The Lair

Oh hear ye, hear ye for I have seen the future. Its name? Portable Apps. On the face of it, a simple enough concept. No installation or fancy setup programs required, no uninstallation. Just unzip the application onto your hard disk and it … just works. Some other OS, most notably Mac OSX, have had it for a while now but this new revolution in portable applications is merely a harkening to the heyday of Windows apps; where applications were lean and writing registry keys and registering components were a rarity instead of the norm.

I’ve already tried Portable Gaim 2.0, Portable Firefox 2.0 beta and Nvu Portable. The only criticism I have of this completely wonderful site is that updates seem to take a while to filter through… For example, Gaim is now on beta 3, but PortableApps still offers what seems like beta 1. Still, a minor detail. All of this focus on portable apps started after advent of U3, a proprietary standard for USB thumb drives. It’s a wonderful idea. Just unzip and start using the application. Don’t like it? Just delete the directory and you’re done. No uninstall required.

And in other news, I notice a new version of Google Talk. Some of the features look so cute that I feel compelled to ditch my Jabber client and install the real thing; but I’m valiantly resisting the temptation. The file transfer stuff, well, I’ve heard it promised before but it doesn’t seem to really work all that well. Maybe GTalk will get it right.

And in that promised rant, I want to vent my spleen (not for the first time, and probably not the last) on blinkered OS zealotry. It’s all very well, sez I, to profess love and undying devotion for a particular operating system, piece of software or anything else. But if you’re using it as a tool, then to remain ignorant of other choices is nothing short of criminally stupid. Consider a web designer who says “I love me Firefox. Thus, I don’t care about what happens to IE or Opera or any other browser”. Or consider a budding young sysadmin who says “I love me Linux. So what if I have Windows machines on the network? I don’t like Windows, so I don’t care”. Umm. Yeah. Chances still are if someone offers our young zealot the use of a browser (or OS), it will more likely be IE (and/or Windows) than it will be Firefox (and/or Linux). Figure them both out and then decide which to use. Don’t make the choice based on ideology and then go “la la la la, I hear of no alternatives, I see no alternatives, thus the alternatives do not exist”.

Umm.. [rant mode = off]

I’ve been reading some code recently which is akin to a Dyson vacuum cleaner crossed with a blackhole. In short, a vortex of suckage. Perhaps shockingly, I had little part in releasing this code to the wild; but I have been stuck with the unfortunate task of reviewing it.

I need to start a slush fund for the therapy I’ll need in a few years after looking at that code. I’ve written code that looks like your ugly cousin’s face through a convex mirror (admittedly, this was at the tail end of a 48 hour continuous coding bender), but this surpasses my best (or worst) efforts by a country mile. Umm. Yeah. It’s not been the best of weeks. Anyway, moving swiftly past that traumatic experience …

Actually, no… instead of moving swiftly on, I’m going to wallow in my misery a bit longer. But only till I see this Pearls before Swine classic.

Read the rest of this entry »

If anyone asks (and you’d be surprised at how many people do, really), I’m a Redhat man. Not because I have a particular affinity to what is, after all, a commercial entity; but more because that’s the first distribution that made me really get Linux. I had some of my finest Linux moments - you know, when this proverbial lightbulb goes off in your head and you think - “Aaah, that’s how you get a daemon working on startup” - working with Redhat in the bad old days.

But I’ve been running Ubuntu, Mandrake and a weirdly customized version of Slack on occasion for years now, so my experiences with Redhat have been minimal recently. And I installed Fedora on an almost-PC; but got rather annoyed with it after a while. My point: I’m not generally bound up with distribution mania. If it works for me, I use it. I started using Ubuntu for no less (and no more) a reason than the local ylug meetup had someone offering ShipIt installer CDs of Warty Warthog. Took one (hey, it’s free!), pursed my lips, thought “hmm, why not? Everyone else is doing it.” and installed it. It worked, it did what I wanted (as most Linuxes do) so it stayed.

From time to time, I need to remember that not everyone else is as distribution agnostic as I am. Some people hop onto distributions (and indeed, Linux in general) through ideology, not necessarily through a desire to get the job done their way. For the past week, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with SATA support in mainstream distros. Yeah, so there are workarounds and patches and updates. Unfortunately, those options weren’t really available to us at the time (not connected to the net, not a fastish connection etc etc… the excuses, they just keep piling up). What’s worse, I wasn’t physically there - but just providing assistance over IM.

I proposed a radical idea. We needed to get this server done soon. Let’s install Windows.

Yes, really. If the distros we have at our disposal are giving us this much grief over a fiddly SATA disk or three, it’s not worth the pain anymore.

This seriously got me thinking. Windows and Linux both need to be secured before they can run on an internet facing server. There is no “secure by default” mantra toting distro developer I’d trust as much as doing my own audit. Ok, so maybe running OpenBSD might provide a modicum more comfort; but that’s not one of our options. At some point, I need to make the call between futzing around for SATA support on the distros we had at our disposal and just installing Windows and getting started on patching the box.

The jury is still out - but I’m definitely advocating going with Windows on Friday. I swear to $hypothetical_patron_saint_of_linux_distros. Now I just need to convince the other guy I’m working with not to go out and shoot himself because I caved in to the Borg.