Alejandro Escalante Medina's Weblocked

Apple definitivamente está siguiendo un camino conocido: el del monopolio. Microsoft lo hizo y le fue bien, seguro que Steve Jobs piensa que también a él le funcionará:

Apps Alone Aren’t Problem; Apple iTunes Lockdown Hurts Creators, Consumers

Les traduzco algo de lo más interesante que resalta el artículo:

• No puedes administrar tu iPod o tu iPhone sin usar otra cosa que no sea iTunes
• No puedes administrar tus archivos
• No puedes instalar aplicaciones fuera de iTunes
• Y chéquense esto: el estar amarrado a iTunes te deja fuera de todas las innovaciones que ocurren en la red
• La única manera de acceder a podcasts es a través de iTunes

Como menciona el artículo, el caso de los podcasts es particularmente triste, porque tiene un impacto en la distribución y, por ende, en la libertad de expresión. Para escuchar un podcast usando Apple, se necesita todo lo siguiente:

1. Cargar iTunes
2. Conectar tu cable proprietario de Apple
3. Conectar tu iPod a tu Mac, que debe correr un iTunes configurado para tu iPod específicamente
4. Configurar los podcasts que quieres escuchar
5. Bajar los podcasts a tu máquina
6. Sincronizar: un proceso dolorosamente lento que muchas veces implica conectarse a la tienda de Apple para hacer unos tortuosos respaldos
7. Cuando ya escuchaste tus podcasts, ¡vuelve a sincronizar!

Ahí les dejo el artículo para reflexionar un rato…

MacDailyNews - Apple now worth more than Google

Now it is time to share the wealth with the employees, don’t you think, Mr. Jobs?

UPDATED: Apple removes $1,000 featureless iPhone application | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Valdría la pena un ensayo completo acerca de la superficialidad en la tecnología. Pero para muestra basta un botón, dicen.

Yo de todos modos ya tenía boicoteado al iPhone debido a la codicia de Carlos Slim, el DRM y demás…

Y luego, para rematar, vean la ironía: con todo su glamour y superficialidad, Apple no le paga a sus empleados. Pero qué bonito está el iPhone, ¿no?

The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program…

What a concise and illuminating way of describing a problem we face today in the computer industry: we need good programmers, not code monkeys. You can read the whole article if you like.

Let’s say that your main system is Ubuntu, and you are playing with a vmware installation of some other unix (maybe Ubuntu!) but you are NOT using a desktop there, you just installed the minimal X libraries. You would have to export your DISPLAY variable and everything, as usual before trying to use some X client application on your guest system, right?. Well, it doesn’t quite work. Not with Ubuntu at least. You have to do a number of things.

First, tcp connections don’t seem to work between vmware hosted boxes and your main box. To fix this, you have to type the following command in your host (your real box), please don’t ask me why:

sudo ethtool -K eth0 sg off rx off tx off tso off

Now that tcp connections work, you export your DISPLAY variable on your guest and then… no luck! Ubuntu ships with the X server not listening on port 6000 as you are used to! And with gdm forbidding any X connection. Ubuntu team says that’s because most people doesn’t need or do this. Come on guys! This is just so usual on the Unix world, why should we not have it by default? Or at least why don’t you state this loud and clear so the people who needs this don’t have to lose hours looking for info?

Rants apart, go and edit /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and remove the “-nolisten tcp” option from there.

And then, go and edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and find the line that says DisallowTCP=false and set it to true. Restart your gdm and there you go. Why do we have to make simple things so complicated?

My upgraded Ubuntu 7.10 seems to be finally working, but it was not without problems, thanks to my ATI Radeon X700 card. We all know that the drivers for ATI are a pain, and here I am going to share my experience in case you run into trouble like me.

Firs of all: the proprietary ATI driver that Gutsy installs (linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22) does not work. My recomendation is that you follow this guide to compile and generate packages for the latest driver (8.40.4 as of this writing). Be sure you get read of any other driver you may have around, either installed by source or by Synaptic.

When you have finally installed your new driver, do not use the provided “Screens and Graphics” applet to configure it: either doesn’t work or I just could not understand it. Just make sure that your xorg.conf file has what it should and please reboot between editions of the file if for whatever reason you ran into the already mentioned applet. This program always rewrote the configuration file to use the vesa driver (failsafe option), and I never noticed under the last moment… You also have to reboot because some drivers might be loaded and could cause trouble if you just restart the X server. Of course you could use rmmod but then, you have to know details… reboot to be sure!

Now let me tell you more about my experience. After I managed to get the driver working, I got back my nice rock-steady 85 Hz, 1280 x 1024 desktop. Nice. I didn’t noticed anything new, but that’s because I hadn’t stumble with the System -> Preferences -> Appearance applet, and the last tab within, “Visual Effects”. I went for the whole enchilada and selected “Extra”…

Oh my… it just looks awesome!!!!

In fact, I never thought I could see Linux looking so fancy, with lots of transparency, wobbling windows, sliding workspaces and much more… It might be a little over the top for some people, but it really shows the potential of the new drivers and X development. Of course OSX fans should be saying that we’are just copycats. But then, who cares. We got it now and it is great.

Do you often find that your software is down? That it has as many bugs or even just idiosyncrasies that make no sense to the user as it does features? Do your users find it difficult to use? Is the problem at hand relatively simple compared to the training or documentation necessary to begin using the software?

If you answered yes to any of those questions you more than likely have average or below average developers…

Revolution Systems Blog: A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality

Well, maybe not an important feature, but Google Homepage Themes really look great! And they had this terrific idea: the images and colors change as time goes to reflect the mood & light of the your local timezone!

Ok, it is silly. But it still looks great…

Dell is making a poll on what flavor of Linux should they offer preinstaled on their hardware. I think this is important for spreading Linux use, considering how popular is this brand. They are considering RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. The only one I can’t say a great deal about is OpenSUSE, since I haven’t tried it. And my choice would be obvious here: I would skip the RPM based ones. No dependency hell, please. That leaves us alone with Ubuntu.

May I say that Ubuntu would be a great choice?

Now that long time user and Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond has finally decided to dump Fedora in favor of Ubuntu, it is a good moment to say that I did a similar move of my own.

As you can see in this very same weblog, I was a happy Gentoo user. But then, I was. I guess that the feeling of power and control of having a completely customizable (to the detail) Linux distribution finally wore out. I was stuck with an installation that demanded so much attention that it made me feel anxious every time that new updates were available. They started to pile up waiting for my free time, which was very little. Finally, when it was time to upgrade to modular X, I knew I just had enough.

Contrary to Eric, I found out long time ago that Fedora, with its nightmarish dependency management, thanks to the RPM contraption inherited from Red Hat days, was no way to go. And I knew about Ubuntu, a fresh distribution based on the venerable Debian, was making its way into a lot of old and new users. I had installed Debian once and felt puzzled by the whole process, it was just too geek and non friendly. But anyway, Ubuntu seemed to be different and promised a lot.

And here I am: a happy Ubuntu user, not looking back! The first thing that comes to my mind about Ubuntu is “it just works”… almost. I mean, we’re talking about computers, right? operating systems? Linux? But then, Ubuntu is the closer experience to a plug & play distribution that I ever had. The installer is nice and easy, package management is a breeze, the destop works and looks great, has lots of nice programs available, good hardware support… It even works with my iPod right out of the box!

Now let me tell you a word of advice about hardware before you ditch whatever you have installed and come to the kingdom of Ubuntu. After all, this is not heaven in any way, and problems do exist. Some of them are not to blame on Ubuntu but anyway, I think that new users should know.

Stay away from ATI video cards with Linux. You better go and pay an extra for an NVidia card. You’ll be happy and grateful. It is not that ATI cards do not work at all in Linux, they do and I have one right now working on Ubuntu. The problem is they won’t work easily. For instance, you have a good chance for the Ubuntu graphical installer to choke on it and refuse to work. And you would have to go for the non appealing text mode installer. And then, with every update of the driver you will have to follow a long and strange upgrade recipe in hopes that all will end up good, with some image on your screen. So long to your user friendly experience. And I don’t mind, but I know that most users have had enough of terse user interfaces.

If you are an audio fan, be sure to check a compatibility list before buying that nice audio interface. Particularly, stay away from the new firewire ones and use internal. You might hav luck but you better check the list…

As a temporary conclusion I would say that every distro has its place, and for me, the geek factor and tweakability of Gentoo was nice for a moment. But right now I’m going through a phase where I need to have a good, non demanding distro that at the same time allows me to be not too far from the bleeding edge. If your needs are in some way similar to mine, give Ubuntu a try. You might be staying for a while.