So I’m trying this experiment to see if I can make a note in Evernote and have it turn up both in my academic database and publicly on the blog. That would make for a convenient blogging method that eliminates the need for unstable blog API apps.
I've just spent over an hour making a single post on Blackboard. No other piece of software so casually throws one's work away. No other piece of software is so determined to thwart even the most basic of attempts to communicate, even simple things like saying:
Dear class,
Hello!
Such things are virtually impossible on Blackboard. Notice the lovely space between the first and the second lines of text! Notice the wanton use of italics, the similarity of the typeface used in all three words!
Just try to achieve this with Blackboard! JUST FSCKING TRY. Only be sure to set aside an entire afternoon for your attempt. Much more than that if you actually have a message you'd like to get across.
After using Linux exclusively as my daily computing environment since 1993, writing six Linux books, and editing countless others, I am leaving Linux for one simple reason: the social and political communities surrounding Linux now have their heads collectively stuck up their fan exhaust ports.
I've moved to Mac OS X and have purchased the Snow Leopard Box Set (OS X 10.6.3 + iWork + iLife), Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and Aperture 3. Yes, a two-decade free software advocate is leaving free software behind.
Why?
The latest difficulty I'm having in leaving Linux illustrates the problem perfectly.
Chapter 1: Data Corruption Thanks to Linux Politics
Mac OS X can't efficiently access Linux files, so I'm switching all of my USB drives to Windows NTFS format, which it can efficiently access. Linux claims to offer stable NTFS support with the ntfs-3g filesystem driver, so it should be simple matter to copy all of my Linux files over to the new drives, right?
Nope. Howcome? Because Linux uses filename characters like ~ : < > on NTFS drives even though Windows explicitly disallows them. Try to copy files across and then check the drive outside of Linux and you'll get mass file erasing and file corruption due to invalid file names. In short, All Your Data Lost on that drive.
It has taken me a day of experimentation and data loss to figure this out. It's not the first thing you think of when your files start disappearing.
Why in the name of hades would Linux do this? Because NTFS is technically capable of doing it, and the developers say that the data loss in question is Windows' fault because it's Windows that doesn't support these characters in filenames, nevermind that this is supposed to be the Windows format in the first place. They seem to think that all of this makes Bill Gates (rather than, say, them) look bad.
They also don't feel the need document the likelihood of data loss should you as a mere user fail to realize this beforehand.
Chapter 2: We Won't Let You Fix It (More Politics)
Once you've figured this out on your own, it's a simple matter to make the adjustment by hand to correct this behavior:
After you "remount" the filesystem with the special "windows_names" option, all names of created files will adhere to Windows' own rules for the NTFS format. Great!
Only you will have to do this every single time you connect a drive and copy over files in Linux. If you don't remember to do this… Voila! Corruption and data loss.
Until 2008 or so, once you managed to discover this problem you could simply tell Linux that you always wanted to use the "windows_names" rule when connecting drives in the future, thereby at least solving the problem going forward.
But around 2008, the developers actually removed the ability for you to make that choice. Why?
Because they don't want you to. It's really that simple. Reading thread after thread in Bugzilla resulting from users' bug reports about precisely this issue makes this clear enough. Developers simply tell people that "just because this behavior was offered in the past doesn't mean we have to offer it in the future," and suggest that the need or desire to tell Linux to connect drives in non-default ways is "not that interesting" to them.
The fact is that these kinds of decisions are political ones, not technical or use-oriented ones. Linux developers in this case (and increasingly in many others) want to create an incompatibility with Windows to drive home the moral differences between Linux and Windows. They'll claim that it's about technical superiority, but any reasonable person beyond the programmer community can understand fairly easily that the ability to include a colon (:) or a vertical bar (|) in a filename is does not go such a very long way toward establishing technological superiority.
What they miss is that in so doing, they remove precisely the moral advantages that Linux has always had, not to mention the very technological superiority (that of rock solid flexibility and configurability) that led so many of us to embrace Linux nearly twenty years ago.
Despite Torvalds' supervision, Linux has finally become a much more purely ideological community than a technical one. Time for those of us that just want working technology… to go somewhere else.
Epilogue on Linux vs. Mac vs. Windows
A month of dedicated Mac OS X use has driven home just how much Linux has regressed with developments like the one above, not to mention how much it is about to regress with GNOME 3 / KDE 4 becoming the only Linux desktop environments for all future Linux releases.
They've been pronouncing the arrival of Linux on the desktop for years, and in 2005-2007 we were right on the threshold.
Now, Linux is leaving the desktop for good, before having ever arrived, and after twenty years and half a dozen books, I am leaving Linux.
No doubt their response to this post would be "Good riddance to a commercial software user!"
And Some Grumpy Notes on iPhone 4 Battery Cases
Looking for an iPhone 4 battery case and considering ExoGear Exolife or Mophie Juice Pack Air?
Keep looking.
ExoGear Exolife: There is absolutely zero reason for you to buy this device. Why? Because it turns itself off automatically when the internal iPhone 4 battery is charged rather than letting the iPhone 4 operate in "wall power" mode. It does this, says the Exolife manual, to extend the life of the Exolife battery. Of course in doing this it radically shortens the life of the internal iPhone 4 battery, which costs much more than the Exolife does… not to mention requiring continuous user intervention any time you want to top up.
Every other iPhone 4 battery case has better sense than this, and gives you a switch to decide between "power on" and "power off" mode. This means that by connecting any external battery, you can use it as main power, only charging the iPhone if you manage to run out of external battery power over the course of the day, dramatically extending the iPhone's life over the long term.
Exolife would rather protect itself. You can always get another phone, after all, but there's only one Exolife! (Or something like that.)
Bonus crap factor offered by the extremely slippery exterior of the Exolife (much moreso than the bare phone) that virtually guarantees many, many drops.
Oops.
Mophie Juice Pack Air: Great idea, but as usual for Mophie, the quality sucks ass. Got mine and put it on and the two pieces fell right off again. They're only held on by friction and there's barely any friction to hold them on. Don't swing your hand around too much with your iPhone 4 in the Juice Pack Air or pieces of your pack (or even, indeed, your phone) may simply slide off and go flying around the room. Extremely sloppy tolerances and fit.
Even better, the silver trim is just a strip of plastic with peel-it adhesive on the back, and on mine the strip arrived, well… glued on about a millimeter outside it's groove, making it look as though the thing was made by chimps. I pried it up and pressed it back down again where it was clearly intended to go, making the sides line up visually. Hopefully the peel-it adhesive sticks and the silver trim doesn't start to peel off in coming weeks.
Best of all, once again the micro-USB cable that Mophie shipped is suspect, only engaging about half the time. My two 3Gs juice packs had to have replacement cables from Mophie before working right, and this one looks to be no different. And once again, the micro-USB connector in the case is just sort of… floating there. It appears, as before, to be attached with nothing but the solder on the circuit board inside the case, meaning that it will probably fall off (as happened on my first 3Gs juice pack air) at some point.
In short: Two craptastic products that will no doubt get great press for the amazing iPhone 4 that somehow got horrible press.
Some days tech just makes you grumpy.
Yesterday I was in a meeting with my chair and attempted to show him something on the website here. Naturally, he uses Internet Explorer 8, so that's what fell to hand. Unfortunately, all we got was a black page.
I was a bit bewildered and loaded up the administrative URL to see what was going on in Drupal but of course that page was black also.
So we moved on. I assumed it was something about his machine/installation and/or something odd about that particular temporal moment at my hosting provider that would clear itself up.
This morning, however, I needed to share the website address with my students. As an afterthought, I decided to test the site again in IE8 just to be sure. I rebooted into Windows and loaded up the page to see… a black page.
?!??!
I had fully tested the site for rendering bugs in IE8 already, and everything was fine. What's more, Salamander is a standards-compliant theme. What could be wrong? No javascript errors logged, so I started looking at the DOM and at the code and trying to see what was up.
Something wonderful and efficient in my subconscious mind told me to stop being so damned technical and try a different IE8 install, so I went to my wife's computer and loaded the site there.
It worked as usual, no black pages.
Again, WTF?
A few minutes of clicking around in IE8 menus led to the difference: "compatibility view." Compatibility view was disabled on her machine but enabled on mine. I disabled it on my install of IE8 and all was well again. Funny thing, though, was that I'd had compatibility view on the last several times I logged into the site for testing using IE8 and had no trouble at all.
A bit of research yielded both an answer and a fix.
Answer: Microsoft distributes automatic compatibility view updates for IE8. One of these clearly broke Drupal+Salamander, despite their standards compliance. Grr.
Fix: Add a META tag to the header giving a user agent compatibility hint:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" />
This basically forces IE8 out of compatibility view mode when the page is loaded. I just stuck it, quick and dirty, into page.tpl.
But once again, IE breaks something without warning, for no reason, despite standards, in a bewildering way, while Firefox, Chrome, and WebKit (Safari/Konq) continue to simply display things correctly from the start.
Grrrr.
Don't like being embarrassed when your sites suddenly go dark for IE users? Tell everyone you know how much IE continues to suck, and use META tag hints to dictate a particular rendering engine iteration for IE users.
I'm spending part of the break between summer and fall semesters quickly "onlining" my entire digital life, even the parts of it that have previously not been amenable to such action.
The entire home directory, including files dating back twenty years, has gone onto Dropbox where everything I'm currently working on and everything I have ever worked on can be instantly accessible to me not only at my own desk or laptop but also on my iPhone, in my office cubicle(s), and at any public computer where I care to pause for a moment and work on whatever it is I'm currently "working on."
Same thing is happening to my email folders, which contain mail dating back to the mid '90s and have been migrated a dozen times between a dozen different local email clients over the years. Today there's a process running in the background uploading some 100,000 messages at about 20GB into my Gmail box, including (hopefully) folder structure. For anyone wondering how I'm doing this, no, it's not using the (painful) single-folder copy method from within Thunderbird or similar. Tried that, failed. Also didn't want to set up my own POP server and fetch via Gmail (too much information loss). Instead, I'm using an IMAP script called imap_upload.py (Google it) wrapped in a couple scripts of my own. Working like a charm.
As a part of the project I've also run scripts with some shaky command line tools like unoconv to convert all of the OpenOffice files and attachments in my life to Microsoft Office formats. That kills me, almost more than anything else, but there is no point trying to challenge the power of the social. MS Office files, despite open source advocates' claims tot he contrary, are destined to be more transparent for a longer period of time (hence more "open") simply because there are so many more people using them today. If I had to bet on either MS Office or OpenOffice files being readable in 1,000 years, the choice is beyond easy: MS Office, if either. OpenOffice, no chance. And since OpenOffice files require what is "special" software by most peoples' and devices' standards, it had to go if working in the cloud is my goal.
The only things that aren't going online and/or aren't getting converted to the "most exchangeable" formats are the "big media" archives right now… music collection, videos, photos, disk images, and other multi-terabyte stores. Those will just have to wait until bandwidth and processing power for conversions catch up (I'm doing this all on Verizon with a <1Mbps upstream using an aging laptop).
It's all a little scary. I'm not from the cloud generation; I'm from the computer generation. It still feels more secure to me to have the "master copy" of all my stuff on my very own hard drive, though intellectually I realize that this is folly. Google is far less likely to experience downtime, and Dropbox is hosted on Amazon S3.
The benefit is that I will be entirely mobile and, for the first time in my life, essentially computer-agnostic. Sit down anywhere, at any device, Linux, Mac, Windows, Smartphone, or other mobile device, and pick up all of my work and communication mid-stream, transparently and seamlessly.
after spending the better part of an entire work week grading the endless stack of exams and papers. Each semester I promise myself that I will never assign anything in essay form again. The following semester I return and demand nearly every assignment in essay form.
—
I think I'm falling in love with Mac OS, which runs better as a hack on my Thinkpad than either Linux or Windows have ever run. In a few hours I get to a wildly functional, stable, and well-thought-out desktop that's easy on the eyes in Mac OS, even with the need to "hack" to get it to boot and run. Linux takes days and you still don't get where you'd like to be. Windows doesn't even pretend; it refuses to offer anything you're after from the outset.
But Mac OS, well… It's just a beautiful, beautiful Unix operating system. Well thought out, well executed, fast, lean, elegant. And inexpensive!
I've been a Linux user for nearly two decades and have been a strong advocate of open source during that time. I even wrote a few books about Linux, I was so happy with it. I've run 18 versions of a Red Hat inspired Linux, beginning with Red Hat 5. Before that I ran Slackware, starting at Slackware 2 installed from floppies. And before that, self-rolled/self-hosted installs cobbled together from netparts.
And here it is 2010 and I've had a summer spent feeling the limits of GNOME (a sensation made more acute by my test encounter with the upcoming GNOME Shell) and a kind of total frustration and exasperation with KDE, which has totally gone off the tracks. I think it may be time to make a switch.
If only Apple had built what Apple has built whilst being more like Red Hat. But oh well. I still have bash and X, and what I gain is stability, functionality, and freedom from the total field of distraction, fragmentation, and instability that the Linux desktop has recently become, all without having to make the serious sacrifices that would come with a switch to Windows 7.
Next question: hardware. When the time comes to refresh the hardware, is it time to shell out for a Mac? Or do I continue to risk running Mac OS on non-Apple hardware under the "fair use and jailbroken iPhone" theory of legal homology, possibly suffering decreased stability and less future-proofing as a result?
—
Only a brief moment before begins the intensity that will be the upcoming academic year. Rather than sleep through it, I'm scheduled to labor through it in a panic.
We'll see how it goes.
Starting with Fedora 9, the KDE desktop was essentially destroyed (release of KDE 4.0). Usability went to zero; all of my learned work pathways/flows were interrupted, and despite tons of experimentation, I can't redevelop either them or alternatives in KDE.
So I switched to GNOME.
From Fedora 10-12, the GNOME desktop was essentially optimal in terms of user interface, but what was required was some technological work (i.e. under the hood) to integrate more efficiently with compositors, enhance the API, etc.
Now with Fedora 13, GNOME is seeing breakage again. They've stopped displaying icons in the icon selector (who's bright idea was it to force users to choose icons by filename, rather than by looking at icons in a grid?) and removed both "Eject" and "Unmount" from device context menus, so that the only option now is "Safely Remove," which spins devices down. Not good if it causes your RAID (as it does mine) to lose at least one drive's sync each time this happens, forcing a rebuild on next use. Of course, neither of these changes… can be changed. The totalitarian devs of both desktops are hell-bent on ensuring that nobody in the primary Linux demographic can actually use Linux any longer.
And of course with Fedora 14, they're doing away with the GNOME desktop altogether. (They say they're not, that they're just introducing "GNOME Shell" with GNOME 3.0, but this is essentially a new desktop with zero UI continuity from the previous desktop, so it doesn't matter.)
Very likely after Fedora 13 becomes obsolete it's Windows or Mac OS for me. Linux is a better system under the hood but if you can't actually use the damned software because of the constant UI Nazism, what good is it?
You can seriously develop a relationship with your children while they are still in utero.
I have switched to a left-handed mouse on the theory that regularly engaging in alternate-hemisphere motor tasks somehow enhances cognition, and because I am getting that damned carpal tunnel numbness in my right hand again.
For a moment, iPhone unlock/jailbreak is in the wild for all OS versions, all baseband versions, all boot loaders.
For 48 hours I have forgotten to wash my Oxo coffee mug. This is likely to incur labor time expenses later on.
The Tamron Adaptall 80-210mm f/3.8 lens is one of the best I've ever used.
In another life I could have been a photographer.
I saw my first firefly ever when I came to NYC in 2006. Now I see them every night.
Dogs are socially precocious animals.
Once a battery of any kind leaks inside a compartment, all batteries you insert into that compartment subsequent to the leak event will also leak, until you submerge the entire set of surfaces in an acid like white vinegar.
It has been years since I created any of my nonphotographic/postphotographic visual pieces.
It has been more years since I wrote fiction.
Time flies.
Out west, driving is like traversing a network. In the northeast, driving is like navigating an obstacle course.
When it comes to books, there is a state between "read" and "unread" that is perhaps more practically desirable. You don't discover this state until you're older and have many, many books and people begin to ask whether you've "read them all."
Childhood doesn't return to you when you have kids; it becomes a form of praxis.
into perspectival vision that isn't easy to overcome. The rest of the world and even the nuances of long-held identities elsewhere seem to recede, to fade into irrelevance somehow in this city that is such a universe unto itself.
Often it is one thing and one thing only, the sensuous faculties and the fleeting impressions that they leave, that can carry one back to places, times, and aspirations long forgotten.
A little gust of air, just a little one through the kitchen window, has restored to me autumn and lawns and leaves and pumpkins and large, fogging windows overlooking bucolic suburbias, along with a particular autumn smell—the smell of time—that doesn't exist in New York City, or that I have not, at the very least, thus far detected here.
Somewhere beneath it all there still lurks a small cache of insouciant dreams in a particularly lush shade of dewey green carrying with it hints of lawn clippings and browning leaves, where traffic can't quite be heard but red paint on thick siding fills one's field of vision.
The land! The land!
No, I was never a farmer, nor a rural boy, but I did spend my formative decades in a place with rolling hills, forests of aspen and spruce, buoyant, twelve-thousand-foot mountain peaks, and houses able to "nestle" into foliage and obscurity, rather than into townhouse splints.
Do you remember a guy that’s been
In such an early song
I’ve heard a rumor from Ground Control
Oh no, don’t say it’s true
They got a message from the Action Man
I’m happy, hope you’re happy too
I’ve loved all I’ve needed love
Sordid details following
The shrieking of nothing is killing
Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair
But I’m hoping to kick but the planet it’s glowing
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie
Strung out in heaven’s high
Hitting an all-time low
Time and again I tell myself
I’ll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh no, not again
I’m stuck with a valuable friend
I’m happy, hope you’re happy too
One flash of light but no smoking pistol
I never done good things
I never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue
Want an axe to break the ice
Wanna come down right now
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie
Strung out in heaven’s high
Hitting an all-time low
My mother said to get things done
You’d better not mess with Major Tom
New York City this evening smells like the Salt Lake City in which I grew up. I can't put my finger on the reason for this; it's some combination of humidity, temperature, air motility, particulate matter suspension, and god knows what else. No matter the reason, tonight it smells in flat, ocean-bound New York like I remember it smelling in mountainous, desert-bound Salt Lake City as a kid.
—
Once upon a time I blogged. Not "blogged" as in "practiced a kind of thin, independent, crowdsourced journalism online" but blogged as in the mid-'90s conception from which the term is derived: personal web log (i.e. "blog").
I essentially stopped gradually in recent years as my professional life became more and more important to me.
I miss it.
—
Things are better than I think they are, better than they've ever been. I have to continue to remember this. Somehow, in the space of daily practice and experience, it's easy to lose sight of context. I am precisely at the place I've spent most of my life wanting to reach. When the world is made of rainbows and gold, it's easy to get upset when a lone cockroach scurries across your path or a spec of dust lands in your eye. You can't, however, let it get to you if the world is indeed made of rainbows and gold where you stand.
And where we stand right now, it is.
is convincing my subconscious that that it is okay to spend time reading and writing in a self-directed fashion, for hours on end and according to my own judgment, even if I can't explicitly tie a given day's reading or writing activity to a particular pile of dollars or a directly identifiable paycheck.
After a lifetime's conditioning in the labor market, it's very difficult to allow yourself the time to simply read and write about your interests. It continually feels as though you're slacking/self-indulging/hiding/wasting time. Ironically, this sensation, which is all about the need to feel as though one is engaged in productive work, also makes it precisely impossible to work productively in this particular profession.
In 1997 I began using KDE on my Linux desktop, a practice that continued until 2008 with the release of KDE 4.0, which was an absolute disaster—a software release with 20 percent of the functionality but 1000 percent more instability and bugginess whose only claim to fame was that it took every single feature and habit that you liked about KDE and stole them away from you.
At that time in 2008, I switched to GNOME and have actually grown fond of and happy with it. GNOME 2.x is fast, friendly, reasonably powerful, reasonably simple, and super-stable.
—
Unfortunately, I recently got wind of the fact that GNOME has decided to do the same thing KDE did a couple years ago. That is to say that in less than a year, GNOME plans to completely dismantle everything users like about it in the interest of "innovation" (read: removing 80 percent of the functionality while making the system 1000 percent more labor- and thought-intensive to use for the same purposes).
Meanwhile, over the last two years, KDE has gone from 4.0 to 4.4.x releases and I'd heard that it was now stable and useful and polished.
So, the other day, I decided to get all forward-thinking and to grit my teeth and switch from GNOME back to KDE, in hopes of avoiding the GNOME disaster to come.
—
Unfortunately, KDE is still an unmitigated disaster. Two years on KDE 4.x remains no more usable than it was on the day it was released:
But perhaps the biggest anecdotal evidence for the disastrous crappiness that continues to be KDE4 are these facts:
And the thing that seals the deal is this:
—
I'm absolutely mortified and frustrated by the fact that GNOME has decided to duplicate the total disaster that is KDE4 with the release of GNOME3, which does much the same thing: throws away the entire Linux desktop as it's become known and "innovatively" replaces it with an unconfigurable, unstable mess that doubles the number of clicks and amount of complexity needed to accomplish any task, while pursuing a general program of incompatibility with other Linux/UNIX software under the theory that they're "doing it the Right way, so everyone else be damned" which is coincidentally the same theory that the KDE project adopted somewhere in the mid '00s that led to KDE4.
Soon it will be all about XFCE. The state of the Linux desktop has gone from "We've finally arrived!" to very grim in the space of a year or two.
§ As you get older, the ghosts become more real than anything else.
§ Under the leaves, soil. Under the soil, stone. Under the stone, souls.
§ Radically empowering individuals in society may be the worst mistake we ever made.
§ Want to be a radical? Refuse to suffer. Then, wait for the assault.
§ Goodbye 2017, part two. (The real part.)
§ Sometimes you find home where you’ve never been—and you dwell where you aren’t.
§ The self can’t play Atlas for postmodernity because science is now supernatural.
§ Rehab is universal. So is history.
§ Identity, transcendence, and tactics.
§ Untitled. (a.k.a. Pretty faces, new old photos.)