Vermyndax’s Lair

Those of you who read the open source parts of this blog may be interested in NO CARRIER Episode 2: Diagnosis Penguin. It’s a little over an hour long, but the second half of the podcast is dominated by an interview with a company who found Windows inadequate for their needs. It’s a wonderful Linux success story and there might be some lessons for entrepreneurs out there.

Give it a listen and spread the word if you’re one of those well-read Linux folks, please

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#477454 - Insulting source code - Debian Bug report logs

…ran across this bug filing in my morning travels.  What a scream.  I love it when nerds get personal and start using source code to do battle.  That’s one of my favorite parts of Linux - just think of all the copies of Debian floating around out there that contains source code like this (Warning: salty, sailor-esque language, as if readers of this blog haven’t run across it before):

===================================================================
— player.py (Revision 4026)
+++ player.py (Revision 4027)
@@ -287,7 +287,9 @@

def init(pipeline, librarian):
gst.debug_set_default_threshold(gst.LEVEL_ERROR)
- if gst.element_make_from_uri(gst.URI_SRC, “file://”, “”):
+ if gst.element_make_from_uri(
+ gst.URI_SRC,
+ “file:///Sebastian/Droge/please/choke/on/a/bucket/of/cocks”, “”):
global playlist
playlist = PlaylistPlayer(pipeline or “gconfaudiosink”,
librarian)
return playlist
daniel@bert:~/1/quodlibet-1.x$ svn log -r 4026:4027
————————————————————————
r4027 | piman | 2007-04-27 05:17:05 +0200 (Fr, 27 Apr 2007) | 1 line

player.init: Give a fake filename to trick GStreamer 0.10.12’s filesrc.
————————————————————————

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plasma and the screensaver « ChaniBlog

So, while trolling the feeds and coming across Chani’s post about this screensaver… and what amounts to one of the stranger use cases I’ve seen in a while… there’s this discussion about some plans to integrate plasma widgets into kdescreensaver and whatnot.  Yeah, she has a use case to justify this sort of functionality and it’s a little odd.  All I have to say is that if I had friends who took it upon themselves to diddle with my laptop while I was away, I’m afraid homicide would be in order.

I’m just saying…

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Here’s a late night pondering for you as I traipse off to bed.

Ask yourself: does the subject matter of a blog control what browser share you’re likely to experience on your site?

Given the stats that I’m getting, I can say (without much of a doubt) that yes, that’s true…

#	#reqs	#pages	browser
1	5132	2910	Firefox
 	4002	1992	  Firefox/2
 	986	837	  Firefox/3
 	144	81	  Firefox/1
2	2535	2189	Safari
 	2534	2188	  Safari/523
 	1	1	  Safari/417
3	1750	973	MSIE
 	705	478	  MSIE/6
 	978	428	  MSIE/7
 	67	67	  MSIE/5

Eh. Just interesting is all.

Once again, I’ve stayed up far, far too late. Someone shoot me so I can get some sleep, please?

Technorati Tags:
Web, Browser

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I meant to post about this over the weekend, but… well, I forgot. I didn’t see much chatter about this over the leap day, but here it is.

On a system that uses Postfix 2.2.9 on SLES 10, Postfix started acting quite wonky on February 29th, 2008. In a standard Postfix+Amavis+ClamAv setup, you actually have two Postfix daemons - one listening on port 25 (duh), the other listening on port 10025 waiting to get mail handed off from amavis+clamav.

Well, it appears that the second daemon gets quite confused about the date on Leap Day and logs everything with March 1st plus four hours. While this seems benign enough, if you use some statistics generator like pflogsumm.pl to generate some numbers for management, your hourly totals quit working.

We had not one byte of statistic data for February 29th as a result. That’s a shame, but it was one of many odd tech-related things that happened that day that I won’t soon forget.

Our power even went out that day.

Technorati Tags:
e-mail, Postfix

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Why Linux will not displace Windows | TalkBack on ZDNet

Absolutely hysterical, misinformed opinion about Windows and Linux.  Must read, especially you #morphixers.

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Large Hospital Software Company Switches to Linux - OSS Ramblings

While I’m not as optimistic as my buddy Tony on the increase of Linux market share, I am definitely in line with him on the decrease of Microsoft market share.  As I continue my march toward converting to an all-Mac environment at home, Windows has been relegated to not much more than a gaming console.  Even that is somewhat doomed though, as I’m starting to discover some of the newest games have outgrown this almost 4-year old PC.  That’s fine, I’ll just start gaming on the Wii and continuing on with my old games. 

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Happy Linux Thoughts: Reasons why I love Microsoft’s Operating sytems

Brilliant, tasty little satirical morsel for your enjoyment.

I should also file this under jealousy that this is only the fifth entry and it’s already been Dugg to the front page. Bother.

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Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Good article. Go read. Now.

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Last night I was reminded of why Linux’s failure to launch on the desktop will continue. It still does not survive the grandparent’s test.

In my case, my stepfather wished to view videos and flash on the web. That, of course, doesn’t come naturally with Kubuntu, unless you’re wanting to watch video on with a free/open-source codec that is used by about 0.000001% of the web. If you’d like to use Quicktime or WMV, that offers a bit of a challenge.

He called me up and said, “I researched this and read on the forums on how to do it… open up the terminal, make these directories, type this shit and all that shit, some apt-get somethingorother… and what does sudo mean?”

I offered to come over and help. Regardless, I know that automatix2 is the cheap way out of this situation and potentially borks up the system, but with the little time I had to play with, I didn’t have much choice.

Ultimately, the Linux community still just doesn’t get it. Let me reiterate this for you. Your product - the fruits of your labor or whatever you wish to call it - will not… repeat… NOT… EVER… SUCCEED on the desktop until you find a way to make this stuff easy and work out of the box. Period. Stop expecting that grandpa can open up a terminal session and whack his way through commands on the terminal. Give him an icon to click. Then… and only then… will you start to succeed.

Until that day, you will continue to fail in your quest for larger desktop share.

/me shrugs.

Hey, maybe you didn’t want a larger desktop share anyway. If that’s the case, that’s fine. Then you’re succeeding. We’ll just continue on fighting those zombie drones that pick up orders from IRC every day. Not a problem.

Bother.

Update: How ironic that this opinion article just showed up on my feed reader. I did not know there was a heated debate forming on this - but at least this issue is getting recognized by the concerned parties with a stake in the ground.

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