T can be rather amusing — if not frustrating — to see what diplomats and legislators know about technology. In an article from yesterday afternoon, Stephen Shankland describes the perils one has when it comes to educating politicians while evangelising Open Source.

Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development for top Linux seller Red Hat, traveled to California’s capitol to educate legislators in the state Senate about open-source software, but he ended up getting something of an education himself.

[...]

For example, several seemed to believe that if an administrator uses open-source software that anyone can peer into the inner workings of his or her computer system.

[...]

When Evans told the Senate’s information technology personnel he’d be brining his own Linux box to show his presentation, Evans recounted, “They said, ‘What is a Linux box?’”

[...]

And the Web site that offered streaming audio of the hearing only presents Windows Media audio files.

ICROSOFT have announced officially their intent to enter the anti-virus market a couple of months ago. They now unveil a service called OneCare (homonym of “wanker”) Live, which is paid for annually. In simple words, the customer gets protection for the operating system’s own flaws and pays $50 per year for the service from no-one but the O/S vendor. As reported by CNN:

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it plans to launch a new computer security service in June, marking the world’s biggest software maker’s entry into the fast-growing consumer anti-virus market.

Microsoft’s Windows OneCare Live, a subscription-based, self-updating service, will push the software giant into competition with consumer security providers Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc.

The article neglects to mention the controversy that is associated with this anti-competitive strategy. Microsoft exploits a monoploy in the desktop market and gives itself motives to create flaws intentionally, then offer the cure for a high cost. I believe Symantec filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft over a month ago.

Next generation of GNOME (source)

KDE inherits Apple’s fancy dress

N my recent vacation, I made a someone’s wish come true. I finally spent time working on a dual-boot Ubuntu setting for a friend, whom I have known since the age of 5. We both grew up on DOS, but in due time got fed up with unreliable Microsoft Windows, following its more successful days which were symbolised by Windows 3.1/3.11, 95 and maybe 98 as well (though that is where its value began to dive).

I made some gentle encouragement to make Linux the exclusive booting choice, but my friend will have to become accustomed to Linux one step at a time. This is no exception. Data migration, as well as migration of software and habit is required. Finally, he got excited about urging his parents to switch approximately 20 machines at their factory to Linux. An hour of explaining the Linux mantra and inner mechanisms was well invested. That guy is now on Mandriva 2006 as I recommended a KDE-based distribution with an AMD 64-bit processor support. Having ditched Ubuntu, he was even more satisfied, yet he kept all the installation CD’s, which he may distributed and disseminate to others.

In the process of migration, Linux (the distributions rather) received compliments on ease of installation, customisation ability, functionality and the number of available programs. We initially encountered issues due to an “expert” installlation of Ubuntu. These were attributed to privileges, which are supposed to protect the users from themselves. Ubuntu is intended for non-systems administrators, but I sometimes think that it goes too far, which can be counter-intuitive.

FTER a few sleepless nights, I am finally through submitting two papers. They have put me under great pressure recently, so I even curtailed my blogging activities. I have mentioned these submissions before, but they were only impending work at the time.

One paper has already been accepted, so the camera-ready version needed to be produced. Within a few days I will know if another paper (mentioned months ago) has been accepted and the reviewers rebuttal period will commence. All submission are to IEEE conferences or journals where I am the corresponding author. This is something that I never dreamed would be attainable. If someone predicted this out loud, I probably would have laughed. In the past year I have been fortunate enough to find myself on cloud number 9.

Another deadline approaches, namely (Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), which gives us an opportunity to introduce and outline our entropy-based model and registration assessment, which is novel.

FTER 6 years with a laptop, I gave up on it completely. This was mentioned in the context of the PDA and also 6 years to a laptop’s retirement. There are a two main reasons for giving up a laptop: (1) a desktop machine is typically more powerful; (2) a PDA can replace laptop for better mobility.

More on the deficiencies of the laptop, which I include as addenda to previous essays:

• The laptop cannot be carried in the streets or pulled out within seconds to be used for a just few seconds, then pocketed
• Laptops are heavier
• Laptops rely on wireless connections while one travels. This makes Web navigation and mail rather impractical on the go. Text, navigation and productivity through creation seem like the stronger points when using laptops
• Laptops are difficult and expensive to fix, maintain, and extend

Mockup of a more futuristic GNOME (source)

HE GNOME desktop environment for Linux appears to be losing its prestige due to KDE, despite some eye-popping video demonstrations that include transparencies, wobbling windows and a 3-D Cube in desktop switching. Looking at some mockup images of GNOME, one gets an idea of future directions. The GNOME developers camp might have to live with the damaging insults from Linus Torvalds nonetheless.

More examples of GNOME eye candy can be found in a
previous eclectic item.

HIS morning I found (and began playing with) a GPL‘d newsgroups statistics tool (homepage of the project). I compiled it from source code without the QT GUI and off I went experimenting. In case you choose to run that tool as well, there is an ample manual for its command-line mode.

I have reported a serious documentation bug to the author — a bug that cost me a fair bit of time. To quote the report, in case this helps somebody else:

In Turquoise 2.2, the help bit says:

Usage: turqstat [options] outputfile areadef(s)

Shouldn’t the ourputfile precede the [options]? It took me a very long
time to realise that.

Having run it successfully ‘off-line’, script invocation has been made a weekly cron job (i.e. a job which is scheduled to run repeatedly by a daemon). I decided that I can only post its output to forums where:

• My participation is noticeable and is decent
• My presence goes back a long time into the past
• The amount of involvement and activity is high, or else there is not much to gauge. Statistics become uninteresting otherwise.
• Nobody else generates statistics already

For the time being, I will generate and publish statistics for the search engines and Palm newsgroups only.