KDE

I have never once written anything using Qt. Why not? I have no real dislike of the toolkit, license, or implementation language. It just hasn’t ever been necessary or appropriate for me to use it. Generally speaking I only dabble with coding online applications in Perl/PHP (Perl is my preference, sometimes I get suckered into using PHP). Any software which I’ve needed to write with a GUI usually ends up being coded using the raw X11 libraries (xlib, etc). A few times I’ve needed to have something be stable, sharable, and GUI-driven and xlib didn’t cut it I’ve chosen to use the GTK libraries. Mostly that has been down to three reasons:

• Finding small examples of code is very simple; as it is well-used.
  • By contrast many Qt applications are larger pieces of code. Finding examples using the functions you’re interested in is harder.
• I love C++, but generally I develop in Perl, or C.
• I don’t have to worry about the moc preprocessor, writing Makefiles, etc.

I’m sure that sometime in the future I will experiment with Qt, and possibly even install KDE to try it out. But it won’t be soon. (I think that desktop environments are a good thing, and can be attractive, productive, and useful. However I’ve only used Gnome briefly and tend to stick with the more lightweight IceWM environment). Once upon a time I did install and tinker with KDevelop, but nothing much came of it. When I lost my desktop machine due to hardware failure I didn’t feel the need to re-install it. Instead I stuck to using GNU Emacs + Vim for editing code.

Right now I’ve written that I shall go back to shaving my head. To make me look more like my avatar.

Coding Mistakes

I broke my debian administration website yesterday. Predictably enough I’d woken up around 9AM and thought that it would be a good time to make significant refactering changes. Tested them on my laptop, committed them to CVS, then updated the live site. Had a quick play to make sure nothing had obviously broken - but didn’t try to leave a comment on an article. Went to sleep and woke up around 4pm to find 15 emails telling me things were broken. Most mails on the site in a single day! Should be fixed now. But I’ll never again make changes before lunchtime, I’m just not good with the whole sleepy-coding thing.

Things I have never coded: 1

Inspired by Joey Hess’s “Ten years of free software”. Things I have never coded part 1. I have never coded a text editor. *shock* In the past I have written simple wrappers around the various text controls in different environments - for example under Windows I once coded a tabbed text editor called MyNotepad, which featured a novel dockable tree-control to the side which allowed navigation and loading of files easily. When I first started working with Java I coded a similar thing, but with the ability to load external Java .class files as plugins. This editor was called Rosetta, inspired by the band Rosetta Stone (who were in turn inspired by the actual Rosetta stone ) At times I think about text editors. I use them daily, obviously, and I love working with some more than others. My editor is usually GNU Emacs but I’m also partial to Vim. I will use both happily; although neither is pleasant without my personal customizations. Simple text editors are a traditional project for coders, and freshmeat is littered with their discared corpses. Probably the only reason I’ve not started - that and apathy. My ideal editor would be:

• Both curses and x11 based.
• Scriptable (Lua is love?)
• Extensible.
• Portable between (at least) GNU/Linux and Solaris.
• Modeless.

Name Overload?

First there was Debian Planet then along came the Planet Debian, unfortunate naming collision, but something we could mostly get used to and understand. If you’re not confused yet: well done. You soon will be:

• http://www.planetdebian.com

Guess which site that is? A third completely new name comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Planet”. WTF? Think that was fun? Lets try again. Stick with me: First there was Debian Help - now there’s another new site which is comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Help”:

• http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/

*Ugh* Now I’m personally of the opinion that competition is a good thing, but please people - can we all just get along without confusing our users/visitors? I’ll sidestep the whole trademark issue, in case my site is in trouble too

Advogato

Randomly clicking around Advogato today I accidently tried to login. Rather than seeing “Person not Found” which is all I’ve seen since my account(s) were removed I now get “incorrect password”. It looks like my primary, and replacement accounts at Advogato are back. At the time those accounts were removed I setup this blog so that I could still remain syndicated upon Planet Debian. It would be nice to have the Advogato account(s) back, but I could live without them. (Indeed mailing Raph at his acm.org address bounced so I may will have to)

Syndication

For my own notes. This blog appears at:

• Planet Debian.
• Planet Hants Lug
  • The Hampshire Linux User Group - ironically i live in Edinburgh and should be more affiliated with Edlug…
• Planet Former Advogato
  • A planet syndicating people who “moved on” from Advogato.

Stalker-tastic. Of course my daily life goes entirely elsewhere - but that contains rudeness, angst, & etc. As you would expect from LiveJournal

Weblog Software

I’ve been keeping an online journal over at LiveJournal since 23rd February 2002. To support them I actually bought a “Permanent Account” a while back, an example of putting money behind companies and/or services which are useful - even when it isn’t required. After getting into the swing of things there I started the blog which is used upon Planet Debian and have also been enjoying that. Livejournal is a nice service, and they have great software powering the site. The Livejournal code is available and it is reasonably simple to install. (I’ve setup a few installations of the codebase, and played with them. I admit I’ve never run it in anger). Obviously it is completely overkill to run your own installation of Livejournal - unless, perhaps, you’re a school or a large company. So for my personal blog I use Wordpress. I don’t particularly enjoy using wordpress. To be honest I need only four features/abilities of weblog software:

• The ability to create posts.
• The ability for users to be able to leave comments upon entries.
• The ability to search previous entries.
• The ability to export the blog entries as a feed.

Everything else is utterly overkill. The downside of using Wordpress is threefold:

• Because it is popular there are multiple bots crawling the web and leaving spammy comments.
• Because it uses some funky addressing system any replacement would leave lots of broken links.
• It has historically had a couple of security issues.

I’ve been telling mysefl for the past few months:

• This software has got to go.
• I’ll wait until there is another security hole discovered.

So .. HTML::Template & CGI::Application will at some point come to the rescue. I’m just not sure when. I guess this means I’ve not yet written a bloggin system…. I want to only cover the basics:

• Multiple users.
• Multiple catagories/tags.
• Comments with a sane anti-spam system.

PS - The Sisters of Mercy rock.

As predicted, the morning was not productive at all. At one point I slightly became concious and saw sladen fetching his bike, opening the door and saying me "Back in two hours!". We didn't know anything about him until 24 hours later. As we started waking up, we tried to think of a plan for the day. The morning was gone, though. Clint took us to a restaurant two blocks away for breakfast, or actually brunch, because that was the only food in many hours. I ate some "pancakes" with banana in them, and barely could finish them; they are very filling. We went to the promenade for a last look at the Manhattan skyline and took some pictures while we tried to figure out what to do.

A last view over Manhattan Mako was developing a plan in secret, though, which involved micah and his car. Micah found out soon after. We went back to Clint's, expecting to find sladen somewhere, but we didn't. I packed my things, and when we really needed to go, we resolved to put his things in the entrance so he could find then and do whatever he wanted on his return. We went on the Metro to Union Square, where, hear this helix, I saw TONS of raperos doing their break-dance thing (ok, maybe not tons, but I did see them). And two blocks away, we arrived to the most incredible book store. Mako has blogged many times about buying very rare books at the Strand for ridiculous prices, but this was totally unexpected. The Strand is huge. On the outside, there's carts with hundreds of second-hand books, all for one dollar. Mako used to go there and browse the books to find interesting stuff. The Acetarium is full of them! Most of the dollar books are total crap though. A very high percent talk about god, religion, "our troops" and stuff like that. Mentally filtering what might be good and what is not is not easy when you haven't done it before. Mako started scanning the shelves as soon as we arrived, and every now and them he'd pick some totally stupid title. I was on my own shelf, missing many good stuff, while mika, Clint and mako did their own. Clint found quite a few titles, but mako didn't find anything good. I got lucky though, and found the precious book of the day: The Spanish Anarchists. The heroic years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin. Although old, it was in very good condition, and mako immediately asked if I was taking it. :) I won! The inside of the Strand was incredible too. Three very big floors packed with books, plus the half-priced "reviewer's copies" at the basement. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of books I'd be interested in buying, and the limited weigh I should be carrying back, so I did my best not to look too carefully. For a few hours, I didn't have a too clear idea of what mako's plans were. At some point, micah phoned him and we rushed to the PATH, the train that goes to New Jersey. Apparently we were meeting micah at Newark, but I still didn't know why we had to go there. During our ride, I could see how pleasant New Jersey is to the human eye. Miles and miles of heavy industries. I'm pretty sure it's the ugliest place I've ever seen. What I couldn't see, and I'm still disappointed, is any of the viciously arrogant rats of the New York metro system. Mako had told me about how they look at you, like saying "if you come down here, you'll be left with 9 fingers", and the incredible number of them on the tracks. Unfortunately I couldn't see any. I blame Michael Bloomberg. At Newark, micah appeared in his car, and we all hopped into it. We apparently were going by car to Boston... including Clint. I was puzzled, as he had to work on Monday, but he'd said that he'd simply "come back". There was a problem though, mako had dilinger's keys, and he was going back to NYC from Boston, and we didn't have time to get to Boston before he left, so we had to find a way of leaving the keys in NYC so he could get into his appartment. Finally, mako resolved that Clint would be left in a cold street, in a rough area of NYC, and he would handle the keys problem. I still didn't understand what was going on. We headed North, and I quickly fell asleep on mika's nap. I'm getting old. When the car stopped again and I suddenly woke up, I looked ahead and... HORROR! We were at the door of a McDonads. WTF WAS GOING ON? So it seems that when you're on the road, there's no much other choice than shit food. After a quick discussion with mako about how badly those burgers taste, I quickly went back to sleep, until we were in Boston. It took a while to find a parking spot, because all of them "permit only". It's impossible to park if you come from somewhere else. I was finally at the Acetarium, a very cool flat in Cambridge, 15 minutes away from the MIT. It was 3:30 in the morning. The day after, we woke up pretty late, and as I opened my laptop and found a privmsg from sladen, he was was knocking at the door. This man has an incredible ability to disappear and reappear when he's most unexpected. Apparently he managed to grab his stuff in NYC, fetch the bus and arrive at 2 in Boston, meeting dilinger at the station, and mako as he went out to MIT. micah and I went to explore Boston, but never managed. We consumed a few hours when trying to ship some equipment to micah's colo, and then trying to find food. When we were ready to go, micah got a very badly timed call, which made him go back to the Acetarium: a server at work was dying or dead. At one point, it was late enough that going to Boston wasn't worth it, so we went to visit the Media Lab instead. On our way there, micah and I kept chatting about this and that, and found out how small the internet is. We both know a bunch of common people from uncommon places like Per , from our involvement in social projects in the net like Indymedia and Sindominio.net. The MIT is incredible, specially the Stata Center by Frank Gehry. We wandered around as we only got voice mail from mako, until an hour later we found we was like 20 metres away from us. He gave us a tour through the Media lab, and it was incredible. I had never seen something like that. Every lab was colourful and fun, and very cool developments were going on everywhere. I also saw the coolest mame box ever, with an arcade case and everything.

The Stata Center, right next to the Media Lab After the tour, micah and I headed back, while sladen stayed to have a look at one of mako's projects. When we got back to the flat, there were a few people already there for mika's sushi party, and I rolled my first sushi rolls, which was fun. A bunch of Debian people joined us, including zufus and gravity, and had a great chat with them. The party ended way too late and after too many beers. sladen used his secret disappearing abilities, and a few colleagues from mako crashed, so there was a bit of overbooking. Mako's solution was simple. mika, him and I could share their bed. I can't say I have slept too much, because mako would keep pulling the blanket and leave me out in the cold, and I was trying not to squish mika. But it went ok, although we discovered too late that mika was hot while I was cold, and we swapped our places too late. Today, we'll go find the Freedom Trail and walk a bit around it, meet gravity and zufus for lunch, and I will sadly have to go back to Cambridge, quickly pack and head to the airport to catch my plane. My hours in North America are expiring.

Alpha systems running testing/unstable with a Debian kernel could be in trouble after upgrading to udev >= 0.073-1, the system won't boot anymore. That's not a bug in udev, but a problem in the Debian kernel configuration on alpha. From the release notes of udev 0.073: Fixed bug in udevd, if inotify is not available. We depend on netlink uevents now, kernels without that event source will not work with that version of udev anymore. In short, kernels using udev >= 0.073 must have CONFIG_KOBJECT_UEVENT enabled, which wasn't the case in the Debian kernels for alpha until 2.6.14-3, which I uploaded to unstable yesterday in the evening. Thanks a lot to Uwe Schindler for his bugreport with the correct solution.

So, as of sometime this morning, most of our worldly possessions were (in cartons) loaded into a shipping container bound for the US. Unfortunately, I don't finish work until Wednesday, so my lovely wife was charged with supervising the packers yesterday and today. My one word of advice with respect to packers is to be extremely careful, and assume that they will assume nothing. If you don't want something packed, don't leave it unsupervised or anywhere where it may be packed. My electric toothbrush was left unattended for slightly too long, and is in a carton somewhere. As was half of the bike rack until we raided a few cartons last night and rescued it. Obviously literacy doesn't rate very highly as a requirement to be a packer either. We had "stools" spelt as "stulls" and "wine rack" spelt as "win race" on some of the items packed. I'd also never seen a couch bubble-wrapped until yesterday. Pretty much no item was left exposed. Everything is either in a carton or bubble-wrapped with funked brown-paper-backed, branded bubble wrap.

If people won't do what you want them to do, changing the law to compel
them to behave in the way you want will not result in them automatically
complying. All it does is grant you the authority to punish them for
behaving in that manner. In many cases, it'll also grant them more
sympathy. If you then proceed to punish them anyway, you run the risk
that more people will start disobeying you as well. It's certainly not a
good way of increasing general happiness.

Yes Branden,
I'm looking at you.

Inspired by Matthew Palmer's writings (1, 2) on his experiences about the Australian judicial system, I decided to write a series of essays on the Finnish legal system, mostly to contrast it with the universally familiar United State system (even if that universal familiarity is a little skewed by generally having been obtained from dramatizations and not actual court practice). I will concentrate on criminal cases. I will write based on my personal experience as a part of the judicial system, and I will be supplementing the experience with my personal research into law. I am not legally trained, but I have read a fair bit of law and related literature. I am a lay judge in the Jyv skyl District court. I will explain the significance of that later, but I hope it suffices to say, here, that I have sat on the bench, as part of four-judge panels, since March this year, in ten sessions each a day long, and each containing at least two, usually four or five criminal cases. Some highlights:

• There are no plea bargains. With some minor exceptions, every criminal case is tried in a full court session.
• There is no jury. Criminal cases are tried as a rule by a panel of four judges, of which one is legally trained and three are lay judges, each having an equal vote.

Later essays in this series:

• The main hearing in a Finnish criminal trial (November 16, 2005)

See more ...

A long time ago, I wrote:

In these days of VPN, IPsec, dynamic routing, tunnels, IPv6, and autoconfiguration protocols, one would expect that it would be possible to configure a laptop to find all kinds of hosts automatically, both for those that are network-specific (proxy servers, NNTP-servers), and for those that are not (mail servers, version control systems, ...).

I then went on to say that I could not, at the time, expect my laptop to find those networks by itself; every time I logged on to some network, I had to set up at least two SSH tunnels. I received a lot of feedback to that post, and I now do have my laptop set up so that it configures itself automatically if necessary. Well, almost; see below. This is what I've done: I don't use ifupdown on my laptop anymore. The package is installed and configures my lo interface, but that's it—nothing else. Instead, I'm using whereami to configure my network cards. Whereami is an excellent piece of software that is configured through two configuration files: detect.conf and whereami.conf. The former has a pretty peculiar syntaxis, which you'll need to get used to at first; but it's very powerful. There are a few things you can do in detect.conf:

1. Run tests. A test will check whether a condition is true, and set a location based on the result. An example of a test could be

   testmii eth0 lan
   

   which checks whether the MII detects a cable (testmii) on eth0, and will set the lan location if that is true. Tests are the raison d' tre of detect.conf; the point is to run as many relevant tests as possible, to get as much information as possible about the location where you are; that way, you can configure the system later on from whereami.conf (see below). There's other things like testdhcp (check for the presence and/or the returned IP address of a DHCP server), testap (test for the presence of an Access Point), testmodule (check whether something loaded a given kernel module), or even testarp if you're desperate (to test whether a node with a given MAC address lives on the network).
2. Checking locations. For instance, you might want to run testdhcp on eth0 only if the location lan is set already. This way, you don't get timeouts if you're on the train or anything. Checking locations is done with if <location> ... elif <location> ... else ... fi. Which is to say, you get a multi-line block of if structures, in which you can then run other tests conditionally. I'm just too lazy to write it out here :-)
   Unfortunately, it is not possible to nest if structures in detect.conf; but I don't think it's actually necessary for the detection (it might be nice for whereami.conf later on, but there the issues can be worked around).
3. There's also the possibility to do things like setting environment variables, default locations, and some similar housekeeping things.

It is possible to set more than one location from detect.conf; for example, right now my laptop claims it's at werk,dhcp,lan. At home, it detects it's at thuis,dhcp,lan—unless I use my wireless interface, in which case it detects it's at zd1211,thuis,wlan,dhcp,wdhcp After whereami finished the tests in detect.conf, your network should be working (provided you have a network cable plugged in, or are in the vicinity of an AP that you can connect to). Next, it will process whereami.conf. The genius of whereami probably lies in whereami.conf: this is a simple shellscript, but every line can be preceded by one of +, -, or =, followed by a location. For example, I have (amongst other things) this set up in my whereami.conf:

+lan ln -sf /etc/news/leafnode/config.generic /etc/news/leafnode/config
+werk ln -sf /etc/news/leafnode/config.werk /etc/news/leafnode/config
+thuis ln -sf /etc/news/leafnode/config.thuis /etc/news/leafnode/config

Whereami will check this file for any lines that start with '+' followed by a location it's going to, or '-' followed by a location it's leaving from, or '=' followed by a location it's either leaving from, going to, or staying at. It then removes the +/-/= plus the location, and dumps the rest of the line to a file; that file is then ran as a shell script. In other words, the above code will overwrite my /etc/news/leafnode/config with an appropriate configuration, depending on what network I'm entering. I don't have to reconfigure NNTP servers anymore. Nor do I need to set up any tunnels—whereami does all of this for me, and more. Next, since a few weeks, I've also added ifplugd. Previously, when I would get my laptop to resume from swsusp, I would need to manually run whereami afterwards; with ifplugd, this is no longer necessary—I just removed the ifupdown script in /etc/ifplugd/action.d, and replaced it with a whereami script that I quickly wrote myself (not as if it's hard, obviously). There's just one thing left: the proxy server. There are just way too many programs that one needs to configure to use a proxy server (or not) in Linux; and though it's possible to configure a proxy server by letting firefox "detect" it, I have no clue how that's done. Additionally, programs that use proxy servers through environment variables can not be reconfigured, unless one logs off and on again. I guess I'm looking for something that will do transparent proxying if there's a proxy server on the network, or just forward the requests to the remote server if not. But that's for another time.

I know, I know. A bit early, you might say. But let's face it: The shopping industry is already fully into christmas. You already get advent calendars, christmas cookies and thing in the various stores. And I got my first christmas presents the last week.... First of all I finally tried again to switch to Linux 2.6. Going through the great amount of options in my make oldconfig from 2.4 I finally tried to boot with it. The most deep changes I did was:

• Switching from APM to ACPI: This was one of the things I was worried about. But there was nothing to worry, I now can even see the temperature of the processor!
• Software Suspend: I now can shutdown my system to disk! That rocks, and seems to be more stable than the former APM sleep mode, which occasionally had problems with waking up again...
• The powerbutton now performs a shutdown. Unfortunately it is the only button that seems to get recognized, the key bindings with the function key don't do much. But I am confident that this can be settled out, they are sending keycodes. Calling acpitool manually isn't that much of an annoyance yet.
• Switching from OSS to ALSA: Another thing I was worried about. But I found out about the OSS emulation, so that reduced my worries. In the end I'm now even running without it, programs like mp3blaster I'm running with the wrapper from alsa-oss. Switched the few packages that were OSS specific on my system (like the SDL sound package) afterwards and am happy with it.
• Framebuffer module neofb works now built in! Finally I also can play around with some nice boot logo, and in connection with software suspend this isn't even wasted time. :)

This was my own christmas present. But I got some more, from a dear friend whom I'm working with and helping from time to time. More in a funny way I sent him a christmas wishlist, but he took it serious, and so there I am. Like, with a Gameboy Advance SP Kingdom Hearts Edition, including the game. I really loved the first part on my Playstation 2, am desperately waiting for the second part which shall be released in europe in spring next year... *sighs* The second major part was a Typhoon My Mini DJ music player. Most important thing for me with it is that it plays oggvorbis files natively. Finally I'm not the only one without a portable music player! Last but not least I'm going to attend LWE in Frankfurt/Main, and finishing my LPI Level 1 certification there. I'm not too worried about the test, though it for sure will be a good feeling to finally have something written and not only you lot telling me that I have some knowledge about it.

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

Om Malik: “[O]n this Web 2.0 highway, there are three exits: Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.” That’s a clever soundbite, and perhaps it’s true from the venture capitalist’s point of view, but I think it misses something fundamental: That the real attraction of the new web platform is that components don’t have to be rolled up into one big monolith anymore to integrate well with each other. We’re entering into a world where lots of little, independent component providers will be able to coexist and thrive alongside the platform vendors. Why? The platform vendors no longer have such a chokehold on distribution that the best the component providers can hope for are a few years of prosperity before the platform vendor notices there’s an interesting little market emerging around a particular component, integrates the component into the platform, and renders the independent component unnecessary. In the old world, a component provider’s prosperity was often its ultimate undoing. I’ve always sympathized with the platform vendors’ (OK, Microsoft’s) argument that this kind of integration is done in the interest of customer convenience—I for one don’t want to buy an operating system only to have to go out and source my own, say, memory management and data compression components (something, if you remember, we had to do in the MS-DOS days). In the old world, that probably meant going out, buying more software, and dealing with the headache of getting it installed and integrated. It was simply more convenient for the customer for the popular components to find their way into the platform, integrated and ready to go with no assembly required. In the new world, though, sourcing a component is no longer a heavyweight operation. By and large, the components themselves are free, and thanks to open APIs and data formats like RSS, it’s now possible to integrate those components into larger applications with comparative ease. Granted, the applications of today are largely ad hoc “mash ups” without an intermediating platform vendor in the traditional sense, but it won’t be long, in my view, before vendors step into that role and make writing such applications as systematized an operation as, say, writing an application for Windows or Linux is today. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are probably those vendors. Yes, the component providers probably hook into their platforms as the primary vehicle for monetizing their wares. However, without the same level of control over distribution that the old world enjoyed (not to mention the proliferation of open APIs and data formats), the big guys will have to coexist with the little guys. The platform vendors will compete by providing the most compelling incentive to the component providers. In old world terms, the platform with the most ISVs will win. This bodes very well indeed for innovation in the new “Web 2.0″ world. Above all, the days of the platform vendors integrating all the components into the platform to the exclusion of independent providers have come and gone. Thankfully.

There's a lot of debate going on across Planet freedesktop.org (okay, so just Havoc), and Planet GNOME (most everyone else) about marketing of media players right now. Discussing iAudios seems pretty timely.

Convinced by Jimmac, and also the shiny look, I skipped off to buy one while I was in the UK late last year. My iRiver was alright, but it was absolutely massive and very heavy, so it just had to go. I grabbed one, and have been very happy with it ever since. But with a few bumps in the road.

In April or so, my remote's display suddenly stopped working. Apparently this was a known issue with that one batch of remotes, and everything else was OK. So I eBayed a new remote at a cost of around $au115. Ouch.

Some time after that, I was attempting to reset it on the train, after it hung. Turns out that the reset button is a relatively small part of a small plastic mount, perpendicular to the mainboard. And if you poke the wrong part of it with a pen, you can snap the whole bloody thing off.

About a month ago, I just lost the ability to charge off AC; you could only do it if you were holding it at a weird angle, and eventually it just lost that ability. Which I found weird, since it's not a direct plug; there's a small breakout adapter which contains the plug for it. So it's not like the contacts on the plug in the device itself are just weird. Same problem with the cradle. So I resorted to overnight charges off USB (gah).

A while ago, the final straw in terms of it finally losing day-to-day usability was that it stopped making proper contact with the 3.5mm headphone plug, so if you held it at an angle, it just barely worked, but you got the occasional burst of awful, loud, electrical noise.

It hasn't been treated especially badly; just a lot of use, in my pocket every day, contending with my phone for space. But in just under a year, it's almost completely disintegrated.

The only reason why I bought it really, was because a lot of my older CDs have been destroyed (two roadtrips with a friend, and his car turned out to have some sand in the tray ...), and I'd really rather not transcode from Vorbis to either MP3 or AAC. But I'm pretty sure my next purchase will be a G3 40G iPod off eBay, because the clickwheel is an utter abomination. Say what you will about their marketing, sales in Europe, or whatever (FWIW: they're mindblowingly popular in Australia), but the G3 design is far and away the best design I have ever seen in any music device since my beloved MZ-R900, which met an unfortunate end when it hit ashphalt at high speed. It's quite beautiful, and the UI Just Works.

Compare this with the iRiver, which is clunky and awful to use, and the iAudio, which is the same, but with some bizzare additions. Such as the two clickable jog wheels. One of them is the 'action' button (think: the Navi key on Nokia phones), and the other brings up a context menu. Except when you go into the options, whereby the action button brings you back to the main screen, and the context menu thing is the 'action' or 'OK' button. Totally bizzare.

Junichi, your iBook G4 might suspend fine, but is the USB stack fully functional afterwards? And could you plug in a device, suspend, resume and continue to use it just fine? I had some problems on mine with suspend, it did not detect a single device I plugged in after the sleep. It seems fixed with a more current kernel, though. But my zd1211 driver still needs to get unloaded before it sleeps, otherwise the iBook will panic after resume.

I didn't really configure anything, but I noticed that when I close the lid on my ibookg4, it suspends;and when I open it up, it resumes.I am using 2.6.14. Amazing.Nice laptop, heh.Update: Phil Kern and Wouter Verhelst commented that suspend/resume doesn't really function when USB devices are plugged in.I didn't have anything plugged in today, that will need to be investigated later...

Something I'm really curious about is why the Java folks suddenly stood up and took notice of Ruby. Is it just Rails? Did Rails arrive in the right place at the right time? It's not a rhetorical question - I don't have a lot of insight into the Java world, so I'm genuinely curious as to what sparked this interest in "beyond Java". Python's been around for a long time, and isn't that different from Ruby. Tcl with Tk runs circles around Java for cross platform GUI development. PHP, even if it's not the cleanest or most glamorous thing out there, makes whipping up small web tools easy. (I'll concede that Perl has a culture that is too far removed from a lot of the things Java tries to do). And all those have been under everyone's noses for years. So why all of a sudden is Ruby the "hot new thing" that is to be embraced, rather "defended against", as we often see in such programming language "willy waving contests". Was this something that was just waiting to happen, and all it took was something to coalesce around? Were people in that world starting to get wrist injuries from typing out so much stuff, and on the lookout for "something else"? Joking aside, I really am curious, because over the years, I've developed an interest in how these things work. I talk about it some in The Economics of Programming Languages, but that's clearly not the whole story. Java and its human resources requirements Another thing I've been idly wondering about is whether perhaps Java got pushed a lot (perhaps unconsciously) by big companies, because 1) it is a good solution for big teams 2) some aspects of it are so big and unweildy that only companies that can muster the manpower to throw at it are going to do well with it, meaning that smaller shops would either have to not compete in that market, or compete poorly. Obviously, it's not strictly necessary to use Java - more often than not, you could accomplish the same thing in less time with some other system, however, the "other pincer" is the marketing out there that Java is the "serious, corporate, enterprise" solution, and that anything "less" just won't do. This gives firms an incentive to use Java even when it might not be the best solution, and helps create a market where it's a given that the solution is some Java system, and the bigger company, being able to bring more people to bear, may have an edge. Anyway, just some idle speculation - what do you think?