June 2008 Archives

There's some Typepad vs Wordpress.com going on. Again. I jumped in and left my two cents worth.

At first, I used Movable Type for my blogs, but I dropped it as many people did when Wordpress came out. Wordpress is GPL, and at the time, this wasn't particularly important to me, but as time went on, I began to value this more and more. Upgrading Wordpress is a pain, and there are updates too frequent for my liking.

So, I moved to Wordpress.com -- adding a domain name to the site was easy, and cheap. I didn't like the restrictions and the pay structure of Wordpress.com, and when I realised it is run on a proprietary web server, I decided I needed to try and find an alternative.

Should I go back to self hosting? Yes. Should I go back to using Wordpress on my server? No.

Movable Type had gone GPL. Movable Type was free software now! Initially, I had some problems with configuration, getting things set up. But now I'm really happy using Movable Type.

There are some really good features in Movable Type:

* Static HTML -- renders your blog as static HTML files on disk. I can't express how much I love this.
* Multiple Blog by default -- Wordpress MU. Meh. No thanks.
* Good set of themes by default -- Wordpress needs to ship with some better themes.
* Infrequent upgrades -- 150 or so days since the last security update to MT.

Problems with Movable Type for me:

* The name -- 'Movable Type Open Source' is too long, and too confusing. Movable Type SHOULD be the name for the product. It shouldn't be a different version, or different name for the free software version. I'll admit I don't like the term 'open source', which adds to this.
* Not enough themes out there -- Wordpress has pwned MT on this.
* Too many confusing editing modes -- Markdown, Textile, etc.

I'd like to see Wordpress address some of these. I'd like to see MT address them too.

What annoys me is what feels like name calling. It seems a little weighted on the MT side -- far too much Wordpress bashing for my liking. Matt has been better about this, but I've seen a fair amount of it from both sides.

I'd like to see a service -- Akismet or MT AntiSpam released as GPL, and soon. I want to run my own version for my own blogs. I don't want to send all my comments to a third party.

I'd also like to see both projects contribute directly to getting good, up-to-date packages of their products into GNU/Linux distributions like Debian and Fedora. They're already there, sure. Given the number of updates from Wordpress, they should be distributing their own Debian packages. Movable Type should do the same.

Run a repository, do it right.

My band, furny, have released all the tracks from our two EPs as free downloads. They've been available elsewhere, including Last.fm and for sale as CDs for a while.

We're putting them all up on the web and encouraging people to download, listen and if they like.. donate.

I don't expect many people will donate, but I do hope a lot of people will download them. We're encouraging people to file share them, and even to make their own CDs and sell them, for profit, and not share that money with us.

Why? Because it's all great publicity.

Want to make your own furny t-shirts and sell them? Great! Let us know.. we'll link to you!

Want to make your own furny CDs and sell them in your record store, or online store? Fantastic.

Using furny music in your game, or movie? Awesome!

We're even including a bundle of someone else's artwork in each download -- with 1999-2005 EP you get CC Ironies and with more mature escapades in hi-fi, you get Canto -- both of these by Rob Myers, a friend of the band after he wrote a nice little write up on our licensing.

It also marks a change in direction for the band. I've never put my name publically to it before.

We're making a new album right now, it's going to be released when its ready, which we don't expect will be any time soon. It's called 'RIP furny?' because we're not sure if it'll be the last one, or not.

Oh, and all our albums are available in Ogg Vorbis or MP3? We'll donate 50% of any donations we get to the Play Ogg project.

Bye George. We'll miss you. You spoke out against the injustice of censorship in the media, and for that, you'll never be forgotten.

An interesting article on Bill Gates and the importance of source code --  in it, it refer to Bill Gates statement in a recent BBC interview that he and Paul Allen were stuck with the first computer they had access to, until they found the source code in a bin.

In a bin.

30 years later, Bill Gates and Microsoft continue to trash the freedoms of computer users, with Steve Ballmer describing the same goals and community ideals that allowed Gates to learn as a cancer, with Gates himself saying "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

30 years from now, will Microsoft continue to act with hostility toward the very goals that gave Gates and Allen their big break? Will the next generation of Microsoft be able to finally drop the arrogance of Gates and embrace the free software community as something other than a threat? Remember -- companies like Sun have shown hostility towards free software in the past, only to turn around and release something as significant as Java under the GPL -- not just any free software license, but the same license that Gates disagrees with.

One thing I really like to do is to download older releases of free software, and run them in virtual machines, to see how things used to be, but also to see how far we've come.

Fedora makes this really easy, with its virtual machine manager. I only have qemu installed, but I get the feeling that Xen and other machines are also usable with this. It makes getting a new virtual machine up and running as simple as possible.

The only strange thing I've encountered so far, is SELinux complaining about the Debian netinstallation ISO I'm using, so for now I have set SELinux to run in permissive mode.

Virtual Machine Manager provides a GUI interface to qemu, making it really simple to get new virtual machines up and running, without knowing all the painful command line options.

Man, Fedora feels polished.

It's quite hard to explain it.

The fonts look better.

The mouse cursor has a little shadow on it.

Even system updates feel.. nicer.

It's also fast as hell.

I have heard that upgrading between Fedora versions is a nightmare, so we'll see how that works for me, but certainly upgrading packages in the current version -- Fedora 9 -- is very easy.

Part of a continuing saga of posts outlining any difficulties I have with my switch to Fedora (from a heavily broken hybrid of Ubuntu, Gobuntu, Debian and gNewSense)

CVS check ins refuse to use emacs.

I don't know why.

I have $EDITOR, $CVSEDITOR, $ALTERNATIVE_EDITOR all set -- nothing.

I want to be able to type 'cvs ci' and have it prompt me for a commit message in emacs.

That's all.

Today I went to FudCon 2008, which was being held at Boston University.

What's FudCon? Well, according to the website:

FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, and workshops, and hackfests in which specific features or Fedora Projects are worked on. Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, packaging, etc.

It was a pretty awesome event, and pretty well organised. I tried to get and see most of the talks, but inevitably I missed some.

One that I took a big part in was the fedoraproject.org usability study, in which I stepped forward as a genuine guinea pig for the Fedora websites team -- having never really attempted to use their website before, but knowing quite a lot about free software in general, it was an interesting experience for me. The notes from the session have been posted to the mailing list, though an attempt to make a video of my potentially stupid responses on a Playstation Portable thankfully failed.

The other interesting talk was Chris Tyler from Seneca College (in Canada) talking about their course which gets students working on real free software projects -- he made a few references to wget being not a great project to work on, due to its size.. of course, wget is just one component of the GNU Operating System, which has over 330 component projects, so I invited Chris to get students working on GNU next year.

After a while away, my comments are back, and working.

Please, come leave a comment.

Google Groups is an alternative to being on a bazillion mailing lists, and has an interface to Usenet as well.

Google Groups is not free software, but rather a web application. The debate on how free software and web applications should work rages on.

To me, Google Groups is far more like.. any discussion forum, than an application like Gmail or Google Docs.

I just joined a new group, and was presented with this:

This is really smart, and something that GNU Mailman should offer, so I filed a bug.

A few years ago, Opera stopped charging money for its browser, but they would show you ads at the top of the screen while you were using it. If you wanted to get rid of the ads, you could pay them.

Then they removed the ads and made the ad-free Opera available gratis.

My question is - why is Opera not free software? Why can't I download the source code to Opera and modify it, study it and distribute it?

Often I see people bemoaning the lack of Opera support for things on forums, blogs and such.

Releasing Opera as free software would get it into the hands of a lot of people, and Mozilla Foundation seems to be making a ton of money doing just this, so why not Opera?

I've been playing with the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) for the last few days. So far, I've only really looked at the CSS stuff, which is my main area of interest. In essence, YUI is a bunch of CSS (and JavaScript for those that want it) that aims to do all the boring, base level stuff for your website for you, so you can focus on doing your real work. The CSS part, comprises of three files - Reset, Fonts and Grids. There's also Base, which is the opposite of Reset. The purpose of Reset is to take all the default styles that all the major browsers have for each HTML element, and reset them to absolute basics -- farewell bold on your strong tags, au revoire to the margin on a list item, etc. This is useful, and I'm already using it on both gnu.org and fsf.org, albeit not the YUI versions, though I am confident I could swap them out today and not lose anything.

The second part of YUI's CSS library is Fonts, which does some pretty neat stuff with regards to fonts and font sizes. You might not realise this, but fonts are actually pretty hard to get right on the web. There are several problems at work here, which stem from the fact that Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux all handle default font sizes and resolution differently, not to mention that they all have different default fonts installed. It all boils down to one of two approaches to fix the problem -- a) Try lots of different fonts and sizes and hope it all works or b) Set a basic font face like 'sans-serif' and leave the size well alone. The latter is what we currently do on gnu.org, while fsf.org being more graphical uses a defined set of fonts and sizes, but doesn't always get this right. YUI's fonts CSS has been tested and designed for all browsers and all major operating systems, and has a bunch of clever mathematics in it, to ensure fonts can be scaled up reliably, too.

Lastly, the best part of YUI in my mind... grids. Grids are the cornerstone of design, and cruicial design elements for the web. Most web pages have some kind of grid set up. I say most, as www.gnu.org is the least grid like website I know of, not surprising considering how it looked as recently as July 2006, 99% of the pages are one column of text. However, this will change, and when it does, I'll be using YUI to make it happen. There's even a couple of neat online tools to define a grid through a point and click interface.

Overall, the YUI library is a fantastic contribution to both web standards, but also to free software. I hope that more free software web projects will embrace the YUI contributions and use them to enhance their existing CSS and JavaScript, giving us better web applications for everyone.

I haven't used anything else so far, but I do have the YUI Rich Text Editor installed in Movable Type, which I use to publish this blog. It's really good, and I'm normally against web based rich text editors and their ability to produce decent markup -- YUI's editor however, takes care of this, and makes editing in Movable Type a much more pleasant experience.

My only complaint is that while Yahoo have made various videos available to demonstrate YUI, they have made these videos rely on Flash. Posting Ogg Theora videos would allow users of any platform to learn how to use YUI, without the need to rely on proprietary software. All in all, YUI is a wonderful piece of technology and I can't wait to use it in my next project.

YUI is released under the modified BSD license.

I have to admit, I used to really struggle to install GNU/Linux...

Many years ago, before I had any experience of my own Unix-like machine, I had played a little with NeXTSTEP, and was hoping that one day I would buy my own computer. For some reason, I was always quietly confident that it would run some form of Unix. At that point, I was facing a potential career as a Windows developer, as it was what I knew. The idea of having a machine running something different always appealed to me, even to this day. I remember a review of something called 'Red Hat' in an old issue of Computer Shopper. Computer Shopper was always a wonderful read for me; part catalogue, part PC magazine, but with little sections for Unix, Atari ST and the Mac tucked away in the back there. In these days, I used an Amstrad CPC 464, and the idea of having a Mac or ST was somewhat repugnant to me. They were the reason people were leaving the CPC -- luring them away with their flashier graphics and their mice... Unix, however, looked awful. Ugly windows full of ugly widgets and blocky text, but to me there was something cool about all that. At some point, I got hold a copy of Red Hat 5 via a magazine though I suspect I bought a copy as well, as I went through a period of buying lots of distributions and books of GNU/Linux, because naively, I thought each version was different and I'd need all the manuals. I didn't even try to install most of them, I just kept them on a shelf and sat back and read the manuals. When I finally got around to installing something, I was amazed at the sheer volume of software available. I remember thinking if I tried a package per day, it would still take me years to ever run out of software to play with. Many, many attempts at producing a working machine later, I found the 'startx' command, and well, here we are.

Amazingly, I managed to find the old distribution online!

I've made a bunch of screenshots, linked below, but here are some of the more interesting elements of the installation.

• It was surprisingly easy, compared to how I remembered it. I suspect this is in part due to the fact I'm installing it on a clean hard disk, and not a machine with an existing operating system, which was OS/2 Warp at the time, and later Windows 95.
• The amount of GNU software in the 'workstation' installation, which was the one I used then, and now is extremely high. Of the 300Mb or so of packages I installed, I'd wager that over 200Mb of that was GNU stuff.
• It even found my video card and set up X for me. I literally just had to type 'startx' and I was away.
• I did have a problem with screen corruption on this Cirrus Logic card, but upon digging into the XF86Config to fix it, there was a comment that told me to add 'Option "no_bltbit"', which fixed it.
• The only proprietary software installed by default was Netscape 4.
• It boots in about 15 seconds.
• There's a real lack of any software. For a workstation, there is nothing other than GNU Emacs or vim for writing any text, but there is LaTeX if you're feel adventurous.
• The whole thing feels very very usable, and considering I used to run this on a Pentium 60 with 16mb of RAM at 800x600, I wonder how it would perform on an EEE PC or similar.