A Blog of Very Little Brain

“Sometimes, people ask me if it is a sin in the church of Emacs to use the editor Vi. It is true that Vi-Vi-Vi is the editor of the beast. But using a free version of Vi is not a sin but a penance.” – Richard Stallman.

I’m not a religious person (and in all honesty, neither is RMS).
But, in the same manner that not being Christian doesn’t prevent me from debating Kirkegaard’s philosophy, being a secret member of the Cult of VI doesn’t prevent me from accepting the wisdom of St. iGNUcius regarding the Evil inherent in proprietary software.

Biggest problem from my point is inherent in the choice of the language of the scripture. True advocates of the One True Freedom (or the 4 freedoms of the apocalypse) know that software made with proprietary tools can never be free. And so came the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), a free software tool that allows ye followers to compile code. This is all fine and dandy when it comes to the “classic” hackers languages, such as C, C++, Lisp, and today’s Perl, Python et al, which are released under free (as in free-for-all) licenses.

But here’s my problem, I use COBOL. The ancient, monolithic, elephantine language, which has the style and elegance of a Rube Goldberg machine without the humour. Until recently, the only way to create COBOL software was to use proprietary tools. Not that there is some sort of voodoo mystery surrounding the language, since the specification for it are available as an ANSI standard for decades. However, it isn’t exactly a hacker favourite, so no one bothered developing free tools for it.

But, those days are long past, as now, not only I am able to enjoy two excellent GNU compilers, but I was also able to install them by using Debian/Ubuntu’s own .deb format. The first, TinyCOBOL, compiles COBOL-85 code to GNU assembly, and the other is Open-COBOL which goes a bit extra by converting the code to C and then compiling it using GCC, however, Open-COBOL does offer support of the later 97 (COBOL2000/OOCOBOL) and the 2002 standards.

The homepages have the source code for both projects, however, to install them apt-get style, head here for the TinyCOBOL packages, and to the Debian Repositories for the Open-COBOL project Packages.

On the other hand, nothing I’ve just said can explain Vigor

Turns out the next Nintendo console will not be named Revolution, but Wii.
I believe my first reaction what “Wha?”™
OK, the concept is just feels too much like a marketing department jerking off each other (disturbing metaphor, to say the least). It’s Wii, like “we” with the ‘ii’ which supposed to look like two people standing together. This, of course, immediately brings to mind the concept of people interacting, and the multiplayer/communal experience the new console promotes.

Only it doesn’t.

It never does, actually. All those “clever” names are just wasted efforts. Sony’s Playstation didn’t succeed because the name conveyed immediate playable station-ness. Nintendo’s Nintendo Entertainment System didn’t create a feeling of systematically entertainment, and besides, most people refer to those as “PS” and “NES”. What the hell does “xbox” even supposed to convey? (it’s a continuation of the “x” branding Microsoft has given to it’s games/multimedia driver/API, like DirectX, nothing more).

For example, Gamers.net have created a 10 worst Console names articles, toting Sega’s Dreamcast at number 9, claiming that “Sega’s got a history of creating inspired console names: Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, and particularly, Sega Genesis sounded effortlessly sleek and powerful.“
No they didn’t. The writing is projecting his opinion of the console over the name. Same with Nintendo: “Usually, simplicity is the best course — “Game Boy” and “Nintendo 64″ were smart, smart choices.” Were they? What so smart about “Game boy” exactly?

Bottom line: Consoles are only as good as their names. Good games on a system give it better consumer appreciation, create a “cool” image, and infuse the name with more positive connotation than any marketing group might ever achieve. People don’t care if it’s PlayStation II, PS2, or “the machine that plays GTA”™. They didn’t care when it was called Atari 2600, Famicom/super Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System/NES/SNES/Super Nintendo Entertainment System/etc. Sega’s Gamegear failed miserably despite having a superior technology AND a cooler name than Nintendo’s Gameboy. And besides, people have grown accustomed to calling Nintendo’s consoles “the Nintendo”. It’s even more obvious in the new handhelds, both Nintendo and Sony released their products under the names of “DS” and “PSP” (Dual Screen and PlayStation Portable), predicting that everyone will already abbreviate it, so if you can’t beat them…

I can easily predict that, in the very fortunate (and sadly, tragically, unlikely) case that Nintendo Wii’s games will rule the next years, that kids growing up with cherish the name wii like other’s cherish the name NES, or like Gamers.net writer cherish the name “Master System”. Other than that, it’s a cute name, with a cute logo.

(Just as a side note, whoever came up with the “two lowercase i’s that appear like two people” concept knows his stuff. It doesn’t “do” anything, but it’s well designed).

I know I keep a straight text-only blog, but I happened to come across a couple of more colourful pages.

The age of Photoshop tends to constantly feed us with mushed-up hilarities, and this art “history” page featuring Mr. Potato Head is no different.

A little bit more artistic, but tres cool nontheless, is this page featuring actual classical CD covers of famous composer’s compilations, drawn by top cartoonists. Beautiful.

And to end it all, a revised mindmap of GNU/Linux distros. Much better than the first try.

All in all it wasn’t such a turbulent affair. Just a long winded one.

I’ve started the process at Friday noon. First I had to work on a promised backup to my mum, which took sometime, with zipping a couple of gigabytes worth of files into 7z files, then burning them on 2 CDs. Once I got that out of my way, I sudo update-manager -h and hit the upgrade button. When the smoke cleared, I was informed that the upgrade will demand a hefty 1 GB download, which will take anything between 2 and 7 hours, depending on the download rate. Ecstatic as I was, this was a real downer, but nothing comes easy. At exactly 9 pm, all the files have been downloaded and the installation process began. This was also the moment when I was supposed to go to my night shift.

I left everything running and went to work. I (correctly) assumed that things will stop somewhere along the way for some input, which will have to wait until my return. They were, I was prompted to replace both the GDM and the Vim configuration files. I approved both, which may, or may not, have been the best decision, as I was soon to learn. The installation and cleaning process went without a hitch, and the system rebooted.

Into a GDM error message. I don’t know if anyone had the pleasure of experiencing this error message, which, from what I’ve yet seen (and I’ve managed to get several of the more interesting error messages), is probably ranked quite high. The problem with it isn’t that it’s incomprehensible (which it is), or upsetting (which it is), it’s the, how shall I put it, look of the message. It’s quite apparent that someone wanted to make this as pleasant as possible. And failed.

“let’s make it nice and friendly,” said our programmer. “After all, we just told our user that his X server is probably riding in the fields of eternal hunting, for all that he cares. We don’t want those unfriendly, laconic messages, no Blue-Screen-of-Death-style stuff either. Let’s give it a light-gray background, and a sky-blue frame, with some nice ASCII motifs in it, and give him a yes/no “buttons” for the error logs, all rendered in what is the last word in ncurses design.” And then our programmer went and painstakingly designed this error message window, and then someone took this code and re-wrote everything in ADA, then used babelfish to translate it to Spanish and back and made sure that whatever error message it displays will be as garbled and misrepresented as possible.

It is quite a mess, really. Fortunately, I’ve already met with this monument to the futility of man, otherwise, it would’ve been a very unfortunate encounter, considering it was close to 8 am, and me coming from an all-nighter at work. A quick sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg later and… Nothing. Apart from the same Vogon-quality error message. Two more tries, didn’t improve things any better. I eventually decided to sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx driver and reconfigure X with the nvidia driver, which, lo and behold, worked. I had to sudo killall gdm and restart it, but it worked.

I tried playing around with the settings, and so far I like what I see. But I’ve yet to dig deep enough into all the tweaks. In fact, it preserved most of my gnome configurations, which meant that all the GUI bells and whistles were still turned off. I’m quite comfortable with it as it is, so I doubt I’ll change it just for the sake of it. I can’t seem to get the screensaver to not work, as the new setting dialog doesn’t include that option, but I’ll find where they hid it.

Which brings me to what seems to be the biggest problem I have with Ubuntu’s new version. A lot of things are hidden. The gconf menu, for once. It’s not buried or anything, and can be enabled with a simple click, but the decision to remove it is bothering. Same with the Palm Pilot setting menu item. I’m sure that hard-core GNU/Linux users probably don’t need those fancy-schmancy menu items, and new users are probably better off without another way to shoot themselves in the foot, but I’m neither, and I don’t really like to dig for what I consider to be basic features. (In fairness, to enable all the menu option, one only need to access the “Alcarta” application which lies on the top of the Application> Accessories menu (not that they WANTED it to be located that high (It just was fortunate to be the A on the A on the A…))).

Another item high on the not-working list is actually gvim. I works fine, but can’t seem to find the designated color scheme. Probably need a quite gvimrc shake.

So I’m still testing the ropes, as mentioned I made no sudden moves, no major configuration changes. I’ll try XGL this coming weekend, but until then, I’m still swimming in the kiddie pool as far as the new version is considered. One major decision was to move everything from the two Windows partitions into one, and format the other to Linux as well. You can count the times I’ve rebooted to Windows in the past couple of months on one hand. All of those were as result of IE only sites, such as my bank’s and my girlfriend’s school’s. And for that I definitely don’t need 30 GB of space.

Got Ubuntu Dapper Drake Beta running, now sleep.

Gah. Hnng. Bleh.

I’m riveting insanely for a week now. All those Dapper (p)reviews and suchlike have been giving me a dapper craving… However, I’ve been constantly reminding myself that it’s still a pre-release, and there’s nothing that guarantees it won’t destroy my entire system, or at the best case scenario, stop things from working. On the other hand, I have a very stable, smoothly running system, which should be able to withstand any such upgrade. On the other other hand, I have a very stable, smoothly running system, why would I want to toy around with an unstable release?

Well, no real reason, apart from this video.

I know, upgrading just for the sake of eye-candy is not the “Linux way”, but dammit, it’s one hellova candy, if you ask me. I mean, the first time I heard of XGL I wasn’t really impressed. I assumed it was yet another nicety, your “coat of paint” rather than a really usable feature. I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong.

I think it was Novell’s presentation that got me interested. There are a lot of stuff running there, some of them better, some worse, some not really usable (why would I want to run a program on the side of the “cube”?), but the overall concept was very solid, it looked like someone got a lot of stuff that have “usability” written all over them. The whole “3d GUI” started to make sense all of the sudden. I mean, first thing I do in any new desktop is kill everything that isn’t functional. All those shadows, 3d menus and buttons, you name it. I’ve been considering Mac OSX’s look as “stupid” since it insists on adding all sort of cutesy animations that don’t do anything. However with XGL, everything has a reason, somehow, moving from pseudo 3d to real 3d gives all those cutesies context, and therefore make them a true part of the GUI.

The big question is, whether it’ll run. I did the test with Kororaa’s Live CD and it was quite a nice experience. Of course, with a Live CD being one, the machine wasn’t running anything else but the 3d GUI. How will it run as a front-end to a full blown operation system? I would risk a guess and say it will do a good job. Most of it is the concept of finally using the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) of the video card rather than the CPU to render the screen, freeing the CPU to actually handling the non-graphical part of the interface. In the worst case I’ll shove another 500 mb of RAM, or buy a new(er) video card.

With all this being said, Ubuntu 6.06 has just gone beta, which only further adds to my grieving. It might just be the final straw on my way to upgrading.

Oh, and the subject is based on this page’o’silliness.

The June 1 date for the next Ubuntu GNU/Linux release is closing (although the original April 24 date would’ve been closer… Oh well), and many “previews” are already available. I placed preview in double quotes, as these are based on the Flight Series alpha test releases, which is a snapshot release of the product.

First to rise on my browser was Linuxforums which aptly claims to be not a preview but a survey of the current available flight CD. He pushes some nice points regarding the GUI installer holy war, and it’s an overall positive survey, but then again the writer is a self proclaimed Ubuntu lover.

Second is a lookahead straight from the padded cells of the Mad Penguin. The insanity of said waterfowl doesn’t deter him from warmly recommending Ubuntu, despite it being, as he claims “not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora“. Whatever league is that, I don’t know, but then again, the writer does, as par with his words, “prefer Slackware over any other distro”.

And, naturally, you might want to go over the actual description of the release, which is displayed for your inquiring eyes in all shades of brown.

The current alpha release, code named “flight 6″ is available here for download.