Israel and Gaza: Just a Sideshow

Posted on January 26, 2009 by ehurst

My time in the limelight has faded; the tools here on this blog indicate very few visits the last couple of days. I’ve had my 15 minutes it appears, and only a precious few friends are likely to read this. It never mattered in the first place, because this blog is nothing more than my what the subheading says it is: “brain spew not fit to publish elsewhere.” For me, the Linux articles which got all the hits weren’t really central to my efforts here. People who think of me as Linux blogger don’t know me.

The business with Israel attacking Gaza was similar: It’s not what it appears to be. First, it’s very easy to prove Israel violated the cease-fire first. All Hamas ever really demanded from Israel was to remove the blockade. It’s also easy to prove Israel created Hamas as a foil to the PLO. When Hamas won a fair election, it ruined some big plans. So Israel has made themselves odious to most of the human race, and things will change. But it won’t really change what matters most.

While we are all distracted about something which is truly horrific there in the Levant, even worse things are taking place in the background. It’s more than the profits made by war materiel suppliers, though that is certainly a central issue. These people are supplying both sides of almost every war in every part of the world. War is their primary business, and business is booming for them. While it’s wholly unlikely Israel will fall as a nation, it wouldn’t matter to these people who make money from wars. They created Israel, but not for the ostensible purpose of giving back to all the world’s Jews, nor even the Holocaust survivors, their ancient homeland. The purpose was to keep attention away from efforts to centralize control over the whole world.

Not every nation today is on the same banking grid. Very big chunks of human economic activity are outside the grasp of these people. Several of the Islamic nations of the Middle East are off that grid. Some South American nations are threatening to pull off it. While the near-global economic crash is having the desired effect where it holds, those nations off the grid are relatively safe. What no one seems to realize is this is what every nation should want for themselves. Globalism may look nice, with its presumed efficiency of resource use, so-called free trade, and free access by all people to all places, that’s not the way it will turn out. Those things are being sold so the mega-bankers can gain control over every particle of human activity.

By having a nation without such wide open boundaries, problems in one place won’t affect another so much. That economic problems are inevitable is mostly ignored. These things come in cycles, and all the efforts to minimize the cycles, to dampen the natural waves, only make things worse, only increase human misery. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, and probably knows they are lying. Humans were designed by God to remain in discrete nations, and inside each of those are supposed to be smaller, tribal governments, clan governments, etc., down to the extended household. Actual civil governments have only one purpose: Defense and some limited coordination to mediate disputes. Civil government control of any degree is simply evil at that level. Social issues were meant to be resolved within the small society where they appear. Every effort to walk away from this model is doomed to failure, sooner or later. Brilliant theories to the contrary are just a delusion.

There have been previous efforts in human history to gain a truly worldwide governmental control, but it always failed when time ran out. The natural cycle of empires is fairly routine in human history. This time around, it may actually come pretty close before it collapses. Previous collapses meant truly grand loss of life. Because the scope of this current effort is so very large, the collapse will bring death on a scale undreamed of so far. Stalin’s 10 million will look small by comparison. Israel’s ugly little slaughter in Gaza, the US slaughters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, are just getting warmed up. Next up: Iran, Syria and another round for Lebanon. Except, somewhere in there, a lot more US troops are going to die.

That’s where the money is, death and destruction. Money is the the current means of control, and as long as we don’t see that, we are simply headed for a day darker than at any time in human history so far.*

*Note: The term “history” refers to events recorded, not events we believe came before good records were kept. The Fall and Babylon I were pre-history.

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CompSec: Another Doomsday Virus

Posted on January 25, 2009 by ehurst

I’m not a mindless fanboy. There are things about Linux which fail. Just now, as I was doing some research on this post, I ran into a website which caused a race condition on my Lenny box. I had to start closing tabs one by one until the CPU meter dropped to a normal level. For the most part, it happens on sites with heavy media apps, and usually it’s Guardian or Telegraph, online UK news organizations. At least, that’s where I notice it most. Such hammering never happened on Windows machines when I visited those sites, because the browser plugins work better on Windows.

However, that’s a small price to pay for a certain level of security. I’ve had Windows machines compromised several times. I’ve never had a Linux box compromised. I keep wondering if each new killer virus is going to bring things to a crisis point. This Downadup/Conficker thing is grabbing a lot of machines. Peaking at 15 million or so, we’ve been told the experts expected worse. However, this is just the latest in several versions of the virus, and the creator is a highly skilled expert. It gets meaner with each upgrade. Take note: Even if you applied the patch from MS, it can still be passed around inside a network, via a USB memory stick, via email, and some other typical user behavior. Simply turning off AutoRun may not solve the problem.

Just what would constitute a crisis point? I’m not sure anybody knows. Right now, everyone is waiting for the virus to download part 2, whatever it is the thing is waiting to download to all the machines it now controls. I’m wondering just how nasty this thing can get. Of course, we note the worm is not having such good luck in Western Europe and the US, because of the higher likelihood of those machines having been patched, we are told. The virus seems strongest in locations where pirated copies abound. However, I note it’s not hard to get a pirate copy of XP which updates just fine, yet does not phone home via WGA. I can get one tonight, but I have no desire to make my system the property of the Redmond Borg.

I’m going to guess whomever is producing this virus is waiting until it gains traction here in the West. That is, the current herd of 15 million bots will be sending out the next version, or something even nastier. Whatever he and his friends plan to do with that large of a bot-herd can’t be nice.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping Lenny up to date, and I don’t trust my DSL router/firewall to do all the work. I’m using a fairly simple script I found here [dead link removed]. While it seems crackers do try to grab Linux boxes, or other types of Unix(-like) systems, such attacks are rather hard to automate. A part of me wonders whether such attacks will be stepped up if a large number of Win-boxes disappear or are replaced with Linux boxes, so that the target share for Linux gets bigger.

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Bible Logic — Like Nothing Else

Posted on January 24, 2009 by ehurst

Over the past few years, as I began to apprehend the logic behind the Bible, I realized increasingly just how difficult it is to put into words. That is, all my years of training and experience in writing with clarity, translating difficult concepts into more common terms, I find myself utterly at a loss for words. It’s not something you can simply talk about in clinical terminology.

Even among committed fellow believers, it is very hard to get across. It doesn’t help the mere mention of it suggests they might have been taught wrong all this time. I’m not interested in correcting a millennium of Christian scholarship. There is simply this matter it doesn’t add up, and maybe there is something we’ve been missing for a long time. The problem is, how do I describe it without dredging up terms with bad connotations?

Because of my heavy background in Philosophy courses, I first began using standard academic terms. The problem is, they are all dismissive in nature. To call the culture of the Old Testament “Near Eastern Mysticism” implies right away it’s illogical. That’s not true. It has its own logic, and it’s not a form of logic we are used to, so it requires some time to absorb it. Trying to analyze it in Western terms, using a Western frame of reference, inevitably ends in painting Bible logic as suspicious, at best. Saying it’s more deductive than inductive might sound neutral at first, but because our whole orientation about just how it is minds can know something favors induction, it’s as if Bible logic is primitive. It did come first, but that’s no grounds for assuming we have somehow gotten better at thinking and knowing.

Adding to the problem is the realization no culture today is quite like it was then. There are tastes of it here and there, but most every place on earth has long since been swamped by tidal waves of other cultures. There’s too much proof modern Judaism is hardly Hebraic in outlook. Even by Jesus’ day the Jewish rabbinical colleges were too Hellenized to be genuinely Hebraic. Most of His arguments with the Jewish leaders of His day was criticizing their inability to regard their Scripture from the same set of assumptions under which it was written. They were bogged down in a shallow, literalist application of something produced from a very non-literal viewpoint.

So while I could attempt to use familiar terms, I can’t be sure readers would not still end up somewhere far off track. Try to realize, something which is not “logical” in the familiar, linear sense we are used to, does not automatically become “illogical.” The first pointer is trying to understand symbolic logic. The point behind word choice in Hebrew is not a concrete description, but to an attempt to transport you to the scene being described. You aren’t supposed to walk away knowing something you can recite, but come away with an imperative to act. There is a myth Hebrew people memorized huge tomes of material word-for-word, but all we see are paraphrases. So some New Testament writer “quotes” from an Old Testament passage and comes up with something we aren’t sure makes sense. That’s because they probably saw something we missed, because we are too doggoned literal minded about it. Let me suggest the Hebrew people didn’t memorize word-for-word until much later, when they were less Hebraic. Instead, they memorized the impact a story had on them, and transmitted that impact, though surely using some of the same words.

Context was everything. The Hebrew language itself was all about context, with far fewer words than modern languages, pulling them together and conjugating in strange ways. The intent was for the words themselves to transmit a sense of experience, not an objective and detailed description. They understood such a thing, but wouldn’t use it for something which really mattered. They could cite specific numerical counts, but we find their relaxed attitude about what numbers meant to be rather alarming. Words for numbers were often used with other meanings, and it gets real confusing to us. So a story told by one speaker in one context might be told quite differently in another context. That’s because the point in telling it might change. They were pretty casual about dropping out a lot of detail, because the impact was more important than the story itself.

So calling Bible logic “intuitive” is misguiding. It resembles intuition in the way it works — there is no straight-line path from question to answer. Part of it passes outside the realm of precise calculation, detours through an area which can’t be recreated by another person, because some part of the calculation is just not possible to put in words. Yet it is far more reliable, on its own terms, than something with mathematical precision. That’s the hard part for us to swallow: “success” is not measured in the same terms. They don’t consider being and doing in the same way we do, so knowing the precise nature of a thing is not necessary. They would be more interested in knowing just what it is you are committed to, not what you are (nature) or what you actually do (behavior). Results are measured in a changed or sharpened commitment, not so much what performance points were hit or missed.

And I’m still trying to figure it out myself.

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The Net: Shared Resources and Trust

Posted on January 23, 2009 by ehurst

In a certain sense, there is no law on the Internet. Sure, there are things you can do with the Internet which will get you in trouble with some governments, but that’s invariably a matter of governments protecting their prerogatives from the Net’s freedoms. As I understand it, the procedures for avoiding most governments’ notice is surprisingly easy for a savvy computer user (most of it has to do with using something besides Windows). By its very nature, the Internet is a place where plain old blind trust is the only way you’ll get much of anything done.

We are used to a certain amount of give and take. We tolerate ads on most sites we like to use because that’s how the sites pay the bills for hosting. If some sites are backed by large commercial operations, there is a certain transfer of trust bleeding over from the legal and ethical restraints which apply in brick-n-mortar space. Longevity of any service, coupled with popularity implying a certain level of user satisfaction, is the ultimate trust rating on the Net. However, should some service violate that trust, there tends to be a certain stickiness of continued use.

For example, YouTube recently removed some controversial videos, in particular those related to the 911 Truth Movement. This sort of action rubs Net activists the wrong way. It puts a dent in the level of trust for YouTube, tarnishing their image as generally fair. The difficulty for those who see any similar action as a problem of principle itself is in knowing it may prove difficult to get the average user’s attention.

The vast majority of those who enjoy the Net freedoms tend not to notice anything which doesn’t hit them square in the face. Further, many of them have developed a sickeningly high level of tolerance about such losses. Even when you do get them riled up and active, it’s often just one more form of entertainment, for which they quickly lose interest. These are the users on the Net who make it hardest for the few of us who take this more seriously. The biggest threat to us is really big companies using their really big viewership as a buffer to ignore the principles of trust.

I’m guessing YouTube will get away with this.

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Personal Preference: Debian Lenny AMD64

Posted on January 22, 2009 by ehurst

A couple of months ago, one of my clients asked me why I liked Linux so much. We discussed things we liked and disliked about various operating systems. This was no clueless user, but she was searching the options for finding something that was less work than XP. She knew enough to realize it was never going to be pain free, but she was unhappy with the constant hassles. I’m not a salesman, and she didn’t come to any particular conclusions, but the conversation got me thinking.

First, it got me wondering if there was a way to make Linux easier for people who didn’t love computers, just wanted to use one. Over the past month I took a grand tour reviewing the distros and alternatives, and ran through a fresh sampling of several. The whole point of the review was how well I believed I could make Linux easier for non-hobby users. My current conclusion is the result of messing about with Debian Lenny and Etch, openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, CentOS 5, FreeBSD 6 and 7, several of the *buntus, etc. Having two harddrives makes it possible to remain sane and keep track of my other work on one drive while horsing around on the other.

Second, I found I could easily tie myself to a project like that and neglect my own personal preference. What I like for myself is not something I can recommend to average non-techie users. I admit I’ve gotten really tired of rolling release as well as any other system which requires I keep moving to newer stuff, even if it’s only yearly. Most of my clients would hate that vehemently, but I simply weary of it. I don’t have any problems with complicated configuration, but if there’s a wizard to do it for me, why not take advantage of it? For my clients, wizards would be obligatory, but for me it’s okay if I have ways to work around it. For example, during my OS wandering, I used SUSE’s SaX to create a really detailed and near-perfect xorg.conf. It was good enough I recycled it when the distro (or BSD) in question didn’t do such a good job. It made a huge difference, and I wonder why more distros and BSDs don’t simply appropriate SaX for themselves, or create something similar. Politics, I’m sure, but while I readily permit Boycott Novell to link to my blog, it’s not out of any sympathy for their cause. My dislike for MS, and large corporations in general, does not extend to boycotts on principle if any of them offer something I can use without hurting myself. You have your principles, and mine are likely way-out-there compared to yours.

So while I’m keeping CentOS 5 on one harddrive, in order to support the project of creating a more non-techie friendly Linux meta-distro, it’s not what I really want to use for myself. I’ve always liked SUSE, regardless who owned it, but lately things aren’t going that well with SUSE on my hardware. I’m also not happy with certain package decisions, and it doesn’t help I find KDE 4 utterly repugnant. I actually prefer 3.x, and will encourage you to snicker or frown, or whatever else you might do to express your disagreement. Since SUSE leaves so many parts of KDE 3 broken, I’ll just take advantage of the SaX product and use it elsewhere. That “elsewhere” is running Debian Lenny for AMD64 on the primary harddrive.

My disparaging comments about Lenny 64 were in the context of what I could offer my clients. They would never have a clue how to develop a fully functional xorg.conf. Unless it just so happened their combination of hardware was readily recognized by Xorg itself, they would revolt. Worse, they would have no idea how to search for and select the standard complement of multimedia packages, completely at a loss to pick through the all-too-generous inclusion of just about any Open Source software made by anyone anywhere. I still say having no default firewall configuration (such as SUSE and RHEL have) is a mistake, even as an option you can refuse. However, since no one has run into serious trouble with it, and complaints aren’t that loud, I don’t expect the Debian folks to change on that issue. It’s not enough to drive me away from running Debian.

The installation narrative follows.

I used the most recent ISO for Lenny’s KDE Installer CD. With my archived SaX-made xorg.conf it was necessary to change the FontPath statements to match Debian’s locations. I made sure none of the lines had that ancient “unscaled” tag, and put the 100dpi fonts before the 75dpi, simply because I’m using a large CRT. Most of the rest was copied wholesale, to preserve the full set of IDs for various sections in the final ServerLayout. Here is the relevant section for my Dell P-1230:

Section "Monitor"
  Option       "CalcAlgorithm" "XServerPool"
  DisplaySize  404 303
  HorizSync    30-130
  Identifier   "Monitor[0]"
  ModelName    "P1230"
  Option       "DPMS"
  Option       "PreferredMode" "1600x1200"
  VendorName   "DELL"
  VertRefresh  50-160
  UseModes     "Modes[0]"
EndSection

A critical element for font display is the DisplaySize line. Those are very close to the physical dimensions of my screen, and offer a perfect 4/3 ratio, so I end up with 100dpi as the hardware resolution without any other tweaking. I find generally nailing down as many variables as possible prevents unexpected behavior in the X server, so I included the nit-picking mouse and keyboard definitions, etc. Once I had this configuration in place, I restarted X and was rewarded with an excellent display. In particular, I note favoring 100dpi fonts on larger display resolutions produces a lot less fuzziness whether you choose TTFs or bitmapped fonts. I also made sure to run dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, selecting to enable bitmapped fonts, since I prefer Misc-Fixed in Konsole.

As you might expect, I added a few repositories to my sources.list because I know what I like:

deb http://mirror.anl.gov/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.anl.gov/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian-multimedia.informatik.uni-erlangen.de lenny main
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ lenny non-free

This allowed me to add easily the NVIDIA drivers, Gspca for my webcam, and includes:

  • Lyx
  • Cream/Vim
  • Opera
  • Xine
  • w64codecs
  • Timidity
  • IcedTea Plugin
  • ffmpeg
  • libdvdcss

I removed the swfdec because I have the Flash 10 beta for 64-bit in my ~/.mozilla/plugins and it works fine in Opera.

However, that’s only because my religion work includes dealing with a lot of videos online, and a few sites I visit require a graphical browser. For document rendering into plain text, nothing beats the Gecko engine, but it won’t work with the Flash beta. I’m pretty selective about which browser I use for the broad collection of sites I visit, and none of them do it all for me. Most of the time, for simple surfing and reading, I use Elinks. While it’s available in the repositories, I find the latest 0.12pre2 a significant improvement over previous versions because the developers have finally gotten rid of the ghost text effect which plagued my use of it in the past. I compiled that from source, making sure I had the development packages for SpiderMonkey, among others.

For email, I’m currently using Opera, but I’d much rather use Fetchmail, Postfix and Alpine. However, in this day when some 90% of all Net traffic is spam email, I understand the limitations which makes all the servers treat my internal mail server as a potential spam source and block me based on my IP address, which arises out of the AT&T home DSL pool. For now, I’m forced to use a client connecting directly to my remote mail server, and Mutt and Alpine both make that entirely too complicated. Yes, I’ve used Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution and Claws. In the balance of evaluating the relative merits of each against the sometimes unreasonable preferences we all have, I’m finding Opera is the most tolerable for the way I like to work.

For no other reason than I like it that way, I’m sticking with the “pure 64-bit” theme. If everything we did made perfect sense, we’d be less than human. Despite reasonable arguments from Thomas Vander Stichele to the contrary, I still prefer 64-bit audio and video, and I’ve not found anything to compare with Xine. I make sure KDE calls that first on just about everything it knows how to play. It works the way I do for such things.

It bears mentioning here again: For the Logitech QuickCam Messanger which uses the Gspca5 driver, there is a conflict during the modprobe process. The system attempts to load the webcam as the default audio device, simply because it includes a microphone. The simplest way to prevent this is add one line at the end of your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base: options snd-usb-audio index=-2. This causes the webcam driver to load after the sound driver for my onboard MCP61 High Definition Audio is loaded and running.

I won’t pretend this makes any sense to most Linux fans, and Debian fans in particular. However, I think we can agree freedom is a good thing.

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The Non-hobby User: Linux Distro Review

Posted on January 21, 2009 by ehurst

This will become a point of reference for future comments which seek to promote this or that favored Linux distribution. People tend to read some of my blog posts in isolation from the others on the same topic. Not much I can do about that, but I can offer mile posts along the way to sum up current positions in what, for me, is an ongoing discussion. This post is subject to modification as I become better informed.

Requirements:

1. If the distribution in consideration does not offer, at a minimum, three years of support for any past release, they will not be considered. As it is, three years is too short, but in an effort to be fair, I’ll start that low. Less than three years is out of the question — end of discussion. Now, to make sure we nail this down, I care not a whit if that support comes via volunteers in the user community, even third party, as long as somewhere in a quick Google search the common user can find a reliable resource for his/her distro which offers bug fixes and security updates, without major changes in how that user experiences the OS. Third party packages which are not updated for security or bug fixes, but just a one-shot enhancement, count as a failure. Be careful whom you recommend if you rely on third party efforts. Further, the whole thing fails if some simple GUI tool, or automated script, does not exist to handle the update process itself. If there is a simple way to add a repository without typing, that’s acceptable, provided users can typically find such resources without having to join a forum.

2. There also must be a 64-bit version. I don’t care about your biases, I know from personal experience on several different machines: 64-bit audio and video is better. That’s reason enough. More to the point, there is now almost no excuse for having a 64-bit system with tons of 32-bit media support. Flash, codecs, and such are all available in 64-bit in sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy most common users. And, if your 32-bit and 64-bit don’t appear to be virtually identical to common users, you aren’t trying hard enough. On a related note, unless you are intentionally targeting older hardware, there is no excuse for not making your 32-bit optimized on i686.

3. The dirty secret (not so secret) in Linux is lack of support for proprietary technology. Blame whomever you like; we don’t have legal access to all the multimedia codecs out there without paying extra money to the likes of Fluendo. For the average user, this looks like something is broken. As a work-around, the community has produced projects in places where such things aren’t enforced, and folks just download the product. Distros appropriately warn users they are on their own, even while it is tacitly acknowledged the distro’s user community makes it really easy to go that route. I maintain this should be an option for the average user, and making it hard is not acceptable. Let users take the risks.

Obviously, these three requirements eliminate the vast majority of Linux distros. This is not about how good they are as Linux, but whether they will meet the needs of the typical users I deal with every day in my computer ministry. The preceding paragraphs really are a minimum standard, just barely tolerable at that. I’m not asking anyone to suck up to cranky aging users, but to realize you won’t get your favorite distro onto more desktops until you decide these people matter to you. If you can’t find a way to staff a three-year support term for older releases of your product — the entire distribution — don’t bother advocating your distro for these discussions. If you don’t have simplified GUI tools for configurations, both 64-bit and 32-bit, and a way to grab multimedia support, you aren’t in the running. I know of only three major groups which come close to these requirements.

Ubuntu and Friends: This includes derivatives such as Mint, but excludes similar distros which don’t offer any long-term support for their stuff. Obviously, this excludes every release of X/K/Ubuntu not marked LTS.

Canonical offers one epic failure. There is no GUI tool for correcting a failure to detect video hardware. Not just on my current hardware, but I’ve had various incarnations of Ubuntu fail on several different machines. If it does not correctly identify the monitor, the common user is stuck. Why it is there is no tool for, at the very least, entering the basic specs of the monitor to get a proper display, I can’t imagine. This is broken. Of course, doing it really right means either listing a database of monitors with known specs, or some means to read a standard Windows *.INF file to get it. As long as Canonical does not add this feature, they cannot claim their product is for “newbies.” Fix this and Ubuntu could easily become my number one choice to offer ordinary users.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the GUI package selection tools, but Synaptic is what most people find when they go looking. This is great if you have some idea what you are doing, but I’d never ask a common user to try it without a long tutorial session. There is a need for a simpler version which lists packages in categories non-techies would recognize, and not list every package. Common users don’t need to know about liboddball 5.3-7. Just about everything else is tolerable.

openSUSE: Three year support is standard with every release.

SUSE sets the standard in GUI config tools. Nothing else comes close, because these tools actually work as designed and as advertised. Aside from complaints it is bloated (so is Ubuntu), the one thing which stymies adoption with the common user is the path to multimedia upgrades. Companies based in the US, at least, cannot offer proprietary codecs for all the popular media formats without paying the fees. For now, Novell isn’t doing that. Thus, users must take legal responsibility for such inclusions by adopting the typical Open Source work-arounds. Fine so far, but instead of simply leaving that open, SUSE releases broken multimedia apps which cannot use added codecs. These have to be replaced with versions which aren’t crippled.

If the user hunts down the community solution and tries the one-click upgrade, the process is pretty shaky. More than once, on different releases of openSUSE, I’ve encountered dependency loops which leave even savvy technicians befuddled. The community forums are loaded with complaints. Whomever is setting this up has not bothered to fix it when flaws are found. That is, it doesn’t stay fixed, or it isn’t fixed well enough. The script which runs YaST through a set of changes remains broken for 10.3 and 11.0, particularly on 64-bit. Further, something in the process too often corrupts the RPM database, and that fix is really obscure. This is an example of unofficial third party support which is unreliable, and I can’t recommend it. Thus, we are left with the original packages in their intentionally broken state.

There are other problems with openSUSE, but I feel they fall within the range of things we might expect from ambitious projects. I note no one is building another project from SLED/SLES because, while SRPMs are available for the main release, they are not available for fixes and updates. Non-subscribers get one annual roll-up service pack, and that’s not acceptable. So far, no subscribers have stepped forward to release their copy of any SRPMs, which is completely legal.

RedHat Clones: There have been several projects, but so far, only CentOS and Scientific Linux remain fully viable. Both of these have pretty much pledged not to do anything which breaks compatibility with RedHat’s product. If it runs on RHEL, it should run on those two.

I’ve had lots of trouble with Scientific Linux installations not connecting for updates, apparently because the default install does not setup Yum properly. This shows up on more than one release. Users are left with parsing the complicated Yum documentation, and there is no simple solution offered from the SL community. There are no user friendly forums I’ve been able to find. That leaves us with CentOS.

Because of RHEL’s standard seven year support cycle, CentOS more than meets the minimum. There are adequate GUI tools for most everything it does. However, the current attempt at putting a GUI on Yum is pretty bad. Further, the likelihood common users will want something not already bundled from RHEL is a given, so third party support is necessary. It exists in the form of RPMForge, ATRpms, EPL, etc. Further, it appears these are updated as warranted, so the support matches the longevity of the underlying OS. The packages found in those repositories do a great job of filling in the blanks for common users.

However, the means to including those extra repositories is not user friendly. Indeed, the whole assumption of CentOS is providing a free version of RHEL, with all the requirements of a very competent techie user. This is not what you offer to common users. That is, unless you repackage it. In this one thing, CentOS and RHEL shine. With some effort, CentOS could be repackaged for the ordinary desktop user. Take out all the server-centric stuff, add in a couple of third party default desktop comforts, with the source repos included in the updater by default, and the whole thing is much more reasonable. It may even fit on a single CD.

For this reason, my current project is aimed at taming and sweetening CentOS for common users. In the background, there is at least one developer working on something from scratch, a Linux meta-distro which could be added on top of a couple of other distros to provide a profile of enhancements most likely to satisfy the common user expectations. It is likely we will move away from the GNOME/KDE war completely, using something else entirely. The current candidate is ROX Desktop, but it’s loaded with eccentric defaults which may prove difficult to wrestle.

As a final consideration, I have worked a great deal with users suffering various forms of vision impairments. The totally blind users are wholly different category, and I am simply not competent with that, but users needing enhanced display and sound features I understand. For now, nothing matches Orca, which is currently tied to GNOME. I suppose we can say in all fairness, such a project will never be finished, but the version I’ve tested is 1.0, and it really falls short. From what I can tell, version 2.x requires the latest and greatest from GNOME, which is simply not feasible on my current CentOS 5 system. However, GNOME themes for high contrast are some of the best.

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The Wide Gulf: Techies and Ordinary Users

Posted on January 20, 2009 by ehurst

I seriously doubt any of my clients will ever be “Linux newbies” for the simple reason too many Linux people assume “newbie” means someone who will become one of the techies. That is, the term seems to assume this person will eventually have to see the commandline, and they better get used to it already. This arises from what I believe is a mindset which excludes other possibilities, even if subconsciously. So while I may get them using Linux, calling them “newbies” might be inappropriate.

Once in awhile I run across a Linux techie who actually seems aware of this. They realize there are a great many potential Linux users out there who will never be Linux techies. It will simply be the OS running on their computer, and that’s that. Today, honorable mention goes to Ed Ropple, AKA FishWithAHammer on Slashdot. Commenting on a Slashdot post noting Canonical is pretty much financially self-sustaining now, Ropple points out what is missing from Linux and Open Source development:

This post is a prime example of why you, and people like you, should not be involved in building user interfaces. That’s not an insult, don’t get me wrong. Techie types are valuable in areas where their expertise is useful. Trying to reason out how people actually use computers — that’s not an area of expertise for most techies. I wouldn’t have most UI designers writing code, either.

The GUI is less flexible, yes. That’s a drawback. But for the majority of people it is far more valuable because it does not require prior knowledge to operate. A button that says “Do Foo” with checkboxes “Initialize ‘Bar’ Subsystem” and “Provide verbose output” is easily grasped by an individual user (especially because it’s very easy to add tooltips to each of these in order to provide more information”. A CLI command of “foo -Bv” is much less easily grasped by an end user who is not already comfortable with the command line.

“Microsoft Word has committed an error and must be closed” is about the most useful information for basic users. What information could you give them that’s actually useful and valuable? The DLL that failed? Why will they care? What error did Microsoft Word commit? Again, why would they care? That information is available for me, as a technical user, if I want it — but I have to click a button to access it and it’s out of the way of those end users.

Users don’t want to know how their computers work. They don’t care about that. Users don’t want to have to learn how the CLI works. They don’t care about that. Users want a quick, relatively efficient system for doing their stuff, rather than doing the computer’s stuff. The CLI is not that system because the benefits of the CLI require more time investment and effort than users want to devote to their computer’s stuff when they could be working on their own stuff. A good desktop environment tells the user nothing that they don’t need to know and doesn’t ask for the user to waste time on the computer’s stuff, as far as that is possible.

Call it “dumbing down” if you want, but a great many users don’t need all the extra information. When told this, techies react as if there is something immoral about hiding details, as if the lack of interest in knowing just what really happened is somehow sacrilegious. It’s not.

Granted, it’s pretty tough to help someone who doesn’t have more details about what happened, but there are ways to generate reports. I don’t mean simply the bug reporting tools which scoop up the crash data and send it off to the coders. All they will do is consider ways to improve future versions. The likelihood that crash report will result in a fix for the user on their current system is about zero. For this reason I seldom attempt to make bug reports. The process of bug reporting compares favorably to kissing the developer’s butt to gain permission to do it, knowing it will never, ever make your life one bit better — unless you are willing to fight the damnably hard process of upgrading everything attached to the next release of whatever we are discussing.

In other words, this thing is so developer centric, they have precious little accountability to anyone outside their little team. I’ve had plenty of really decent human beings discuss with me what I might do to improve my experience with their product — Netsurfer and Elinks come to mind. Friendly response, useful suggestions, honestly answering my questions and making sure I understand. But you will notice those two projects are pretty much “free standing” — they can be built on a wide range of systems with varying releases of the dependencies. Less than a year ago, I built Elinks on RedHat 7.3, and it worked fine.

Why is it the developers working within really big projects — GNOME, KDE — and stuff which relies entirely on either one, can’t be bothered with such courtesy? What is it about those big projects which requires users to crawl on their faces just so they can support the project, a project which will do nothing for them in return? Do the bigger projects simply draw a different kind of developer? Are the smaller ones led by people who can’t tolerate that atmosphere?

I wish I knew. I also wish the bigger projects included more people who thought like Ed Ropple.

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Linux Elitism: It’s a Fact

Posted on January 19, 2009 by ehurst

(NOTE: This post is getting hits almost three years later. Many Linux fans still don’t get it. More explanation can be found here.)

Context: I use Linux. It’s the best there is, particularly for the way I work. I thank God for Linux every time I put my fingers on the keyboard, even though I know a huge number of Linux developers and packagers don’t care about God. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, but I’m not in a position to say. What I know is the folks behind Linux are quite elitist in at least one sense of the word: They are only interested in dealing with their own kind, and have no interest in what most computer users want.

Jeremiah T. Gray says Linux is not elitist. However, he refuses to actually answer the question. Linux as a community is exclusive, though not uniformly be intention. If it were a conscious choice it would be easier to prove it, but I believe we can make a case for disputing with Mr. Gray. As my friend, Jonathan Brickman says, Linux is elitist because the Linux community refuses to acknowledge the vast majority of computer users want something a little different than Linux people want. So much so that trying to adapt Linux to serve that market is a major problem. He should know; Jonathan has been working very hard at finding a way to make a Linux distro which actually meets that demand, and the existing corpus of Linux product is fighting every step of the way.

I’m not in a position to prove this by massive user surveys. I’m not sure that would serve any purpose, since it would surely result in skewing the sample, as the subjects would have to be self-selecting. Rather, I base my argument on the only thing I have which no one can attack: My experience serving hundreds of clients who are running Windows, and a few running other things. They all know I prefer Linux, and most of them probably understand why, because I’ve advocated for Linux since I first began using it. The one thing sticking out in my mind after the last decade or so is my clients’ lack of interest in upgrading. The first response spilling out of the brains and mouths of the Linux community is how wrong this is. Fine, make all the technical, or even moral, arguments you want about how wrong it is for people to avoid change. That’s a good excuse for refusing to deal with the very real human race out there who need you most. I contend, from the billions of folks out there who actually use a computer, it’s a tiny slice who are willing or interested in upgrading and changing what they use. Sure, they may wish for this or that small feature change, but if that change came at the cost of having to learn it all over again from scratch, most would say, “No.”

My friend, Mark Falcon, lays out an example of breakage typical with Linux upgrades:

[Y]ou can imagine my frustration when I found out that my VectorLinux of 5.9 will be replaced soon by the latest and greatest update. Now I will give them an A for effort because they provide a program that allows you to save your “stuff” to be used after you reinstall but that doesn’t cover all the customization you do. Things like background pictures, number of desktops and their names, iptables changes you have made to get things like VNC and file sharing working, and on and on the list goes. I’m sorry but I’m tired of updating.

This seems to be the norm for Linux distros, not just Vector. I can’t say what response Mark may have gotten from his complaints on the VectorLinux forum, but I’m willing to bet they were unsympathetic. Indeed, when I have broached the idea with various other Linux distro representatives, and folks who spoke for various projects used by just about every Linux distro, it ranged between, “Sorry, that’s the way it is,” on one end, and words of hostility unprintable on the other end. There is no room in their minds for the concept of a stable release, with some maintenance to keep it working and secure. There is no maintenance at all. There is only the push to the next version.

The next version is seldom a trivial upgrade. If only a couple of projects here and there did this, no one would complain much. Instead, it seems there is no project doing it any other way. Worse, a vast sweep of product which is called “Linux” is all so deeply interlocked, you rarely ever get to upgrade just one thing. This is the source of the phrase “cascading dependencies.” Every project is related, and all are moving forward. To update any single element of the whole requires updating almost the entire system itself. Every fix is rolled into an upgrade, but God forbid anyone should ask for a fix to be applied to a previous release. If you aren’t mentally programed to upgrade continuously, either from the source or through the packagers for your distro, you aren’t part of the community — you don’t belong.

The vast majority of computer users can’t fathom such a mindset, and can easily explain the problems with it. They want something they can install, run for as long as the hardware works, and only apply a few patches and updates. They don’t want to upgrade, and I believe they shouldn’t have to. There was nothing inherently broken on some really good releases of certain Linux distros back in 2000, for example. There are machines which kept running those distros for a good long time. In fact, so powerful is this concept, the two largest commercial Linux firms (RedHat and Novell) focus their sales on releasing distributions they support for seven years. Because this is where the mass demand is, those two go through the hassle of hiring developers who will work out how to apply patches back to older versions of software so it won’t disturb a working system. This is what most of the world expects.

Does the Linux community want mass adoption? I have to wonder if that isn’t just an excuse to whine, and I consider Mr. Gray’s piece dangerously close to that. If the folks developing Linux aren’t going to meet the masses where they are — it’s called “serving the customer” — they can’t pretend to offer them anything. Linux will remain an exclusive club of snotty elitists to the extent they refuse to consider stable releases and long-term support.

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Progress on the Fitness Trail

Posted on January 18, 2009 by ehurst

Some readers may be aware I had been working on carving a fitness trail through some woods near my home. The plan is to create a large loop over varied terrain, suitable to walking, running or cycling, but too narrow for the numerous four-wheeler recreational vehicles out here. They have plenty of fun trails already, and they aren’t suitable for much of anything else.

Our trailer park is situated on the southern edge of this woodland, and rather near the western edge. My son and I had begun clearing on the east side, but ran into a hitch. Our path circled around a pair of lagoons which serve to purify the waste water coming from the trailer park. Some vandals, most likely rowdy punks living here, did some damage to the water flow controls. Because of the legal liabilities, the management of the park was required to forbid all residents “trespassing” on the eastern side of the park. That meant we had to stop working on the trail there.

However, we were free to continue working to the north, since that part begins on the slender portion of land just west of the park. There are three sections of woodland separated by open areas originally plowed down for streets, as the land was at one time slated for development as a pricey little neighborhood. It has been fallow since then, used by deer, squirrels, rabbits and four-wheelers. The first section we had finished some time ago, and the second was started. For awhile really nasty weather made it impractical for us continue our work. However, just recently we had some unseasonably warm days when we weren’t working, and made some progress.

To our surprise, the second wooded section contained some fairly clear areas, so the cutting was quite minimal. In just two days we’ve carved out a very twisting path over 200 yards in length. We are now just a few more yards from clearing the second patch of woods. In the process, I’ve completely worn out the limb-loppers. The steel cutting faces have bent and curved away from each other. Further, the point of contact between them has worn to the point the cinch bolt cannot be tightened any more. I’m down to the methods I have used from the very beginning two decades ago: machete and ax. That is, in order to maintain the “mulch in place” ethic, I simply hold a branch against some dead log or stump and chop it up in little pieces with the machete.

However, the third section on the north end promises to be quite a bit more challenging, as I have clawed my way through it once already without tools. It will also be the most varied terrain so far, since the path I’ve scouted runs in and out of the woods (to keep four-wheelers off of it) and through a couple of very thick thorn bush patches. It will also cross an area where the original clearing called for some cuts through a stone out-cropping.

Perhaps by the time we get that far and start turning east, then back south, the necessity of keeping residents out of the east side can die quietly. Management is completely sympathetic to our project, and they want us to keep it going.

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In the Prison of Lies

Posted on January 17, 2009 by ehurst

The yard in front of the house had become a mud pit every time the yard thawed at mid-day. There weren’t many rocks around, but he had suddenly recalled small slabs of asphalt working loose up on the roadway, in spite of the repaving being new. The traffic was gone. Nobody drove out here anymore since the bridge collapsed, and there were no funds to replace it. It was probably the same shoddy contract work which produced the new pavement and new bridge. And there was really nothing to see out here, so it was hardly a tourist destination. It had always been a place to pass through on the way to some other place. That’s probably why he could afford the price of the old farm well back off the highway, using the money he had saved while serving in the military.

The cold wind was his only companion as he scanned for the closest loose chunk of the brittle black surface. There, on the opposite side, at the edge of a pothole — a pair of cracks running back from the edge almost met. A couple of gentle taps at first, bumping the outer edge to get a leverage point with the pickax. Then, stepping around to the other side, he wrapped both gloved hands around the end of the handle and pulled. It resisted a moment, then popped up with an odd sound.

It was about three fingers thick, as he had expected. What he had not expected was what lay beneath. Instead of the battered concrete of previous paving jobs, it was almost a thin sheet something not quite cement. It was more durable, showing little of the scratches it should have had from his working with the pickax. His curiosity got the best of him, and he worked loose a few more slabs of frozen asphalt, which he would have eventually done anyway.

Eventually he had uncovered a panel of this odd material. With the edges exposed, he dug around a bit, found it was very heavy, but could be moved. He hadn’t worked this hard since last spring, when the tiny, one-wheeled plow broke and he had to turn the whole garden with a spade. The flat edge of the pickax was almost too thick to wedge it down along the edge of the panel and the ones adjacent, but he finally got it up enough to drag away from it’s place. It was too heavy to actually lift, but some clever twisting and pulling of the pickax and some gravel to make it roll, and he was able to slide it over like a lid.

What he saw underneath froze him colder than any winter wind which blew across this rolling plain. It was the top of a car. It had been crushed flat, but not like the ones you could find in derelict salvage yards down toward the now empty town. This had been pretty new, but squashed by something with cleats, like a bulldozer. Because of the haphazard folding of the top, there was a portion where a section of the front seat was exposed — and finger bones.

At first, he was shocked, then wondered what sort of skulduggery got somebody killed this way and buried under a road project. As the days slipped by while he collected more slabs of asphalt, as much out of curiosity about his find as actual need, he reassembled the chunks into a very nice patio and drive. All the while, he managed to lift more of the strange panels and the numbness set in as he found more cars. Apparently they had been smashed in place, because they neatly filled the space under the panels. The cleat marks indicated multiple passes over the entire road bed, which had been filled and built up over these crushed cars, three across. All the while, he kept detecting a faint odor his unconscious mind recognized, but not as a normal smell of human burial, with or without proper mortuary processing.

One night, he woke with a start, covered in sweat and tears. The smell. In his dreams he saw the helicopters dropping canisters over the Afghan villages which had the misfortune of being inside enemy territory. The containers dropped to about 20 feet above ground, shattered into fragments and releasing a heavy, descending mist. Wherever the mist drifted, flesh quickly fell away from bones and the screams died away surprisingly fast. In a few hours, it was safe to send ground teams through with no apparent ill effects to collect what few weapons and intelligence items might exist. Only that odd, faint smell lingered.

All those crushed cars with skeletal remains, the symbol of crushed lives, used to fill a low spot for a road. What lies had been told to explain their disappearance? Whom could he tell? Whom would he ask about it? And who would believe it?

That very night found him struggling in the blistering cold to lever all those panels back into place.

Here in the US, we are so deeply surrounded by lies, it’s hard to explain. Sometimes it is the facts which are outlandish.

The very ground under our feet, as it were, hides a vast cavern of hidden truth. We can’t imagine how bad it really is, because all the noise we hear, and the sights we see, coming from those we trust to tell us what is going on is staged half-truths. While most news reports are factual, it’s what they leave out, buried out of sight, which makes it all a huge lie. It’s huge, too audacious to imagine. We pass over it every day without wondering what’s hidden, because everything conspires to reduce our skepticism. About the only way to find out is to find ourselves with a target painted on us.

No one in this world is innocent. All are fallen. If every law and rule were enforced, every breathing human would be under sentence, even in the earthly sense. When we view the justice system from a broad scope, we find the only real purpose is keeping the people cowed before government. Should it be human frailty causes no real harm to anyone else, but simply presents a challenge to government prerogatives, those sentences are harshest. Those who fall under such harsh justice realize clearly the word “justice” is a complete misnomer. These will tell you we are all in prison already.

You are told stories by the press and mouthpieces of the system how justly these wretches deserve their punishment. It seems plausible, until you become one of them, and discover how completely false is the image painted. And to all appearances, the people who paint those false images truly believe the falsehood they promote. So twisted is the mind which serves the system, it is utterly alien to those of us outside it. When someone who has frankly done no injustice to others finds himself crushed under the system, there is nothing left but to embrace the identity of criminal. A few will embrace true evil, but most simply realize it’s another name for “slave.” The difference is, they sense the chains, while most of us do not. They can do nothing right, so there’s nothing to gain by being careful to avoid confrontation with the State. The government mouthpieces call this “recidivism.”

For those who simply cannot believe this has become the reality in the US, you are the most pitiful of slaves. When the mindless bulldozer of the State runs across your life, it will probably be too late to realize. It was never about the needs of the governed, but the convenience of the bureaucrats who cannot imagine the needs of others. This is not simply an anarchist point of view, since I certainly have a clear idea of government as God intended it. Indeed, my objections are entirely biblical. The biblical response is not so much to fight back, but also not to condemn those who do fight back.

America, the largest prison on Planet Earth.

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