the corner office

I'm in a mad rush to get some assignments done before I bugger off on holiday. Quick breather in the interests of security, though:

Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 are out. I wish I could remember which blog I read it on this morning, but apparently they fix new security holes. The Mozilla developers are getting a reputation for responding pretty quickly to security issues, which I find quite comforting.

If you're still living in bug-ridden, spyware-addled, tabless, pop-up hell with Internet Explorer, then perhaps this is a good time for you to go and give Firefox a try.

As a slight aside, if you were wondering what a Firefox is, I learned today, thanks to the Firefox Brand Name FAQ, that Firefox is another name for the Red Panda. What a cute little critter!

This is not the sort of thing you expect farm animals to be able to figure out:

Hungry sheep on the Yorkshire moors have taught themselves to roll 8ft (3m) across hoof-proof metal cattle grids - and raid villagers' valley gardens.

The crafty animals have also perfected the skill of hurdling 5ft (1.5m) fences and squeezing through 8in (20cm) gaps.

More: BBC: Crafty sheep conquer cattle grids

I think it's cause for concern, as any Pink Floyd fan knows:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by
With bright knives he releaseth my soul
He maketh me hang on hooks in high places
He converteth me to lamb cutlets
For lo, he hath great power, and great hunger
When cometh the day we lowly ones
Through quiet reflection and great dedication
Master the art of karate
Lo, we shall rise up
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water

You have to ask: are they hungry, or in training? Today, some harmless rolling. Tomorrow, wave upon wave of demented avengers...

It goes without saying that Ed Brill's personal blog tends to have a very biased view of the MS/IBM competitive landscape. That's understandable, it's his job. It's also fairly obvious that being a particularly pro Lotus crowd, the majority of people who follow his blog quite enjoy and agree with the things he blogs about.

I've noticed a trend, though, for people to start labelling the Domino blogging/online community in ways that are not particularly flattering. Some folks have insinuated that we're all a bunch of self-congratulating, back-slapping croneys who brook no dissent and who close ranks to shoot down any contrary voices. People have suggested this in comments on Ed's blog before, and I especially noticed that in troll posts like this one, and in the Radicati follow-up to the goings-on at Ed's blog, reference is made to "Ed Brill and his friends".

A rather subtle dig, with a very clear purpose: to discredit the opinions being given, to disparage the posters, sidestepping the merit of their statements. A schoolyard scrap, nothing serious. At worst, a bunch of buddies ganging up on poor unsuspecting Radicati employees. Puhlease.

The truth is that if you go back through Ed's blog, you'll see as many contrary and critical comments as there are positive comments. IBM Lotus has done much to raise the ire of the 'community' and the arguments and disagreements are there if you care to look for them. There are plenty of differing opinions and naysayers, often respected people in the industry. Certainly, given the context, people can find themselves faced with a hail of disagreement, and there is an element, perhaps, of "I'll say bad things about my own family but don't you dare say them." It's understandable, but it doesn't necessarily imply the things suggested by folks who don't like being on the less popular end of a contentious issue.

Ultimately though, we all have minds of our own, and the facts and arguments should stand up to scrutiny, end of story. The majority of people who follow Ed's blog, myself included, are capable of forming our own opinions about issues, thank you very much.

Red Hat 8.0 came out with a common desktop theme called Bluecurve. The idea was fairly noble and sensible from a business perspective: they tried to make the Gnome and KDE environments look exactly alike. Bluecurve was commonly called Bluecurse and proponents of both desktop systems griped that in aiming for the common denominator stuff, Red Hat had left out the best parts of both systems. So almost everybody moaned about it.

The underlying issue was real though: one of the biggest turn-offs for a new Linux user is that they're bombarded with too much choice. I think that modern distros have tried to simplify things a bit, to make the experience less overwhelming for new users.

If you rewind back to 1999 or so, things were quite different. The coolest thing about a Red Hat or Mandrake install back then was that out the box, you could easily switch between and play with a whole heap of window managers and desktop environments, each with their own style and look and feel. Very often you had no idea what the hell you were doing, but things were so exotic and exciting after the blandness of the Windows world, that you spent more time buggering around with eye candy than getting anything important done.

On that note, there's an interesting article at Newsforge, listing four "alternative" window managers. As always, the comments and gripes and histrionics of some of the responses to the article are equally educational, and mention a whole heap of other window managers too. For a full listing of window managers, a visit to the comprehensive Xwinman.org is in order. The variety and choice is staggering. You could lose hours just looking at screen shots of themes for the most popular ones. I suspect the only crowd of people with a similarly obsessive approach to eye candy and customisability are the Winamp skin junkies.

Personally, I've used next to none of these window managers in anger, but I'm looking forward to playing with a few of them in the next couple of weeks. Especially given that my main PC is less than beastly these days. It's nice to know that there are still people out there whose main focus is building software that's blisteringly fast on years-old hardware. The fluxbox window manager, which I've been playing with, weighs in at less than 800Kb of source code. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Gates.

More of that interminable I-hate-Formal-Logic procrastination (over now, thankfully), led me to finally read up on a new Bloglines feature I'd noticed a coupla weeks back, but was too lazy to RTFM about: Clipping:

Clippings allow you to save particular articles for later review. When you scroll through the contents of a feed, you'll notice a "Clip/Blog This" link under the article summary. By clicking on that link, you'll add that particular item to your 'Clippings Tab.' To view a previously saved clip, open the 'Clippings' tab and click on an item. You can sort and organize your Clippings just like you can organize your feeds, to make later retrieval easy.

Wicked.

Cool. My Gentoo system now has fluxbox happily chugging along, with sound (in a rare turn of fortune, my ALSA installation and configuration happened without a hitch). Gnome has been compiled, and a quick tyre-kicking had me rather impressed at how polished it's looking these days.

I'm hoping that either WINE or VMware will be able to take care of my Notes client and university Windows programming requirements, in which case I might be able to move the majority of my daily grind stuff across to Linux for good. I'm even making a concerted effort to try to like vim, although man, I do miss TextPad!

I also noticed that to download all the packages needed to get Eclipse 3.0 running (including JDK etc) was over 220 megs. That's a lot of bloody source code!

Not the most productive day yesterday workwise. We went through to Jhb International yesterday morning to meet Ronwen's cousins who had a stopover en route from Ireland to Durban. Quick brunch, and sent them on their way again.

We got home and I should've buckled down to more Formal Logic, which is to say I ended up spending the most of the day playing with my Gentoo installation. We're down to a single 1Ghz Athlon these days, pending a few repairs to my other PCs and me finding the time to accumulate all the components for a new Beast Box. So, I'm trying to get this puppy going as a dual-boot. I haven't yet gotten X-windows running, which does limit the machine's functionality as a Linux box, apart from browsing the web using Lynx. But, we persevere...

Two major hassles - the first, getting X windows configured. (Backing up, budget a few hours to get X windows recompiled, before configging). I finally got it working late last night. I'm using a grotty old ATI card which is going to give me more grief, I know it. The other PITA was getting my USB mouse working. It turned out I'd compiled USB support into the kernel but no support for HID (human interface devices) drivers, for things like, oh, the bloody mouse, say. So Linux could see the USB device, but didn't know what to do with it. A bit of pain getting the various kernel configs sorted - if you break a kernel compilation then you know you've cocked up somewhere. All fixed now, though.

I also hauled Gnome and KDE down the wires. I've always preferred KDE but it's been a while since I've played with Gnome, so I figured I'd broaden my horizons. I left Gnome compiling overnight. I woke up this morning and it was still chugging away... had to stop it halfway through to reboot into Windows to check my mail and whatnot. I also know that on my considerably more beastly previous machine, it took over 6 hours to compile KDE, so I have a looooong way to go. It's crazy, but ultimately very rewarding in a sad, geekly kind of way.

I watched Scent of a Woman was on SABC2 last night. It was surprising, watching it again, to pick up the number of expressions and lines that Al Pacino made famous in that movie. Hooha! (hmm, come to think of it, that's the only one I can remember this morning ;-)

Really grotty weather in Jhb today - there's snow in the Berg apparently, so the whole country's freezing. Tomorrow's forecast high is 10C. Brrr.

The stuff of science fiction?

Brain fingerprinting is supposed to assess the truthfulness of what a suspected criminal is saying by monitoring electrical "flashes" in the part of the brain associated with memory.

The suspect is shown words, images or objects of the crime scene or a weapon that only the police or the person who committed the crime would know about.

The implications of this could be pretty damned hectic...

Via Gauteng Blog, the Guardian has an interesting article about Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in the UK. In essence, miscreant children get ratted out by the neighbours, and limitations are placed on what they may do, or say, or where they can go, and while the 'asbo' is not itself a conviction, breaking the order renders the child liable to criminal prosecution.

I'm honestly not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, the civil liberty issues make me cringe, and the potential for abuse and victimisation must be huge. On the other hand, from a socially conservative South African perspective, the (supposed) misbehaviour and delinquency of British kids has reached mythical proportions. OK, I have to admit that the majority of Brits I've met (including family!) don't seem to have been too delinquent as young 'uns, but most of us know someone who's ended up teaching in UK schools and who can rattle off horror stories for hours on end. Draconian measures to curb that don't seem too unreasonable.

Anyhooo. I think the most telling part of the article (in part2), is the issue of family loyalty and good old-fashioned self-delusion:

"Zach call some woman a cripple? No! He'd never dream of it!"
"I did," Zach said, quietly. "She was horrible."
"These people!" His mother swept his words aside. "They can't let kids be kids, can they?"
"And I smashed the windows, yeah."
"Every kid smashes windows! He's a boy, isn't he? You know what, they're all dead talented, Zach and his mates. The way they MC and everything."

Well, surprise, surprise. You could debate why some parents are so defensive about their children's wrongdoings (I'm sure not wanting to admit you're a crap parent is one reason), but if parents don't have the courage or willingness to confront their children when they've done wrong (and heaven forbid, punish them), then no wonder their kids are screw-ups in the making. These children don't stand a chance.

Bob Congdon points to some interesting stats from the Eclipse 3.0 project, including these:

Donuts consumed (North American committers): 1,120
Cigarettes inhaled (European committers): 14,656

It's been about 11 months since I kicked the habit, (notwithstanding a drag or two on special occasions, I'll concede), but reading a comment like that still brings back the cravings.