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Archive for January, 2006

Accepted Research Paper

Roy - childhood
Decisions and announcements that makes me as happy
as a child (photo from around 1986)

OUR paper which was submitted to ISBI 2006 has just been accepted, so I will be going to America in April. In March I will know if another paper of ours (CVPR 2006) has been accepted. The content of this paper is similar to the one contained in a recent presentation.

I mentioned both submissions in the past in the context of deadline pressure. I will most likely take advantage of this journey across the Atlantic and visit some of my family in Florida. This will make up for the pressure I am constantly subjected to (as well as — in this case — presenting in an international conference).

My relatives seem to anticipate my visit and, quite frankly, so do I! The deadline for another submission is drawling nearer, so we must take it up a gear and invest more time in experimentation and writing. The trips abroad will give me a significant motivational boost.

OpenOffice and Microsoft Office Comparison

Microsoft Word
A screenshot of Word (Office 12) with copied graphical themes highlighted

OPENOFFICE 2 was officially released a few months ago. Microsoft Office 12 will probably be out in the near future and it imitates much of the Mac OS X look, for which it has been criticised. See the above image if persuasion is needed that the contention is true.

Around the release time of OpenOffice, a particular controversial article made the rounds. It described OpenOffice as slow and inferior. Comparisons involving Microsoft Office and OpenOffice were only conducted under Windows, for it seems the only possible platform for benchmarks of this nature. However, it is a ‘home and away’ situation.

Windows is optimised to run Microsoft Office. It keeps many common objects in memory, for which there is a noticeable cost. On the other hand, OpenOffice ‘feels’ most comfortable in its origins: Open Source environments. The Windows OpenOffice version could be treated as merely a secondary port. Moreover, someone claimed that the OpenOffice build which was used in this comparison had been compiled with debugging ‘bits’ which accommodated for bug reports. It was not the final product, but merely a candidate with a practical purpose that entailed improvements.

Judging and comparing office productivity tools on Windows is unfair and grossly biased. It is like assessing the performance of a football team based only on its home games. This is not the first time that biased studies are conducted. Web servers, legacy hardware, and security are a few more examples. There was recently a big controversy over a study which counted security flaws, but compared Windows against many dozens of different Open Source platforms and applications like Apache and Firefox. The miserably-delivered figures were very deceiving, almost intentionally so. Flaws count was aggregated from just about any distribution or derivative of UNIX and then compared against the corresponding number from Windows.

Free Software – What Does it Truly Mean?

Season of the playful penguins
Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

I decided to explore and assemble a few favourite essays that explain what “free software” actually means. It does not mean what people tend to believe. I can assure you that, so please read on.

Essay #1: What software freedom means to me

Some seem to view software as a closed sphere; meaning that one person or group’s success must come at the expense of another’s. For those that have this rather selfish and narrow view of a closed world of zero sum games, I guess it makes sense to be able to take software and ideas that others have created, and offer them back with some modifications as proprietary solutions under the exclusive control of one individual or group.

Essay #2: Debunking common GNU/Linux myths

(Fallacy:) Free software is Communism. Free software promotes a gift economy and is anti-capitalist. Free software will kill the software industry and hurt the economy. First let’s examine free software. Basically it is software that you are allowed to use, sell, distribute and modify in any way you see fit. Compare that with proprietary software, which most often only allows you to use the software on a limited basis — no redistribution, sale, or modification of the software is allowed. Actually it goes further than that; criminal and civil penalties can be imposed on you for doing any of those things. It would be more accurate to say that proprietary software is fascist rather than suggest that free software is communist.

The “free” in free software does not mean “free of charge;” it means “free of restriction.” That’s free as in rights, not price. This is a point often misunderstood or misrepresented by proprietary software CEOs and others who have a proprietary software agenda to push.

That being said, free software is often also free of charge.

[...]

So, as the GNU slogan clearly says, it is “free as in freedom“.

Signatures and Spam Filters

Hand signing

A long time ago I argued that more people ought to digitally sign their E-mail messages. Unfortunately, very few people bother to do so. There are many benefits to encryption-based verification of one’s identity. Ultimately, it can lead to more trust, which can in turn prevent spam and make communication less susceptible to ‘noise’.

There recently emerged a word-of-mouth that signed messages are less likely to be intercepted by spam filters. As to whether this is true or not, I would have to say I doubt it. I am sorry to antagonise some people’s hopes, but several messages that I PGP-signed got flagged as spam (not by SpamAssassin). At least I was informed in all (probably two) occasions, but it was nonetheless worrisome. Quite recently I mentioned a trend whereby banning of autoresponders becomes prevalent. It is very important that moderators up above can discern spammers from those who attempt to fight spam in genuine and effective ways.

Volume Normalizer

Volume controller

DO you know the feeling of listening to playlists which contain assorted tracks from various different albums? More familiarly perhaps, have you ever pondered this issue of volume shifts?

The sound becomes louder and quieter as one track bounces onto the next one. Balancing the — shall we call it — ‘cross-song imbalance’ is an unnecessary nuisance. This lead to a lot of manual intervention with the volume control throughout playtime. Should music players not have the capability to adjust this on-the-fly, before playing a track? Equating in one form or another the volume baseline? Would this be done better off-line? The latter option often requires that the entire track is analysed first. One wonders which players incorporate such functionalities already.

Exchange Servers: Disgraceful Failure

Horde

My Web-based mail access (primarily Horde)
click image to view in full size

THIS is going to be the type of post that potentially leads to friction, but I simply cannot hold off. I even created a new category due to this item and aptly named it “Rants”. I will stick to anonymity in order to prevent sensitive criticism from having context.

15 minutes we spent in the weekly meeting. 15 minutes discussing the mail problems that have plagued this department for the past week. You’ve guessed it. The Department has got an Exchange mail server. People are unable to send mail at times, Web access is flaky, and popups keep coming up to inform the user about error in the local mail client, which to most is Outlook. Fortunately, I metaphorically took my toys and left this mail system 2 years ago. It seemed unreliable when I first joined the Division.

In the interim, people still suffer from mail issue. I do not take pleasure in the misery of others, but I could not feel better about my foresight. I did the right thing by ditching this mail system very early on. This is only the pinnacle of something that has culminated after months of recurring issues. More interesting is the following observation: At no point throughout the meeting was the mail system criticised. Not Exchange, not Outlook, not even the support staff. The IT department suggests that there is a single Outlook user which is the catalyst for this issue, probably without any awareness. They can’t identify who it is (not me of course, just for clarification!).

The staff would defend the only thing that they know and consider to be trustworthy: pricy Microsoft products. This loveaffair is by all means expensive. Linux to them would seem as though it serves only be a step back. It may be the effect of age and earsay. Regardless, the most amazing thing is that the entire meeting revolved around blaming an anonymous user who had the system crippled due to its deficient nature. Exchange cannot cope with something as simple as manageing 100 mail accounts. A single user can have it grind to a halt for very long periods of time, burning the valuable time of both support staff and research staff. There is no solution on the horizon either, other than speak to each individual user which is bound to the mail system. The staff might also need to verify that the system is properly configured on each individual workstation.

I find entire the scenario rather pathetic. This is probably why I was never fond of the Microsoft-friendly attitude among academic IT departments. Due to issues of liability and large available budgets, brand names are often picked at the expense of quality.

Needless to mention, these mail issues are irrelevant to me. I could not be happlier with my mail system. I had my mail hosted in my Linux-based domain for over year without any downtime or quirks. It never ceased to work, just like the positive Linux myth. Need it be mentioned that my server is responsible for mail accounts of just a single individual and not an entire Department? This is not the first time that I mention Exchange server disasters.

Linux Advocacy Graphics

Malware magnet

AMUSING photos are appreciated whenever light entertainment is sought. So, in the past months I have created a few using the GIMP. Steve Ballmer is involved in two of these, both of which stem from discussions in the Linux advocacy newsgroup.

Lastly, I decided to give my own version of Microsoft Linux. I hereby present the box set of Microsoft Linux. Anti-virus and Service Packs are included free of extra charge.

(To Webmasters: You can borrow these images to use in your Web site; no need to request for consent. In fact, I do not mind HotLinking either.)

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