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Working for Canonical doesn’t make you pro-Free Software?
Stuart Langridge works for Canonical. Canonical produces Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. Apparently, this means he favors proprietary software in some people’s minds.
Yes, this is the same Ubuntu Linux you can download freely. You can make copies of it and sell them, legally. You can modify it, if you have the ability and inclination. Just setting the record straight.
Canonical does what it has to do to get Linux working well on your computer. And it succeeds rather nicely. If a computer can run Windows XP or newer, it can run Ubuntu, and installing Ubuntu will be easier than installing Windows in many cases. The computer this website runs on was built on a variant of Ubuntu, and it literally took longer to burn the CD than it took to run the installation. It blew my mind.
This is a case of software being like religion.
I am Lutheran. Almost militantly so, to the annoyance of some people who know me. I break from the traditional Lutheran camp in two regards: favoring music in the service that was written during my lifetime, and not being uptight enough about doctrine. I take the concept of grace alone, faith alone very seriously, and to an outsider, that plus the Lutheran definition of grace–God’s riches at Christ’s expense–is enough to make you Lutheran. That’s good enough for me. Some vocal Lutherans expect you to be able to recite precisely what makes John Calvin a heretic. I neither know nor care about that. I read the Bible, in its entirety, and concluded that Calvin puts certain responsibilities on you, a human being, that Luther puts on God. Since I believe that God is more reliable than me, I concluded that the Lutheran view is safer. I believe that ought to be enough.
The big question is whether I care if I’m Lutheran enough for some people. And the answer is no, I do not. I just ignore the rants about heresy that I see on Facebook, or better yet, stay off Facebook for long stretches at a time, and go about my business.
I guess that’s easier said than done in the Free Software community. There are a lot more witch hunters in that group. I suppose the people who can’t write working code try to make up for it by concentrating on ideology, or something like that. I do know it’s a whole lot easier to crusade for ideology than to write code.
The silent majority of people just want a system that works. They don’t want to hunt down drivers and compile them, or spend hours editing configuration files. I can’t tell you how many e-mail messages I received over the years from people who tried the most popular Linux distribution of the time, ran into difficulty, and gave up. (It’s one reason my e-mail address isn’t on this site anywhere anymore.) Even if the problem was something I could answer relatively easily, they just gave up and installed Windows instead. In their minds, if Dave Farquhar knows how to make that work, then whoever made that particular Linux distribution ought to make it work automatically. And they have a point.
So if Ubuntu installs a driver or some other low-level code that isn’t completely Richard Stallman-approved, the majority of people really don’t care. They’re happy it works. If their freedoms are infringed upon, they don’t know it.
I’ve said before that I could re-train my mother to use Linux. In fact, she could probably get all of her work done in Linux and emacs, and I’m sure John the Baptist Richard Stallman would be absolutely thrilled. But it would take her several years to learn the nuances of emacs, and some of her job duties would take much longer. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind occasionally spending hours to do something that can be accomplished in minutes using a more specialized, albeit proprietary, tool. In the end, when she’s a master of emacs, I’ll be able to tell her that she’s free. And she’ll tell me, “It wasn’t worth it.” Or, if she’s feeling a little more reasonable, she’ll throw something at me.
It’s easier said than done. But perhaps when the witch hunters come knocking, it would help to ask them if they had anything better to do?
After all, he could be a total sell-out like me. In my job, I’ve recommended Linux-based solutions when appropriate, but I spend the overwhelming majority of my time supporting things that run on Windows. Perhaps they would prefer he do that.
But I wouldn’t. I really like the work Canonical is doing.
And we have safely arrived in the 21st century.
It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions, but it went a whole lot better than it could have. I’ve moved the venerable Silicon Underground, with its nearly 1,800 posts spanning a little over a decade, to WordPress 3.0.1.
This blog’s been pretty stale for a long time. Some of that is due to the software. Some of it’s my fault. Blogging software has really advanced a lot in the last few years, and the software I’ve been using since 2004 was a bit behind the curve even then. In its defense, in 2004 nothing could do everything I wanted, and the system I chose was one of the few that required login and authentication, which I desperately needed in order to stop spam. But then registration broke, and I didn’t fix it, which meant only longtime readers could comment.
For commenting, we’re going back to username and e-mail address with optional URL, and with some spam analysis tools hopefully filtering out the spam. Users are moderated until their second comment, which will help take care of the trolls. Comments containing multiple hyperlinks automatically go to moderation. And comments will be closed after some period of time, probably 14 days. Discussions usually go downhill as time goes on.
Will I post more now that it’s easier? Probably.
Modern blogs can interact with one another; mine was always an island. Now I can trackback and pingback like everyone else, which will probably prove useful.
I’m sure I’ll be making changes for a while, but this is a big improvement.
I’d like to thank Steve D. and Rich P. (you know who you are) for their help with the migration. It only took me what, three years to go through with it? Four? And then it ended up taking about two hours of real work, if that, spread out over the course of a couple of weeks.
WordPress may be coming soon. I hope.
I’m experimenting with WordPress. I have it up and running on a system built from spare parts, but importing from this archaic blogging platform that nobody uses (and for good reason) is less than obvious. A filter exists but isn’t officially blessed, so you can’t just go grab it like you can for a common blog platform like Movable Type or Greymatter.I’m going to look at it all again when I’m less tired. It may be possible to just take the importer and turn it into a standalone program that just slurps the database over and puts it into WordPress format. It’s probably been eight years since I did any PHP coding at all. But I have everything to gain from the move.
As far as I can tell, this server and this software have been running for 8 years. That’s a good run, but it’s too long. It’s time to modernize. Time to use modern software, running on a system that was built in this century.
Hey! I’m famous!
I got mentioned in a post about Adblock Plus on Lifehacker.
In a comment about something else, I mentioned that you should install Adblock Plus and turn on the Malware Domains subscription to give yourself protection beyond what your antivirus software does. If intercepting bad-guy software is good, not even downloading it in the first place is better.
I guess someone liked the advice.
I got an LED bulb, and it is fabulous.
I half-heartedly checked Home Depot’s web site today, and saw they had 429-lumen, 8.6-watt (40W equivalent) LED bulbs at my local store. Finally!
So when I had a chance, I drove over, plunked down my 19 bucks, and brought one home.
It’s not perfect. But I like it an awful lot.I tried the bulb out in a lamp first, to test the light quality. It’s very similar to the last batch of CFLs I bought. Not quite as yellow as my remaining incandescent bulbs, but nice.
It’s not quite bright enough to use in a lamp, and it’s fairly directional. You’ll want at least a 60W equivalent for that, and probably more. Give it time.
In my son’s bedroom, the light worked great. It works nicely in overhead lights, and it’s dimmable. Dimmable CFLs are expensive and hard to find, so I might as well buy LED bulbs instead since they use less power and last 2-3 times as long.
In operation, I found the LED bulb never got uncomfortably hot to the touch.
LED bulbs produce no UV light, so they won’t attract bugs and they won’t cause the pictures on your walls to fade. That sounds like a plus to me.
And, believe it or not, they’re assembled in the USA. Presumably most of the components, if not all of them, are made in China, but LED bulbs are one of the few things you can buy that support manufacturing jobs here in the States.
The bulbs have a five-year warranty. I suggest saving the receipt and perhaps the packaging, and writing the date of purchase on the base of the bulb in pencil. That way if the bulb fails prematurely, you can do something about it.
The 46-year life expectancy claim sounds overly optimistic, but 15-20 years wouldn’t surprise me.
I suggest you “burn in” the bulb by leaving it on for 24 hours straight. Like any other electronic device, if it survives that first 24 hours of running continuously, it’s likely to last years.
If the bulb is going in a bedroom or someplace else where leaving it on for 24 hours is impractical, put it in a lamp and leave the lamp on for 24 hours, then install the bulb where you intend to use it.
At $19 a pop, I’m not going to run out to convert the whole house. But as old bulbs burn out, I’ll buy LEDs to replace them. As time goes on, they’ll only improve, and prices will come down. But these bulbs are good enough to be useful today.
The energy savings isn’t chump change–LED bulbs pay for themselves in a couple of years if they replace old-fashioned incandescent bulbs. Not only do you get more lumens per watt, but the less wattage you consume, the lower your cooling bills will be. I was an early adopter of CFLs–I have them everywhere but my kids’ rooms, and a seldom-used light in the shower of one bathroom. Between that, my thermal curtains, and a programmable thermostat, I haven’t had a $200 electric bill in years.
Energy isn’t going to get any cheaper, and we consume more of it per person than the rest of the world. We can voluntarily cut our energy usage, or we can wait for China and India to show up with guns and force the issue. I’d rather cut it voluntarily.
Incoming link: http://mondayevening.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/led-bulb-glows-after-i-turn-it-off/
Barely scraping by on a quarter-mil a year
This WSJ article (with profuse apologies for linking to something owned by Rupert Murdoch) offers some advice for those who are struggling to make it on $250K or $350K per year.
It’s good advice for people making 1/10 of that too.The gist of it is that people need to lower their expectations. I’ll make this real personal and include myself in this group.
About a year ago, I ran into a former coworker in the parking lot. He asked how things were going. They happened to be going bad that day. Real bad. “Got any job openings?” I asked.
“Actually, we do,” he said.
A day or two later, I sent him my resume. Another week or so later, I was interviewing for a job. Another week or so after that, they offered me a job, with the biggest raise of my life, though I’m still well below that $250K threshold.
Still, I’m making more than I’ve ever made, and I’m having more trouble paying my bills than I’ve had in a very long time.
Don’t feel sorry for me.
I got lazy and I got sloppy in my budgeting. It’s not my employer’s fault for not giving me a bigger raise, and it’s not the government’s fault for taxing me too much. It’s my fault for not bothering to stop for a minute and figure out what I can and can’t afford before plunking down the cash or reaching for the plastic.
Of course there are other things you can do that this article doesn’t suggest, such as buying high-efficiency light bulbs that use less energy and last longer. This saves money on the electric bill every month, and reduces those trips to Target resulting in fewer temptations to buy $100 worth of other stuff you didn’t really need. But the mentality matters more than the specifics. Develop the mentality, and specifics will follow.
And it matters whether you work in food service making $18,000 a year or you’re a professional athlete making millions per year. After all, how many athletes have we heard about going broke after their career ends in spite of earning tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars?
Personally, I’ve been eating a lot more Campbell’s Chunky Soup and using a lot more coupons lately.
The Gray-Hoverman antenna
I threw together a Gray-Hoverman antenna tonight. It’s literally two pieces of bent copper wire taped to a piece of plywood, connected with a 75 to 300 ohm transformer like this one, stashed behind the entertainment center. I’ll pretty it up at some point.
I now get 15 channels of over-the-air TV. With my old antenna, I only got 10.
With some tinkering, Antennapoint suggests I should be able to get channels from as many as 9 nearby cities, including, potentially, Springfield IL, and Jefferson City, MO.
I’m definitely hoping to pull in a couple of additional distant PBS stations, since they tend to vary their programming a little bit more. It would be nice to get an additional PBS Kids station, since the local PBS Kids stopped carrying a couple of shows my oldest son liked.
A basic cable TV package only gives you 20 channels, and most of them are stuff you wouldn’t want to watch anyway. And they usually don’t include the extra DTV channels. For instance, the local PBS channel also broadcasts a channel that alternates between home improvement and cooking, a kids channel, and a news channel. All are better than their cable equivalents, and they’re free. A couple of the other stations broadcast syndicated programming on a secondary channel.
I eventually want to build a better one and possibly mount it in the attic or even outdoors. But it’s amazing what 30 minutes with a piece of scrap lumber and $2 worth of wire yielded.
Garage sale strategy: Go where the hordes aren’t
Today is one of the biggest garage sale days of the year.
An old, established, and relatively well-to-do neighborhood nearby has a tradition of doing a massive 4-block yard sale every September. People put it on their calendars. You never know what you’ll find there.
I went somewhere else.I’ve gone every year the last four years, but I noticed a pattern. Every year I get less and less, and it seems like fewer homes participate. This year promised 50 homes participating, but finding the 10 really good ones in the 50 is tough. The only way is to go to all of them. Figure five minutes per sale, and I was going to spend a minimum of five hours there. Some years I’ve spent longer.
So instead, I picked 10 sales somewhere else and spent about two hours out and about.
I got some good hardware for around the house for literally pocket change. I got some other predictable odds and ends.
But the prize was an under-cabinet LCD TV with radio and DVD player for 20 lousy bucks. The cheapest I’ve ever seen them new is $70. But one with reviews that suggest anyone would actually want to own it costs more like $200, which is about what this one cost new.
I plugged it in at the sale to verify it worked, then brought it home and hooked it up. It works nicely and takes up a lot less room than the 13" CRT we’ve kept in the kitchen for the last few years.
On any other day, I doubt I would have scored that. I arrived at the sale 10 minutes or so after it opened, and was the only one there. You have to be the first or second person there to get anything like that, especially at that price.
Since everyone else was at the big neighborhood sale, I got my chance.
Make Firefox run like new
This is an unbelievable trick. If you’ve been running Firefox for a long time, it gets a lot more sluggish. Here’s how to optimize its databases and give it back its youthful vigor.First, go to Tools, Error Console. Copy and paste this long and obnoxious line in:
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");
Click Evaluate and wait. Firefox will appear to lock up, but fear not, when the query finishes, it’ll recover with a vengeance, loading faster, rendering pages faster, and doing just about everything faster.
The difference could be enough to cure new-computer fever, in some cases.
You can close the Error Console window after it finishes.
What this trick does, from a technical standpoint, is dump all the empty space in the databases where it stores all of your data (bookmarks, browsing history, usernames, stuff like that), making it smaller and easier to manage, and, in turn, faster. Whenever data expires, it’s blanked out rather than truly deleted, so the databases just keep on growing over time, contributing to Firefox’s slowdown.