August 1st, 2008 cmsj
Update: It has been suggested that it is not productive or collaborative to talk negatively about some developers releasing software for unixy operating systems without really trying to integrate it with the versions of widely deployed software available in those operating systems.
It is a fair point. It’s not productive or collaborative. It may be true, but ranting about it doesn’t help anyone but me.
More productive and collaborative would be to nicely ask these ISVs to establish a less isolated packaging process with our communities and companies (but I don’t mean LSB or a new package format). Clearly some people won’t work with them on ethical grounds, but a more pragmatic position will accept that commercial software exists, so it might as well not make our lives unnecessarily hard. And the companies shifting Linux are hot on ISVs.
Jorge: No, I don’t like having multiple JVMs, but I have been in corporate situations before where it has been necessary because specific applications have required different versions :(
Posted in FOSS, Rant, Techie, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
May 20th, 2008 cmsj
Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.
It’s utterly outrageous that we have a law which supposedly prevents individuals from expressing their opinion.
3. A system of intense religious veneration of a particular
person, idea, or object, especially one considered
spurious or irrational by traditional religious bodies;
as, the Moonie cult.
[PJC]
even if you don’t like that, there’s:
2. A system of religious belief and worship.
[1913 Webster]
so that covers every religion as a cult. As for dangerous - they have a well documented history of legal threats, intimidating behaviour, etc.
Update: It seems that sanity is not lost and the guy isn’t going to be prosecuted because, as should have been fairly obvious, his sign wasn’t inciting anything \o/
Posted in Rant | 1 Comment »
July 28th, 2007 cmsj
Firefox is a very popular piece of software. Claims run up to 100 million users, which is really good and on the whole I think it’s a very good browser.
However.
What Firefox isn’t, is integrated. Sure it renders using gtk (and Cairo, if not already then soon) and gnome actions involving URLs spawn Firefox, but it’s still trapped away in its own little universe - Marc Andreeson’s gift to the world, a platform agnostic application architecture. Clearly Mozilla has built itself a highly capable cross-platform application architecture, but that necessarily isolates them on every platform.
The trigger behind this post is the patches that recently appeared to let Epiphany use Webkit (Apple’s fork of KHTML, as used n Safari). Epiphany isn’t a bad browser, but it’s not flexible like the fox (purely because there aren’t enough extensions). The problem here is that if GNOME is going to achieve the online desktop integration they have been talking about, reliable HTML widgets seem quite vital. GtkMozEmbed (I say having never used it) appears to be very painful to work with.
A high quality GNOME widget based on Webkit that makes displaying HTML really easy would be so extraordinarily useful to the project. It would allow the browser to disappear into the desktop - want to visit a page? click/press something to type some stuff which is an address or search keywords. Out slides the appropriate web page. It gets rid of the necessity to go Applications->Internet->Firefox before typing a URL (and yes I know things like deskbar can launch a browser in these circumstances). Mostly it massively lower the barrier to writing apps which partly rely on the internet, or HTML in general, which can only be a good thing for a more online world.
What’s holding it back though is Firefox. It’s a very popular piece of software, even on Windows. Maybe too popular, if Ubuntu were to drop Firefox by default in favour of an integrated future version of Epiphany it could hurt Ubuntu - one of its selling points is no longer that it uses the much vaunted Firefox thingy people have heard of.
(I also wonder if GTK should support CSS ;)
Posted in FOSS, Rant, Techie | No Comments »
October 13th, 2005 cmsj
Since Firefox doesn’t seem to make it very easy to import/export the data it creates (beyond bookmarks at least), I probed my profile and found a signons.txt file which seemed to contain the information, albeit encrypted. No problem I thought, that will be the password I set for the master thingy in firefox. Wrong was I.
A little googling turns up that you should copy the key3.db file too, which is fair enough, but I really think this kind of thing should be easier. That does have a nasty habit of tending to introduce a lot of complexity as more aspects of the program get more flexible, especially from the user’s point of view. Interface designers are getting pretty good at making simple interfaces that do the right thing most of the time, with more advanced options hidden away for when they are needed and this is something I like a lot, but it’s a shame that all that functionality is isolated with the user.
It makes me pine for the old days of ARexx on the Amiga. It was (fortunately) considered de rigeur for self-respecting applications to support it and it exposed the full user functionality of a program to automatic scripting. If that kind of thing were updated for the modern world and combined with bindings for the various scripting languages, a whole range of possibilities open up. Back in the Amiga days, Arexx was all about automating the hell out of graphical tasks for power users, but I have been thinking about another possible use.
The idea would be an alternative to traditional help systems which are tedious to compile, large to download, not always very helpful, etc. Instead, exploiting an Arexx-like ability to control applications, the “help” system guides users through the application without making them watch a stupid tutorial - it actually helps them.
That is to say, I click “help me export my data”, it asks me some simple and sensible questions to figure out what to do, and actually opens the right windows and shows me what to do while it does it. In one feature you are training the user to do it for themselves (maybe they want to do it or they want to use more advanced options), and you are providing a simple, automated solution for the casual/new user who maybe uses this feature once a year at most and doesn’t need to learn it. This has to beat writing reams of documentation and capturing thousands of screenshots. You just need a few text prompts to explain what is happening and what the results are, and the rest is scripting that is quite stable. The developers can do whatever they like inside their application, the “help” is controlling it at the level of UI widgets, effectively. It might even be possible to write the scripts and place the text prompts with some kind of tool, rather than write them by hand.
Perhaps it could be done by the UI designers in Glade-like applications - the same functionality could be useful to them for automated testing and they could write the tests, documentation and interface with the same tool into one XML interface file.
Does that make any kind of sense?
Randomly, I also think the next release of Ubuntu should have a little animated Jeff Waugh who pops up and talks to new users, cheers them up and helps them learn how to use Ubuntu Linux, preferably with the above help system ;)
Posted in FOSS, Rant | 1 Comment »
July 19th, 2005 cmsj
I saw Mark Thomas doing a stand-up gig at Concorde 2 in Brighton this evening with Alex, Simon, and Simon and jolly good it was too. The man can certainly express some righteous anger!
It wasn’t all political ranting (which was still very funny), there was a good mix of humour, some of which went beyond the pale for some of the audience; Along with some excellent anecdotes from various anarchic protests he has taken part in.
Two thumbs up :)
Posted in General, Rant | No Comments »
June 1st, 2005 cmsj
I’m quite a big fan of the Zend Studio development environment for PHP - I use it quite extensively at work and generally speaking it’s a very capable tool and makes developing PHP a lot easier/quicker.
However, it’s closed source and quite expensive, which is a bit of a downside, but at the same time it should give me some leverage to get the features I want into future versions, right? Probably not.
I’ve been bugging the Zend support guys about AMD64 support for near enough 10 months now, with little success. Now, this might not seem too surprising, what with it being closed source, but the important difference here is that Zend’s Studio is written in Java.
Given that Java is supposed to be a platform agnostic virtual machine, precisely why is it that Zend only ship binaries for a few platforms? The answer appears to be that the installer they use to install said binaries on customer machines is a complete nightmare.
Specifically they appear to be using InstallAnywhere, which is becoming quite common for installing java programs, especially on Linux. Sadly it has some pretty serious flaws. Firstly it’s one of those godawful self-extracting/installing shell scripts, so modifying the installer is exceptionally hard. It also knows almost nothing about AMD64, despite the fact that it ought to be really quite compatible with 32bit code (especially for something as library-free as java) and triggers a lovely glibc bug (set “LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5” on an AMD64 machine and then try to run anything ;)
So basically that all sucks and anyone using InstallAnywhere is cutting themselves off from potential customers for no particularly good reasons. Obviously I can’t accept that, so knowing that Zend Studio is really just a Java program I went at it with a copy of vim and a lot of scribbling notes until I figured out how InstallAnywhere’s crazy LAX configuration system worked. With that out of the way I was able to determine that all you need to do to make this thing run *perfectly* on AMD64 is make two tiny changes to two not-so-tiny text files. Simple!
Here’s how:
- Install Zend Studio somewhere (a 32bit machine or a 32bit chroot), copy the folder to your 64bit install
- Look in the directory Studio is installed in (e.g. “
/usr/local/Zend/ZendStudioClient-4.0.2/“) and edit “bin/ZDE.lax“, you need to have “lax.nl.current.vm” point to your 64bit Java VM binary (e.g. “/usr/bin/java“).
- Now edit “
bin/ZDE” and comment out the line “export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5“
That should be it, fire up bin/ZDE and you should be hacking PHP in 64bits of goodness (be aware you may need to reconfigure where Zend Studio finds external binaries like cvs - see the ZDE configuration window).
Update
I’ve spoken with Zend since writing this and although they are still not committing to supporting AMD64, they did provide me with a handy link to download the Zend Studio installer without the 32bit JVM in it, which (with some work) makes a native 64bit install possible. Hurrah!
So, what to do, well firstly you will need the tarball (I’m not going to link to it, ask Zend) and to extract it. This should leave you with a single file called ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin (in the case of 4.0.2, current release at the time of writing). Run the command:
cat ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin | sed -e 's/=2.2.5/=a.a.a/g' >ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin.1
Then run “sh ./ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin.1” and the installer should start. Once it has completed you still won’t actually be able to start ZDE because the same LD_ASSUME nonsense is going on there, so edit “bin/ZDE”. Above I showed the quick and hacky way to make this work - comment out the “LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5” - however there is a way that is probably better, so I will encourage you to do this instead… Edit line 1326 so instead of reading simply:
if [ `uname` = "Linux" ]; then
it now reads:
if [ `uname` = "Linux" -a `uname -m` != "x86_64" ]; then
and all will be well :o)
Update 2
One thing I hadn’t noticed because it was working transparently is that not all of ZDE is Java, for example the code analyzer binary in Zend’s bin/ folder appears to be a native 32bit binary. These should still work fine if you have some 32bit compatibility libraries installed (Fedora should install these by default on AMD64, Debian based systems may need to install the ia32-libs package).
Posted in FOSS, Rant | 5 Comments »
November 15th, 2004 cmsj
Suck suck suck suck suck. That’s how much a really sucky thing sucks. What sucks more than that is crap like this.
For those who don’t read the link, the 4 word summary is “Operation Screw The Iraqis”, this time by rewriting their constitution to place all sorts of insane legal restrictions on their agricultural industry and specifically the seeds they are allowed to use. I mean, come on, we’ve been doing this agriculture thing for thousands of years without needing large corporations to sell us infertile seeds we have to buy year after year.
In my opinion it is sick and amoral to do this kind of thing. I sincerely hope the new Iraqi government overturns insane orders like this, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope given the amounts of money people stand to make :-/
As the article makes out, this is all about pleasing the WTO, which is a whole other rant I won’t get into now, suffice to say, despite whatever good intentions they have, they suck too.
Posted in Rant | No Comments »
