6 posts from 2006

Ubuntu and Linux in general has a ways to go before it's ready for mainstream desktops.

I'm a techy geek (professional and personal) and a few months back loaded Ubuntu on an old laptop with what seemed like a fair amount of difficulty. After a lot of doinking around and failing to get the pcmcia wired ethernet card working I managed to get a wireless card working. Unfortunately the laptop only had a 2gb HD so space was always tight and it would usually choke if i tried any of the automatic updates. Well, in an attempt to clean off unused features I accidentally killed the OS. Since I was really unhappy with the HD space situation I tried a few smaller distros like Damn Small Linux and couldn't figure out how to get the wireless card working in the time that I had available. Plus....well, it just had a sort of crude feel to it.

A couple days later I brought home my MSDN CDs from work and loaded XP Pro on my laptop. XP Loaded like a charm with minimal involvement from me, correctly detected the Wireless card, only used about a 800MB of install space and seems to run more smoothly and take less time to load apps than Ubuntu ever did.

Frankly I was rather disappointed by this. I had really wanted to believe that Ubuntu would be better than XP. As far as the rather limited array of Linux distros I've used it's quite nice. However, I had really expected that it would be more efficient than windows and it that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I think there are three main areas that need to be addressed in order to win the general public's loyalty.The UI, the behind the scenes install and config and the documentation.

The UI - It's important to have a nice Windozy UI for neo-luddites such as my wife. Ubuntu did a good job with that; Better than most distros I've seen and I think they are on the right track.

There are, however, issues with the behind-the-scenes install and config. As I said before, I'm a fairly technical person. I've been in the professional IT world for about ten years starting with desktop support, help desk, network admin then for the last seven years as a dba working in SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and DB2. Now, we've all worked with those IT people who we wouldn't trust with setting our VCR clock. I'm NOT one of them. For the first three years of my career I was the IT dept for a small software vendor. I regularly had software, hardware and oddball requests thrown my way with the explicit instructions to "make it work." I have a bachelors in CS but truly pride myself on being self-taught. To my great irritation after graduating with a BS in CS, I discovered that my degree provided very little in the way of actual useful skills/experience in the job market. So imagine my surprise when I start trying to work with linux and felt like I was floundering. (My professional experience is almost exclusively windows and my Unix experience has very minimal admin aspects to it.) My laptop was very drivespace challenged and the debian app loading model while very good for a neo-luddite is not very helpful for someone used to being able to decide where an application should be installed. After some head scratching and a couple of script changes I was able to install apps to an external USB drive but I had to troll the internet for ages before figuring out how to do that. To be honest, Linux is a gadget lovers dream. It's free, it's flexible and it's fun. However, as someone who used to do desktop support it's got miles to go before the average IT desktop support guy can manage it.

Finally, there is very little documentation provided by the authors of the Ubuntu distro and in fact with most distros I looked at. Working with MS products has the advantage of there being tons of documentation online. So much, in fact, that it's often a big pain in the ass to cull it down to something useful. Linux seems to rely on the user community to provide it's fixes and documentation. In many ways this is good but it has the disadvantage of missing some essential overview materials and causes at least me to be suspicious of the fixes you do find that were provided by "joe user". (Pet Peeve: Forum posts where someone has "THE" fix for an issue. Unless you are an author of the actual distro then 99% of the time it is not "THE" fix but rather simply "a" fix that worked on their particular system.)

 In closing I'd have to say my biggest disappointment was Ubuntus lack of efficiency over XP. Aren't the *IXers the ones always complaining how windows is bloated and inefficient?  Somehow I feel like I've been let down.  

I get tired of things like Zune coming out that are great hardware but then fall down on the software. In Open source software, you can write it to do whatever you want and share it. So, I wish there was a way to make an open source portable media player.

I'm not sure exactly how it could be implemented but imagine if you will being able to buy components that sort of snap together without the need for soldering. A screen, a hard drive, some sort of programable chips, whatever. (Duh, in case you haven't figured it out I'm not an electronics guy.) Or go to a website and order I want this screen with these components etc. Pay for it and a company/geek builds it and ships it to you.

Then use some tiny distro of Linux to run it. Would it be as sleek and tiny as an IPod? No. However, with your own hardware and software you wouldn't be screwed by politicians and money grubbing business people.

Ah well. Pipe dreams....

You know, people probably wouldn't hate the RIAA so much if they changed their tactics from the "Trying to make a point/set legal precedent" to one of "trying to get the recording industries fair share"

Wander with me a moment if you will...

DRM - Change the DRM so that instead of trying to block copying of media it's more of a tattletale. Periodically it informs the RIAA what songs you have, when you copy them, whatever. I don't have this completely fleshed out but it would probably entail some sort of RIAA song registry.

Then the RIAA takes the same vague sources of data that they have now and instead of suing someone they send them a bill for a set reasonable fee for each song plus a 50% "You were being bad" fine. The consumer has several options upon receipt:

1. Pay the bill - Somehow a system of what music you have would have to be registered somewhere.

2. Refute the bill - Set up an arbitration process that doesn't actually involve a court. Some third party looks at the evidence and makes a binding decision. This process would have to have some mandatory fee to prevent everyone from clogging the system. Fee to be paid by the loser or as determined by the arbitrator.  So if you do have "stolen" music and you lose, you'd pay the cost+fine+arbitration fee. Ouch! But in the case of all these other people now being sued it'd be a lot cheaper. Ooo, and if they got their greasy hands on evidence that you tried to screw with the tattletale DRM then there would be an additional fine.

3. Ignore the bill - After a certain length of time the RIAA would have the option of pursuing it like any other debt. Black marks on your credit rating, "selling" the debt to third-party debt collection agencies etc. Or if it's some massive amount of songs/money then they could sue you in the appropriate civil court.

The end result of this? A new source of income for the recording industry. Potentially it could change the primary distribution model to one of mainly media downloads. (Why leave out the MPAA?)

For music the DRM could allow you to play the song a set number of times before you have to pay or delete it. I doubt the movie industry would go for that. Maybe a set number of minutes into the movie like hotel room pay-per-view used to be? "Warning! If you continue to view this movie you will be required to pay $XX.XX or you can stop now."

I had been using Azerus as my BitTorrent client and was reasonably happy with it. It has lots of features and settings to mess with but the torrents I was downloading (Non-copyrighted material, naturally) tended to take ages and ages to complete. This didn't seem unreasonable as what I was downloading tended to contain ~22 files of ~350MB each. A further annoyance was my inability to use my computer to browse the internet while Azereus was running. Although it shouldn't have taken the entire internet connection bandwidth, I just assumed that my ISP was throttling me or that the numbers weren't as straight-forward as they seemed. So for a while I was content with download speeds averaging 10Kb/s with occasional spurts to 16kb/s.

Then I was reading an article and it pointed out that uTorrent had an extremely small footprint (~500Kb) and that it took correspondingly less memory. So when I had a chance I downloaded and installed it. HOLY CRAP! Did that make a difference. It didn't bog down my computer's memory, it didn't hog the processor and the download speed have hit an all-time high of capping out at 85kb/s. I managed to download an entire seas.... um large set of non-copyrighted files in about sixteen hours! I had been trying to finish up another large set of non-copyrighted files for fricken weeks! It wasn't a terribly popular torrent but uTorrent flashed through it in about two hours.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily thing this is because uTorrent is the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, it worked quite well for me.

Although I take pride in being a geek, sometimes I wonder if I am a geek to the core or if I play it up a bit. Well, that question was answered for me the other day...

I had just checked the out the latest Dick Francis book 'Under Orders' from the library on CD. I immediately took it home and ignoring my portable cd player ripped the CDs and loaded up my mp3 player. This took a little while both to rip the tracks and to relabel them. Sure, it would have worked just fine to leave the tracks labeled like this '01-track01.mp3' as long as I left them in the folders labeled by their cd number. However, that just doesn't seem tidy so I tend to rename them all in the format of CDTR_<Booktitle>.mp3 or '0101_UnderOrders.mp3' for CD 1, Track 1.

Anywho, I didn't have room for all the tracks on the player because I had one episode of CrankyGeeks I hadn't listened to yet and five episodes of SQL Down Under which is a podcast about SQL Server. Frankly, I thought about deleting SQL Down Under because although I had listened to part of one episode it just seemed a bit too geeky and at the time it didn't hold my interest.

So, later that evening in the grocery store I'm listening to my audio book and dammit, my rechargable batteries die. So I leave my cart and stroll to the registers, buy some new batteries and head back to my cart. (No, it is not possible for me to brave Walmart without something to listen to so piss off! ) Then, two tracks later I run out of Audio Book tracks and further discover that I had, in fact, already listened to that particular episode of Cranky Geeks. I heaved a giant sigh and decided to give SDU a whirl. To tell you the truth, I rather liked it. In fact, I grew rather excited about the new indexing schemes I could try to exploit for some applications at work to the point that I called and left myself a voicemail. You see, I was aware of covered queries but hadn't actually realized the need to cover both the columns in the select list but also those in the.... Um, well, you get my point, right?

So let's summarize:
1. Ripped CD tracks to MP3 despite owning a perfectly good portable CD player.
2. Took the extra time to rename all the tracks so they were "tidy".
3. Actually had Cranky Geeks and SDU podcasts on my MP3 player - Just in case.
4. Purchased fresh batteries because I was unwilling to grocery shop without distraction.
5. Listened to a podcast about SQL Server, complete with interviews with SQL Server MVPs.
6. Grew excited about SDU podcast content.
7. Left message to self about said podcast.

On my own personal geek scale of 1-10 I've rated myself accordingly:
1. 8 - MP3 players are just nicer than portable CD players but... My wife overruled me on this one.
2. 9 - No real explanation needed is there?
3. 8 - Ok, the content was real geeky but the 'Just in case' is really more of a spaz thing.
4. 0 - Sorry but no one should be forced to grocery shop without some way to keep their sanity.
5. 5 - This was more a move of desperation. See point 4.
6. 10 - Excuse me while I push up my taped eyeglass frames.
7. 8 - Not quite as sad as getting excited about it but....

Final Score 48/70

How would you rate me?

What does this mean? I was getting in the shower this morning and this phrase popped out of my mouth followed by an evil laugh.

Title of a story?

Explanation for all of humanities cruelty towards itself?

Early signs of a neurological disorder?

Have I ever mentioned that I used to ride "The Little Bus"? Now stop that! It wasn't like that at all! We lived in the country and the school system we went to was a forty minute bus ride from our house despite being two miles from an elementary school in another district. So my parents paid tuition to have us go to the school close to us. Then it gets a little fuzzy... Somehow or another we kept bouncing from school to school for a while. I don't remember exactly why but I can tell you that I had nothing to do with all those unsolved murders that occurred around the schools I was attending. Nothing at all.

Currently I'm reading The Last Mortal Man, Book One of the Deathless by Syne Mitchell. I've never heard of this author before but I am really enjoying the book. Newsflash! In creating the link I discovered that this book will be the first and last of The Deathless series. Damn those publishers and their obsession with sales!