BarCampESM

Join us January 18th and 19th in Austin TX for BarCampESM!

If you happen to be able to get over to Austin, TX Friday or Saturday, and you are interested in open and informal discussions around Open Management or Enterprise Systems Managment or ITIL or BSM or if you just like hangin' with other geeks, then drop by J. Blacks on West 6th Street in downtown Austin. Here is the Wiki:

http://barcamp.org/BarCampESM

The first 50 folks signed up there get free food on Saturday. After that first 50 you have to pay for the food, but not for the company.

The details, including a link to Google Maps, are on the Wiki. I hope to see some of you there!

Apps and Platforms

"Anonymous" pointed out on my post called "Repairo" that one reason people still use MSWin is that running things like AutoCAD under WINE under Linux are fraught with problems. At best, it requires work and experience at this point in time.

As much as I am a fan of Linux and OS.X these days, I want to state that there is nothing magical about either platform. All computer operating systems are amazingly complex bits of code written by human beings, and at any point in time it is possible that one platform is better than another, and even the term "Better" would require one to state what they mean by "Better". Better at memory utilization? Easier to cluster? Less prone to crashes? More virus proof? Sells more hardware?

That there are currently more MSWin applications is also not magical. To repeat what I said in the comment to the "Repairo" post: AutoCAD started as a Mac app, and when Autodesk saw people were willing to pay for copies of it on MSWin they ported it. If Autodesk thought enough people wanted it on BSD or Linux or the iPhone they would make a version that worked there as fast as their fingers could code.

Phrased that way, the question would *seem* to be, do enough people want any given app on Linux to bring it there. But that is not the way Linux works either. Here is where companies get into trouble not just with Linux but with all Open Source.

The real question about any Open Source platform always is: Are there enough people that want any given *type* of application that they are willing to take the time and effort to create it. In the example of AutoCAD: Are there any technical people out there that want a CAD package on Linux bad enough that they will write it themselves?

To look very quickly into that, I googled up two search terms: CAD + Linux

http://www.tech-edv.co.at/lunix/CADlinks.html

Over 50 CAD packages for Linux, some commercial, many Open Source. And that was just one of many hits.

The problem for a commercial company like Autodesk is knowing when the market has moved enough to a new platform to make it worth their while to port to a new OS platform. That costs a fair amount of money, and if the product is not written in a portable fashion, then it costs even more money to either port it or better, redesign it to be portable.

The problem is worse than it seems though, because in this case the Open Source world will look, maybe ask once, get a response like " We are waiting to see which way the market goes before we decide if we are going to move to the new platform", and then the Open Source folks just move on without them. By the time they decide to enter the market, the field is crowded and they are no longer the number one choice. In fact, there is now probably a free, Open Source solution sitting there and now they have to convince people that it is worth money to pay for their newly ported version.

I pay for the best. I think most people are willing to. Since I don't use CAD, I'll switch to Office packages for a second: Even though I do not have to, I send money to OpenOffice because I use their product and I like it. I like it better than MS Office because it uses Open Standard file formats, and runs on whatever platform I happen to be on.

Another example: I just paid for a copy of Scrivener recently. I am working on writing a few books, and found OpenOffice to be unable to do some things that I wanted it to do (Chapterization and organization). Some research found Scrivener, and I am extremely happy with it... other than I wish there was a Linux version. It's OS.X only. Guess what happens next? If someone comes up with a decent manuscripting program that is Open Source and cross platform, then I'll be retiring Scrivener...

All software applications are like that. Companies need to know and understand this new Open Source dynamic of platform, or find themselves playing catch-up.

Winning by Not Competing at all

When I was very young, I used to fight with my younger brother. Well, from my point of view, he used to fight with me.  I probably egged him on in some way that I don't remember now. I do remember being really frustrated because he would not leave me alone!

The point is that at some point he would get so riled up that he would dive bomb me, we wrestle to the ground and I'd proceed to pin him down till he gave up. I was two years older, and even as adults I was always taller and weighed more. of course he became a Marine, but fortunately we didn't fight anymore by then :)

One day, after being made to give in, he went to my mother and complained about the fact that I had been in a fight with him, and mom told him that if he didn't want to fight, he didn't have to. He could just walk away. After he said that he couldn't and that she just didn't understand, and he left the room, she also told me the same thing. That I was older and stronger and that while he was the one picking the fights, I did not have to fight back. 

I then proceeded to drive my brother nuts, because I realized she was right. I did not care about the things he cared about, and I did not want to fight. I always felt a little sick about the fights. Even though I won, I did not enjoy it. Part of it was knowing that they were not fair of course, and kids have a built in fairness meter. But I did not enjoy the violence of them. I know some folks get into that kind of thing, but it is "not my bag, baby". My daughter has been watching Austin Powers again....

How I drove my brother nuts was that I did exactly what my mom said. I quit competing. I started working on my inner geek, while he was off trying to figure out why I didn't engage anymore. 

This is why Linux makes MS nuts.

Linux / Open Source et al does not compete with MS. They don't care about the issues MS cares about. Sure there are certain corners of the Linux world... even entire distros that try to compete with MS, but at the end of the day Linux/OpenSource (L/OS) is about whatever they are interested in. 

Where MS is in part about things like Digital Rights Management and piracy of their code and the like, L/OS could collectively not care less. The very beginning of Linux is a microcosm of the whole thing: Linus Torvalds needed an OS for something at school, and so he wrote one.

People that take their own precious time and talent and create open source are also a breed apart. For many, it is about the code, and the act of creation, and the filling of a need, not about being contract programmers writing code they could care less about.

Linux and Open Source end up getting better and better, and doing more and more because they are not competing with anyone. Only themselves.

I watch few competitive sports. Really, I do not understand why I should care if the green team or the blue team put the ball/widget/thingie in a special place more often than the other team did.

The sports I do watch are things like snow skiing at the Winter Olympics. I ski... I used to anyway, and all skiing for me was about getting a little better at it every time I went. I knew I would never be great (I started at age 29...) but I always felt great after a day on the mountain where I had learned a new thing. I watch the Olympics in admiration of these people that are just so good at this. I don't really care who wins. I just like to watch.

Linux and Open Source will always be better because at the end of the day, it is not trying to be anything other than the best it can be. 

Just like Mom said.

Waiting on the iPhone Community to fix Apple

Apple is being deeply clueless lately, at least about the iPhone.

I am not talking about iPhone unlocks here. I do not get why Apple does not sell an unlocked model at a higher price-point than the unit they sell via AT&T here in the states. Seems like a no-brainer, so I assume it is contractual with AT&T that they do not.

I don't really care: I know there are folks who really have issues with AT&T but I am unable to discern any major differences in moral character between any of the carriers here in the US. The price is the price, I have looked at it, decided it is worth it, and am willing to pay it.

I also do not care about the iPhone sealed battery, no GPS chip, or no 3G. I have looked at each of these issues, and decided that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For ME. I also do not expect that others needs, wants or desires here are the same as mine, and I expect that others will stay away from the iPhone because they don't like these two features *more* than they like what the iPhone is. [update from the future: Ok, that was three features, not two. Doh.]

I am pretty clearly on record as loving my iPhone... mostly. It is as much a portable computer as anything else. That is what I wanted from the converged device.

However....

Apple is not meeting my needs in the application department. I want things other than what they offer. I get the whole web 2.0 thing. I still want certain classes of things to run locally on my iPhone. My deepest disappointment to date is that there is not a decent Klondike time waster available for local install. Not from Apple, and not from the iPhone community at large, even with their local applications installer. I know about the web site solitaire sites, and so far none of them are making my socks roll up and down.

I have the Nullriver Installer.app, and have used it to install all sorts of the stuff that Apple forget to install or at least make available as options. Things like a native IM client No iChat... what *were* they thinking. Give me this great keyboard, and I can't use it to IM! I am not a big IM'er. I don't do it at work much at all. When I have time to IM is when I am sitting on the subway someplace, or in a waiting room at the Doctors office or something. When I am with my iPhone, not my computer.

Other missing stuff I want are things like an RSS news reader, VNC, and (as a geek) the BSD subsystem so I can open a terminal and SSH around to things.

There should have been an SDK from day one, and when Apple did not create it, they should not have been surprised that the community was not going to sit around and wait for them to figure it out.

I am in the interesting position now that I will not install the new 1.1.1 version of the code on the iPhone because it is attempting to break my applications (and perhaps brick my iPhone in the process), and I value the community developed applications far more than any ability to directly download music to my iPhone,(iTunes store access being the only really new thing in 1.1.1, and "Just In Time Music" is not something I live for. I can wait till I get home.).

It would be nice to have iTunes Store access from the iPhone, but I do not want it more than I want all the other cool community applications. I mean really: has Apple *seen* Navizon? I don't care that the iPhone has no GPS chip. Don't need it with Navizon.

Instead of taking the opportunity to build community, not to mention get great feedback about what people really want their iPhones to do, Apple appears to be trying to make the community mad. It won't be long before folks just say "This isn't worth it. Great hardware though. Time to install FreeBSD / Linux and just be done with this."

I don't think that is what Apple wants: an lPhone. That is exactly what they are incenting. The law of unintended consequences is a cruel master.

So, like the Chuck Norris joke, I am waiting (Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits). I am waiting for the community to fix 1.1.1. I am watching what Apple does next. I am deciding.

I don't *have* to buy Apple stuff. I do so far, but I am fully willing to not do it in future if Apple continues not getting it. Linux is taking off in the Smartphone market. There is probably a reason.

Come on Apple. Please figure this out!

Schism

When one is young, and asking questions about the new world unfolding before them for the first time, the answers often given by the adult being are less than satisfying to the questioner. It is a common situation: I dare say it is universal. It is the fuel for all sorts of jokes on American TV sitcoms, such as "Dad, what is Sex?" and after much consternation that answer we all knew was coming is "Go ask your mother". She answers "Go ask your Father", and the kid says "I did. He told me to ask you." And she says "He did did he... Boy is he in trouble.". Much hilarity ensues, and the ultimate answer given is usually something along the lines of "Wait till you are older" or "Go ask your friends at school: why do you think we send you to public school?". I watch too much TV....

When I was pretty young (I do not recall the exact age: somewhere around five or so I think) My mother and I were driving past a church. I learned how to read by looking at street signs and asking my parents what they said. This particular church had a very long name. I don't recall it, but I remember it was longer than I could read in the time I had as we drove past it. I was intrigued. The church building itself was very small: Like a one room schoolhouse from Deadwood in the late 1880's. I asked my mother what that church was. It went something like this:

Me: Why is that churches name so long?

Mom: I don't know exactly. I have never been to it.

Me: Why do churches have different names? Aren't they all Christian churches?

Mom: [starting to look uncomfortable] That one is. But no, not all churches are Christian churches. There are many different religions.

Me: But that Christian church has a different name than the one near our house...

Mom: Just like there are many different religions, inside Christianity there are many different churches. People sometimes believe different things, and when they decide that they believe too differently, they decide to form a different church, so that people that believe the same things can go to church together.

Mom never talked down to me when I was young. Even if she was uncomfortable with the subject of what I was asking about, she gave it her best shot. Maybe in this case she was just glad I was not asking where babies came from. :)

Later I heard a minister call this "Left Foot Washers", and being different from "Right Foot Washers". His point was that the points of schism can seem incredibly small things when viewed from a third party point of view.

And this Relates to Linux or Open Source how?

I have now brought up sex and religion. Maybe I'll skip politics today, not go for the trifecta and have a post that has something to PO everyone. I have a theory. Just a personal speculation, but it seems to make sense to me.

Whatever it is about people that causes such fractures to occur, and elevates preference to things people will argue over: Whatever the "Engine of Schism"(tm) is, it is at least part of what makes Open Source so diverse. It is just that in Open Source what is divisive has been turned into a strength. In the same way that Biodiversty helps life on earth.

My starting point for my text today (boy, I am really asking for it here...) is a comment made to apost of mine over at TalkBMC. In this comment, there is one sentence, one central assertion, that one version of Linux is 100 times better than another version of Linux. The two Linuxii in question are both of recent vintage, running the 2.6 kernel.

It is hard to tell on a written comment how much is tongue in cheek, how much is intentional hyperbole, and how much is something the person truly believed to the core of their being.

This is clearly subjective, since I can think of no easy way to create a measurement systems that would let you measure the goodness of one version of Linux distro compared to another... or to any other OS for that matter. While I am on the record as not being deeply interested in running MS Windows for example, I will tell you that a big part of that preference is just that I resent all the hours of my life I have lost to MS Windows systems breaking, plus all the hours I have spent trying to make MS Windows systems play nice with others. I know the basis of my preference, even if I can not quantify it.

My recent set of posts about Fedora and Mint (both here and at TalkBMC) were in part based on a Fedora schism point. Fedora holds it as extremely important that they try and stay pure open source rather than include any unencumbered but not open binary bits. My point was that while this was admirable, it was also going to hurt their adoption rate. This is the difference in my point of view or preference: I would like to see Linux more widely adopted, and I see their position as being hardline and inflexible. I think that if they are more inclusive, then vendors might come to see the value of Open Source and relax their "Binary Only" positions.

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC I looked at PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) 2007 as a corporate Linux desktop candidate. PCLOS is a fork from Mandrake / Mandriva a while back, and its guiding star is Texstar. He has been packaging Linux stuff for years. I do not know exactly all the things that drove Texstar away from Mandrake such that he felt is necessary to create his own distro (At least part of it was that he grew interested in LiveCD's, which Mandriva did not have back then, but now they have in spades. Maybe they leveraged Texstars work?), but once on his own he says that he started pulling in patches and fixes from all over the place: Debian, Fedora, etc. PCLOS is a schism point... and it is also inclusive. More on this is a sec.

GUI

Also over at TalkBMC, a while back, I spent some time thinking out loud about peoples preferences for KDE or Gnome or Afterstep of whatever. Linux is rife with GUI projects, and while most of the gravity has formed large planetary bodies around KDE and Gnome, there are still a bunch of others. The schism point for Gnome was that they did not like the tookit at the core of KDE (Qt, from a company called Trolltech) being commercial in nature. They wanted a totally Open Source solution, and so took GIMP as their starting place to create the Gnome Toolkit (GTK), now in version 2 (GTK2). Funny thing is that now that toolkit for KDE has been GPl'ed, but not before we had two pretty nice GUI's. The early days of Gnome and KDE were bad times: the applications developed for one GUI were famous for not working under the other GUI. I never see that anymore.

Another recent schism of interest was the one where Beryl was split off Compiz, and they have now joined forces to create the compositing engine for 3D stuff on Linux.

The reason for each of these schisms was different. Purity of cause, people not getting along on a project, a project not being inclusive enough so some folks decided to just go form a new project... whatever. The reasons are technical, emotional, legal, external, internal. They are powered also by this weird thing we have called preference. I talked about this a bit in "Color Theory".

The "Engine of Schism" is the ultimate in flex fueled engines. It feeds off all sorts of things. It drives wedges between groups of otherwise rational people. It feeds of real issues and trivialities with equal ease. it seems to be completely in human nature that this engine exists though. We do not seem, as a race, able to do otherwise.

"You like Blue?... err, then my favorite is Purple. yeah. Purple. Maybe Red. No. Definitely Purple. Are you sure you like Blue best?"

Politics

Here is an example from Politics. I said I was not going here,but what the heck. Lets have some schism with our "Post Toasties" today.

In the US, from 1861-1865, a huge war was fought [changed verbiage per Richard's comment:SC] between neighbors in the same nation. It was called "The Civil War" here, because it was so huge and so deadly and so bitter that is seemed like it could only ever be singular. It was "The" because to have another like it even to this day seems unthinkable. It ignores the fact that there have been smaller uprisings and civil disobediences for all the history of the US. The others were small enough as to pale in comparison to what the horror of "The" Civil War was.

The schism point was slavery. A deeply immoral evil practice that went on in this country for far too many years. There were lots of compromises along the way of the early history of the country that in retrospect made "The" war inevitable. However, when it broke out, in the south it was widely rationalized as a war for self determination. States Rights. In this case 'The' war was about the right of a state to determine whether or not they were going to stay a slave state, but that last part was sort of glossed over.

This is a hugely serious schism. It caused a huge war, tore a country apart, had brothers killing each other, and it is still healing all this time later.

When I view splits in Open Source projects from that perspective, they seem so innocent.

Making a Weakness a Strength

What is unique to Open Source is that for all the schisms that projects might have, and all the fifty thousand different directions that people might pull, all of it generates products. Code. Doc. Things that other projects, by the terms of the Open Source licenses, can re-use, Even if they don't use a line of code from a project, but just take inspiration, it is an engine that reverses the ill effects of the "Engine of Schism".

Circle back to PCLOS for a second: the current issue of "PCLinuxOS Magazine" has an interview with Texstar about the birth of the distro. In it, it is pretty clear that Texstar uses diversity to his advantage. Here is a small quote:

In November 2006 we utilized a one time source
code snapshot from our friends at Mandriva to pull in an updated
glibc/gcc core and associated libraries. We spent the following 6
months rebuilding, debugging, customizing, patching and updating our
new code base. We pulled in stuff from our old code base, utilized
patches/code from Fedora, Gentoo and Debian just to name a few. This
is why you will never see me [Texstar] distro bashing as it would be
hypocritical to do such a thing since we are still dependent in many
areas on other distros development processes due to our limited but
hard working volunteer development team.

The only thing that bothers me in the slightest about that quote (and I do not think it was meant this way) is where Texstar says that they are 'Still' dependent on other distros. My assertion is that "All distros are dependent on each other, and the folks in the core projects". Linux is not really 'PCLOS" in a pure sense. Linux is the bit you get from kernel.org. You are still a thousand projects away from a distro at that point.

Schism is bad, when it leads to things like wars. Schism is good, when its resultant diversity is leveraged.

Computer Religion

And that brings me to why I brought up sex and religion in this post. When someone says a recent Linux Distro is 100 times better than another recent Linux distro, I worry a little that schism has lead to computer religion. Taken on its face, examined rationally, you have to ask "how can that be?". They all feed off the same kernel stock, and pull in the same sets of office projects and same GUI projects and so forth.

It is not a trivial thing to package up a Linux distro (See Texstar's quote above for the amount of work that went into just one point release). Any Distro with a following will have people testing it, feeding back to it, and over time that distro will stabilize and improve, and because the chewy Linux goodness is inside, it will be a good distro. It almost can not help but be. Have a look at distrowatch.com, and look at the number of downloads of any given distro. The ones that are the most downloaded have the greatest community around them, therefore the most testing and feedback, therefore are likely to be pretty good, useful versions of Linux et al.

They will be different from each other. Some will be better on laptops or desktops. Others may be focused on technology exploration for later inclusion in server versions of the OS. Some will be installed with one GUI, or another. Some will be focused on education. Others personal usage. Others business usage.

So, a commandant of computer religion should be "Computer User, Know Thyself, but Tolerate Others"

Like any other religion, it will be something that we strive for rather than achieve all the time. Being human, we'll fail, and just have to get back up and try again.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Open Source, Diversity, PCLinuxOS, PCLOS, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora

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Its Not Easy

As a followup to my last post here (but subtly related to the last two over I did over at TalkBMC ) I wanted to mention something that has been bothering me for a while. There is an attitude, quite prevalent in some quarters, that everything should just be easy. Uncomplicated. That if thought is required, then it is not worth the time. I don't want to know anything new, or learn anything new, I just want the right thing to happen. It is everywhere, and the funny thing is, like so many other things, that attitude is both good and bad. When it is bad, it is incredibly destructive though.

Whats Good About It?

I am a computer generalist, and a geek. I love learning new things, and I love to learn across a broad swath of topics. History, science, technology, travel... I'm your guy. My wife starts to tell me about some kind of costume jewelry made back in the 1950's and I start asking how they made it. I don't care that it is "pretty" (but it is handy to know that she thinks it is), but I am curious how they did vapor deposition of rare minerals on various surfaces 6 decades ago. I am hardly alone in being this kind of person, and everyone I know who is like me gets pretty frustrated when someone raises their hands to interrupt a loving soliloquy on some topic we are interesting in and says "I don't care: just tell me if it works or not."

It is a classic communication gap, and it works in every direction. Start telling me about the win-loss record of some sports team I have never heard of and watch my eyes glaze over. Now the sports person I am talking to thinks I am an idiot for not caring about what they care about.

Here is at least one way I think simplification is good: take OS.X for example. Under the covers is a sophisticated, secure, UNIX-like OS and Apple has hidden all the geek stuff under the covers and away such that utterly non-technical people can use the computer to do productive things. At the same time, I can still pop open the terminal or X11 window and do the same things I can on any other UNIX.

Saying something can not be made simpler is just a challenge for someone someplace to prove them wrong. Even if it took a billion dollars and a zillion person-hours to create the simple face over the complexity, it can almost always be done.

There is a reason there are specialists. And the best ones are those that can not only deal with the complexity of the task at hand but explain it to ways the uninitiated can comprehend. I am thinking of things like Brian Greene's books like "The Fabric Of the Cosmos" or Kip Thorn's "Black Holes and Timewarps" here. Moderately easy to read and comprehend, well presented books about some of the deepest and most esoteric stuff going in the human "space".

What is bad about it

It isn't easy.

An expert may make something look easy: Bonnie Raitt may make playing steel guitar look like it takes no effort at all, but only because she has been living with the music since she was a tadpole.

Raise your hands, scream, and run all you like from the geeks, but at the end of the day nothing gets created without them. Without someone writing code someplace, a software company has nothing to sell. If you want your software to be the best there is, you can't have someone who writes bad code run it through a magic box and have it spit out great code. All the high level languages and Nth-generation coding toolsets may make people more productive, but at the end of the day, that good creative knowledgeable person still had to write it. Forget this at your peril.

That new gadget like your tiny cell phone? That thing has been under continuous development since Hedy Lamar invented the principal behind them. Literally billions of dollars, but more importantly millions upon millions or person hours went into making that tiny little thing. You can have all the money you like but till it hires a talent to do the creation... well. Say you went back in time, and had a billion dollars with you. You could hand it to all the cave people you like: you still won't get a Web 2.0 application. More likely a bunch of campfires.

It is not easy. Nothing worth doing is.

So What?

• "Bottom line that for me."
  
• "Just tell me how to make it cheaper."
  
• "Can I have that in a spreadsheet?"
  
• "In Color please."
  
• "No new formats or paradigms please. I only understand stuff I learned when I was a kid."
  
• "I do not care how you make it happen, just make it happen."
• "I don't want to know"
• "NAANAAANAAANAAA NAA... Not LISTENING"
  

Ever feel like the Black Knight in the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"? You keep succeeding, so they keep lopping off more body parts? Which part of the "this isn't as easy as I'm making this look" principal is not being grasped here?

Grasp. Concepts. NEW concepts! Run away!

Social Media is one place I see this new knowledge / new concept thing. Something as simple as a Wiki. Here is this nifty tool, easy to load content onto, easy to enable group editing and enabling sharing "tribal knowledge" or "groupthink". Content generation is one of the *hardest* things for anyone to do, and here is this tool that allows that pain to be shared, and knowledge grown and expended on by everyone that has a piece of that knowledge. Under the covers is webtech (actually based on some pretty old principals: Hyperlinks have been around for decades) so it can hot-link to other things, like explanations of terms and background information and all sorts of other things.

It was not easy. It took a bunch of incredibly creative people person-years to make the Wiki tools simple and easy to use. In fact, multiply *that* by all the Wiki toolsets out there, since there are many Wikis. Add in the other tools that were something else that *added* Wiki features. Millions of person-hours, and most all of them from subject matter experts with *years* of experience. But there it is: this new concept. This new invention. This new way of thinking about how people can work together on content. It isn't a glorified file server. It is based on layers and layers of other inventions, but it is this new thing.

There is this group of people. This huge group. They don't want to know the new thing, or adapt. They view documents as having "owners" and should only be edited sequentially.

"Here: I copied that web page on the Wiki into this document and emailed it to you so you can update it."

If you read that last sentence and went "Well, yeah. Of course..." please slap your forehead.

Naw... This is a blog. No one who reads a blog about Linux and Open Source would think like that. Right? :)

The Recent Posts

Here is how this all relates back to the recent posts I mentioned. Over at TalkBMC I am doing a new thing where I am talking about an in-flight project. As things progress problems are found, traced, solved, and corrected. Progress is made, but only as fast as it can be made. Remember that for humans the principal encapsulated in the phrase "Having a baby takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned" is true in all sorts of other endeavours. Progress is gated on expertise and the time and focus allowed TO the expert.

OK. Sure. No one not interested in that project will even read the post. But that is OK, because it is a blog. Whenever anyone needs the information it contains, they will find it with Google, Yahoo, etc. The power of social media in action. Google up 'tru64 nfs v2 linux problem' or similar search terms, and you'll find out what we know, and in the process see when we knew it, and how we learned it. At the end, you'll see that building a NAS cluster file server doesn't just happen.

Related to the last post here, one of the disconnects out there is around the way we use words, and what extra meaning is loaded into them based upon our experience. "Open" has connotations, and the initiated in "Open Source" bring to the party a meaning every time they read it in popular written media, even if it has no relation at all to what it really is. But for those that know a little more. Lets say they know about Linux, and that it is free, and even that Dell now supports it, and maybe it is even on the PC they are sitting in front of, and it is easy to use, lets them surf the Internet, read and write email, create documents, balance their checkbooks... whatever.

What are the chances they know how many people have worked how many untold hours creating this nifty computer, wrapped in the intricacies of things like device drivers, system schedulers, running the application space in the right key so it doesn't have root level access... on and on. And on. And on. Experts created it. It was not easy. Not everyone can do it. And not everything can be made simple. It can be made simple to USE. But if you want to do something: add a feature, fix a bug, whatever then you now have to learn.

Here is the destructive bit I talked about. If one does not know how hard something is, and they are the ones deciding how resources will be allocated to various things, what are the chances they are going to get it right? What if political realities are well known but technical ones are just too hard to figure out? See the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster for details: The politics of having to have a successful space program was defined as launching on time rather than with a safe bird. An uninformed point of view. To be clear, I am not saying that we should not launch Space Shuttles because they are dangerous. Exploration is dangerous. We know that. The tragedy of Challenger was that the "O" rings was a known problem. If we are going to die exploring (and we will), lets do it finding out the things we didn't already know. See last section.

The lesson of Challenger: Learn how to listen and learn from your experts.

Learning is Not Just Technical

it is not just about technical things that you have to learn. There are social things too. Example: Once you are good at C (the technical thing, and no small feat), and have read the code, made the change, tested it, verified it works, and all sorts of things, you still have to deal with things like:

• How does any given project like to receive code updates or suggestions?
  
• Just because it worked, is it coded according to the standards of the project?
  
• Is the feature useful to enough people to make inserting it into the code base worth all the effort over the upcoming years of maintaining it?
  
• Did anyone get talked to? Consulted? Will it hurt anyones feelings that the change was made?
  

It isn't simple. It isn't easy. Not everyone can do it. But that does not mean that there is not benefit in learning something more about about it, no matter what "it" is. Next time someone is telling you something about a subject that you think you have no interest in, take a second and learn a little more. You never know where it might take you.

All Knowledge is Good

The biggest detour of my life was when I spent about two years working in an alcohol and drub rehab center. Nothing I learned there has direct bearing on being a computer person? Wrong. I use the stuff I learned from all these people who were trying to turn their lives around every single day of my life, and in every aspect of it. I would not trade that time for anything. It was hard work (16 hours days sometimes, Rotating shifts, minimum wage pay, Constant emotional stress...) and it was especially hard for a geek just trying to understand. Long story why.... Doesn't matter. As they say in the commercial here in the US, it is "priceless"

On Being Open

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC, "The Secret Linux Agenda", I spent a fair amount of time trying to think out loud about some of the disconnects in the world of Open Source. I am given a pretty hard time at BMC about the fact that I write long posts, so I worked hard to keep the "Agenda" post as short as I could, but still touch on at least a few examples of some of the disconnects people have when they talk about being open. Or Open. Or open source. or Open Source. I also mentioned the negative image some of this "open" stuff has because of the behaviors of some people in the various communities.

I wrote that post before I went to my first ever Austin Social Media Club meeting. Whurley was the speaker at the event, and he made a metric ton of terrific points about this during his talk.

Open Confusion

There was one particularly ticklish question from the room at the Austin Social Media Club meeting (Anne Gentle and I there) that I think really boiled all of this down. That comment / question was:

If people are doing "Open Source", why aren't they more Open?

It was a great question and really underlined the confusion about what the term "Open" means. Given the amount of audible agreement in the room with that question, for many in a social media club, "Open" in "Open Source" had connotations of "Accessible", "Easy to get along with", and "Willing to have civil conversations".

The Rainbow of Open Source

Spend any time in an Open Source product forum, and you can easily see what the folks in the social media club were talking about. Someone asks a question. Usually it is an innocent question being made by someone that does not know anything about the product. They, for their part, feel that they are doing the right thing. They are showing interest, and willingness to learn. They are being "open".

You know what happens next: In an un-moderated forum, some will actually try to help, and answer the question. At the very least, they will tell them where the first-timer documents are located, and some might even point out how to use the search facility to find every other time that question was asked, and the answers that they got then. All of those things are classifies as what we call "signal". Useful information.

The middle ground response happens when a response is given, but the person who asked the question has no way to parse the answer. That breaks down further as:

• The answer was given in a way that assumed the person to have knowledge they did not.
  
• The answer was given in such a way as to question whether the person is actually responding in the same language as the questioner.

Either of these examples are about communications styles, and whether or not the person who is doing the technical work can enter the requisite frame of mind (empathy, if you will) to have conversations with those less technical than themselves.

I had this experience growing up when I was talking to my Dad about math. He is a EE at NASA. A real rocket scientist. They exist! He knows so much math (some of it pretty esoteric and useful largely in his speciality of antenna design), and has for so long, that my simple frustrations with things like Freshman Algebra were in some ways a mystery to him. In one particularly memorable conversation, I asked why something worked in a particular way, and after a bit of time he said that once I knew a certain higher level of math this would become obvious. I was temporarily stuck: I would never *see* the next level of math till I grokked this one!

And Then Came Maude....

Sooner or later, intolerance strikes. Someone will post a response to the new person that contains anything from mild abuse to questioning their patriotism in a time of war. Something like:

"Are you NUTS!!! Why the H*LL are you posting such stupid dumb*** question. Why do you hate our troops? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries (From the Monty Python Phrasebook: "Useful things to tell customers when they are calling and bothering you")".

It may be more ... err... sophisticated:

"We do not tolerate fools lightly in this forum. Please remove yourself to other places, so that you do not annoy us in the future, and so that we may concentrate on real issues."

This new, trying to do the right thing, be "open" person is now deeply confused and hurt. Is this not Open source. Is this not a public forum? Even if they don't know anything about this tool or product, they still need help on it.

In a forum for a paid product, no support professional would post such a response. If they did, their career would be at an end in short order. A company would not tolerate paying customers being abused by people from their company.

There are a lot of reasons why the maladaptive response to the newbie question is occurring in the Open Source forum:

• I am doing this "for free"
• This is not my day job
• I answered that same question endlessly already
• I only have so many hours in the day. I can spent them repeating myself, or being productive
• PUUUULEASE!!!! They asked me why this didn't work the same as Windows!!!! AS-IF!!!!!
  
• I am out of caffeine, and I have no money to get fresh. I hate being poor and brilliant
• I have not been on a date in a decade
• Combinations of several or all of the above

The reason does not matter. In a customer support situation, if someone was thinking about trying the new "Open" thing, and gets that response, the damage is done.

Smug and Arrogant?

A post came out recently about Apple users being "Smug and Arrogant", and when I looked at it there was a poll. 2/3's or those who had read the post agreed that Applen were guilty as charged. You could take that post and change all the Apple references to Linux or other Open Source projects, and I think the poll would be about the same. And it is because of the same reasons. Well... maybe not the Apple advertising campaign part. But as smug as those ads may be, I like 'em. I think they kind of actually miss a point criticising the ads saying that John Hodgeman plays "PC" as bumbling. John Hodgeman gets all the good lines! In many ways, he is the more likable of the two. I have in fact often viewed the ads as being sort of a misstep for Apple because "PC" is more endearing in his own, can't stop blue-screening, kind of way. Maybe it's just me though...

Fedora and Ubuntu

Now I want to circle around to part of what I was trying to get at with my recent posts both here and at TalkBMC about Fedora and Ubuntu. Another aspect of "open", "closed", and the new users experience.

Fedora is a great Distro, if you already know what you are doing. Fedora, like OpenSUSE, lives in the middle of the road. It is not as challenging to install as MS Vista or rolling your own Linux distro starting with a download from Kernel.org. Fedora is easier and faster than installing GenToo. It is not as easy as Ubuntu or Linspire or Xandros. Yes: I know Xandros is in bed with Microsoft these days. See the bit above about arrogant and smug though: I know why the Xandros/MS deal is not optimal, but does the average person that just wants this stuff to work?

Fedora has an admirable stance on why they do not include any software in the Distro that is not really Open Source. My example in the other posts was Wifi cards like Intel and Atheros where even though the vendor has supplied driver code, they hold back the code to the cards driver loadable firmware and only provide a binary. With Fedora, you will have to work hard to get that card going, and their point in acting closed to closed source is to incent card manufacturers to be more open.

I love it. I think card manufacturers are wrong to think their microcode is all that splendidly different in a commodity market like Wifi, and that being more open and easier to install would be an advantage in the marketplace!

However....

Being hard to install for the right reasons means by default you are NOT after the casual installer. The person just trying to use the computer as a tool to get something or the other done. The person who heard that Linux was really cool and was willing to try it to see what it is all about.

The Spectrum

On one end we have the Xandros / Microsoft lashup. Xandros is licensing closed protocols from Microsoft that will allow them among other things to create programs to access content on MS Exchange. They call this mash "Mixed Source". If I sound a bit leery, it is because I used to run BMC's email system, back when we used HP's OpenMail, and I watched HP make a similar deal, and then not to long after that, see OpenMail sold to Samsung, where it later died. The problem from my point of view was that having the protocols was only half the battle. Someone still had to write all the programs to use them. MS has spent years layering all this stuff together, RPC's and Protocols like MAPI and CIFS so that it is no trivial thing to create programs that use them. Ask the folks at Samba.org. There is a reason MS Vista took seven years and billions of dollars in R&D, and came out looking like a gussied up version of XP with compatibility issues.

Middle ground is Ubuntu/Mint. Closed source, binary only bits are not only allowed but supplied. A message is sent to the person at boot that "Restricted Source" is in use, and if you click on it, a display of all the restricted source bits that the OS had to load to run on this hardware is displayed. You know who is playing nice, and who still keeps their cards close to their chest, source code wise.

Then there is the completely open. And Open. Supporting only that which is fully Open, and fully unencumbered, projects like Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE reward openness by inclusion. Open is a wide world of things, where you can build whatever you need, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time.

Support

Stretched across the span of closed to open is another dimension. Support. Whurley likes to say that "people" (and these people include companies) have one of two things: Time or Money. I would add to that "Expertise", which came at least in part with time, and now costs money.

If you are paying for support, you probably have money, and you also expect that you will *never* have the conversation I outlined in the "Maude" section above. You are paying for the right to have a throat to choke. You can also spend money on a person who is your local expert, and whose throat you'll being squeezing. Or both.

Novell,RedHat and Ubuntu walks between all these worlds with their commercial Linuxii. Novell, like Xandros, has some sort of deal in place with Microsoft although I am not sure it is quite as "deep" as Xandros's. You can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it, and it will be supported by Canonical. Etc. Etc.

But Its My First Time

I have been saying for a long while now that Linux is ready to take on the personal and corporate desktop. I base that on personal experience, not only of being a user personally and professionally, but in helping others to do the same thing. I watched my brother (who is not a computer person) look at an Ubuntu PC for the first time and say in some wonder "This is Linux?", clearly thinking it was going to be something much more mysterious than what it was.

If you are Open Source / Computer savvy, I'll wager someone someplace has asked you at least once: "What is the best version of Linux for me to run?". As technical people, we as a group like to answer such questions correctly, even if two minutes later their eyes are glazing over, and, like one of my blog posts, we are just warming up.

These days I just answer that question with "Mint" or "Ubuntu". If they asked me that question, they are not ready to hack device support in Fedora just yet. They may never want to. As good as Fedoras reasons are for being Open, and only Open, this rules them out for a beginner at least in my estimation.

As I was lamenting in "Agenda", that is too bad. Fedora has a ton of great stuff in it. By ceding the entry level Linux to Ubuntu, they are also ceding mind and market share. Since under the covers, Linux is Linux, Ubuntu can grow with the user. When it comes time to install their first Linux server, Ubuntu has one of those now too.

At the end of the day, it looks like to me that the way one goes about being open (or Open) is to be inclusive.

Linux on a Laptop, Twitter, and writing open source code on a Mac

Linux on a Laptop

I just received notice today that an article I wrote back in March of this year is now being published. Its in the new LiNUX+ Magazine, and is about choosing a laptop for Linux. It is kind of funny in a way: I am so used to the immediacy of weblogs and tweets that publishing in a real paper magazine just seemed to take forever.

I kind of knew that when I was writing the article in an intellectual way, and so made an effort to keep the article not specifically tied to any particular version of Linux, knowing that they would have all revved versions since I wrote it. Example: Mint 2.2 was current at that time I think, and of course I'm on 3.0 now. Emotions clearly did not know how long it was going to take. It feels like forever ago.

The topic seemed pretty germane to what I have been up to lately, what with messing with Fedora 7 on the IBM X30 laptop. My most recent post of at TalkBMC (going up later today actually) counterpoints the Fedora 7 post I did here last week, and notes a new trial I had with that.

Tweets

Anne Gentle, former colleague from TalkBMC and now Blogmaster of her new blog "just write click" has been talking about using twitter as a form of micro-blogging. I never really gave it much thought, even though whurley and Y also talk about social networking and twitter and stuff all the time.

Three things then happened:

1. I got an iPhone
2. It had an app called "Pockettweets" that let me update a twitter wherever I am and whatever I may doing
3. I found David Hewlitt (Dr. McKay) from Stargate: Atlantis is a religious twitter'er.

OK. Fine. I'm trying it out to see what it all does. http://twitter.com/stevecarl
I'll be honest: So far this seems more like a 'dear diary' thing than a micro-blog. But the iPhone makes doing it dead easy, so we'll see where it goes. It was kind of fun to look back and see the progression of events as posted that led up to this and my last TalkBMC entry. Seeing the entry about getting my new comics reminds that...

MySQL and CocoaMySQL

My wife has given up on eBay applications Over and over and over she has tried to make them do what she wants them to do, only to find the software she has paid for to be unstable, slow, behind the times, etc. She has tried and tried to get out of programming, but she finally decided that the time has come to just solve the problem by writing her own application. She is also work on an inventory management tool for some friends of ours that run "Comic Book Orphanage".

This is a brave new world for her. She has written tons of applications over the years for the MS Office suite. One tool she wrote in MS Access saved a hospital in Galveston literally millions of dollars. She knows how to code.

She has sworn off MS as anything other than a target platform. I talked to whurley a bit as he is a well known Apple hacker, and so now she is off learning how to use MySQL and CocoaMySQL. Later she'll add in Apple's Xcode, and she hopes to be able to write applications on her beloved Macbook, and just cross-compile them to MS Win. It should be very interesting. Apple does it with iTunes and Safari, so it can be done... More on that as it progresses, but it is very cool having another Open Sourcer in the house.

The new blog, same as the old blog, only not

If you have ever read "Adventures in Linux", over at http://talk.bmc.com, then you already know what this blog is going to be about more or less. Where this one will be different is that this one is going to be more about everyday, personal Linux. The BMC blog is focused on data center and corporate desktop usage of Linux.

I will admit that I have strayed from those parameters at BMC many times. I will almost certainly stray farther afield here. For one thing, Open Source is a really big place to wonder around in. Wander around in too. And for another, I am also a big Apple OS.X user, so I am sure to get into that from time to time. Putting yet another thing in the blogs title though... well. It is generally considered bad form to have the title of the blog be longer than the posts therein. There-below. Something.

I will cross link posts from here to my corporate blog so that the content in each can reinforce each other, whenever they do. I have been posting at my corporate weblog for about two years, and there are about 130 or so posts, with over 300,000 words between them.

Backing up for a moment though, if you have not read any of that, and are wondering why I might have anything relevant to say about any of this... well, fairly asked.

On being old

I am really old. Older than dirt. The first computer I played with was a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 (with the 16k expansion) that a friend of mines dad bought. My first experience programming was sitting up one xmas eve with another friend who knew Basic, and writing a program in ASCII special characters that displayed a tree, presents under the tree, snow falling past an outside window, and a dog randomly barking at the tree. Took all night. My friend did all the work, but I walked away from that having a pretty good idea how to program in Basic.

That long night led to a TRS80 model 4, a TI 99 4/A, Windows, OS/2, Working on the mainframe OS VM, and in the early 1990's to Linux. My first distro I bought over at Microcenter for something like 10 USD. It was a huge set of CD disks that included Slackware, and a late 1.x Linux kernel.

One thing led to another, and eventually Linux became my primary OS at the office, and I have a number of laptops around the house where I keep various versions of Linux, depending on the experiment de jour. My current main personal Linux system is an Acer 5610 laptop, w/ 2GB of RAM, running Mint 3.0.

Open Source

Even when I am not using Linux itself, I use a great deal of, and support, Open Source. This is why this blog title is longer than the one at BMC; When I started blogging about Linux at BMC, while we used open source, and we had open sourced a number of things, we had not really announced an Open Source strategy. That will be changing. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I use OpenOffice across all computer platforms (NeoOffice on the Apple, for now, although OpenOffice 2.3 Aqua is also loaded for testing). I use Parallels on the Mac (me and a zillion others, I know...) to run yet *more* versions of Linux. Many other Open Source tools as well (yes: I know Parallels is not Open Source: it just enables me to test Open Source on the Apple). I'll get more into this here over time.

That is probably enough for the first post. I'll try and get something up every week here, and another over at talk.bmc.

Stay Tuned...