RGB Rant on the software industry

RGB recently posted a rant/editorial to the beowulf list that discusses Microsoft as a monopoly and why we should be afraid of (not hate) Microsoft, even if we use their products or work for MS. His arguments are based on history, economics, and human nature instead of MS hate. Long but an interesting read. The font used in the linked to site sucks, copy it somewhere else :)

Continuous play for Podcasts on Ipod

I just spent a while trying to figure out how to get multiple podcasts to play sequentially on my Ipod without kicking back out to the main menu. I found lots of people with this same problem but no solution. This behavior is caused by the random setting on the Ipod being enabled. If the Ipod is set to random song or random album then only one podcast will be played and then it will return to the main menu. If random is set to off then if you put the podcasts in a playlist or smart playlist it will play them one after another with no intervention.

Google Everything

After fighting various email client/address book/calender programs for the past few years and being rather frustrated with them I’ve been looking for a good app for quite a while. I recently started mucking with google docs and have found it to be incredibly usable for being a web based app. This success pushed me over the edge and I decided to do Google everything. I’ve moved all my personal email to a gmail account, which was quite easy, I just added a forwarding rule to my local mail server and added that account as a send alias. Getting work’s email to go to Google was a little tricker. At work they are running Groupwise, which doesn’t provide an easy method to redirect email to a different account. I ended up using fetchmail to pull the mail off the Groupwise server and forward it to the local account that gets forwarded to gmail. I’ll post an update in a few weeks with how well Google everything is going.

QOTD

Contrary to popular belief, windows does follow the UNIX programming guideline (which is to do one thing and do it well). The one thing that it does and does well is BSOD.

New server

The site is now hosted on a real server at a real data center, instead of some old and failing hardware that lives under my desk. I’ve been looking on and off over the last few years for a virtual server hosting provider that will give full root access and control over a virtual server. I finally found one and jumped at the chance to use it. I am currently hosting with vpslink. They have great prices, much newer hardware than what I was runing on, and let me run debian, yay!

Itunes and DRM

I recently recieved a marketing email from apple touting the wonders of itunes 6, trying to entice me as an itunes5 user to make the upgrade. Untill I can use the media I purchase on the devices I use every day I have no desire to upgrade. My response.

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“Along with all those wonderful features I get completely unusable music and videos. I can’t play it on my linux only laptop (cant use a mac laptop because it only has one mouse button, and windows is just flat out unusable for both stability and ui).

“What if I want to play my music on something other than an IPod in 10 years? Woops, can’t do that either. Integrate my playlists with a mythTV box, nada. I know you like your vendor lock in that the encryption provides, but I like choice and as soon as that goes away so does my business, which i believe currently is $500 to $600 in song downloads alone. I have spent most of my life listening to the radio and being happy with the price/performance, I imagine I can go back if I have to.

“I really do like the ITunes store, being able to download music legally has opened a new world to me, but I won’t purchase media that I can’t exercise my fair use rights with. Thank you for your work in producing some wonderful products and I hope to see the day when I can use those products in ways that may not have been envisioned by the creators.

“The mark of a great and lasting product is to have it used in many unique and exciting ways that the inventor never conceived.”

Regards,
Josh

Deb vs RPM

I’ve been using Debian for years on all my work and personal machines and building RPMs for work for years. I finally put together my first major Debian packages (open-mpi). Having build RPMs for years they are almost second nature to me, but I was pleased to find out how easy it is to build a ’simple’ debian package using dh_make (debhelper). I had my first package (modules) up on no time. It was as easy as building a simple RPM package.

Next came openmpi, where I wanted to provide profle and debug packages as well as the standard libraries. I was cast head long into a huge pile of scripts and dh_* binaries that I had no idea how to use! It took quite a while but I got though it (mostly) unscathed.

Now that I know how enough of the Debian packaging system I am can say that it is probably too complex for the common case. Multiple ways to start packages out, different standards revisions, etc. Though I am quite pleased with how easy it can be to produce a simple package yet how flexible the build system can be when needed.

Compared to RPM: Pros, Don’t have to learn yet another scripting language (rpm macros) to use the build system, just standard shell and make scripts do it; Data is stored in multiple files instead of one huge file; overall the Debian build system seems more powerful. Cons: Too many files that don’t exist in the default setup are useful, Too many different standards versions (if using this standard program foo behaves this way, else it behaves a different way). Overall building complex debs is about as hard as building complex RPMS, and to someone who knows what they are doing building a simple deb may be even easier than a simple rpm.

Xoftspy - nothing more than a scam?

Last night I tried to clean a computer overrun by spyware using Xoftspy from paretologic based on a recommendation from what I though was a blog, though I suspect it was a planted marketing site. After installing the tool it scanned (too quickly? 20ish times faster than adaware) and reported a number of hits but would not clean the computer without first paying the registration fee ($60!?!?!). Others have come to similar conclusions, though the company has supposedly turned clean I’m not sure I believe it. If you want to check the validity of a spyware removal product might I suggest checking this list of false anti-spyware utilities.