Vignettes 1

Posted on January 2, 2009 by ehurst

A collection of small thoughts. They are connected, but can be considered individually.

1. The Democratic Party was hijacked about four decades ago. It had been a fairly conservative, rural oriented bunch of old men, but became home to American socialism in just a few months. The Republican Party was a lie from the start. It had always been the party of industrial oligarchy, and always pretended to care about people by supporting things which were superficially morally, or superficially supporting moral things, just to make a buck.

Oddly, both eventually agreed on a brand of corporate socialism, with only superficial differences to keep the masses fooled. The system for plundering the nation’s productivity has nearly run its course. Pretty soon it will be naked oppression, and we the people will realize once more, too late, there has been a separate ruling class all along, and we are not a part of it. Some may serve it directly, but the ruling class is wholly different from you and I, and will not shed a tear when it comes time to murder huge masses of us.

2. As this naked oppression rises on the back of a falling economy, I’m wondering how much longer we will have access to the Net, and to blogging like this. I confess the Net has been a very powerful tool in shaping my philosophy and theology, in that it provided the means for me to explore areas otherwise not available to me. It made the long path of study much shorter. I am certain access will change radically, though I can hardly predict just how.

3. I am honestly certain the ubiquity of the Windows operating system will play a major roll in this. That’s because the nature of the Net itself prevents much control. There is a serious vulnerability in our high reliance on DNS as a public infrastructure, but for a great many serious techies, there are ways around that. Serious techies tend not to rely on Windows, simply because they can never control it. That is, hidden within the system are controls which have only been hinted at by the marvelous ingenuity of virus and malware writers. Some are extremely hard to remove, and this is from people who have to discover slowly by determined study how to activate controls buried within the system. How do you think it would be if MS and government agreed to deploy a means of control, with MS’s inside knowledge of what they have created? The final “Doomsday Virus” on Windows will come at the behest of oppressive government, not some clever criminal cracker.

4. On the one hand, as long as this vector of control lasts, government will probably not seek other forms of control on the Internet. I’m guessing here, by the way, the US oligarchy can convince the EU oligarchy and others play along for their own oppressive ends. Thus, at least in the West, things will change only for MS slaves, and it may be Macs will be roped into it. This leaves only the independent Open Source movement, which as a whole would never play along. I am torn by the realization as long as we are few, we are safe. But I want people free. So deeply do I want them free, I am working on a project to offer a Linux which might just tip the balance and convince more people to try it. If some critical mass of people switch away from operating systems vulnerable to external control, the whole thing may get shut down, in a manner of speaking.

5. At the same time, a random collection of geeks are working on protocols which do not rely on wires and fiber as the current system does. On the one hand, we know far too much government business relies on the Internet in all its manifestations. If they cut the wires, they cut off their own primary means of communication. If they restrict access to the wires, they will forever fight the battle to keep all access closed. Fat chance. The brightest minds in the world never work for government, because bureaucracy always attracts losers, so the outsiders always have an edge. These bright minds will always have the advantage in unraveling what the bureaucrats have tried to wrap up tightly. But this will leave out the average Joe Sixpack who is utterly lacking in the kind of hobby obsession which takes advantage of these alternative routes. Even if I do create a Linux distro which draws the masses, the masses will likely fail to fully exploit the advantages. It would require the geeks who write the code and develop the protocols to put it all in easy reach of Joe Sixpack. There is some hope, since most people who defy the system to “pirate” music and movies do get away with it.

6. But a lot of this may make no difference at all for some here in the West. Even the oligarchs probably can’t say what they’ll do beyond general plans, because there are too many variables. That there will be a blood in the streets is inevitable. We are too far down the slope, and there’s no turning back. The entire Western economic system of fiat currency has collapsed, and only the scale of things has kept it from having even more immediate effects. It will not recover, though it may appear to at certain points. The current bureaucratic system of government across the West is incapable of rising to the challenges, pretty much because of the aforementioned lack of talent. Instead, government will seek to maintain it’s current level of consumption in a drastically reduced pool of available resources, and people will rightly conclude this is evil. Conflict is unavoidable, and it will mean agents of enforcement will be caught in the middle, the oligarchy’s buffer zone. Most policemen, sadly, have been so thoroughly conditioned to avoid moral considerations, they will close ranks against the civilian population.

Part of what makes me pessimistic about 2009 is how very much of this has already begun during 2008, and so few people know it. The senseless abuse of police power rose dramatically this past year, but we haven’t seen anything yet.

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Sometimes It Scares Me

Posted on January 1, 2009 by ehurst

It scares me when someone in a fairly mainstream publication says something which makes sense. I’m afraid Greenwald does that now and then.

In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn’t that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?…

Bernstein’s mentality is echoed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who defends Israel’s actions by approvingly quoting Barack Obama’s statement that “If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” But that mindset justifies any and all actions by any group with a legitimate grievance, as in: “if my family and I were forced to live under a 4-decade foreign occupation and had our land blockaded and were not allowed to exit and my children couldn’t access basic nutrition or medical treatment, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing.” That happens also to be the same mentality that was used to justify the 9/11 attacks (“if my family and I were forced to live in a region in which a foreign superpower dominated our politics and propped up brutal dictators for its own ends, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Muslims to do the same thing”).

But — just like those who insist that American Torture is different because American leaders use it for noble ends — this is nothing more elevated than an adolescent refusal to view the world through any prism other than complete self-centeredness, where one’s own side merits infinite empathy and the “other side” merits none. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars — there is endless blame to go around to countless parties.  Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it’s not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.

Then he quotes at length George Washington’s warnings about getting too deeply involved in the quarrels of other countries. Favoring anyone too much ties us down, and cannot possibly ever be in our nation’s best interests. For those of us who recognize the theology of Covenants, knowing this falls under the Covenant of Noah, we have every right to point out their sin, for this is nothing less than defiance of what God said. For those of you who embrace Dispensationalism, please show me how this Modern Israel participates in any way in the Mosaic Covenant? First, they openly reject that covenant, so they can’t inherit any of the promises. Second, if you don’t yet realize virtually none of Israel’s citizens are of Hebrew lineage, I wonder just how you are going to explain to Jesus Christ you refused to learn any facts about this mess?

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Posting from Elinks

Posted on January 1, 2009 by ehurst

Just testing how well I can do this all from Elinks, the plain text browser. Lately I have been somewhat disappointed at sites which have so completely changed, you can no longer view them from a plain text browser. This does not bode well for users with sight problems. Most well-established (and affordable) screen reader software is based on rendering text, but there is a growing tendency to make websites with text displayed graphically in a container which does not display as text.

For now, kudos to WordPress for keeping it accessible.

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Talking Past Each Other

Posted on December 31, 2008 by ehurst

Why did I know it would happen? I got some of my views on rolling release published on a webzine. Immediately, comments began to appear, as I had hoped. That means people are reading it and thinking about it.

Except, they aren’t really thinking about what I said. There is this mental block in the mass of hobby users who just assume everyone in the world will want improvements, and improvement can only mean more features. They are utterly cut off from the world of everyday folks who use computers, even use them a great deal, but don’t want changes in the underlying operating system. They want to use it, not play with it all the time. For the hobby folks, there can be no using it without playing with it.

So ingrained are these differences, I am not surprised to see the comments from the hobbyists who just cannot understand the point I was making. Let’s assume for a moment there was no Microsoft, and just to be fair, no Mac. All computers are limited to the Open Source operating systems like Linux and BSD. Let me assure you there would be far fewer computers in the world, and they would be a darn sight more expensive. However, let’s start from where we are, and MS and Apple just evaporate, along with every copy of their products. The world is forced to turn to Linux, BSD, etc.

Very quickly, after a the first couple of months, you would have angry users seeking to choke some developers to death. They would be yelling, screaming and rioting. They would tell anyone they could catch: “Stop changing it! Leave it alone, and just make it work!” After just two to three months of automatic updates, and the gentle nagging this or that is insecure or broken, but the only fix offered is a newer version which, in the eyes of the user, is significantly different and requires running through the setup process again — you would have people throwing their computers away.

For the average user, constant change is not fun. For the hobby user, lack of change is no fun. If the Open Source community only reaches out to the hobby users, they will have nothing to offer the average user. It’s not a matter of which user type is right or wrong, but whether we can accommodate both.

Addenda: I don’t take myself too seriously, but I know what I like. The last time I really enjoyed using KDE was 3.1.5. It was stable, everything worked, and it needed no improvement. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.x with Enlightenment. The one best release of RedHat in terms of how well it actually worked underneath was 7.3. For FreeBSD it was around 4.8, and SuSE around 8.2. The best word processor was WordPerfect 8. The best X server release in terms of snappy response on current hardware and stable operations was around XFree86 4.2.

In general, I haven’t been too happy with Open Source as a whole since those experiences. What I have now is pretty good, but it could be better. It could be simpler. As a philosophical statement, I would say we have gone past the point of diminishing returns in computers, both hardware and software. It won’t die for a very long time, but it will never be that good again.

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Decreasing Returns: Put the Brakes on Rolling Release

Posted on December 30, 2008 by ehurst

In Economics, we speak of the principle of decreasing returns. At some point, putting more resources into something no longer produces as much profit. As the thing becomes more complex, it gets more difficult to move forward without making major mistakes.

A part of my assertion about the problems of rolling release is this concept applied to software. Is it possible someone can produce software which satisfies most needs, is almost totally bug free, and simply needs no improvement? I realize the question is hard to separate from the issue of user comfort. Yes, some people are still in love with WordPerfect 5 for DOS, and still pay money to get a copy. It’s impossible to say it’s superior to later versions, nor simply whether it is the principle of decreasing returns for that individual. It’s the subjective sense they can’t be more productive, and don’t want to invest more time in learning something newer. It seems nobody listens to them. We find marketing drones are entirely too concerned with some indefinable image consciousness, and seldom in step with actual consumers, so it can be profitable to keep an old product alive as long as somebody is buying it.

Take away the idiots who only think they know what’s going on, and you find most software packages pass through a cycle when they are a brilliant concept not yet fully implemented, through a series of very popular releases, into irrelevance because the most recent managers lost the vision. Could the product but have been managed, they would have known when the stop and simply support a good thing until it no longer sold. Yes, we have to contend with the tendency of corporate buyers to believe any marketing baloney that simply strikes some unreasoning chord, but there remains a certain core of buyers who feel cheated when you stop supporting something they truly value. This explains why the likes of Enable O/A still has a user base who struggle to keep it running on differing implementations of the necessary underlying DOS environment. That ancient office suite was nearly the pinnacle of what folks actually need to get business done. Simply adding a GUI would have kept it ahead of the market, but some corporate droid decided to sell it to MS, who buried it so they could promote a clearly inferior office suite.

We already have a vast supply for the people who can’t wait to buy the next new hardware gimmick, and the software to exploit it. What so few in the Open Source community realize is that sort of user is the minority. Sure, worldwide they number in the millions, but the world’s population is measured in billions. By now, the majority of that population has encountered a computer. There might be a period of fascination, but once they have assimilated the thing into their lives, it is for most of them relegated to the status of a tool, not a god. So keeping development going to make use of newer hardware technologies is almost a necessity, since most computer hardware tends to die all too soon, and the newer stuff is so very different. However, there is a growing number of computer users who just won’t notice much, and aren’t likely to care about even that little. Keep the hobby alive, because something truly essential will inevitably arise from all the feverish activity.

For the vast majority of computer users, though, we’ve already passed the point of decreasing returns. Feature saturation has set in, and it’s time to consider keeping alive a branch of some projects which have already produced something good enough for most of the world. When you have a winner, stick with it. Fix the bugs, make it work better. Tighten the code, remove unnecessary layers of abstraction. This goes for underlying libraries, as well. I can’t recall the article I read long ago, but someone was able to explain in terms I understood: The main cause of bloat was not always new features in the userland software, but in the libraries used to build it. Is there a release point where we have good enough libraries, too? Keep that product alive, independently if necessary.

If computers and the software don’t serve the needs of humans, the industry needs to die. If we can’t develop without proposing to define for them what they need, as if we were somehow a superior class who justly dictate what users will do, we have no moral ground to stand on.

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HTML Word Processing

Posted on December 30, 2008 by ehurst

The basic purpose of a word processor is to format text for printing. If you aren’t going to put it on paper, you really have no need for a word processor. However, I find a huge portion of the computer using population don’t make a distinction between documents and webpages. That is, not consciously. They know instinctively if they want to print the contents of a webpage the way they want it to print, they’ll have to copy from the page, then paste into a word processor, format, then print. They focus on the presentation, and the information is a separate issue. Indeed, the former often takes precedence.

The problem here is such users seldom have much more than a semi-conscious awareness of their own preferences, even when they focus on presentation. They have no idea what makes presentation effective to their audience; they simply assume people are impacted as they were at that particular moment. Tomorrow the same printed page becomes trash because it doesn’t speak the same. No one seems to notice. People who have studied the issue of how the average brain processes information are more likely to reduce all the trashy, flashy extras in presentation, and stick with the essentials. They know all caps, all bold, all italics, all underlined, all brightly colored means the average brain says the message must be unimportant, because it requires such a hideous paint job to convey the importance the sender attaches to it. And we all know most people are more impressed with themselves than most other people are. Save the theatrics for the live presentations; in print there are precious few with a talent for it.

Unload all the silliness, and you arrive at the information itself. Adding attributes to plain text has a well-established meaning. The framework was established long ago, and various attempts were made to produce software which approximates that framework. Some details have shifted around a bit once standards were established for text displayed on a computer screen. What we used to do in print won’t exactly work on computers, and for most uses, print has shifted to match what we do on computers. For example, it’s no longer acceptable to indent the first line to mark the beginning of a paragraph. Now we use vertical space between paragraphs, and leave lines unindented in the main text. We still set off large blocks of quoted material by indenting the whole paragraph, so there is some overlap. Whole books have been written on the details. The point has always been: What’s the best way to inform the widest audience?

In the end, we have web publishing standards as reflected in the system called HTML — HyperText Markup Language. That framework continues to develop, but it’s now the reflexive standard in the minds of most people who can read. Over the years, I have found myself moving away from the word processing model altogether. While I still have a printer attached to my computer, I seldom use word processing software. For things which must be printed, I prefer a typesetter (Lyx), but for most things I prefer either plain text or HTML. All the more so since, even for printing, HTML processed by your browser seems a better way to go.

That is, it’s possible to write formatting instructions (CSS — Cascading Style Sheets) for inclusion in the webpage display which can be tailored just for printing. Even then, the whole idea is to avoid making choices for the reader, and giving them maximum freedom to alter the presentation quite a bit. Of course, that means they’ll need some awareness of what they can change and how, but for those who don’t know, the basic standards are probably fine. I use minimum formatting, with one CSS for browser display, and another for printing. This lends itself to a certain global accessibility, since neither directs the result to fit a particular size of paper. My printer CSS allows the user to print on any paper, because it’s solely an issue of browser and printer controls. All I do is provide relative guidelines, and those who really must change those can do so by telling their browser to prefer their own CSS over mine. I construct my CSS files specifically to be advisory, and easily overridden by anyone who has the savvy to set their own user-CSS.

On the one hand, this forces me to focus on the content. It’s pretty much the same for typesetting software. In my best academic style, I try to limit the use of italics, boldface, and reserve underline for marking hyperlinks. If you really need white-on-black, you can tell your browser to make it so, and it should work fine. If you really like blinking text, you are free to learn how to make it happen and apply it to my webpages. You can print any color you wish, because I only suggest black-on-white as the most common style. Depending on how your browser and printer cooperate, printing my webpages should work about the same as with a word processor.

I used to have a huge cache of word processor documents, and always worried about the format and whether anyone else could open them and print them. Over the past few years, I have changed them all to HTML. It’s become the most widely acceptable format for just about any purpose.

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Opera Reconsidered

Posted on December 29, 2008 by ehurst

CentOS isn’t all that friendly to standard desktop use, but it can be tamed. It has become my choice because once I get things working, I can pretty much expect it will continue working for the next couple of years, at least, with full security and bug-fixing support. Meanwhile, anything I build or add from outside the repositories will continue to work for just as long.

While I don’t really like Flash media junk, entirely too much of my interaction with people important to me requires I be able to run a Flash player. The Open Source projects — swf and gnash — just aren’t there, yet. I’m doing my best to keep everything 64-bit, especially multimedia stuff — better sound and better video quality. Not too long ago, Adobe released native 64-bit Flashplayer for Linux, so my excuses were gone. The tar.gz just opens to a single plugin file, and you have to make the appropriate symlinks yourself. I can handle that.

Firefox won’t use it. The about:plugins page shows it, and so does the Plugin Manager, but all I get is a blank spot in the webpage. So I decided to try Opera, which also recently released a full 64-bit version. Oddly, I’m not getting the spastic unexpected mouse gestures I complained about previously. What I am getting is a very smooth integration of Flashplayer in Opera. So for now, Opera has redeemed itself on my system.

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CentOS Fix: GNOME Mahjongg Scores on “Difficult” Level

Posted on December 28, 2008 by ehurst

This is pretty minor and doesn’t warrant much discussion. When you play Mahjongg on the default game called “Difficult,” upon completion of that game a window pops up saying your score qualifies for the Top Ten. However, the window is empty, no scores are shown, and you can’t do anything with it except close it.

The fix was found by chasing bug reports for the upstream GNOME Games channel. As root, edit the file /usr/share/gnome-games/mahjongg/maps/mahjongg.map at line 311:

<map name="Difficult" scorename="diff">

should be

<map name="Difficult" scorename="difficult">

The game score file name in that control file doesn’t match what is created by the package in /var/lib/games/. That it was not fixed until the next release just shows the standard GNOME developer attitude of moving onto the next release without fixing the previous one.

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More on Rolling Release

Posted on December 28, 2008 by ehurst

Let’s get one thing clear: I utterly despise the brand of morality and ethics displayed by Microsoft. Gates knew a thing or two about computers, just enough to steal everything he built; he never comprehended the difference between good and evil. To this day, his utterly broken moral compass still affects the way Microsoft does business. However, to a large degree, he simply continued what was already in place in the business world. He remains a primary example of what’s wrong with that world. For example, when you buy a system running Windows, you are not the customer. You are the product delivered to MS business partners, generally in the form of a system so shot through with intentional security vulnerabilities, you are forced to surrender your privacy and your eyes to a tsunami of advertising. The only “malware” MS attempts to squash is from companies who won’t play nice with MS.

There is, however, a few things MS does right. Have you ever noticed you can run multiple versions of a particular library on Windows, and each application knows which one it should use? Try that on Linux. Here we sit some eight years later, and just about every software product I can buy for Windows will run on Win2K. And notice Win2K is still supported by MS. Buy a Windows server once, and for at least five or six years, the only complete upgrade required is for a few third party packages. If any particular package needs later versions of some library, just add them. You cannot do that in Linux. On a private mailing list, Jonathan Brickman said:

This is all the basic rub, with Linux packaging+library standards. And non-package app delivery standards run into Linux P+L as a brick wall. Just for one instance: I have an old eight-core server with two gigs of RAM, built for RH Enterprise 3 and still running it nicely. I would have loved to add a number of things into it, convert it into an application server, but the glib is so old that many things just won’t go without a complete recompile, which would mean getting a whole lot more dev libraries, et cetera.

Well, you could in theory, I suppose, but nobody does it that way. Not often, at least. I can recall a single incidence where I was running SuSE 8.2, and someone was building GNOME packages. One particular application required a later library, so the packager installed it in its own directory, labeled in part by the release number, then had his package refer to that library directly. But that’s not the Open Source way. In fact, such a concept seems to be held in contempt among Open Source developers.

That is, except for a few projects. For example, I can go to the Mozilla folks and get a copy of Seamonkey, still working fine on older machines, and even a version with the old Gtk1 interface. That would probably run quite well still on clones of RHEL 3, and certainly on 4. Yes, there are machines out there still run some of those old clones (CentOS and Scientific Linux, to name two) and those are still supported from the upstream RHEL distribution until 2010. And did you know? RHEL 2 is still supported until sometime in 2009. That’s roughly the same as the old RedHat 7.2 — released in October 2001 — almost as old as Win2K.

I didn’t post this to sing the praises of RedHat and friends. As I understand it, they did some of their customers dirty when they sold support licenses for 9.0, then simply dropped it. However, that hardly compares with the consistent and persistent mean-spirited behavior of MS. RedHat does compete well in terms of business expectations. The next nearest support level comes from a handful of Linux distros supporting their releases as much as three years, among them openSUSE, and certain Ubuntu releases (labeled “LTS”). These are the versions you can get for free. Both RedHat and Novell support their commercial versions now about seven years each. Buy a server, install the OS, both last about the same and things are simpler. That’s the sort of life-cycle business like. With this sort of support, we can expect to see Linux making some inroads in the future.

Except for one problem: third party developer support. That is, those who are developing stuff to run on these systems tend to ignore the commercially stable distributions of Linux. It’s one thing for me to upgrade ALSA in place on my CentOS 5 box. That’s pretty low-keyed, and the instructions are easy to find. It affects only one element of how things work. However, if I want a better webcam application, such as Cheese, I’m out of luck. It won’t compile on my CentOS 5 box unless I upgrade the entire GNOME system installed. I find it odd the folks writing GnomeSword can make it so I can compile their latest and greatest, but not Cheese. I don’t know the difference at the code-writing level, but I wonder what this is which makes some developers spare no concern for supporting anything but the latest and greatest distros of Linux.

The people running these projects seem to have no comprehension how this cuts them off from wider adoption. I can get OpenOffice, Seamonkey, and even commercial products like Opera to run on much older systems, but far too many popular desktop software applications exclude those of us for whom Linux is not merely a hobby. Also, I realize projects tied tightly into the major desktops (KDE and GNOME) are worse about this than those projects which use other toolkits, or which aren’t so tightly woven into the desktop itself. For example, you can use both Qt and GTK libraries in such a way as to make applications compile on a very wide range of release versions. Projects linked to Motif/Lesstif, FLTK, Tcl/Tk, and other, or multiple, interface toolkits probably represent the best of breed when it comes to opening the door to inclusion. Perhaps the problem is more a matter of the culture within those large desktop projects. All the more is this a serious problem, since these are vying for wider adoption as “the Linux standard” in industry. If so, they guarantee it will never happen.

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Return to Sanity: CentOS Is Home

Posted on December 27, 2008 by ehurst

After a few days of testing Debian Lenny AMD64, I just can’t make it home. Yes, the packages are newer, and once it hits “stable” in the Debian developer cycle, it will be supported for a long time. Still, there are a couple dozen little things which just don’t feel right, and I can’t get used to them.

CentOS is home.

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