I stopped reading slashdot a few years ago. It became really popular and it was overwhelming to read. Besides, there were all these corporation-oriented topics and tight control over news stories. I jumped ship and went to Digg (which lasted about 6 months before I grew bored with that as well).

I wrote several book reviews for Slashdot and was delighted to find they were being run. Then, two of my stories were rejected without good reason, and Slashdot’s luster seemed to fade for me. Also, their interface for viewing threads was insufferable. They switched to an ajax interface, and I could never figure out the best way to view things.

But now that Slashdot has lost web traffic to other geek sites, many of the loyalists remain and the last few times I’ve visited Slashdot, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Today, I read on slashdot that the SCO vs. IBM and Novell lawsuit (this crazy and baseless lawsuit which became a subject of hilarious ridicule) is now reinstated after a judge rejected a previous summary judgment. I just read a discussion about transgender and was amazed to find that at least 5 of the commenters were transgendered. From a discussion  about why linux battery life sucks, I see this great comment:

My first Linux install was Slackware (if I remember correctly)…back in 1998. That’s 10 years. And for all 10 of those years, my experience with Linux has been like this…

Linux Community: ‘This new version of Linux is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!’
Me: "Ummm, that’s cool and all – but I have a problem with X"
Linux Community: "*I* don’t have a problem with X! I don’t even believe you have a problem. Where is your proof? It’s totally not a problem with Linux, if it’s even a real problem at all."
Me: "Umm…okay. Well…all I want to do is be able to X (where X was get on the internet, hear sound, use a wireless network card, have decent battery life – all of which were or are problems). Here’s more information….
Linux Community: "You are using Y? Y is worthless. Everyone knows Y isn’t supported in Linux because of XYZ. You either need to write your own driver or get a real Y."
Me: "Can you tell me, specifically, what Y I should buy?"
Linux Community: "*I* have ABC and it works great. But it’s more than just what is on the box, it’s the chipset and stuff. It’s kind of hit or miss.’
Me: ‘Wtf? This sucks….I’m going to run Windows’
Linux Community: ‘N0ob.’

*six months later*

Linux Community: "Great news! We’ve totally made it so you can do X"
Me: ‘Wait, last time you told me you could do X, and that it was easy, and free, and better than Windows. When I said I had problem doing X, you all told me I was crazy and to RTFM!’
Linux Community: ‘Oh well….yeah…in the past, we’ve had some problems with X. Some users couldn’t do X at all, but now we’ve totally fixed it! Now Linux is is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!”

——–

You get the idea. Months after getting flamed for complaining about how my wireless network adapter doesn’t work in Linux, the Linux community raves about how they’ve improved wireless support.

I’ve had plenty of problems with Windows….but when I have a problem with Windows, at the very least, people *believe me*.

After lots of people  rise up to defend the Linux community, some snarky guy comments:

This post is exactly what is wrong with Linux advocates. Instead of answering the question – why does Linux die when watching DVDs where other OSes don’t – the GP blames the user and suggests another, harder way to do the same thing.

Hi, I wanted to provide information about the recent meeting of the Houston OLPC meeting, which featured Samuel Klein, the director of community content.   I don’t know how much of these nuggets of information was off-the-cuff and how much is official; use your own judgment. After the meeting, we met at Beck’s Prime for Hamburgers. Here is some tidbits we learned over that day:

• OLPC is due to have a major update in a week or two. (Translation: two to three weeks). Here are the release notes. This update is expected to fix lots of things (which may have already arrived in the minor updates).; Klein mentioned a few things I don’t remember. He mentioned faster startup time for Activities,  better mappings of the game buttons on the display (useful for reading in tablet mode), improved handling of video and other multimedia. However, you will need to download  Activities and  Collections again, and possibly other customizations you made to the machine (such as Flash) . For this update, they separated Activities from Updates, so after this Update, it will no longer be necessary to reinstall activities.
• Klein confirmed that that for Update 1, drivers/libraries have been written to make use of the trackpad (which up until now was disabled). That means that developers of Activities will be able to integrate the trackpad (and handwriting detection)  fairly soon although no activity included with the update will be able to use it.
• Klein showed off a 3-D game called Bounce which was the hit for the meeting. In addition to being like a 3-D pong, children are able to configure/edit the game to increase the physical dimensions of the play area and speed.
• I learned quite by accident how to install content collections (i.e., .xol files)  in XO. The collections page has so far been poorly maintained and documented. All you have to do is download the .xol file. Afterwards, when you open up the Browse Activity (as if you plan to surf the web), the newly added collections will appear on the left hand side of the home page  underneath each categories (after you expand them). This is so non-obvious it’s hilarious.
• So far not a lot of .xol content has been available. Most of the content are image galleries and little else.  But here are three .xol files you should download: Wikislice General,  Wikislice Animals, and Wikihow. 
• Building a collection is not hard.  It basically is a bunch of files readable by XO which are bundled together and zipped, along with a configuration file. So far, a lot of the collections are PDF files, so they take a while to load, but I suspect it would be possible to build a collection out of HTML files and view it inside the same Browse activity. That would definitely avoid the slowness of PDF loads. 
• I have plans to put together a storybook/picture book of well known children’s tales. I plan to have two volumes: Level 1 and level 2 (depending on age level).  I am definitely taking suggestions for content!
• Klein confirmed that XO owners have had difficulties sharing activities with XO owners who have already updated to a more recent version.  (That is why for example sharing activities was relatively easy at our first meeting, but became more difficult after people updated their machines with each minor release). Hopefully, if everyone gets updated to the Major Update 1, these problems will disappear. (I’m assuming that WPA authentication problems will disappear as well).
• Klein confirmed that XO will be available for sale to Americans at the end of 2008.
• Klein mentioned something interesting; although olpcnews.com is popular with users inside North America, in fact,  developers mainly follow the official forums, so if you want to give feedback or hear from people who actually know what they’re talking about, you should check the official forums in addition to olpcnews.
• Houstonian Aaron Poffenberger did a demo to show off Webkinz on the XO. Our main problem turned out not to be XO but the library’s wifi capabilities.

This was a really fun meeting. The topic for April’s meeting will be Updating; if you haven’t had time to update your XOs, someone at the meeting will be happy to do so. I haven’t picked a meeting date yet but would entertain suggestions. (We’ll try to meet at Montrose library this time on a Saturday afternoon).

Well, I had been worrying unnecessarily about installing fedora 7 on my laptop. Sure, it was a pain downloading the DVD and backing up data, but this time it didn’t present me with a lot of choices and installed things fairly quietly. Also, the dual boot situation wasn’t messed up at all.
Right now, it’s upgrading the packages with pup. I have yet to try wifi. I expect that to be a pain, but certainly easier than it was before. I also have to install proprietary applications (and the forbidden items ), but things are going quickly now. My main fear is that some of my configuration files in my home directories will confuse my installations. Apparently, ntfs write is substantially more reliable than it used to be, so I might be in fedora more often than I used to. Frankly, I stay in windows only for two reasons:

1. recording in Audacity–I have a usb adapter that doesn’t seem to work in linux.
2. demoing ebook software.

My main disappointment with linux solutions is that I couldn’t get my nokia pda to sync with my linux calendar. That was a reason I ended up buying a Dell Axim PocketPC pda.

Update: Wifi worked out of the box (in Gnome anyway). There are advantages to keeping your /home directory. Now if only I can figure out the absolutely bizarre way to download mp3 libraries (and perhaps other codecs). (Here’s a solution for downloading all those closed codecs). Here’s the fedora 7 tips page. Here’s another tips page. You gotta hand it to Fedora though.  They’re losing the mindshare war to ubuntu because of these damn libraries and codecs, and they won’t compromise!

Speaking of totally bizzare, here’s instructions on how to run IE on linux fedora.  I won’t be trying that anytime soon.

I just noticed that Fedora is no longer supporting FC5. lately I’ve noticed that support of things is waning: most notably Firefox 2. So now I’m faced with the perilous prospect of beginning another install on an older laptop. I would need to reinstall commercial applications, make a list of things I’ve installed and do the requisite backups. It would be a major time sink.

Oddly enough, last Monday I made significant progress getting started with plone 3. To install FC 7, I would need to start from scratch. Also, there are potential gotchas (I seem to recall my Thinkpad doesn’t allow install from DVD). Also, the wifi chip on my Thinkpad did horrible things when I first installed FC5. It took me a good 2 weeks of persistent troubleshooting Wifi to get it to work. I am not really in a position to waste time on unproductive activities.

So what do I do? At minimum, this is going to take a day and a half, possibly more if something fouls up. Someone suggested running the LiveCD to test hardware, a sensible idea if I ever heard of one. Also, apparently now you can boot the Live CD and then use an iso image from a hard drive. So Fedora people are making it easy. (Here’s an article about Fedora 7).

Still, it looks like Ubuntu has made the problem of forbidden downloads (i.e., java, mp3, adobe, etc) much more palatable to ordinary users. (Fedora doesn’t seem to have changed on its policies).

Although I finally managed to tackle my laptop wifi problem on Fedora Core 5, I really haven’t done much work on the Thinkpad T43 laptop until last week. But since then I have really been falling in love. I never realized how much I had fallen in love until I came across someone running a version of Red Hat from 2003. It’s like night and day. Observations:

• FC5’s default is Gnome. I like it because of its simplicity (and more importantly, because I like the Network Manager, which only seems to show up in the Gnome toolbar). But it has problems. The File Manager always opens up a new window when you click on it and lacks a two panel view you typically see in File Explorers. KDE’s Konqueror is an unusually good file manager, especially if you turn on the option “Show Navigation Panel” under the Window Menu. (see my screenshot) The vertical tabs on the left side tremendously enhance the user experience, letting you change views from Root to Home to History to System. With Konqueror I am always bookmarking paths to local documentation, so that helps a lot.
• Yumex kind of sucks when you have a dependency problem. (Sometimes to run a simple utility you end up having to downloads tons of other seemingly unrelated RPMs), but generally it works smoothly.
• KDE is a bit too topheavy for me, although you can access a lot of the stuff through command line and the Konqueror file browser. That’s right; you can experience the coolness of KDE within gnome just by typing konqueror on the command line.
• I haven’t quite figured out how to create menu applets for applications even though it’s rather easy to create them on the toolbar. Too bad they don’t come with hundreds of unique generic icons. I end up using icons from little used programs to appear on the top toolbar for quick launching.
• Clipboard problems (which I always used to experience previously) now seem to have disappeared in this linux.
• I no longer have stuck windows or Xwindow problems.
• With Thinkpad I’ve had issues related to start after suspending (usually after I close the laptop). But I’ve learned not to immediately start hitting buttons but to wait for the display to flash on before doing anything.
• I haven’t implemented my backup solution yet (that’s the project for this week), but I don’t expect to have many problems.
• FC5 hasn’t really had any problems with mounting USB drives or DVD. I’ve experienced some small problems with video files, but mostly it’s a matter of knowing which codec is supported for which application.
• In Gnome I’ve noticed that some applications have gigantic dialogue boxes which go outside the main display. Really annoying. Maybe I should increase my screen resolution? (I’m at 1024 x 768).
• Although I haven’t downloaded any mp3s yet (they will be on my storage network drive when I connect that). However, I’ve noticed that the fancy mp3 players aren’t adept at playing m3u files off the net–something really strange.
• I didn’t install the ATI drivers, although I might consider doing so later.
• Although I’m happy with my laptop experience, I can’t begin to describe the hell I had to go through to get wifi to work. Eventually I just needed to reinstall the whole thing. Thank god I installed /home on a separate partition. FC5 let me reinstall without even touching /home.

Looks like someone has converted the famous & free Linux manuals into .pdb ebook files.  That’s awesome.

Mark Pilgrim is a python/xml programmer who influenced a lot of web developers. I’ve read his great Dive into Python book and caught various essays here and there. But he’s been an erratic blogger. Now I find he is blogging (and even vlogging) on a semi-regular basis, which makes me very happy. Apparently, he has switched from Mac to Ubuntu recently, in response to some concerns about lockin. Here’s his thoughts about a Mac email client:

However, in the interests of fairness, I will amend my previous statement that Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with no possibility of exporting it to an open format. This is not true. Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with a tantalizingly broken export feature. I apologize for the confusion.

Here’s his list of essential applications he’s been using in Ubuntu  . He still uses emacs (that bastard!) but some of his other apps are more current. Here’s his rant about why open source apps don’t automatically ensure open standards:

There are more risk factors in the layer above the OS, the application layer. I still need to be vigilant about the formats that specific applications use to store data I care about preserving. Open source != open formats, and there are many examples of undocumented and underdocumented data formats in open source applications. The GIMP is a particularly egregious example. Its default .xcf format can only be read by GIMP and is deliberately undocumented outside the source code. GIMP only exports to formats with massive fidelity loss (you can export the final result but not in any editable form that includes layers and effects and brushes and so on). There are only a handful of third-party converters, and none of them are anywhere near complete. This is no better than Microsoft Office; in fact, it’s probably worse. In practice, Microsoft Office documents have better interoperability, because third parties have spent more time reverse-engineering the formats and handling all the edge cases. (Third parties are working on reverse-engineering XCF too.)

(On a gimp-related note, I’ve been reading up on gimp features and enjoy being able to leverage my knowledge on different PCs. I think Pilgrim is faulting the project when it may simply lack the resources to  document the format and handle the export filters).

Pilgrim mentioned beagle, a nifty-looking tool for searching your personal content. That includes email, multimedia, IMs, files. Apparently this gnome application was already included with the FC 5 default install. Am definitely checking that out soon.

The Beagle demos were made with  a vnc to swf screenrecording program. I’ll try that out next week.

Other interesting apps on the list: tomboy (a notetaking tool) , diva (gnome’s answer to imovie), freemind (a java applet mind mapper), bookburro (firefox book shopbot extension),  backuppc and rsnapshot . I also plan on investigating the itunes-like applications (such as amarok) after I configure my network/backup drive.

I am happy to report having solved my linux wireless problems (for now). I might write up a short tutorial about troubleshooting linux wifi (by now I’m practically the expert). The solution was dumb and ridiculously hard to figure out. I needed to hardcode the device configuration so that the channel corresponded to the channel of my LAN.  The default values in Fedora Core 5’s are absolutely ludicrous. I don’t know if the firmware is supposed to provide some default values or if the network configuration tool just is ludicrous.

I’m sorry to say that this problem had really gotten me stuck. I gave myself one more session to figure it out, or else I would buy a separate wireless card.  Luckily blind luck helped me.

Things I have learned from this experience:

1. When you start talking specific hardware, the number of people who can help you becomes very small.
2. Actually, I think the Network Manager tool is nifty. It seemed to have a lot of insight into the wifi networks around me, and it provided many visual cues for what was going on.
3. I had a stupid error message that apparently nobody else had gotten. That should have led me to believe that the problem was a lot dumber than I initially thought.
4. Although here yum/fedora wasn’t really to blame, I see the problems inherent in maintaining a package management system like Yum. When you update lots of things at once, it’s not always clear what is actually causing the problem.

Update: I have been busy chasing down yet another wireless bug related to my Linux laptop and the Intel 2915 wireless driver/firmware. Frustrating, and yet educational. (For those who take joy in my travails, check out this thread).

There is a positive side to this. I’m reaquainting myself with the linux networking configuration files. Also, I have decided henceforth to keep a fairly detailed chart (er, well, list) of the information I gain along the way.  There’s a lot of good information on the forums, although it’s so scattered that no one really has a sense of where everything is. It’s not so much documentation as notetaking. (When I gather enough information, I’ll post it on my weblog).

I am really close to buying a Network Area Storage solution. The frontrunner: Buffalo Technology Linkstation gigabit 250 gigabyte solution for $200. Actually, I may upgrade to the 300 gig solution ($280) after learning that installing the linkstation open firmware lets you install a server and media player software like swisscenter or twonkymedia (which apparently work well with my Avel Linkplayer DVD player via its ethernet connection).

I have a lot of things on my plate now. I really don’t need the chaos of having to maintain a buggy opensource hardware solution. All I really need is a backup solution. On the other hand, I’ve always been a gadget/hardware kind of guy, and it would be a feather in my cap (and nice to mention on the resume) if I can claim to put this together.

Update: Gosh, money doesn’t grow on trees. $300 for a backup NAS seems excessive for someone currently on sabbatical and trying to pinch every penny. 300 gigabytes; couldn’t I make do with 250 or 160? Maybe. But I have 4 devices (XP Desktop, XP laptop, Fedora Core 5 Laptop, Nokia 770 pda) I need to back up, many of which are media files, some of which are high definition files (and need to be viewed) on my HDTV. Those things, plus the advantages of having a nice media player interface on my HDTV/DVD player, makes spending $300 seem like not a big deal. Plus, having the ability to run media server software for my HDTV would really add to my ability to use my HDTV.
Now all I need to do is buy a HDTV capture card, and I’ll be set (just joking).

Update #2: By combining the order with two other things and ordering from newegg instead of amazon, I ended up spending $281 for the network storage server.  Not bad.