nixternal

I was surprised to find out this morning that the local stores still have iPhones. They didn’t sell out! I figured they would have been gone instantly. Yesterday our local Apple store had a line waiting out front waiting for them to open. I mean a huge line, like that was seen everywhere. Gobs of people wanting an iPhone. But only a handful of people purchased one, the employees were upset, tired, hungry, and whatever else you can think of that just drains you.

I want to know something though, if any of you purchased one, has it been turned on yet? My neighbors decided to pick up a couple yesterday, and almost 24 hours later, they still have useless devices with a full battery charge. AT&T has yet to activate their phones. I read somewhere online another person is experiencing the same thing, however he didn’t have comments activated, so I really want to know if you purchased one, how was the experience? I am personally waiting for the Openmoko to see what that is all about.

Yet Another GPLv3 Launched Post

Good job to the Free Software Foundation! Congrats to all of them, and especially congrats to Mako to his new board position as well. Peter Brown, thank you for all of the FSF, Deffective by Design, Bad Vista, iPod DRM, and GNU/Linux stickers you recently sent as well. They were a hit! Thanks to Eben for all of your guidance, help, and support, and especially for the YES vote on Monday prior to your resignation. Thanks to Richard, not me the other Richard, for staying true to your ideas, your goals, and most importantly your philosophy and values in the Free Software world.

Sorry for the double post, but low and behold this just came across Akregator.

With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.

Note the There are for more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. THOSE ARE CHOICES, NOT SPLITS!.

You have made your bed, lie in it. Don’t sit here and try to make excuses now and try and point the finger at other distributions. You talk about this Moral High Ground that some distributions are standing upon and then claim that some of these same distributions also link to tools that allow illegal installation of codecs and drivers. Bah humbug! I am willing to bet you are speaking of Automatix, in which not many developers I know like it, use it, advocate it, support it, and the list goes on. I know that Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat don’t link to it at all, and if there was a moral high ground, these 3 are standing proudly on top of it.

Quit defending you decision, or trying to, and then spewing opinions and not facts about the situation. You said you are fine with us disagreeing with your deal, yet you defend it every chance you get.

NOTE 1: I do understand there is a demand for the proprietary codecs and drivers, however I don’t feel we should sign a deal with the devil in order to provide them. And what does signing a deal with Microsoft have to do with proprietary codecs and drivers? Microsoft doesn’t create any of these items that are in demand.

NOTE 2: GPLv3 to be released in 24 hours!

First, I will start off with some praises. Google Desktop “LOOKS” promising, it does index quite fast, very small CPU footprint when running.

Now, it is time I let you have it a little. And if you do happen upon this post, don’t email me or comment with excuses. Excuses and opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.

First off you admit that this new release contains “some” of the features that the first release for Windows did. Seems kind of odd that you would releases something that isn’t even as feature rich as your first Windows release, but hey, you did release one, so I am going to somewhat give you the benefit of the doubt.

Secondly, where is the source? You claim that you support open source and preach it, yes you Chris, yet I don’t see the source. I even added deb-src to my sources.list hoping there was a chance I could see your source package. Nope, 404 baby! OK, I can give you that one, so hey, let me check your link to the Google code page, and look for the source there. Nope, not there, but oddly enough you mirror real free software and open source packages. GCC and OpenSSL to name a couple. Granted some people don’t care to see the source, but then again there are some who do, me being one of them.

Thirdly, what the hell are you thinking with your freakin’ menu setup? Who told you that we want Google Desktop as a top level menu? One word, oh should I say link? FREEDESKTOP.ORG! And if your Debian packagers at Google were as good as I have heard, they would know about menus.

Fourthly, a man page would be nice, but hey who uses the command line anyways?

Fifthly, I understand why no source now. I click on preferences and instead of popping up a local preference dialog, I am taken to a google.com web page webpage that looks like google.com for my preferences. And look at that, there is my directory structure listed smack dab at the top. And also when I set preferences or index, tcp ports are opened to google.com. So, that makes me wonder. No source code, preferences are web based, leading me to believe that a) you are doing more snooping than you should be, or b) refer to a.

So Google, are you the first Spy Ware application for Linux? I think you are! Now get off my damn system and shoo fly!

Linux users around the world that may not know, but Linux already has what Google is attempting, and guess what? It is free and open. I am talking about Beagle and Strigi. Beagle is the prettiest, and Strigi is the fastest. Both are available in the Ubuntu repositories, and more than likely, in every distributions repositories.

UPDATE: I apologize for booging the “Fithly”. I stated I was taken to a google.com webpage when I wasn’t. What I meant to say was that setting preferences and even indexing, netstat -a shows google.com tcp connections. I have added and edited the correctness into the post above.

OK my lazywebbers with IPv6 and Python experience, this goes out to you!

I am creating an application right now, with Python of course, and I need to set an environment variable to be always on when a user logs in. I have messed with the os.environ and the os.putenv and what not, but it doesn’t work permanently. This application doesn’t do anything more than a few tests and then sets the environment variable if the tests return true. Is there an easy way to write to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile to enable the variable, and then later on if the user wants they can disable the variable which would either remove the variable all together or would set it to False?

Another question I have is with IPv6. Is there an easy way to test and see if your network is an IPv6 network or an IPv4 network? Right now I am grepping /var/log/syslog for ‘no IPv6 router present’ and printing the ‘no’. If it is ‘no’ then the network is IPv4, and if it returns 0, then it is an IPv6 network. This is rather hackish I feel, but it does work. Just wondering if there is a better method to do this simple task.

Thanks everyone!

That’s right, Ubuntu Chicago invaded this weekends Barcamp Chicago event in style.

From left to right: Francisco (aka OmniColos), Freddie (Admiral_Chicago), Eddie (posingaspopular), Rich (nixternal), and Jim (j1mc).

Or for the image above, in terms of operating systems, from left to right you have: Ubuntu (tablet pc), Kubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu! And the install fest, I seen plenty of Ubuntu and Kubuntu booting up on peoples laptops.

Plenty of excellent talks, cool people, good pizza, great beer, and a patio that was about to collapse! There should be some great video posted this week as well as more images, so I will keep you informed.

Also, great news. The University of Illinois Chicago are planning a bigger Flourish Conference for 2008. This past conference had Chris DiBona, Peter Brown, and other great speakers, and for 2008, there are 2 people they are really interested in getting, Mark Shuttleworth, and/or Jono Bacon. We would love to have Peter Brown from the FSF back again, but I also mentioned that Mako Hill is a killer free software speaker and they are interested as well. The UIC ACM will have a definite date set this week, so more information will be made available.

Thanks to everyone I hung out with yesterday and met yesterday. Thanks for the beer and food, and for the good times! Here is to Barcamp Chicago 2008!