Overreact Much?

The recent kerfluffle over the post that Shuttleworth made on the openSUSE mailing list has me torn. First of all, and this is in no particular order, I think it's clear that Shuttleworth is just extending a friendly invitation to those developers that feel abandoned by the deal. That being said, however, it does serve his purpose to some extent as an email like this may poke said developer into action (ie. jumping ship) when otherwise he/she would have given into his passive ways and stayed where they were comfortable. Also, I think it is fairly well known that volunteer developers are typically welcomed, if not encouraged, to join any project they so desire. The fact that Ubuntu accepts new developers really isn't news. Whether the email was really composed as an innocent invitation, or as some kind of weird stunt, I guess we'll never know. And frankly, who cares?

On the other hand, I also think the openSUSE developers are overreacting a little in their responses. The most effective way to answer an unwelcome post like this is to not answer it at all. Being childish and bad mouthing competing distros is uncalled for, and that's exactly what some of those responses do. Swinging again in the other direction, however, what did Shuttleworth really expect? It's not difficult to predict that an email like this will be met with hostile resentment. It's not as though Gore invented the Internet just last week or anything. We've all see this stuff before, many times over. Someone (Shuttleworth) does something unacceptable, the victims (openSUSE devs) cry and toss insults back in response, then thousands of uninvolved peons (me) blog about it for weeks. Prodding people to leave the distro that they are clearly passionate about rarely ends nicely.

In my opinion Shuttleworth was silly to even think about making such a post to the mailing list. The guy is in no position to sing about unity and software freedom after making the decision to ship and install non-free binary drivers by default with the next Ubuntu release. I mean, let's face it. If I were an openSUSE developer who was looking to move elsewhere as a direct result of this deal, I'd make an attempt to decide which distro/company would least likely wind up doing the same thing to me in the future. If we lined up all of the major distros (Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, etc.) and looked at them in this light, I think many of us would agree which one we would add to the avoid list. The future of Ubuntu "freedom" spooks me a bit for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on the reason though.

I got a kick out of how this guy compares the Microvell deal and Ubuntu's commitment to freedom in a comment on the Newsforge article:

Microsoft+Novell deal involves: *Not sueing people.

Ubuntu involves: *Singing the praises of Free Software and all about how all software should be Free, yay, la la la, let's get around the bonfire and sing Koombayah and dress up the desktop in brown colors because it's all about humans and people and being human and proprietary software is bug #1 and...

*Except it actually isn't totally free software. Oops! We'll stick that in under bug #123581352.

*...But hey you SuSE goes can come develop for us cause we're more about Freedom and Unity with a capital F and U!

Not sure why, but I found that funny.

Replacing Mono Applications

Since Novell admits to violating software patents in their code, and points at you and I for using offending software, I'm making an attempt to partially rid my machines of it. First to go, of course, is anything related to Mono. This means Banshee, F-Spot and Beagle need replacements. Replacing Banshee won't be a big deal in my case, since I don't really listen to music on my computer very often anyways. Also there must be a ton of music players out there. I think QuodLibet wins in this category for now just because it's written in Python.

F-Spot will be a little more difficult for me to get rid of since I've become quite accustomed to using it. For the time being, however, I'll switch back to using the quite capable gThumb. Also since F-Spot uses a weird format for storing data (meaningless directory structures etc), there will be some effort required in converting it to something that makes sense to use with gThumb.

Beagle has already been replaced by the much faster, leaner, and command line friendly Tracker. This was a switch that would have happened regardless of Novell's actions, so I've got no problems there. I'll not go into great detail about Tracker now since this would probably warrant its own post, but this is a project that I hope has a bright future.

Removing Mono and all (I think) related packages from your Ubuntu install is as easy as:

sudo aptitude remove libmono0

That will remove all kinds of stuff, including the ubuntu-desktop package. Read the list of packages before pressing Y so that you have no suprises. As of Edgy, Ubuntu ships with Mono since Tomboy and F-Spot are in the default desktop configuration. I am curious to see where Canonical takes this, if anywhere at all. It's probably about time I moved on anyways.

PS: To all of you who are pointing at me, laughing, and shrieking "I told you so!", yeah yeah I know... I guess I should have seen this coming.

Beep, SSH, and Perl 101

I typically have my IRC client running on a remote machine in a screen session so that I can SSH from my laptop and attach to that session from anywhere. This is a great system, but the one thing it lacked was audible notification of highlighted messages. For the last few months I've used the hilightwin.pl script so that any conversation that contains keywords of my choice gets displayed in a little window at the top of my screen. The script is sufficiently small enough that even though I don't know Perl, I was able to modify it so that any special message shows up there. After being away from my keyboard it's nice to know I haven't missed anyone just by glancing at this little window.

The only thing that this system lacked was an audible beep to alert me when these messages arrive. Too often I'm just on another workspace when someone is trying to talk to me, and if I could hear the alert, I could chat back at them. Anyways, irssi does have beep functionality, but it doesn't seem to work very well through an ssh/screen session. Already long story short, inserting one line of Perl into the hilightwin script solved the problem in a rather hackish, but effective manner.

system("ssh hostname beep -f 100 -l 50 -r 2 &> /dev/null");

This command simply opens an ssh session with my laptop (exchange hostname with the actual hostname, of course), and runs the beep command producing two relatively low, short beeps. They are easily distinguishable from the normal system beep. If passwordless logins are enabled, then you're golden. Not many people talk to me so this really doesn't add much traffic to my network :)

Gmail and Top Posting

I know many have bitched about this in the past, so I won't go off on a rant now. I am curious though if Google has addressed this anywhere that I haven't seen. As in, have they so much as acknowledged the complaints at all? Even if there were some FAQ entry somewhere that said something lame like "We at Google have decided that top posting is best practise and have no plans to support bottom posters." that would provide a feeling of closure. Instead, each time the New Features indicator appears I jump all over it hoping that today is the day. It never is.

Admittedly, I do feel like a bit of a knob even complaining or mentioning this at all. It's not that big of a deal to delete the space at the top, trim the replied text, and add my reply to the bottom. Also, I understand that Windows users are the majority and that Google probably doesn't wish to confuse them. But at least acknowledge good form and provide a non-default setting so that the geeks of the world who do give a shit feel loved too.

Am I alone here?

The GnuCash and Ledger Combo

For the past month I've been using the excellent GnuCash 2.0 accounting package to keep track of our (my wife's and mine) finances. It's a quality accounting package with a quick double-entry accounting style, but I found it lacking a quick and flexible querying and reporting feature. Actually this is not true. I understand the built-in reporting features are quite extensible if you are familiar with Guile, and I mean, who isn't?

Anyways, just yesterday, an article at Linux.com pointed me to a package called Ledger. I'll not go into great detail about the package since the linked article does a pretty good job, but suffice it to say, that it is everything we've all grown to love in a powerful command line tool. It's very fast, and very powerful (with the use of regular expressions). Of course, it doesn't produce the prettiest of reports, but it does get the information you are looking for very quickly. It even has the option to output the matching entries to your query in XML format if you wish. I think I can see some Python report generating scripts in my future :).

As the article mentions, the package can read the data files that are produced by GnuCash. Instead of manually editing the Ledger data file as a method of entering transactions, I think I'll stick to using GnuCash as it has a very fast and efficient flow with autocompletions and all that goodness. The Ledger tool, however, is perfect for quick queries and reporting from one of my always open terminals. I think these tools will have a long and harmonious life on my desktop.

Disable Touchpad While Typing

I ran across this blog entry while browsing around aimlessly yesterday that I think will play a large part in keeping my sanity. It drives me crazy when I accidentally touch the touchpad on my laptop while typing, and the cursor ends up being moved to some random spot on my desktop where my typing resumes.

I'm not sure why this little tip is not more widely known, but I think it should be. Especially since it's so easy to do. Ensure the line Option "SHMConfig" "on" appears in the appropriate Input Device section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Then stick the command sysdaemon -t -d in your list of session startup commands. Here's the appropriate section of my xorg.conf file for reference:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier         "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver             "synaptics"
        Option             "SendCoreEvents"         "true"
        Option             "Device"                 "/dev/psaux"
        Option             "Protocol"               "auto-dev"
        Option             "HorizScrollDelta"       "0"
        Option             "SHMConfig"              "on"
EndSection

Done.