instead of simply “libjs” — the latter is the default from source.

I really wanted Elinks with JScript, and I didn’t care about all the other crap Debian developers build into. What in blue blazes do I know about Lua scripting? So I typically build Elinks from the latest source (0.12pre5 at this moment). After downloading the source for Spidermonkey, I poked around at various ways to make it work without breaking the way Ubuntu runs Firefox.

Lacking the experience and understanding for tweaking the build configurations, I simply ran the basic build without installing. Then I examined where the Elinks build script looks for Spidermonkey, hoping to find a place in the file system Ubuntu didn’t use normally. One of the choices was the /opt/spidermonkey directory and I used that. But I didn’t know how to put that in the installer instructions, and my searching for simple instructions turned up nothing I could identify. So I examined the package contents and structure for the way Ubuntu builds libmozjs and echoed that under /opt/spidermonkey with an include and lib folder, and simply moved the files from the build manually. I had to poke around in the build directories of Spidermonkey, and found all but one file which appears on the Ubuntu package file list — jsosdep.h. I have no idea what difference that makes. But it seems the primary difference is the name of the actual runtime file — libjs versus libmozjs.

Once I had them in place, the Elinks configure script found it all and gave me a Spidermonkey build. Then I had to make sure Ubuntu knew to include this in the ld.conf. In /etc/ld.so.conf.d directory I created a libjs.conf file with this one line:

/opt/spidermonkey/lib/

and ran sudo ldconfig, hoping there would be no runtime conflicts. For now, I can run Firefox on JScript heavy sites without trouble, so I guess it’s working as I hoped. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who know more about this than I do, so feel free to comment.

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Open Source, Closed Mind

Posted on May 18, 2010 by ehurst

This is a rant aimed at the Open Source Software Development Community as a whole. We recognize in the Social Sciences we have no choice but to make generalizations and stereotypes; otherwise, we get nothing done. Every grouping of humans exhibits characteristics by which we understand the nature of the group. The failure comes in seeking to apply any stereotype too tightly to any given individual within the group. The OSS philosophy is a high moral standard in one sense, and a devilish evil in another. The following rant is aimed at reminding the OSS advocates, Linux advocates in particular, of their single greatest blind spot, a major moral flaw:

You don’t give a rat’s patootie about the user.

Again, not every project, not every developer, etc. This is a generalization, a characteristic which rears its ugly head every time I read a debate or discussion over anything which touches on the OSS philosophy. For some reason, people aren’t a very high priority with OSS.

Granted, the major commercial providers of software exhibit an equal contempt for consumers, but at least manage to understand what it takes to appeal to them. Therefore, while MS, for example, regards consumers as the product sold to advertisers, they do respond to consumer pressure demanding a certain degree of change. As far as the consumer is concerned, MS delivers. Not in the purest sense, of course. There are colossal failures, but overall it’s better than nothing. They got there “firstest with the mostest” when this whole thing of privately owned computers got started. For whatever reasons, consumers with the money to spend bought MS products.

Yes, most consumers bought for home use what their employer bought for use in the workplace. Concrete example: In the late 1980s, US troops in Europe were ordering vast quantities of 286 and 386 systems and parts because they used them on duty, and saw the value of having their own private version of those same tools. At that time, it was MS-DOS and cheap knock-offs of the Enable O/A suite, along with countless games, of course. The military exchange stores sold cases and cases of floppy disks when they had nary a single other computer-related product. In many ways, the market was built on what corporations and government used, and MS quickly grabbed the whole market, at least in part because they responded to demand. (BTW, Enable is still in use, and I know where to get it.)

The only reason anyone will leave MS is if something better comes along. Right now, in my computer ministry, I am able to sell Linux to a portion of my clients because it offers something which strikes them as better. While it does eventually mean less work for me, the real reason is because it is in their best interest. They are the reason I have a ministry — the user is king and queen with me. I don’t manipulate, plead or harass them into it. I offer it as an alternative to yet one more re-installation of their broken Windows. Most decline, and I respect their decision. Because I have a laptop which runs Etch (I don’t care if it’s not supported; it’s the best choice for this hardware) I can demonstrate something of the GNOME interface and some of the ways in which it is not too hard to figure out.

Notice I didn’t say “how it is better than the alternative,” only that it’s not utterly foreign.

Nobody in their right mind would complain at the vast array of variations available with Linux. Those who demand uniformity should have no voice. That is entirely and wholly immoral, and I refuse to debate that. The whole point of everything I do with computers is giving people what they need, while maintaining the humility of never assuming I know what’s best. I serve them; I don’t command them. I’m not the corporate software vendor who cynically manipulates the clientele.

Nor am I Open Source, in that sense. That is, I don’t demand they adopt to my personal preferences. The greatest power of Open Source development is the vision of computing as it should be, of keeping things where everyone can see it, contribute, and make of it what they can. Fine. But to demand everyone who touches it have the ability to read and write their own code guarantees isolation to only those few with time and talent to pursue it. I won’t name names, but at least one “owner” of a very large project has tartly told those who asked for a certain feature to kiss his backside. Even when it was thousands of users making that request, and when it was repeatedly pointed out the previous series had this feature. His response was, “I don’t care.” That was a few years ago, and his tune hasn’t changed, and the project still lacks the feature.

That’s his prerogative, but I can’t recommend that to anyone. In my experience, that is the dominant attitude of the entire community. When in their divine whims they deign to recognize a user’s wish, they grant it only if it pleases them, and they were already inclined to do it. If it means in any way something they would rather not do, the requester is lucky to escape without flaming hostility. The current story line on User Friendly exaggerates what I believe is actually the literal attitude of many OSS folks irritated at mere mundane users. If they could get their hands on a nuclear missile, they would use it on someone who dared to want something which so mightily disturbed their vision of pure computing.

It’s a very old observation — a stereotype — that the very best and brightest coders are so good at computers precisely because they are so bad at people. So we have the standard joke about geeks having no social life in meat space. As long as all they do is poke at code and computer hardware, we are fine. Turn them loose in another direction and the world might well be destroyed in a very short time. That’s the way it is. Jokes are fine, but we have to live with the underlying truth. If you like computers, you have to put up with the people who don’t like anything except computers.

But those basement dwelling social misfits who turn out the world’s greatest software would not have found their niche if millions of consumers had not by their demand driven the price of computers down. I can’t count how many projects would be better if the developer could get his/her hands on a wider array of hardware and write the drivers, but they can’t afford all of it. Still, they do have at least one computer and a connection to the Internet. People and corporations with money and hardware to donate won’t come around if the code isn’t something they can use to enhance their bottom line. Without that market, it’s just a tiny handful of weirdos firing zeroes and ones at each other. If you want to advocate Linux for a wider adoption, you’ll have to understand the folks with the money.

So we have a fairly large community of those in between those two ends. It’s a broad mixture of corporate, government and private efforts which results in many distributions of Linux. Each one seeks to scratch an itch no other distro can reach, but obviously the consumer has spoken, because a tiny handful dominate the scene. For the corporations, it’s Red Hat, Novell-SUSE, and a few other smaller players. For the common user, it’s Ubuntu. For all the purists who complain about how those three are perverting the purity of vision, and how those seem to crowd out other things they prefer, I have little sympathy. They aren’t hurting you. The vast resources they represent would not be involved at all if Red Hat didn’t strive so hard to offer what corporations think they must have, and Ubuntu didn’t appeal to the more average users.

Even within those distros, the community carries a large contingent of purists who try to steer the whole thing away from the very direction which makes those distros so dominant. The vast majority of those who put their fingers on a mouse or keyboard don’t care about the ongoing internal debate, and surely don’t want to hear about philosophical issues. The majority simply want a product which matches their interests, and the closer the better. Telling them to kiss your behind because their interests don’t matter means you lose the dollars which make your little hobby possible.

The Holy Grail of Linux advocacy is not standardization; it’s learning to make the consumer think you care. Right now, the vast majority are pretty sure Linux advocates don’t care. They believe you are just trying to jive talk them into something you want, not what they want. I think those users are mostly right. It’s up to the Open Source Software Development Community to change that image, by changing priorities first.

(Updated comments on this topic are here.)

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Inherently Broken: Government Employment

Posted on May 16, 2010 by ehurst

Not just military, but every arm of government bureaucracy is utterly anti-human.

In this case, we have this universally despised Census Bureau, which has no clue about the US Constitution and the limits of their authority. They apparently also have no clue how to get folks paid.

Consider this: Anyone with half a brain knows we have thousands of people unemployed, desperate enough to work for something they despise. The Census Bureau management can’t pretend they aren’t taking advantage of this. They were drooling at the prospect of having more than enough people to finish the work on time. Not just the occasional housewife needing a few extra bucks, but some pretty high quality folks who got laid off, typically from jobs paying significantly more. So they get these folks who are holding on by the skin of their teeth, make them do all this work at their own expense, and then can’t manage to pay most of them.

I get this picture of pay claims be rejected for things like the form has wrinkles, there is a stray mark on the corner of the paper, the signature flourishes went outside the box, or they lost hundreds of files and can’t be bothered to hunt for them, etc. Yes, the military saw some of this, too, so I know what I’m talking about. From what I understand, typical civil service folks are actually worse than military clerks. Individuals vary widely, but the snafus I saw in things like military pay followed me everywhere I went in uniform. I fought with the system every time. Lots of my friends did, too.

The military is loaded with crude terminology. Even the accepted term “snafu” is an acronym for foul language. It implies when things are at their best, it’s intolerable as a human experience. Now consider something. As the economy gets worse, and politics gets crazier, and tension and unrest rise, all that will get even worse. You should read some of the comments at the above link. It’s just getting started. More and more Americans will be under the gun to take any work they can get, which often would be something like this, yet in the same moment, you surrender even more of your protections. You see, the Census Bureau exempts itself, as does almost the entire federal bureaucracy, from the same strict rules the government applies to private employers.

This is what happens when you demand your government be a modern secular state. Employees become nothing more than machines. Think about how Haliburton treated their machinery in Iraq and Afghanistan under the “cost-plus” contracting, and you can estimate how Uncle Sam is going to treat you.

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Debt Is Death

Posted on May 15, 2010 by ehurst

More specifically, debt which is not 100% personal and private is what God hates. Once you break the personal bond, debt is inherently sinful.

Christians have completely lost their way on this one. We still have one major institution in our world which refuses to engage in debt-based economics, that being Islamic governments. Where did they get that? Only a Muslim denies Mohamed got any of his ideas from Judaism. We know Judaism is not equivalent to Old Testament religion, but was derived from it. It is the Old Testament which bluntly declares God’s hatred for charging interest on loans.

You loan to your kin to keep them alive and give them a stake for future prosperity. It’s an obligation we all feel instinctively. That’s the right way to do things. We don’t do it to collect interest directly, but to gain that subtle material benefit from having your cousin or nephew make his own wealth. His wealth comes back to you in a thousand different ways, but the whole point is not the cash nexus of measured returns, but of knowing you did the right thing.

If he can’t pay you back, you take the loss. Eventually, you do so quite literally under the Jubilee laws. That’s what God commanded, and it wasn’t simply some peculiar primitive tribal thing, but truly His will for humanity. Early churches maintained this, not because there were Jews in the church, but because it was right. Paul said we should prefer to be victims of fraud than chase material recovery or profits. Precise accounting in that sense arises only — only — from idolatry of the god Mammon.

For Christians to be in any way associated with debt-based accounting amongst each other is an abomination. There should be people lined up to give to the needy, and when they can’t outright give, they should at least be ready and eager to make “risky” personal loans. No one should ever go to a loan-sharking financial institution (which is all of them), or (God forbid) a government agency, to afford necessities of life. If they really need it, they should be able to get it via the church-family. If not, they don’t need it.

You can be sure, of course, current world affairs seek the destruction of any such godly ways. So we have the propaganda demonizing Muslims because they dare adhere to a law forbidding interest-based banking. TPTB will have to destroy all the Muslim governments, of course. Meanwhile, they enslave all nations farther and farther into debt, toppling the economies first, then the governments of each modern state. If the economic pain is bad enough, we will surrender willingly. Global government has never been so easy.

To get some idea of this, I want you to see if you can find out just how much of the US federal budget is borrowed. Also, think about how revenue is dropping due to unemployment and so forth. Now, extend that to every state and local government. Suddenly, the bond market says your governments are too big of a risk to loan any more money. But previous debts don’t go away. So they actually have to find a way to take in more revenue than they spend. Somehow the words “budget cuts” don’t carry enough meaning. Then some IMF type agency says they’ll cover us, but we have to make those cuts anyway.

There are two elements in defending yourself and your family from this. First, you had better get a more realistic notion of what you really need in material goods. Our profligate wasteful lifestyle is part of what put us in this unconscionable national debt. Second, disentangle as much as possible from the debt-based economy.

Yes, I know the only 100% escape is to live in a cave and use only what people give you or throw away. That might be a good idea, but there are only so many caves out there, and most of them have restricted access. How you work out the underlying principle is yours to decide, but start thinking that way. God is more than capable of making you understand what it takes once you embrace His Laws.

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