Fanboys will be quick to point out that “you can’t expect service for free” and “if you don’t want it don’t buy it.”

To the former: Yes, I can. We all can.

To the latter: Don’t worry, I won’t. And fuck you too, thanks.

[…] quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I do open source because I think it’s the only right way to do software, but at the same time, I’ll use the best tool for the job, and, quite frankly, Bitkeeper was it.

Torvalds, the creator of the single most important open source operating system kernel in existence, was talking about his earlier reliance on a proprietary distributed source control management system, which was used to maintain kernel development.

My god, that’s like breeding a water buffalo with a humming bird?!

Not quite. There is a spectrum of beliefs in software development with regard to, well, how to do it. In the spectrum are many complex opinions, and unfortunately, there is no provably “right” one — though many have done proofs, laughably. Linus Torvalds, when speaking in terms of openness is, like most of us, a moderate; he favors a particular direction, but he’s not at either end of the spectrum.

It may be hard to distiguish at times between a moderate and an extremist. When all else fails this is a quick and dirty method for determination: if you feel that you are so right as to force your beliefs onto others, you are an extremist. Otherwise, you are not. The software-spectrum, like all other spectrums, has extremes at both ends, and everything else in between.

At one end of the spectrum, there is the FSF — Richard Stallman, et al — which vehemently rejects the notion of proprietary software, in every form, from its development to its use. At the other end, there is Microsoft, which, although lately has been warming up to open source — more out of necessity than out of choice — is the poster-child for proprietary software and, tightly coupled with that, profit from it.

It is good, and in fact necessary for these polar opposites to exist at such extreme distances from one another. Why? Because without this exaggerated spectrum, there would not be space in the middle for people like Torvalds, who understand both.

Neither the FSF or Microsoft is completely “right” or “wrong”; the fact that each holds its own beliefs to be true is not irrelevant, it is also necessary to keep the spectrum alive and wide enough. The most important thing here is that everyone else learns from both sides.

Richard Stallman, for example, is too jaded to comprehend that the “best tool for the job” could be proprietary. He is brilliant, and his brilliance has locked him into the idea of a pseudo-software-utopia. That is not to discount his ideas, because without them, and his belief in them, the entire force of the software industry machine would have simply crushed the open source movement (or it would have required someone else to have the ideas — ie there has to have been a Richard Stallman.)

Steve Ballmer, as another example, doesn’t care or understand that there is something more to software development than dollar signs. He doesn’t get software as an art, a science or a hobby, though he does know it as all three, because he is not as dumb as I’d like him to be. He’s like a record company executive that doesn’t listen to music — aware of the “artists” beneath him that make him his money, but completely unable to empathize because he is simply not one of them. But again, this is necessary.

I specifically stay away from Bill Gates in this spectrum, because honestly, his story is more dynamic. In his story, Gates is like Anakin Skywalker, his software the force, and money the dark side. Early on, he actually did understand software in a way other than stock quotes, but somewhere along the line was corrupted by the dollar. In the end, I think he still understands. And I think he is going to toss the emperor.

And no, I am not a Star Wars fanatic, it’s just apt. But thanks for inferring.

The point is that software, like politics or really anything else of any importance, needs extremists. It’s the only way that the median can be acceptable.

In Vista though — or really, any version of Windows — I have no comfort zone. And because of my infrequent use of it, I’ve never bothered to create one. That is, until now.

Vista isn’t really as bad as I initially reported; I was admittedly biased against it from the get-go. It still has a huge hard drive footprint, but I slimmed it up a bit by cleaning up some stuff and trimming down system restore. Plus, I have a huge hard drive (oh, that is such the Windows-like rationalization, I know.)

There are a bunch of things that I need to have to be comfortable navigating an operating system nowadays, things that I need to have to be productive and not become horribly frustrated. The following is a list of these things and how I achieve them in Vista:

• A decent browser. Easy, Firefox.

• A decent email client. Also easy, Thunderbird.

• An Instant Messaging client: Pidgin. Pidgin connects to everything.

• A decent, tabbed text editor for quick notes and simple editing. It has to be tabbed; I keep a lot of different things open for reference at different times, and having the same application open over and over again to keep track of different pieces of information is not a good plan. It is in fact retarded.

  Notepad++ fills the tabbed-editor niche nicely. Why Notepad isn’t Notepad++ I have no idea.

• A terminal shell. Simple: Windows Command Prompt. Yikes, just kidding. Windows Command Prompt, though probably wonderful for Windows administration, is horribly inadequte for navigation and general non-administration shell-based work. Don’t believe me? That’s fine. You’re wrong. Anyway, Cygwin is a worthy Linux-like environment that provides all the necessary functionality and more (it even has an X server, if you need that kind of thing.)

• A graphical, SFTP-capable FTP client. A couple free applications I am evaluating are FileZilla and WinSCP. They both seem adequate, but I’m leaning towards FileZilla because it has more view options.

  For a regular, tried-and-true standalone SSH client, there is always the de facto standard, PuTTY.

• Ext support. Ext2 IFS for Windows does the trick nicely. This is a definite plus because until recently, I would use an NTFS partition for inter-operating system access. Mounting NTFS from Linux is no big deal, but the permission systems are different, so that’s all wacky. I’d much rather keep the filesystem Ext3 and mount it from Windows. So far, so good.

• Multiple desktops. This is truly a must-have for me. I keep three desktops going at the same time, at all times, for organizational and sanity purposes. As I mentioned, on Linux I use Compiz Fusion, which provides the oft-hyped desktop cube, as well as other visual effects, such as an application ring switcher, which is utterly useful, and is the best application switcher I’ve used in terms of intuitiveness and effectiveness.

  There is no way to duplicate the cube or the ring switcher in Vista, but there is a way to have multiple desktops, and I’ll settle for that. The Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) provides a decent, customizable multi-desktop environment. It allows you to alter the key-bindings for most of its functionality, and I have it set up to behave similarly to Compiz Fusion (aside from the actual “cube”, that is.)

  VDM is a welcome addition to the Vista experience. You will not realize how powerful and efficient a multiple desktop environment is until you use one for a while. This is something that *Nix systems have included since the beginning of time.

• Key bindings. In Windows, this can be divided into two parts: application shortcut keys and Windows key combinations. Or, respectively, editable and impossible to change. The latter is troublesome, so let’s start with that.

  On almost every system, Alt+F4 is the default key combination to kill the open window. I’m not sure what the default key combination is to toggle between maximized and non-maximized windows, or if there even is a default, but in my Linux comfort zone, I have Alt+1 bound to kill the current window and Alt+2 bound to toggle between maximized and not maximized. I don’t care that Alt+F4 is standard, because it is a physically uncomfortable stretch to reach up there with one hand; Alt+1 is right there, it’s not uncomfortable, and I don’t have to look. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a built-in way to modify this key binding to be anything other than Alt+F4 in Windows. I am working on that. If you know how to do it, please do share. I actually use this functionality all the time, more than I realized until every time I tried to do it in Vista it did nothing. If I must resort to Alt+F4, then obviously, I can. I just don’t want to until I’ve exhausted all other decent options, which I don’t feel I have yet.

  The application shortcut keys are easy, and as you probably already know, just right click on an application -> Properties -> Shortcut Tab -> Shortcut key and do your desired key combination once the text field has focus. Done and done.

So far that’s my list. I’ll update it as things move along and things get figured/ironed out.

I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised with the number of quality, open source applications available for the Windows platform. You know, it would be interesting to write one…

Sixty percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama, but 17 percent said they would vote for Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee and Obama’s rival in the general election. Nearly one-quarter, 22 percent, said they would not vote at all if Clinton were not the Democrats’ nominee.

To those 17 percent: So you are going to buy a bottle of red wine for dinner, but the liquor store doesn’t have your brand of choice. The obvious thing to do is to buy a six dollar bottle of Tequila. I mean, that just completely makes sense.

In the past, I have (sort of) ferociously attacked Java for being a horribly slow, memory-hogging platform. These attacks were not based on nothing; I can assure you I have done my share of Java programming both as an undergraduate CS major and a graduate SE major, and also in general on my own for various applications. I have written various swing apps, applets and servlets over the course of my Java-programming life, and I’ve also deployed them on my own server. So, I have walked the walk, I just haven’t walked it lately.

My experiences with Java, when I did a lot of Java programming, which was years ago, had formed the basis for many of my prior complaints.

A specific instantiaton of my stupidity

Recently, when web programming became my full-time job, I was in search of a good IDE to work with PHP, and I briefly documented the steps I went through to find one. Eclipse PDT, a Java-based PHP IDE, was first on my list, because it was highly recommended and it runs on Linux (since it’s Java).

My experience with Eclipse PDT, as I documented it, was not good. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that either the Eclipse platform, or the Java platform, or some combination of the two platforms was the culprit, and promptly bashed them both. Dumb and dumber.

The fatal flaw

I run Linux as my primary operating system, and included with Linux is something called the GNU Compiler for Java, or the GCJ. The GCJ itself is not Java, but a reimplementation of it by free-software developers, who not only provide the platform but all of the source code for it as well. Nothing written here today has anything to do with the benefits or drawbacks of free software, but my fatal flaw was that based on my past experiences with Java, I assumed that using the most recent version of the GCJ was exactly similar to using the most recent version of Sun’s Java, which is available for free but (mostly, now) without source code.

Apologies, 1 and 2

Due to certain circumstances, which are largely unimportant, I was encouraged to give Eclipse PDT another try. But this time, I decided to install the latest version of Sun’s Java instead of relying on the GCJ. And man, can I just say, it worked. Eclipse runs more-or-less flawlessly, and without the huge memory footprint I had expected to see when first loading it up.

It was a mistake to bash Java and Eclipse without really giving either a proper shot — albeit somewhat unknowingly. For this, I am sorry. Had my experiences with earlier versions of Java (which really did have speed and memory issues) not contributed to a preconceived notion of what to expect, I might not have assumed that simply trying the newest, authentic version of Java would have no affect on my issues with Eclipse PDT.

To both camps, I apologize. The strides made by the Java community in the past few years to fix Java’s earlier issues have been realized. The fact that Eclipse simply “works” the way it is supposed to, using the latest version of Java, makes me not much more than an asshole for complaining it did not. At least with Java my complaints were just very outdated. With Eclipse, they were flat out wrong.

Conclusion

I suck. But I’m working on it.

I really don’t believe it was a put-on. I always thought she felt ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.’ And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said, ‘Oh damn, where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.

Why bother to inject race into this at all? I don’t think she cares that she is white, except that that appeals to white voters, presumably. This is a revised version of Pfleger’s statement, which is probably right on the money:

I really don’t believe it was a put-on. I always thought she felt ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.’ And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said, ‘Oh damn, where did you come from? I’m entitled. There’s another guy stealing my show.

Same meaning, except maybe a little less salt-in-wound-ish considering the audience is sitting in a black church. White people have this thing where we think that if we talk in reverse racism, it somehow makes it OK and proves we are not racists.

But here’s the cold hard truth: the best way to prove you are not concerned with race is to not be concerned with it. Making sermons bashing a particular race, even if it is your own, makes you fucking retarded.

The problem was that the set of “random” keys that OpenSSL generated (before the patch) is constrained to the point that the number of unique keys can easily be automatically generated and brute-forced to break the encryption. This is not unlike locking your front door with the key, but not completely pulling it shut. It appears shut, but all someone has to do is target you, and go push open your door. Fuck.

Watch as Ballmer gets it. Notice the “duck and hide” behind the podium move. Classic.

The best part, though, is the obvious level of despise for Steve Ballmer exhibited by everyone else. First, they clap. Then, after the guy is allowed to casually finish his egging, the people sitting in his row simply stand up to excuse him, as if it were a movie theater and he was getting up to use the restroom. Finally, some guy with a “mad” look on his face escorts him out. For “escorts” read “walks out with him without touching him.”

Magyars!

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
3 GB 800mhz DDR2 RAM
Sapphire ATI X1550 512MB PCI-E XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS 512MB PCI-E
WD 500 GB SATA II
WD 250 GB SATA (I)

The machine came with Windows Vista Home Premium, and almost as a reflex, I removed it immediately in favor of Ubuntu. However, during my partitioning, I decided leave a couple NTFS partitions for a Vista reinstallation — one NTFS partition for Vista itself, and another so that files could be shared between OS’s. Ubuntu of course has no issue mounting NTFS drives, while Vista, of course, does nothing but…

Vista looks pretty, but I can sense that it’s just fancy dressing over total fugliness. Even on a machine with specs as impressive as this one, it hiccups and momentarily freezes, which is ridiculous.

Vista is also a hard drive hog. As a student I have access to some software packages provided by my university — included in this bundle are Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 — which I downloaded and installed, along with Firefox, video drivers, and that’s it. Twenty-five gigs, people. Twenty-five gigs! I’m sure that some of this is due to system restore, but system restore is on by default, so this is what most people are going to endure. Plus it’s Windows, so you need system restore.

Oh, did I mention that my network drivers magically uninstalled at one point? Yeah, and system restore didn’t fix it, either. Nope, that was fantastic.

My belief (or hope) is that Vista will turn into Windows ME (remember that?) The next version will hopefully be more like what XP became after 98Se. Of course what will I care? Booting back into Ubuntu…