Author: Bobby Rockers

Knowledge vs Wisdom

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
– Will Durant

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
– Albert Einstein

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
– Albert Einstein

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”
– Andr Gide

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
– Bertrand Russel

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit.”
-Aristotle

Task Based UI’s

Inductive user interfaces (aka: IUI’s) or more commonly called “task-based” interfaces are a user interface (aka: UI) advancement that promotes “usage” or “tasks” over individual applications.

The article above talks about how Microsoft has promoted and been the most noticeable innovator of IUI’s. The reason I point the article out is because of an apparent “slight” to the Mac OSX community regarding the amount of innovation going into their OS. The author basically states that Mac OSX has done little or nothing (I would strongly support the use of the word nothing!) for UI advancement. This really bothers Mac users because they historically see themselves as the origin of all things innovative. And they were… once.

It’s a popular trend in the “literary computer expert world” to slight Microsoft for now comming out with a UI to the level of OSX. Some authors go so far as to say the Mac OSX is the “ultimage Unix desktop.” While many people believe the OSX is the most beautiful personal computer UI in existance… the reality of the matter is that it is less functional than OS9, less user-friendly than XP, less flexable than KDE,and less innovative than any of the above mentioned.

IUI’s is a wonderful advancement for the majority of end users (as long as power users do not loose their flexability), and one that should be promoted in all desktop UI’s. Denouncing it and rejecting it does nothing to help improve user interfaces. And makes those who ignore it look as ignorant as those who thought the internet was simply a fad.

Information vs Control

One of the most distructive pieces of legislation comming out of Congress might be this little beauty, at least for programmers. What is it and what does it to?  Click on the link below to find out more…

Anyone here ever heard of Senator Fritz Hollings the Democrat from South Carolina? This gentleman (along with several other Senators) wants to make all programs have government approved copy protection put in them. Everything from Windows “copy” and “paste” to video games and camcorders. It would have essentially the same effect if you required that all writers to write using only government approved pencils and paper; writing only government approved content.

So why in the world would someone want this kind of draconian law knowing that would virtually stop software innovation within the United States? The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America feel its the only way to stop IP piracy that has been occurring since the proliferation of the Internet. While it may be true that excessive software regulation may be the only thing to save the MPAA and RIAA, fundamentally the problem comes down to; do we really want to give up our personal software rights to prop-up an obsolete industry structure?

Make no mistake about it, this fight is NOT about wither quality music and movies will be created. Nor is it about wither musicians, actors, and directors will be able to make a living from their content. Music was being created, paid for, and distributed long before the recording industry existed; and it will continue to do so long after. Both the MPAA and RIAA know this.

Computer networks and digital content are changing the way information is available. Fundamentally (regardless of what we thought during the dot com bubble) the Internet is about knowledge proliferation. At no other time in history has information been so easily available at such an inexpensive price. Organizations like the RIAA and MPAA are content (i.e. information) distributors and because there is a much faster, easier, and less pensive way to deliver content, these groups are finding themselves becoming extinct. And they know it. They could change their business models but the sad reality for them is that they will no longer be in control. One way or the other they will forever loose the iron grip (and by extension huge profits) they once had on information.

…and I am not willing to pay the price of my freedoms to keep it from happening.

kdialog –msgbox “Check this out.”

So KDE is easily the best GUI for *nix type OSes… but how useful is it really for command line application usage?  Funny you should ask.  This developer.kde.org tutorial covers kdialog; a command-line driven script-able window generation tool for KDE. Good tutorial with some great examples.  Just perfect for the new programmer or the system admin.

Learning Linux

I am looking to take the RHCT in late September and as such have been keeping my eyes open for tutorials to study.

One of the best links I found was RHCE 2 B an RHCE prep site with several useful tutorials. It looks like the best RHCE prep book available currently is this one, and although they are not RHCE tutorials; IBM has been running a series of tests for the LPI certification that seems to cover much of the same material.  I have copied the articles (in pdf form) locally:

This should keep me busy over the weekend.

School Issues

A discussion in the Christian Science Monitor talks about the benefits (in the opinion of the author) of same sex schools.  Recently I have seen several studies that not only point to some value for same sex schools but seem to confirm a long held belief that they most strongly benefit females by providing a safer and less “competitive” environment to learn in.

I actually graduated from a same sex catholic high school and although I did not necessarily enjoy it; it was very easy to see that it was an immensely beneficial environment to some of the students who attended it.  I don’t necessarily believe that it is  the job of public school systems to encourage “separate but equal” based on sex (the opportunity for abuse is simply to great), but I definitely think that such an environment can be very useful for some individual learning capabilities.  The best way to make such an opportunity available to low income students would be to widely implement a vouchers program.  This would give students the opportunity to attend same sex schools, magnet schools, private schools, religious schools, or give parents who choose to home school their children some much needed help.

The opportunities for improving or educational system are too great to ignore the benefits that same sex schools could bring.

Tornado

I was in the Oklahoma City tornado yesterday so I am in the mood for a bit of humor this morning.

My boss passed The this parable along to me a while ago. Its another example of shot landing too close to home. I will let you make guesses about which one of the two programmers I am most like.

There is more about the tornado and my “interaction” with it inside:

Yesterday afternoon I was anxious to get home and be with my family because of the sever storm warnings out and the probability for tornado activity. It ended up being a bad decision on my part. About halfway home I started to get quarter size hale hitting my Explorer and realized that I was not far from something that had touched down. When I finally saw the thing it was about 300 yards from me… I had just enough time to stop the Explorer, get in the ditch (under a culvert), and watch as the tornado passed overhead.

I don’t think the tornado itself is really bothering me any today. What I am really upset about is how scared I was. I was concerned about my life (of course) but the thought that went through my head was that I might leave behind a fatherless daughter and a widowed wife. My stupid decision almost did more to damage the lives of the two people I love most in this world than the storm did to the tractor-trailer rig in front of me.

I think I was also upset about _feeling_ scared. This kind of fear was something I had never had when I was a young adult. The overwhelming pressure of this fear was greater proof of my advent into adulthood than my mortgage, my daughter, or even my marriage was to me. I am not upset about being an adult. Quite the contrary, I would not trade one day as a dad for another four years of college. It just that I had never felt old before that moment; laying in a ditch, on the side of the road, alone… with my fear

The Art of Hacking

Hackers and Painters is an essay by Paul Graham about “hacking” being more of a creative art than an actual science. Its is one of the best reads I have found online in a while. Originally seen at Slashdot.

To be fair and honest from the gate I must admit no not agreeing with many of the points that Paul makes in his essay. This is not really a concern to me because I, with very few exceptions, find fault with things everyone says.

What I find interesting about the article is how much rings true in my own experiences. Not that things that “ring true” make for a good evaluation of real truth. Communism appealed to so many people because it seem to do such a good job of explaining problems that they saw in their own world. But that being said…

My CS background was from a PhD is Mathematics who was bound and determined to convince us that software development was the physical extention of mathematics. I program by putting something down in code, trying to compile it, debug it, and see what happens. This does not jive well with the basic “workings” of mathematics, start with the known and move to extend from that. I, also, spent a lot of time feeling bad because I did not “know” theory.

Looking back over code I developed just a year ago; it becomes blazingly obvious that I am “working” on applications, not “solving” problems. My applications constantly change as my skill and style improve. During my freetime I work on applications because I love developing them, changing them, molding them, and seeing what the outcome becomes.

That being said, I spend most of my work hours architecting and designing. At work I am most assuredly a software engineer/architect (at least most of the time) from the standpoint of implementing changes and creating software designs. So maybe the answer is that software development is BOTH art and engineering. It can be, for hackers, something done to express and create while still being, for non-hackers, be a science used to discover and understand. Heck, most architects I know consider themselves artists and not engineers.

kconfigure

Kconfigure is a KDE program to compile the sources without the xterm or console. I am its newest developer.

Ok, my first real world development for the OS community has begun. I am now working on kconfigure (after getting the old developers permission to do it =-). ) It doesn’t look like a particularly difficult project but it DOES need some work.

My first priorities are to add checkinstall as a build option and to configure a way to use templates for known system types (i.e. Redhat 8, Suse 8.1, Mandrake 9, etc.. etc.. etc..) and have them detected and and used. This will help improve the build success rate for kconfigure.

Later ideas include adding support for the gentoo build system and Debian dpkg. It sure would be nice if we could get kconfigure to become the install shield of the *nix (build from source) world.

This is exactly the kind of application that I want to work on. It is a KDE utility (we NEED more utilities in the Linux world!), it is generally focused at newer *nix users, it gets ppl away from the command line (and is thus a perfect addition to desktop linux), its a KDE app (and regardless of what Redhat says KDE is the future of desktop Linux), and its one that could have a dramatic effect on HOW *nix is used. I hope I can do it justice.