BBC 6music radio channel’s Last.fm statistics

MetaFilter reports on the neatest hack I’ve heard about for a while. A BBC systems architect wrote a Last.fm plugin that submitted all the songs played on BBC’s 6radio channel to a Last.fm account called Sekrit.  Not only can you see what kind of “musical taste” BBC’s player robots have, but you can also check out what kind of friends the channel has. Judging from these statistics, I just might try this channel myself and see if I like it :)
 

When the Social Web goes sour: the Digg editorial mess

When the ForeverGeek blogger MacGyver noticed that two stories on the Digg front page were dugg by the same 16 people in the exact same order, he got curious. After all, Digg is supposed to be a social and user-driven technology news website, with no editorial control. Digg is one of the poster boys of the Web2.0 buzz, right up there along with Flickr, del.icio.us and the various AJAX application services. So, what does a blogger like MacGyver do if he suspects the system is rigged? Naturally, he blogs about it.

Uh-oh, wrong move. All of a sudden, strange things started happening on Digg, as described on McGyver’s blog entry from the next day. This of course is just his side of the story, but others have taken into investigating the matter as well. Roblomoso posted about the matter on Google Blogoscoped and was banned from Digg. Naturally, ForeverGeek in its entirety was banned as well.

I’d say this is editorial control, and not very “user-driven”. If users don’t like ForeverGeek’s stories, they wouldn’t digg them and all would be well, no? That’s how the social web is supposed to work, and that’s definitely how Digg claims to work. Digg founder Kevin Rose sort-of responed to the mess, but didn’t really succeed in explained anything, as illustrated by McGyver’s reply. What does matter is that ForeverGeek stories are suddenly starting to appear on Digg again.

People and communities do fight in real life all the time of course, so why wouldn’t they do the same on the internet (let alone the chaos that makes up the “Web2.0″?) Nothing new in that. I guess my point is that it’s just as sad in both cases.

Ubuntu newbie blog #1 growing blog on WordPress.com

Noticed that the fastest growing blog on wordpress.com is “Linux for human beings?” by Danny. The blog is a report of Danny’s real-life experiment of replacing Windows with Linux. He honestly tells us the good and the bad stuff a new user faces trying to use Ubuntu without geek help around. Hang in there Danny, lots of people have gotten their Ubuntu boxen working beautifully in the end!

Update: I completely missed this: the second fastest growing blog is “Ubuntu newbie” by Cornell :)

Linus still delivers mature, balanced arguments

In the middle of a technical debate about virtual memory in different kernels, Linus Torvalds showed again his charm and tact by claiming that “Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.” After Slashdot reported this, Linus wrote a nice, friendly response on his own medium (the lkml), not on Slashdot of course, pointing out that the Slashdot people “usually are smelly and eat their boogers, and have an IQ slightly lower than my daughters pet hamster”. He is in a position to say this because not only is he “the smartest person around” but also “incredibly good-looking”.

This flamebait is a worthy continuation of a long tradition of Linus’ communication, starting back in 1992 with his own master when it comes to operating system programming, and a more recent evaluation of the competence of the makers of the world’s premiere business Unix desktop.

All this is well in line with the fact that he is so smart he knows free software licensing matters better than the FSF which enabled him to write Linux in the first place, and its lawyers when it comes to the upcoming version of the GPL, the license which he licensed Linux under.

Dapper enters beta, Edgy planning started

I’ve been running the development version of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on all my machines since GNOME 2.14 was released on March 15th, without too much trouble. When I ran my daily upgrade yesterday, I noticed the artwork started to mention Dapper Beta. Today, Dapper officially enters Beta status, so the release should be more or less in its final form. Now you can read the Beta Announcement and drool over the great new features. If you can, try out the Beta and report any remainging bugs!

Dapper is different from previous Ubuntu releases. It is the culmination of lessons learned from the first three releases and will be the first one to receive three years of support for desktop installations and five years for servers, which makes it comparable to the expensive “enterprise” distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. The difference is of course that Ubuntu will never have a separate “enterprise” release but all Ubuntu users get the best possible distribution for free. This is great for corporate users and others who value extremely stable platforms but it has another consequense as well, for those who enjoy living on the edge: the freedom to experiment on the release coming up after Dapper, the Edgy Eft!

Following a rock solid release such as Dapper, the Ubuntu community can again freely concentrate on exploring new, exciting technologies for the next releases. Ubuntu leader Mark Shuttleworth, A.K.A sabdfl, opened yesterday the planning period for the next release, giving the community free hands to experiment, imposing almost “zero from-the-top requirements” for the release. We can afford this because of the long support for Dapper. Those who want to keep running a solid release can still enjoy Dapper while the more adventurous users can venture to the unknown with Edgy Eft. I’m sure that will be very exciting. I’m already anxious to try out Xen, wobbly windows on Xgl/AIGXL, and whatever the Ubuntu hackers come up with. Let’s first get Dapper out though, and make sure it’s the most awesome system to date!

EOL for proprietary chat protocol support

As of today, I will no longer be logged in on the following proprietary chat networks:

• MSN
• Yahoo!
• AIM

I will be happy to chat with you on the free Jabber and IRC networks. Please see my updated contact information on the About page.

If you don’t have a Jabber account, you can easily get one for free on the jabber.org home page. If you use Gmail, you already have a Jabber account. If your current chat client does not support Jabber, upgrade to the open source multiprotocol Gaim messenger if you use Linux or Windows, or Psi if you use a Mac. Of course, I’ll continue to idle on the Freenode IRC network as well.

I stongly recommend that everybody upgrade to open chat protocols and leave the corporate networks fight their own battles.

Linus fixes Kaspersky’s flawed “cross platform virus”

Kaspersky Lab's announcement of a Windows/Linux cross-platform virus was the scoop of last week (source code available of course).

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn't actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse's analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I'm not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus's explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users' need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let's see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky's software for any platform.

Proprietary video drivers in Linux

Some time ago, I wrote a lament about the sorry state of video support in Linux, or more correctly, the crappy Linux support on the part of graphics chip manufacturers. Today, an interesting CNET article touches the issue. Do proprietary drivers belong in a free kernel? I’ll just summarize the views of the main manufacturers here.

ATI defends proprietary drivers on IP reasons: their drivers include licensed proprietary third-party IP that they are required to protect. They also cite teir own IP interests and wish to “maintain the proprietary, trade-secret nature of that as long as possible.” Way to go.

Nvidia doesn’t think hackers can write complicated software: “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” Also, their customers don’t seem to be complaining enough. They do have open source “where it makes sense”. Nice.

Intel seems to be the most interesting company here. They hope to compete against ATI and Nvidia specifically with open source drivers. If their chips become good enough in the near future, I have something to recommend to newbies again!

The article also has lots of interesting comments from the Linux kernel hackers and development of a stable interface for proprietary drivers, as well as the strategies of the commercial Linux biggies Red Hat and Novell. So go ahead and read it in full.

Oracle Novell SUSE Desktop Linux Pro?

According to a Reuters scoop, Oracle wants to deliver a “full stack”, i.e. an operating system and the applications in a buldle, just like Microsoft. Linux is a natural choice for an Oracle database grid/cluster/whatever platform. That would make a lot of sense, why not? The story mentions that Oracle is thinking about buying Novell, which would mean that new Oracle systems would be built on the SUSE Enterprise Server.

Oh well, the news, especially business news is full of stories like this. Perhaps I should just go and read some real news now.

Update: Oracle has confirmed the OS plans.

WordPress.com down, topyli’s blogging not affected

WordPress.com had a long, unscheduled downtime yesterday, during which users could not view blogs, nor post anything. I was able to document my valuable thoughts with no interruption because of Drivel, the wonderful offline blogging tool for GNOME. So this morning, i simply post yesterday’s batch of drivel for your drooling pleasure.

SMB printing in Dapper: a bug and a workaround

People at work tossed a little Fujitsu laptop to me for some reason. It had Windows XP but I promptly replaced it with a real operating system and now it runs Ubuntu Dapper. I named it oskar, after the little hero in Grass’s The Tin Drum. Its internal network card is broken but I can replace it with a little USB LAN dongle (tested under Windows and it worked). The installation was totally uneventful, everything Just Works as advertised.

Samba printing, however, is currently broken. Because there is a Windows box on my home network, I use Samba for all networking. Samba on my Dapper server works well and the Windows box can print to it, but the Dapper laptop could not. On the Ubuntu Forums, other people seemed to be having problems with printing from Dapper to Windows servers, so i went on to examine relevant bug reports on Dapper. Looks like the problem has appeared quite recently (sometime around April 12th), and is on the client side. Sure enough reverting the smbspool binary to an older version indeed fixed the problem. Hopefully we’ll soon see this bug fixed and smbclient updated!

Otherwise, Dapper currently works very well, and the new GNOME is awesome.

Easter eggs

Warning: Easter Egg spoilers ahead!

Celebrating Easter, Jonathan has gone egg hunting. He first exposes a known liar, aptitude. We all know of APT’s Super Cow Powers because they’re documented (type “apt-get” with no arguments and hit ENTER), but aptitude keeps its powers hidden. The key to finding aptitude’s Super Cow Powers is endurance and liberal use of the -v switch.

Firefox’s secret message from the Book of Mozilla is well known as well, but the really great OpenOffice.org Easter Egg that Jonathan unveils was news to me. Of course, Jonathan sees such an elaborate Easter Egg as “proof that OpenOffice.org is bloated”. Not that we would need further proof of that! :) I didn’t know about the funny release names in the Ubuntu kernel documentation either.

Here are a couple of GNOME eggs I’m aware of. Open the “Run” dialog (press alt+F2). Type “gegls from outer space” as the command. You get to play a game that “will change the way you think of your desktop forever.” It features GEGLs (Genetically Engineered Goat, Large). GEGL is a mythical creature in GIMP and GNOME lore, and the unofficial secret logo of the GNOME project.

The other GNOME egg i know about features Wanda, the fortune telling fish from the Fish Applet. Type “free the fish” into the Run dialog and Wanda will swim around your desktop occasionally. (You can accomplish the same thing by hitting the ‘f’ key three times after opening the “About” box of a panel.) If you click it with your mouse, it will flee, only to return later. You cannot kill this process because it’s hidden in the gnome-panel process (or one of its children – killiing gnome-panel does help).

Of course, Easter Eggs in free software have given rise to some complaints as well. An OpenOffice.org user argues that a piece of free software should work as advertised and only in that manner. There are bug reports demanding the removal of Easter Eggs from OO.o, or at least an easy method for sysadmins to disable them. Issue 61685 has extensively discursive comments for and against eggs.

A picture is worth a thousand words?

In his ZDNet blog, Richard Stiennon shows maps of system calls that occur when a Web server serves a single HTML page containing a single image. He cites the thread chaos on the Windows server as proof of the operating system’s insecurity. It’s true that complicated systems offer more opportunities for crackers to utilize buffer overflow vulnerabilities compared to simpler ones. Although the images don’t really show just Windows and Linux systems but combinations of LInux/Apache and Windows/IIS, the sheer visual difference in the system call maps is stunning.

GNOME 2.14.1 hits Dapper

New GNOME versions are always first introduced to the development versions of Ubuntu (well, Foresight gives them a run for their money), so 2.14 has been in Dapper since almost day one. The GNOME project tends to release a point release pretty soon after a major release, to fix obvious bugs and stabilize the desktop for production use. I can now pronounce my GNOME deskop not only “awesome”, but also very very stable. This is clearly the best GNOME ever. I haven’t been this happy about GNOME since 1.4 or so (not that I would be very happy with 1.4 today :)

This is also a major step feature-wise: the searchable GNOME. I can have even less widgets, dangles, bells, whistles, and “stuff” on my desktop because I can very intuitively find anything without the interface getting in the way too much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but MORE true than ever before on any desktop I’ve tried. Under the hood, the GNOME hackers have really put a lot of work into making GNOME less resource hungry, so that maybe I don’t have to buy another set of hardware just because I have a new version of the software. It’s the other way around! Try telling that to Microsoft.

Young killers praised

I couldn’t agree more with koke. Apparently Mexico is celebrating their youngest killer. Bullfighting might be an established tradition in some countries, but that doesn’t make it right. I find praising 9 year old children for their kills particularly repulsive.

The last of the Linux-friendly graphics chip makers

For years, when newbies asked me which graphics card they should get when building a Linux box, the answer was easy. Unless you need bleeding-edge 3D support for, say, playing Doom 3, buy a Matrox card. I was always very happy with my Millenium G550 card’s 2D performance, which is what really counts on a serious workstation, and I always got enough DRI support to play simple 3D games and graphics hacks. Matrox used to support new versions of X with their binary drivers, which were incorporated into XFree and X.org sources pretty soon afterwards.

Now that Ubuntu Dapper uses the new X.org 7.0, i naturally wanted to play with cool and useful effects that the bleeding-edge XGL extension supports, so I needed DRI. Direct renedering was apparently not supported with the free mga drivers in X.org, so I readed for the Matrox website for drivers. Turns out Matrox had no driver for X.org later than version 6.8.1, and judging from the responses by Matrox representatives on their support forums, we shoudln’t even expect them any time soon. Perhaps the Matrox hackers have assumed the stagnated state of mind of the old XFree team and got scared of the brand new modular X that the 7.0 release represents, or perhaps the company policy has changed, I don’t know. No explanation there, beyond “no ETA at this point” for the drivers. Daunted, I went on to do other stuff.

This morning I returned to the support forums, only to find that the Linux forum was locked, no new posts could be submitted. Apparently Matrox had grown weary of the Rants of the Linux users (who had been spoiled with quick delivery of drivers in the past), and decided to simply shut off this channel of critique. Daunted, and this time very pissed too, I turned to Google for a last search for a solution.

Lo, Google directed me to Arch Linux Wiki, where somebody had indeed come up with a fix involving a simple change in the xorg.conf file and the free mga driver in X.org. I quickly applied the fix (edit xorg.conf, add

Option “OldDmaInit” “true”

to your “Device section), tested and saw that it was good.

So now I have DRI, but I have no graphics chip maker to recommend to newbies. I never guessed Matrox could afford to lose the strong support they’ve had from Linux/X users over the years now that they’re losing the game to NVidia and ATI already. Now all I can say is, ATI is the worst one because their proprietary drivers are constantly broken. Matrox is close to the bottom, since they have no binary drivers at all, and we don’t know how much they are interested in giving the X community’s free drivers. NVidia has very good proprietary drivers for linux in case you don’t mind using them.

One of the best things about Linux has been that you almost never needed to hunt down and install drivers for your hardware, as Windows users are accustomed to do. If things continue to decline, we will always need to find the correct drivers (non-free drivers no less!) to get decent graphics support.

Woe is me. Please tell me I’m wrong and Matrox cards will work out of the box like they used to Real Soon.

topyli goes Graphite

This must be the smallest news of the weekend, but weekends are slow on news anyway. So, having enjoyed Lokheed’s lovely gPerfection theme for a long time (see my screenshots page), I decided i need a refreshing change. I changed to the Graphite suite by the same Lokheed, and I really like the results! Here’s the screenshot:

Canon camera bug fixed in Dapper

Upgraded today, and was pleased to see Lukasz’s bug fix has been applied to the Dapper libgphoto2. Working software rules.

I also like the new look. The brighter Human theme and especially the new icons are very slick. In particular, I enjoy the new Tangerine icon theme variant based on Tango standards. A branded spash screen and a new default background are still missing.

Ubuntu usually has very fresh software but for some reason LyX tends to be a bit old. This was the case in Breezy, and now again in dapper. I have built packages of LyX 1.4 because it has some nice new features missing from 1.3 which is still included in Dapper. I was particularly excited to test the new experimental GTK+ frontend, but it doesn’t work very well yet and is definitely not production ready. Selecting text is very awkward in particular. Luckily, I have managed to integrate Qt apps into GNOME quite nicely, using the Polymer Qt theme as described in this tutorial.

Get your facts straight

Found a nice blog entry by Bldust with some beliefs some people may have that might need checking out. Even if you’re not American, this checklist is worth a read. On a similar note. compare the American adventure in Iraq to, say, the cost of funding global anti-hunger efforts.

Dapper and the Canon Powershot A400

To get my camera working on Ubuntu Dapper, I used this hack. Nice work Lukasz, let’s hope this bug will be fixed in Dapper proper soon.

Dapper almost works

I’ve upgraded both office and home machines to Ubuntu Dapper now. Good: GNOME 2.14 is sweet, the speed improvements are noticeable and it’s better than ever. Bad: My digital camera is not found automatically. Some sound problems.

The delay of Dapper release vs. the Windows Vista delay is nicely discussed here. It’s all about openness!

“The operating system is going to be late. Last-minute decisions mean a last-minute delay — more testing needed, says the organisation, and a bit more integration. But the reaction isn’t what you might expect: with a few minor reservations, the users and developers are positive and supportive. “It’s worth it,” they say.”

mahangu.org has some notes about Dapper, the Linux Desktop in general, and the sweetness of hardware support in Linux compared to Windows.