'Til All Are One

Unlike my last post, this one is ser­i­ous. One of my favour­ite podac­sts, The Linux Link Tech Show, inter­viewed RSI expert Deborah Quilter. The phe­nomenon of RSI has risen to prom­in­ence in recent years, largely in response to increas­ing com­puter use. That puts tech work­ers such as myself in con­sid­er­able risk of devel­op­ing injur­ies, and in fact I am cer­tain that I have developed some already. Ignor­ing the prob­lem only makes it worse. Any­one who works at a desk should listen to this inter­view and heed at least some of its warn­ings and advice.

The epis­ode is avail­able in Ogg Vor­bis and MP3 formats.

Are you aware of the con­di­tion known as Ser­vice Sup­port Ter­min­a­tion Trauma (SSTT)? View this Nov­ell Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment to find out more.

This report is pretty cool. The emphasis was added by myself.

The open source soft­ware phe­nomenon has spread far bey­ond Linux and is gain­ing enorm­ous momentum, accord­ing to an IDC study of over 5,000 developers in 116 coun­tries, rep­res­ent­ing 38 developer net­works. The ana­lysts found open source soft­ware being used by 71 per­cent of the developers in the world and in pro­duc­tion at 54 per­cent of their organ­isa­tions. Half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increas­ing in their organisations.

The study declares that open source soft­ware rep­res­ents the most sig­ni­fic­ant all-​​encompassing and long-​​term trend that the soft­ware industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC believes that open source will even­tu­ally play a role in the life-​​cycle of every major soft­ware cat­egory, and will fun­da­ment­ally change the value pro­pos­i­tion of pack­aged soft­ware for customers.

I must say that the SLUG Videofest on Sat­urday went very well. The imme­di­ate aim is to organ­ise a video recording/​editing/​encoding/​hosting/​streaming team for Soft­ware Free­dom Day (SFD) on Septem­ber 16. I’ll need to squeeze every bit of per­form­ance I can out of my Pen­tium III 700MHz laptop to per­form the requis­ite edit­ing and encod­ing. Encod­ing in single-​​digit frames per second has never been more fun!

The real goal of this ven­ture, how­ever, is to pre­pare for linux​.conf​.au (LCA). We are see­ing SFD as a dry run for this premier annual event, so it is import­ant that we are organ­ised for this one. I am not con­cerned: Silvia has been doing a fine job lead­ing us so far.

Speak­ing of SFD, con­grat­u­la­tions Pia!

In Janu­ary, dur­ing Steve Jobs’ Mac­world key­note speech announ­cing the new Intel Macin­toshes, Microsoft made a “com­mit­ment” to con­tinue to develop for and sup­port the Apple Macin­tosh plat­form. In true Microsoft style, they con­veni­ently didn’t explain how deeply that com­mit­ment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Vir­tual PC product, remov­ing a vir­tu­al­isa­tion option from Mac OS at the same time that sim­ilar func­tion­al­ity is being fol­ded into Win­dows Vista. They are aware that vir­tu­al­isa­tion is quickly becom­ing a killer fea­ture, and they’ll be damned if they allow any­one else to have it. For­tu­nately (and prob­ably prefer­ably), VMware will be made avail­able for the Apple Intel plat­form. There’s also Par­al­lels, but they still do not have any server-​​oriented products.

In addi­tion, Microsoft will also be remov­ing Visual Basic sup­port from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop sup­port­ing some­thing, why not cripple it instead? Many busi­nesses are depend­ent upon VB script­ing, or exchange files with people/​organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a defi­ciency will be subtle: people will pur­chase Office for Mac expect­ing it to work with files cre­ated in its Win­dows coun­ter­part (or vice versa), and will be sorely dis­ap­poin­ted. This has already been occur­ring for a num­ber of years, but the prob­lem is becom­ing increas­ingly acute.

Ulti­mately, the best solu­tion is to remove our depend­ency on pro­pri­et­ary formats and lan­guages, for they are the root cause of this mess. Open​Of​fice​.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it bet­ter. It even has grow­ing sup­port for Visual Basic for Applic­a­tions. Open­Of­fice is truly look­ing like a bet­ter Office than MS Office. The Open­Of­fice file fil­ter­ing sup­port developers work hard to sup­port all the MS Office formats they can find (people have coun­ted over 20 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office pro­gram­mers, who are notori­ous for break­ing com­pat­ib­ilty with older ver­sions. Using the Open­Doc­u­ment formats (which are now an ISO stand­ard) assures that your data will be access­ible on many dif­fer­ent plat­forms for many years to come.

The main stum­bling block to Open­Of­fice adop­tion on Mac OS is the Windows-​​like inter­face and its reli­ance on X11 for dis­play. There is work being done on a nat­ive Aqua ver­sion, but in the mean­while there is NeoOf­fice.

Last month’s SLUG meet­ing (Fri­day 28 July) was an inter­est­ing one for me. The SLUG­lets topic was Web browsers, so I decided to volun­teer my ser­vices to give a demon­stra­tion of my favour­ite, Galeon. Its philo­sophy of “The Web, only the Web” felt extremely refresh­ing back in 2000 when the world was dom­in­ated by Web browsers that were either integ­rated into some form of soft­ware suite or even into the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. Its pos­i­tion as a top-​​dog Web browser has since been usurped by its off­spring, Epi­phany, and its par­ent, Fire­fox, both of which have been clearly inspired by Galeon. Nev­er­the­less, the slick­ness and func­tion­al­ity of Galeon has left it cemen­ted as my Web browser of choice.

One thing I was not pre­pared for was a fair num­ber of my co-​​workers to be present. That in itself was no sur­prise, given the SLUG-​​friendliness of my work­place. The effect of their heck­ling was another mat­ter. Their light-​​hearted dis­trac­tions may have dimin­ished the qual­ity of my talk, but they also made it much more enjoy­able for every­one, includ­ing myself. This inform­al­ity is a clear defin­ing char­ac­ter­istic of SLUG­lets as opposed to the Spe­cial Interest Talks, which are nor­mally quite ser­i­ous and intellectual.

I had also offered to give a “Privoxy in Under Five Minutes” talk as well, but unfor­tu­nately we ran out of time. Per­haps another time.

All in all, I am mostly happy with how things went. Sure, my talk could have been slicker, but nobody expects a pro­fes­sional present­a­tion in SLUG­lets. The fact that I was try­ing to demon­strate a Web browser without Inter­net access didn’t help either, nor did the time con­straint. This was the first time I have done some­thing like this, so I couldn’t have expec­ted it to be flawless.

Steve “Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field” Jobs has delivered his key­note address to Apple’s World Wide Developer Con­fer­ence (WWDC). It’s amaz­ing what he would have us believe. Apple has appar­ently inven­ted vir­tual desktops. What does Microsoft have to say about it, given they applied for a pat­ent on the tech­no­logy in 2004 (com­plete with images ripped out of GNOME and KDE!)? Let’s just for­get that they have exis­ted since at least 1985, shall we?

That aside, I am heartened to see that OpenDar­win did not close their doors a couple of weeks ago in vain. Apple them­selves are spon­sor­ing Mac OS Forge, and in the pro­cess they have made read­ily avail­able the source code for Bon­jour, Col­lab­or­a­tion (Dar­win Cal­en­dar Server), Web­Kit (which is really just KHTML on ster­oids any­way), Launchd and even their XNU ker­nel (minus some essen­tial pro­pri­et­ary parts). They have even licensed some of these pro­jects under the Apache Licence 2.0. I pray that this sig­ni­fies the start of a new era of col­lab­or­a­tion between Apple and the FLOSS com­munity, and not just a cheap attempt to con­trib­ute the min­imum amount required to keep the bulk of the com­munity on-​​side.

So with Tiger being favour­ably com­pared to the forever-​​delayed Win­dows Vista, what does that make Leo­pard? Mac OS just gets bet­ter and bet­ter, while the Win­dows débâcle is far from over. With screw-​​ups such as this [video], it’s no won­der that Microsoft feels the need to prevent/​destroy all com­pet­i­tion.

Update (2006−08−13): Here is a much more sober eval­u­ation of the so-​​called ‘copy­ing’ going on between Mac OS and Win­dows. It puts everything into more per­spect­ive, show­ing that some of their killer fea­tures in fact ori­gin­ated else­where. It reminds me of a funny quo­ta­tion: “Mac OS, Win­dows, BeOS: they’re all just Xerox cop­ies.”

As much as Paul Thur­rott likes to claim that Spot­light is a copy of Win­dows Search, Apple had the same func­tion­al­ity in the mid-​​1990s with its Cop­land Pro­ject.

Kle­pas poin­ted us on IRC to a brilliantly-​​done film explain­ing the concept of Trust­worthy Com­put­ing. It con­cisely and clearly demon­strates why so many of us in the FLOSS world prefer to call it Treach­er­ous Com­put­ing.

Unfor­tu­nately, the pro­du­cers decided to make the film avail­able as a Sorenson-​​encoded Quick­time file. I find it amus­ing that people who oppose digital restric­tions are using such a highly-​​proprietary video format. For­tu­nately for us, there is a DivX/​MP3 ver­sion (still not as good as The­ora or even XviD, but it’ll do) avail­able at Google Video.

Once you have fin­ished view­ing it, head on over to Against-​​TCPA for more information.

On the rare occa­sion, I find myself in front of a Macin­tosh. In its default state, the OS feels rather bar­ren. The default set of applic­a­tions is quite sparse, and you have to put some work into installing the soft­ware you need to get going. As a GNU/​Linux user, I’m accus­tomed to installing an oper­at­ing sys­tem and get­ting a full suite of applic­a­tions without put­ting in any extra work. Mind you, OS X is not nearly as bad as oper­at­ing sys­tems from a cer­tain other vendor.

Here is a list of soft­ware that I recom­mend to Mac users. Most of these apps are free soft­ware and also work on GNU/​Linux (or a suit­able ana­logue exists), so switch­ing between the two oper­at­ing sys­tems is easy.

Desktop nav­ig­a­tion:

• Quick­sil­ver
• Desktop Man­ager

Audio/​Video playback:

• VLC Media Player
• MPlayer OS X

Web brows­ing (like Safari or Inter­net Explorer):

• Fire­fox
• Cam­ino (which is based on Fire­fox; you can find exten­sions for Cam­ino here)

Office suite (like Microsoft Office):

• Open­Of­fice (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• NeoOf­fice (which is based on OpenOffice)

Desktop pub­lish­ing (like Adobe InDesign):

• Scribus

Draw­ing (like Adobe Illustrator):

• Ink­s­cape

Painting/​Photo edit­ing (like Adobe Photoshop):

• The GIMP (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• Sea­shore (which is based on The GIMP)

Printer drivers:

• Gimp-​​Print/​Gutenprint

Get more free applications:

• The Fink Project

Win­dows compatability:

• Boot Camp
• Par­al­lels