Vault

Great post originally from http://www.illusionary.com/GNOMEvKDE.html but as the site is no longer up I am re-posting it with full credit to its original author.  This “summary” was a surprisingly accurate feel for the overall development process of the two major Linux  Desktop interfaces.   Specifically this was the overall feeling during the KDE 2.x – 3.5 & Gnome 0.0 – wheneverubuntueffectivelytookovertheproject.x time frame.  While these generalizations no longer hold true, they sure make for some entertaining reading to those of us who remember the those days.

KDE

A big room somewhere in Europe with lots of chrome and glass and a great big whiteboard in the front with lots of tiny, neat writing on it. There are about 50 desks, each with headphones and pristine workstations, also with a lot of chrome and glass. The faint sound of classical music permeates the room, accompanying the clicky-click of 50 programmers typing or quietly talking in one of the appropriately assigned meeting areas. (Which of course consist of elegant contemporary white pine coffee tables surrounded by contemporary white pine and fine leather meeting chairs.) Coffee, tea, mineral water and fruit juices are available in the break area.

At the end of the day, *everyone* checks in their code and the project leader does a “make” just to make sure it all compiles cleanly, but it’s mostly only done from tradition anymore since it always compiles cleanly and works flawlessly. When all milestones have been met, and everything has been QA’d, (usually within a day or two of the roadmap that was written up 18 months previous) a new KDE release is packaged up and released to the mirror sites with the appropriate 24-hour delay for distribution before being announced.

KDE developers are generally between the ages of 16 and 25, like art made of lines and squares and the colors white and black. When/if they finally stop taking government subsidies and get around to getting “real jobs,” most of their salary will be taken in taxes so the socialist government can subsidize the care and feeding of the next generation of KDE developers, just like it did for them. A high percentage of KDE developers, during their mandatory 5 years of government military service, crack from their years of cultural dullness and flee Europe to become terrorists for the sheer joy to be found in killing random strangers for no discernible reason.

GNOME

An abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, kitted up as for a rave, electronica playing at 15db louder than “my ears are bleeding and I’m developing an aneurism” volumes and the windows all painted over black so that the strobe and spotlights and lasers can be seen better. Computers, mainly made of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs, are scattered around on whatever furniture is available, which also consists of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs. There’s no break area, but you may be able to bum a beer (or more likely something harder) off of one of the developers hanging around, and they will probably be too jacked up on X, coke, acid, heroin, ether or all of the above to notice that you’ve taken anything.

Development strategies are generally determined by whatever light show happens to be going on at the moment, when one of the developers will leap up and scream “I WANT IT TO LOOK JUST LIKE THAT” and then straight-arm his laptop against the wall in an hallucinogenic frenzy before vomiting copiously, passing out and falling face-down in the middle of the dance floor. There’s no whiteboard, so developers diagram things out in the puddles of spilt beer, urine and vomit on the floor.

At the end of the day – whenever that is since an equal number of programmers will be passed out at any given time – or really whenever someone happens to think of it (which is rarely), someone might type “make” on some machine somewhere, with mixed results. Generally nothing happens, so he/she shrugs his/her shoulders and wanders off to look for someone who might have more pink/black-striped pills. Once in a great while, generally in the unpleasant time between the come-down from the last thing they took and before whatever it was they took just now comes on fully, someone will tar up a bunch of random files and post it on a website someplace it as the next GNOME release, usually with a reference to some kind of monkey.

GNOME developers rarely live past 25 and prefer “alternative” art – generally stuff made of feces that’s “too edgy” for most people to “understand” or “like.” Core GNOME developers are heavy Ketamine users. The bodies of GNOME developers can often be found in dumpsters or floating face-down in any sufficiently large body of water.

Copyright 2002, Derek Glidden.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
-Martin Luther

While checking one of my WordPress sites I noticed an update for one of my favorite plug-ins, The Events Calendar.  Everything was broken after the update so I when to the support site to get things running.  Long story short, I got the site working again based on the support recommendations they had but regardless, some functionality was still missing.  The reason for this was related to a huge shift in the underlying focus of the WordPress post design.

the issue you state about other plugins integrating has more to do with WordPress being in a period of flux between having everything be either posts or in its own table and authors fully adopting custom post types. The core WordPress team is placing a heavy emphasis on CPTs and most major plugin authors are moving over… As more and more plugins make the move, the integration you want to see will return in a much more powerful and controlled manner.
–Shane Pearlman

The Events Calendar has converted over to a new design method called Custom Post Types (CPT) whereby individual modules can define their own post “types” instead of adding functionality to default post type already available in WordPress.

This drew my attention because the new version of The Event Calendar provides a “Professional” version, with more functionality, that can be purchased. I haven’t actually seen much software in the WordPress universe that followed this model (and I don’t believe The Event Calendar did until this new update occurred.)

My concerns were confirmed with some web searching:

Custom post types aren’t really meant for that use […] Custom post types are great for things that are more or less catalogued: products (in an e-commerce site), listings for a real estate site, etc. For regular content creation as described [by Chris], you can already do [that] by using custom taxonomies and/or stylesheets to make post templates.

Some part of the WordPress team has been pushing these these CPT’s and it looks like they have been doing it primarily to capitalize on the success of a Free Software program. I suspect that most developers who are interested in focusing on this kind of feature set are probably not Free Software developers but are, instead, quasi-open source developers running Macs who would be making iPhone apps if they knew something more useful than PHP.

This kind of monetizing has become massively popular with the success of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Market. A significant number of developers who have built very popular software stacks on top of Open Source applications are looking for ways to turn that work into cash flow, and I don’t blame them. That said…

…I really don’t like something about it. Maybe it is because I left a “free” blog application because it stopped being free (I learned a valuable lesson between Free Software and free software and I still have a bad taste in my mouth about it.) Maybe it is because I have actually contributed work to a number of WordPress plug-ins and would NOT have done so if I had known my efforts were going to help someone else make money. Maybe it is because the new version of The Events Calendar actually broke a lot of functionality in the name of changing their platform model to a for-profit design and now I have to use an unsupported version of the software until I find another or I write one myself.

Whatever the reason, Open Source software is loosing something of itself if this is actually the intent of their focus, and we are all the less because of it.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
–Arthur C. Clarke

It has been entirely too long since I last ranted about how truly amazing Linux is. I have three different problems in the last 24 hours that all resolved themselves via a fairly simple Linux hack. There is some of links that were useful for resolving my problems:

• Convert MS/Word to PDF OpenOffice/LibreOffice macro for automated doc to pdf conversion. Use a simply bash script to use call the macro without starting a GUI instance of oowriter.
• wvWare & antiword — More examples of MS Word command line processing.
• testdisk — Boot-able Linux CD Rom for fixing broken partition tables, corrupted MBRs, and recovering lost files.  I used to have to do this by hand with fdisk but testdisk makes it MUCH MUCH easier!
• Repair Broken Grub Multi-boot — Stupidly simply tutorial for using Yast to repair a broken Grub install on OpenSuse.  Includes information on fixing the Windows boot options for Grub as well.
• zipsplit — Got a zip file too large to upload/transfer/email?  Use zipsplit to split the zip file into multiple files base on size.  Careful, the size is specified in bytes so a 300mb files would be split like zipsplit -n 300000000 myfile.zip.  BTW it is significantly FASTER than re-zipping a file or even unzipping a file.

That a company can be a technologically innovative, cutting edge, information driven entity when I get emails from them that have this on the bottom?

NOTICE: This message is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Title 18, United States Code, Sections 2510-2521. This e-mail and any attached files are the exclusive property of Pictometry International Corp., are deemed privileged and confidential, and are intended solely for the use of the individual(s) or entity to whom this e-mail is addressed. If you are not one of the named recipient(s) or believe that you have received this message in error, please delete this e-mail and any attachments and notify the sender immediately. Any other use, re-creation, dissemination, forwarding or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.

Does anyone in the world seriously believe that putting this crap at the bottom of am email actually protect them from ANYTHING?

Some thoughts & quotes from John Maxwell’s “Equipping 101″

The most expensive employee isn’t the highest paid one, but the least productive one.

Attitude is:
-The advance man of our true selves.
-Our best friend or our worst enemy.
-Is more honest and more consistent that our words.
-Is the thing that draws people to us or repels them from us.
-Is the librarian of our past.
-Is the speaker of our present.
-Is the prophet of our future.

People become like their models. Who are our leaders models?

Finding good leaders is like mining for gold, you have to dig out 2 tons worth of dirt to find it but once found pays for all of the work.

You can tell a persons character by his/her relationships.

Finding talent in a business is no different than finding talent for a professional sports team. You have to recruit, scout, and draft the best you can find. Eventually, you will have to pay for that talent or risk loosing it; so stop investing in players that don’t grow.

Leaders attract potential leaders!

An organization’s Growth potential is directly related to its personnel potential.

As a potential leader you are either an asset to an organization or a liability to it.

I am just documenting a couple Firefox settings that need to be fixed.  These settings can be modified in the about:config section of the browser.  Why Firefox seems to think they need to copy everything Chrome and Safari do is beyond me but they keep changing things anyway:

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent, false -Changes the default behavior in FF4 to that of FF3.6 when it comes to opening tabs. After the change tabs will open at the END of the tab bar as GOD intended them to.

browser.tabs.closeButtons;3 - Places the close button at the end of the tab bar by itself instead of on each individual tab.  When clicking the close button the currently viewable tab will be closed.  This is a simple user interface standard that Firefox has botched-up back in version 3.  Close buttons per tab break good UI design because the tabs shift as they close and the close icons (when on the tabs) are NEVER in the same place.  Additionally, it is simply easier to close multiple tabs if you don’t have to move your mouse to close them.

The following are some of my favorite excepts from O.G. Mandio’s “The Greatest Salesman in the World.”  They are broken down by scroll number the quote comes from.  It is a short book that is really more of a “guide for living” than a “guide for selling”.

Scroll Number I:

“Time teaches all things to him who lives forever but I have not the luxury of eternity.”

“Failure is man’s inability to reach his goals in life, whatever they may be.”

“…the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits… I will form good habits and become their slave.”

Scroll Number II:

“I will love the ambitious for they can inspire me!  I will love the failures for they can teach me.  I will love the kings for they are but human; I will love the meek for they are divine.  I will love the rich for they are yet lonely; I will love the poor for they are so many.  I will love the young for the faith they hold; I will love the old for the wisdom they share.  I will love the beautiful for their eyes of sadness; I will love the ugly for their souls of peace.  I will great this day with love in my heart.”

Scroll Number III:

“So long as there is breath in me, that long will I persist.  For now I know one of the greatest principles of success; if I persist long enough I will win.”

Scroll Number IV:

“I am nature’s greatest miracle.  Vain attempts to imitate others no longer will I make… I will begin now to accent my differences; hide my similarities.”

Scroll Number V:

” I will live this day as if it is my last… I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, yesterdays defeats, yesterday’s aches of the heart, for why should I throw good after bad.”

” I will avoid with fury the killers of time.  procrastination I will destroy with action; doubt I will bury under faith; fear I will dismember with confidence.”

“Henceforth I know that to court idleness is to steal food, clothing, and warmth from those I love. “

” This day I will make the best day of my life.  This day I will drink every minute to its full.  I will savor its taste and give thanks.  I will maketh every hour count and each minute I will trade only for something of value.  I will labor harder than ever before and push my muscles until they cry for relief, and then I will continue.”

Scroll Number VI:

“Today I will be master of my emotions… Weak is he who permits his thoughts to control his actions; strong is he who forces his actions to control his thoughts.”

“If I feel all-powerful I will try to stop the wind. If I attain great wealth I will remember one unfed mouth. If I become overly proud I will remember a moment of weakness.  If I feel my skill is unmatched I will look at the stars.”

Scroll Number VII:

“I will laugh at the world.  No living creature can laugh except man.”

” For all worldly things shall indeed pass.  When I am heavy with heartache I shall console myself that this too shall pass; when I am puffed with success I shall warn myself that this too shall pass. “

“Never will I allow myself to become so important, so wise, so dignified, so powerful, that I forget how to laugh at myself and my world.”

Scroll Number VIII:

“Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold… To surpass the deeds of others is unimportant; to surpass my own deeds is all.”

“I will commit not the terrible crime of aiming too low.  I will do the work that a failure will not do.  I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.”

Scroll Number IX:

“…dreams are worthless, my plans are dust, my goals are impossible.  All are of no value unless they are followed by action.  I will act now.”

“Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground.”

“I will not avoid the tasks of today and charge them to tomorrow for I know that tomorrow never comes.  Let me act now even though my actions may not bring happiness or success for it is better to act and fail than not act and flounder.”

“I will act now… When I awake I will say (these words) and leap from my cot while the failure sleeps yet another hour.”

“Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy.  I am not lazy.”

“This is the time.  This is the place.  I am the man.  I will act now.”

Scroll Number X:

“Guide me, God.”

The book itself has got me thinking about writing down the outline for my own personal philosophy.  I am not talking about a religious creed or a statement of beliefs but a guide to define the philosophy of life I would like to follow.  In ancient Greece, and to a lesser extent in later Roman cultures, it was common for the upper classes to adopt a philosophy of life.  In fact parents sent their sons to schools of philosophy, like Stoicism and Asceticism, partly to acquire such a philosophy.

Working on an install of kubuntu that is farily non-standard and my lvm configuration caused grub to go totally insane. So are some notes I am posting from the live CD (that doesn’t have lvm configured.)

If separate /boot
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/Qmail-root /mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
$ grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

And here and here are some specific grub2 install information for Ubuntu.

February 19th I attended the Dave Ramsey Live event here in Oklahoma City.  I can say that if you have been listening to Dave for any significant length of time, read any of his books, or attended his  Financial Peace University; you are not likely to get any new information out of his live event.  This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as Dave’s message is one of simplicity and focus over depth and sophistication.  All that said, Dave’s events are fun.  The event is as much a pep-rally as a financial training event.  Here are the only two tidbits (seriously, there are the only two) that I had not heard from Dave during some previous encounter with his material:

If you walk around life without a plan, you will loose your money to those that do.

89% of people who own $1,000,000 homes do NOT make a million.

While the information I got from the Live Event wasn’t exactly new it does work and sometimes everyone can use a little pep-rally.

For years, I have watched the number of technology companies that operate without debt.  The trend has always been popular among IT/IS companies because of the fundamental instability of intellectual property over hard assets.  The logic is hard to argue with.  If everything you “own” of value only has value as a direct cause of its perceived importance, then a shift of public perception doesn’t just hurt your brand, but fundamentally devalues your property.

Think of it this way; if tomorrow everyone stopped trusting Google for their search results (say, you know, someone found out their code sent all our personal information to the Chinese) then overnight they could loose 95% of their US market share.  How much is Google’s code-base worth at that point?  Currently Google is trading at 183 billion so a 95% loss in usage would probably translate to a market value somewhere south of 3-5 billion.

Physical assets don’t behave the same way.  1,000,000 lbs of steal doesn’t just loose 98% of its value overnight.  Even in heavily over-inflated markets things like… I don’t know… homes, don’t loose 98% of their value.  People may be upset that their 350,000 home is now worth 260,000 but just image if one NIGHT your $350,000 home was worth $7,000.  THAT is the danger for companies whose primary assets are intellectual property.

I will give you another concrete example.  Once upon a time there was a company who made A LOT of money in the energy trading business.  Basically the company had sold off almost ALL its physical assets because they made so much money acting as a broker for energy trading.  Think of them as the stock market (or eBay) for energy.  The only problem was that their principal value lay in the fact that people trusted them, trusted their market, trusted their systems, and trusted their software.  Then one day  it was demonstrated that this company lied, cheated, and stole in almost every way you could imagine.  Enron’s stock dropped from $90 to just under $1 in a matter of weeks.  Basically, Enron’s major asset was trust, which it lost, and the company disintegrated overnight.

So how does a company protect itself from such quick devaluation?  The same way you and I protect ourselves from economic turbulence; a big savings account and as little debt as possible.   Microsoft, for example, is famous for “saving” close to a billion dollars a month… yes, a MONTH!  At the same time, Microsoft doesn’t borrow money.  I have been told, by people I put NO trust in to know this information, that they don’t even lease the copiers.  Competitors who want to beat Microsoft can certainly do so, but it will not be an easy fight.  That kind of financial position means that competitors must beat them dollar for dollar, customer for customer, year in and year out… for YEARS!

So who else do you know that doesn’t use debt?  Here are are couple names both in IT and outside of it.  Accenture, Activision Blizzard, Apple, Bed Bath & Beyond, Broadcom , Citrix Systems, eBay, Gap, Google, Infosys Technologies, Juniper Networks, Marvel Technology Group, Qualcomm, Research In Motion, Stryker, Texas Instruments, and Yahoo.  Want to see something more amazing?  Check out those companies 1, 3, and 5 year average returns compared to the market average!

I think it was Warren Buffett who said, “Leverage [i.e. debt] is a funny thing, people who don’t understand it shouldn’t use it; and those who do, don’t.”

I removed the Amarok button on the bottom of Vault today. It was long past time but I didn’t really want to say good-bye to what used to be the greatest media player on any platform ever. The unmitigated evil that is the new version of Amarok only goes to reinforce Joel Spolsky’s rule number 1 from Things You Should Never Do.  Unfortunately this is an all-to-common problem in the world of free software; where the needs of users are functionally secondary to the desires of developers (not ALWAYS, but often enough.)

By way of comparison take a look at the software I am using to replace Amarok.  Clementine is nothing more than a port of Amarok to Qt 4 (what Amarok should have done.)  Yes, it looses some functionality from its predecessor but it is not nearly the total nightmare that is Amarok 2.x… and it is gorgeous!

Undoubtedly, Clementine will continue to make improvements to their player and someday soon I suspect it will start to exceed the functionality of its progenitor; all the while Amarok will continue to make “usability” improvements to an interface that was formally famed for its usability.  I know that it is simply nostalgia but it seems a sad fate for software that was once unquestionably, to anyone who had been lucky enough to use it, the king the music player world.

Yesterday, during the last of my two snow days from the blizzard of 2011, I was giving my wife a hard time about her Twilight vampire affinity when my daughter spoke up.

Emily said, “Edward is weird Daddy. He never smiles.”

I replied, “No kidding Em.  I mean, would you really want to marry someone who didn’t smile?”

Her answer was, “No! I want to marry someone like you.”

It was the greatest compliment I have ever received.  I hope she does better than me, and that I become more like how she sees me.

Dear god in heaven, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has yanking and pulling!  I don’t know how long MS has had, what they call, the clipboard ring but I have a new found respect for Visual Studio (VS08.)  For those who are not familiar with this feature, yank/pull is a Unix staple (especially among EMACS users) that effectively saves a clipboard history for you.

Using a modified paste command will cycle you through your history pasting the your most recent copy to the edited text (and then highlighting it,) using the command again will paste the second most recent copy (and thus removing what was just highlighted.  Some versions of this feature will allow you to view a list of your clipboard history and arrow down to select it.  Imagine having a list of commonly pasted text instantly available to add to any document without your hands ever leaving the keyboard.

Once someone starts using this feature it because almost addictively beneficial. Trying to live without it is similar to trying to edit text without copy/past and has been one of the main reasons VS08 (or any other Windows text editor) is PAINFUL to use.  Admittedly there are a number of third party applications that give you this functionality, but really, should a user be paying for a feature that is as fundamental to using a computer as copy & paste… or virtual desktops?

Wait… oh well, back to Linux.

We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity.
–Kabbalah

Generally speaking I work behind a desk eight hours a day (OK, more like 12) but once in a great while I will get to go out with a field crew to do actual physical work.  While physical labor is generally pretty scary stuff; I love getting out-of-doors.  My most recent excursion was to the western side of Oklahoma on a GIS mapping project.

I have driven through the panhandle a couple time previously but really didn’t spend any time there.  It is absolutely BEAUTIFUL.  For someone who is used to the lush green of the Ozark mountains; the naked beauty of the gypsum hills and high plains was like landing on another planet.  This trip was actually months ago, but I forgot I had taken pictures until today. You can check out the photo gallery by clicking the link below.

Oklahoma Gypsum Hills and Eastern Panhandle

Got a couple great quotes from Drive, by Daniel H. Pink:

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible.  Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

“Rewards, we’ve seen, can limit the breadth of our thinking… They can focus our sights on only what’s immediately before us rather than what’s off in the distance.”

Watched a couple older game reviews that reminded me of video games I wanted on my todo list. We have a Nintendo Wii but generally, when the kids are in bed, I play PS2 or Computer games. Why still the PS2? Well, honestly I don’t think there has been that many “must have” games for the Xbox or PS3… at lest compared to the library of 10,000 “must try” games on the PS2.

–Thief 2
–Hitman, Blood Money
–Shadow of the Colossus
–Silent Hill 2
–Killer 7

Anyone else have some suggestions on their favorite PS2 games?

Of course the federal government cannot force individuals to actually buy something they don’t want, but it is just as much an abomination that the court didn’t strike down the power of the federal government to regulate healthcare. Anyone who is ignorant enough to bastardize the Interstate Commerce Clause to assume such should really check their history:

It is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.
–James Madison

Just to be clear, when it comes to the government “giving” millionaires $750 billion for a middle class tax cut; the US government isn’t giving anything to anyone. They are simply not TAKING $750 billion from people who make millions a year. We can rationally argue the cost/benefits of such action but government only gives away what it has taken, by force, from other people.

In free societies, States do not have rights; people have rights. States (i.e. governments) have powers that are delegated to them by people.

I believe that government has the power to tax people and I even think taxing people is a necessity in any successful government. But people who confuse a right and a power are doing themselves an intellectual dishonesty by choosing to remain woefully ignorant about the means and methods of obtaining that freedom. Government is ONLY capable of taking liberty; it cannot give it.

Again, I believe that it IS necessary to take some freedoms to have a organized society but do not foolishly convince yourself that you have not surrendered something; even if in the act of surrender you give yourself more stability or opportunity.

The number of really useful posts on this blog has dropped to almost non-existent levels.  With very few updates to speak of, the only new content seems to be tweets lately.  Now having my tweets archived here is important to me but almost worthless for anyone else so I have finally found a solution.

A new set of plug-ins I installed with the newest release of WordPress (the CMS this blog runs on) allows me to still post my tweets in a weekly archive, just like they have been for a couple years now.  The difference is that those posts are hidden from the front page.  If you really want to see my tweets you can click on one of the archive links on the right.  The posts are still there but they don’t reduce the signal to noise ratio of the content on the front page (lacking though it is.)

Hopefully this will encourage me to post more meaningful content.  Something nearly impossible to do in 140 characters.

I have a good friend in the Lice removal business (and her psychotic, yet strangely hot co-worker.) If you want someone else to remove lice for you give them a call. Here is their website Liceology.com