Author: Bobby Rockers

The Eight

The Eight by Katherine Neville, is a alternative-history style thriller novel in the same basic genre as “Da Vinci Code.” The book is a pretty fun read, even if the character development is lacking and its dialog unrealistic.

What really characterizes this book is the over-the-top nature of the plot. Take every historical figure that you can think of, combine them as pieces of a complex chess match, add in lots of technology and math references, and finally add a dash of romance novel; and you might get an idea of how this book works. While the plot is never too much to handle, some readers might be turned off by the simplicity of the authors writing style.

The Eight was an enjoyable “weekend” book and one that I am glad I read. I suppose the best comparison I can give of the book is this; I come away from “The Eight” in much the same way I came away from “Die Hard.” Its was an enjoyable experience whose short-comings helped “make” it, instead of taking away from it.

The death of a desktop…

There has been a heated debate going on in the Gnome world over which development environment to integrate on a native level with the desktop layer of Gnome; Java or Mono. The dark secret that every Gnome developer subconsciously understands in their rigid little pre-OOP based minds is that C is killing Gnome’s ability to compete effectively in the F/OSS desktop world. All the core Gnome developers understand this, as do most anyone who has had to develop on Gnome. To make C a truly useful language for desktop application development it needs a couple things; like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. If these qualities sound familiar its because they are quite literally the defining characteristics of object oriented programming. A cursory look at GTK shows many a half-assed attempt to implement said qualities in Gnome libraries even though their primary language of choice doesn’t support them natively. Suffice to say that Open Office, Mozilla, KDE, and almost all sane desktop software application are developed in C++ (or similar OOP languages) these days. Fundamentally Gnome HAS to make a switch; and this switch will decide the future of the Gnome Desktop.

Now this is where things get interesting. Redhat has decided to back Java (or more specifically Classpath and gcj, an open source Java implementation.) Why? No one is really sure but it should be noted that Havoc Pennington (head of Redhat Gnome development and probably the second most famous talking head in the Gnome pantheon) has gone so far as to say that Redhat will not and CANNOT include Mono in its version of Linux. Rehat is the single largest Gnome contributor, the largest corporate Linux distribution, and employees more Gnome developers than any other single employer. Not including Mono (and not supporting it) would be a huge blow to the success of Gnome on the Linux desktop. So how far is Redhat willing to go to keep Mono out of Gnome? Evidently they would be willing to actually FORK (yes you heard me right) Gnome.

Now, easily the most public face of Gnome development is Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is most famous for a little project he works on called Mono. Yes, that would be the same Mono that Redhat will not ship. And easily some of the most interesting technology to come out of Gnome in the past couple years has come from Miguel’s platform of choice (things like Beagle.) Mono is the obvious favorite for the future direction of Gnome. So much so, that Java doesn’t even register on the radar of most Gnome developers.

So here is the rundown. 1) Gnome needs to move from C if it ever want to bring modern applications to its desktop environment. 2) Mono is the logical direction for Gnome to head. 3) Gnome’s most influential developer is ONLY willing to go towards Mono. 4) Gnome’s most significant corporate contributor is not willing to use/ship/support Mono. 5) That same contributor is pushing Java. 6) Very few in the Gnome world actually want to use Java (minus Sun and Redhat) on the Gnome desktop. 7) Redhat is actually willing to fork Gnome (the thought of switching to a superior desktop never even crossed their minds) rather than use Mono. And finally, 8) Many of the Gnome core developers would rather stay with C than bother with the whole mess.

Man, does this sound like a desktop with a bright future! Oh, ya. By the way. Because of the flexability, and power of the Qt environment. You can already make native Java applications in KDE. And they are a whole lot easier than making them in GTK#, AWT, or Swing.

NetWare on Linux

I had never heard of this project before, so I figured I would post a link. MARSNWE is a NetWare emulation tool for Linux. MARSNWE can easily replace the file and print services of a Novell NetWare 2.2 or 3.11 server. It can also be be used in this manner as an IPX router. It does not offer all the features of newer version of NetWare (like Directory Services) but works as a nice tool for legacy support on Linux. The link is to the Novell Suse information sheet.

Subversion and Apache SSl

Ben Meyer (aka icefox) pointed out this quick tutorial on getting Subversion (SVN) up and running with Apache & SSL. The tutorial covers install with Debain, but is fairly relivant for any other distro.

SVN is a replacement for the venerable Current Versioning System (CVS) use to manage very large, very distributed, digital information. While it is most commonly used to manage software projects, it can also be used to manage documents, websites, or even personal home directories.

The tutorial is particularly interesting to me because I am changeing over from CVS to SVN for source control on KDE.

Antarctic Cooling

TCS has a story that discusses some of the broader facts of the AP “Glaciers Shrinking” stories that were popular on last weeks Earth Day. The article accurately portrays the intent of many news agencies who reported on the AP story (with titles like “Scientists Say Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking.” its hard to miss the intent.) He also points out some little known facts concerning the Antarctic Continent. Most people who are not climatologists have the mistaken belief that Antarctica is getting warmer; while in fact the opposite is true.

While the planet may very well be getting warmer; human catalyst global warming theories generally have, as one of their primary indicators, the prediction of Antarctic warming. Antarctica (or at least the vast majority of it) has been getting cooler for almost 35 years as has been documented a number of times by outside sources. The good news is that some organizations actually presented the AP story in the light it was intended; not as the scare tactic that Earth Day advocates wanted it to be.

You can check out the original text of the AP story here.

Gnome vs KDE: Part 2

Got the heads-up for this from Michael Pyne. The newest version of Gnome, 2.10, will include among its many features; the editor will be able to highlight the current line, highlight matching braces, and single-click preference in the file manager will also affect the archive manager.

Seriously, at this blazing pace Gnome should catch up to Windows around 2075 (assuming Windows does nothing) and maybe it will catch up to KDE sometime around 2120 (assuming again, no action on KDE’s part.) How is it that such a desktop is even considered in the same league as something like OSX, Windows, or KDE?

BTW I am typing this in a web browser text field within KDE, with auto spell-checking. Wonder how long it will take them to implement this.

Gnome vs KDE: Part 1

I know I have been on a KDE rant as of late, but I find that the technology continues to amaze me. For example, Gnome decided that (for compatibility sake with Windows GTK applications) that it should have the ability to reverse the button order on their dialog boxes. You see, a couple years ago Gnome made the decision to move from the button order to the MacOS style button order of . The enter button, because of this design, always defaults to cancel instead of ok. Well here is that patch to allow selection of the button order.

For good measure, KDE decided that, for compatibility with MacOS style interfaces it would allow its dialogs to select their button order. Here is KDE’s patch.

Seriously, thats it. Four lines! Four lines and all the KDE dialog button get re-ordered. All KDE applications inherit this change automatically. Here is the kicker, Gnomes patch is around 266 lines; and it will only affect two-thirds of their applications. That is why Gnome is getting its ass handed to it by KDE. Fewer developers, fewer lines of code, and more functionality.

KDE From Scratch

I am collecting scripts for automating the process of getting, building, and installing a KDE desktop from cvs/svn. When I posted the question on #kde-devel, I got answers from the who’s who of KDE application development. Here are some that I have collected already.

  • Aaron J. Seigo— is a core KDE developer and responsible for Kicker and the Tenor project. A god in the Linux/KDE world.
  • Ali Akcaagac–Check out getkde.sh and kdemake.sh for excellent build examples. Actually, oGALAXYo (aka Ali) is a Gnome, Amiga, AND KDE developer. Who put this guy get on the list?
  • Michael Pyne— Another KDE application developer. His script kdecvs-build is fairly well known among Linux desktop application developers.
  • Waldo Bastian— May be responsible for more of KDE (as it is today) than any other developer. Currently also working on Freedesktop.org, but try not to hold that against him.
  • Thiago Macieira— Another super powerful, blah blah blah, KDE god, blah blah blah… Does, well, everything in KDE.

That is something that never ceases to amaze me about free software. Some of these people are considered super-stars in the world of hackerdom, but they will stop to answer questions and pass along code (or for that matter just talk) with anyone who is interested. Its like the first time I had a Perl question and could not find an answer on the web, so I sent a message to a Perl mailing list. Larry Wall answered by question… the inventor of Perl.

This doesn’t happen in the rest of the normal world. When you need some help with your taxes, you don’t simply call up Allen Greenspan. Nobody messing around with their own comic book, sends letters to Stan Lee for advice. Even in the computer world this is unusual; do you really think Steve Jobs is gonna help you out with your Apple? Or that Bill Gates will tell you how to debug Windows XP? It just make working with free software that much more, fun.