Older blog entries for mrorganic (starting at number 231)

I'm getting the SPARC64 port of NetBSD installed on an Ultra10 I have. The machine was just gathering dust in a closet, so I pulled it out and decided to do a bit of playing around. I've always been a fan of NetBSD -- of all the various free Unix variants, it seems to be the "purest" BSD of them all. It's just as user-hostile to install as I remember, too. No fancy GUI installers here, by God! You either learn to use disklabel or you get the f**k out!

Pure Unix-geek thrills, man!

I've been playing with my Neuros MP3 player, which I got a few days ago. It's the 20GB jukebox model, and I got it so I could take my whole music collection with me to work. It sounds good, and it's easy to use. The only downside is that the unit only has USB 1.1 support, so transfers are a little slow; still, it's not a major hindrance.

I read with interest ESR's dissection of the so-called "stolen code" in Linux. I think that this why so many geeks with literary backgrounds grivatate towards UNIX -- it's a language with a history. UNIX geeks love nothing better than to trace the etymology and ancestry of function calls and obscure chunks of code; it's like tinkering with the mind of God. UNIX has linguistic roots, and an evolutionary history which can be traced back to its origins in the early 1970's. I always imagine a group of monks in an abbey someplace, doggedly inscribing the the POSIX specification onto parchment with quill pens. UNIX is the Word; UNIX is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. Amen.

After a long time on Blogger, I pulled up stakes and came back here. Blogger's instability had a lot to do with it, but since I'm more a tech-blogger anyhow, Advogato makes a much better forum for me. If I have any personal crap to rant about, I'll do it on my personal website.

I'll have more to say shortly, but for now, I'll just say: "Hello again!"

Microsoft is astroturfing , you say? The shock! The horror!

All they're managing to do is further piss off people who are already not too happy with them. Microsoft seems constitutionally incapable of doing PR. Strange for such a successful and wealthy company.

The dotcom bloodbath continues apace. The Industry Standard is closing its doors. I never read the mag much (I'm not a reader of business rags), but I occasionally dipped into the website. Yet another example of how inept and short- sighted management killed what might have been a sustainable business.

Be, We Hardly Knew Ye

I'm going to miss Be. Dave Winer wrote a good piece on why Be failed and what might bring it back (will Palm open-source the BeOS?). Frankly, there's little to lose by open-sourcing the BeOS at this point -- as a piece of "intellectual property" it's all but worthless. Palm "paid" in stock, not cash, so their investment really isn't that substantial and will not take much of a hit if the OS is open-sourced.

Dave Winer opines that silence was part of what killed Be, as well as JLG's insistence on keeping stuff in-house. That was certainly part of it, but another problem was Be's deafness to their developers. In the last year or so of Be's life they said nothing publicly about their next release, patches, updates, or anything. Developers, who had no roadmap and no promise of new features, had no incentive to develop for the platform.

Consider the case of Java support: as far back as 1998, Be promised a JVM for BeOS. Well, it never materialized. Further, Be never commented on its failure to materialize. So developers never knew if the project had been killed or was just terminally delayed. The same can be said for hardware-accelerated OpenGL support, or for a BSD-compliant network stack (BONE). All were "promised", but then dropped with nary a word to anyone.

I hope BeOS does live on as an open-source project, and I hope that other platform vendors (are you listening, Sun?) learn from Be's mistakes.

More Microsoft Evil

In Cringely's Pulpit this week, we see (maybe) some hidden agendas regarding Microsoft's dropping of Java. See the Cringely piece for more details, but I never suspected that the sudden problems with Quicktime and Real Player in IE 5.5sp2 were part of some larger conspiracy. As it turns out, getting rid of the APPLET and EMBED tags in IE gives Microsoft a dandy way to both hinder Java and to promote .NET.

Nasty work. I hope the DOJ stomps on these guys, and fast.

The gory details are here , but the upshot is that Palm bought Be's assets for about $11 million. Note that they did not buy Be itself, just Be's intellectual property. This probably means that Be as a company will be shut down soon.

Too bad. Be was pretty cool.

Check out DaveNet. A consistent source of Good Shit (as Doc would say). Today's a good day to read it because there's an excerpt from David Bank's book "Breaking Windows".

Scripting News always has interesting tidbits to get the synapses working.

Dan Bricklin has some interesting stuff about 802.11b deployments in coffeehouses.

memepool is occasionally sick, usually twisted, and always interesting.

J erry Pournelle is not only a good sci-fi writer, but also a good tech writer. I don't always agree with what he says, but he's always a good read. (It's good for background on his Byte columns, too.)

Check out the Talking Moose. You won't be sorry. Today's installment is particularly intersting, especially if you (like me) think that the RBOC's are even worse than Microsoft when it comes to monopolistic behavior.

Linux

I still haven't had time to resurrect my Debian box. Maybe things will settle down this weekend so I can devote some time to it.

Music

I finally finished ripping all my CD's to my hard disk - - I use Real's Jukebox, which is simply the best of a mediocre lot as far as music-playing applications go. Someday I plan to write my own front-end that works the way I want it to.

I can recommend "The Others" very highly. It's gore-free, but nicely chilling; an old-fashioned English ghost story. Nicole Kidman gave a standout performance.

Reading Material

I'm almost done with Libra, an account of JFK's assassination. Good stuff. Don DeLillo is an excellent writer, and he paints an interesting portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald. It's interesting to read this book in tandem with Oliver Stone's JFK. At some point I'll probably read DeLillo's Underworld, too.

I got a free DVD with the Beta 2 of Visual Studio .NET on it from Dr. Dobbs, so I figured "what the heck" and loaded it up on my Win2K box. It's certainly an improvement over VC++ 6.0, but then again that's not saying much. The IDE is improved, and the GUI- builder is *much* better, but the whole thing feels unbearably bloated and slow.

C# is pretty much a java clone, as far as I can tell. I don't see the value-add over just writing in java -- at least with java you can run on other platforms.

I scrubbed the software after I was done playing with it. It's just not compelling. This whole .NET initiative of Microsoft's looks more like smoke and mirrors with every day that goes by.

Reviving My Linux Box

My Debian linux box has been hors de combat for some weeks now, and I'm trying to find time to bring it back from the dead. I worked on it briefly last night, and discovered that someone had hosed Woody again -- I tried to apt-get dist-upgrade from potato to woody, and the update not only failed, but left my machine in a completely unusable state. My recommendation to potato users: stick with potato for a few more months. Woody is still too unstable for everyday use.

I might try Progeny instead. It's a pretty generic Debian base, but has more up-to-date packages than potato and is far more stable than woody right now. The only problem is that if you're using Ximian Gnome it'll probably mess it up.

Ah well.