Encouraging news to Open Source advocates have been published today.

Firstly, OpenDocument (a la OpenOffice) attracts further interest, much as in the Massachusetts case, which stirred similar interest elsewhere:

Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s desktop software.

Secondly, IBM, Sony and Philips sidle closer to Linux:

Three of the world’s biggest electronics companies — IBM, Sony and Philips — have joined forces with the two largest Linux software distributors to create a company for sharing Linux patents, royalty-free.

Well, somebody’s happy!

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

OBERT Scoble is a well-known Microsoft evangelist and blogger. He has recently set up a free blog in wordpress.com, which is of course based on Open Source software. I decided to ask him what he was up to. I was highly skeptic as he made this questionable migration of his popular blog and heavily-requested feeds. Earlier this week I sent Scoble an E-mail and got a disappointing reply; both of which I post verbatim below:

Me:

You are of course aware that you run your blog on Linux while evangelizing Windows. Hypocrisy?

Robert:

No.

An evangelist must be credible if he wants to be listened to.

The only way to be credible is to actually use other methodologies and products.

You must have evangelism confused with marketing. The two are not the same.

Rather than being critical of Open Source or PHP/MySQL, he implicitly revealed devious intentions; at least that’s the way I interpreted it. Only a couple of days later Scoble posted an item titled “WordPress Sucks”. He gets paid to say that stuff. He came in to give a critique and when the WordPress community posted follow-ups in defense of WordPress, they simply echoed his unjustifiable rants.

To make matters worse, Scoble opted for a free software package and complained about an extremely powerful feature in WordPress: RSS feeds. Is he complained about WordPress feeds, he could bash his wrath anything (or envy anything for that matter). Owing to that, he loses credibility rather than gain any.

Scoble on WordPress was a ticking bomb from day 1 and it exploded prematurely for all the wrong reasons. Like Matt said, WordPress is the Burger King of feeds. WordPress.com must become more selective when it comes to people it permits access and subscription to. I once mentioned the importance of WordPress invites. They are perhaps insufficient as they only deter splogs and mirrors, not enemies.

KPilot screenshot
version 4.3 on SuSE 8.2 (not the version reviewed below)

INUX Palm synchronisation is a scarcely-explored territory to many. I currently own a Tungsten and I have 3 machines, all of which run Linux. In practice, I refuse to use my Palm for much beyond basic PIM, at least on a daily and thus realistic basis. Even MP3 playback capabilities have lost their appeal, so what I require is a rather rudimentary, but nonetheless user-friendly and reliable Palm-PC interaction suite.

Introduction and Disclaimer

I am fortunate to have had an opportunity to put both KPllot and JPilot on GNOME (gnome-pilot or gpilot) to the test. It seems as if they all trace back to a similar codebase, which includes pilot-link at the very core. My experience with the JPilot front-end is limited, so in my short review I will attempt to focus on default KDE and GNOME conduits — particularly the ones that come ‘out of the box’.

Admittedly, I only used GPilot for several weeks before looking into what KPilot (Version 4.5: “Baby”) had to offer, having glanced at it briefly last year. On equally-modern distributions, namely the GNOME-based Ubuntu Warty Warthog and the (largely) KDE-oriented SuSE 9.3 I have been putting Palm synchronisations to the test. Experimentation was a prolonged one and it covered some crash testing (hard-resets with data loss) and in-depth GUI exploration. This came after 3 years of using Palm Desktop under a Windows 98 laptop and a Windows 2000 desktop, I might add. All in all, there was good basis for inter-platform benchmarks, so critique should not have been a narrow-minded one.

Conclusions and Opinions

My first impression is that KPilot is more comprehensive than others, much like the entire desktop environment is resides in. I personally favour KDE although I use GNOME several times a week and almost every day. Overall, my opinion is not likely to have that ‘desktop environment bias’.

KPilot integrates rather well with its underlying/surrounding environment (e.g. mail client and calendaring software) whereas the GNOME equivalent is rather stripped-down and raw. The latter does what I require it to do and it even attempts to synchronise with Evolution (Outlook-type suite), which has been said to be slightly buggy. Nonetheless, it fails quite miserably at matching that ease-of-use of KDE’s equivalent. Firstly, setup in GNOME requires some hand-tweaking, at least in accordance with my own experience. This can end up consuming plenty of time. I also found the wizards in GNOME to be less helpful, more verbose, and more confusing.

Returning to KPilot, the front-end interface is a more natural one to its user. During synchronisation, all files are ordered with a sensible file structure under ./kde/share/apps/kpilot (or equivalents). gpilot, on the other hand, adheres to a flat hierarchy that provides little context, if any. Moreover, KPilot is largely intuitive, highly-customisable and comes with cleaner and apparently more comprehensive documentation.

Lastly, to those with strong sentiments of disagreement, I must clarify that everything was tested under Ubuntu and SuSE. All of the above observations can be attributed to distributions rather than the Palm conduits and packages. Nonetheless I would choose to go with KPilot as I presently do although I used gpilot at the start. It seems as though KPilot is simply more mature.

Your Palm and That Linux Migration

If you dread the day when you must synchronise your Palm with a new Linux box or a fresh installation, have a look at the very self-contained HOWTO.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Dozens of remote sessions occupying a cluster. Terminals shaded on the left monitor (click to enlarge)

HATEVER operating system we use, the idea of using remote terminals should not be foreign to us. These days, it is rather common to log on to a computer remotely and manage it from afar as if we were actually there.

Inter-Platform Connections

Windows users frequently stick to VNC, which requires a high-bandwidth connection and grabs the entire desktop/workspace metaphorically ‘across the wire’. Nonetheless, there are some smart algorithms (c/f Citrix clients), which only re-draw elements once they change, so speed/bandwidth might not be the utmost concerns.

Linux users, on the other hand, are capable of establishing transparent connections with Windows machines via VNC, for which there are many applications in existence (Remote Desktop or rdesktop among several more variants). Linux also takes a different approach in its most natural method for remote access. Take, for example, SSH connections wherein individual windows get ‘grabbed’ and communicated over the network, only upon demand. Everything else should be managed from the command-line interface (CLI), e.g. bash and xterm. This might be less natural to the majority of users nowadays, especially to those unfamiliar with CLI’s.

Windows connectivity to *nix protocols can be established using the renowned PuTTY. In the case of Telnet or RLogin, applicability might be slightly different, but merely all protocols seem to have been covered. In fact, Windows typically supports telnet at its core (Start » Run... » telnet » ENTER). This establishes a somewhat mutual relationship. Windows users can remotely log in to Linux machine (might need a commercial X-session if not CygWin) and Linux users can connect to Windows hosts. In modern Linux distribution, all necessary toolsets are already pre-installed from what I can gather.

Extreme Use of Remote Access

When carrying out some computer vision experiments, I was at times using over 30 Pentium 4′s. These were used for quite a considerable overnight resource hogs. The communication barrier was merely inexistent; I an fortunate enough to work upon a 100Mbit Ethernet backbone. To give some indication of how fast the connection actually is, I can transfer an entire CD (~650 MB) across campus in less than a minute. That unbelievable speed is at times truly needed. I estimate that I use up bandwidth of over 100 GB per month, mainly due to backup necessities.

As regards extreme use of remote login, this is one of the most exciting experiences, to me at least. Rather than conducting large-scale experiments over the period of one month on a single CPU, they can be distributed, thus completed within a day. Nothing can beat that in terms of productivity. AI is known to be resources-greedy. Our computer vision methodology falls under that branch too. I will soon write about the use of supercomputers to run my experiments, albeit this is still under negotiation.

Traffic Chain

I could no longer resist my geek spirit so I decided to experiment with the idea of SSH chaining. The dependency of one machine upon another is something that intrigues me, so often I log in remotely to one machine, which in turn connects to another.

I decided to set up a larger SSH chain wherein I connect to my own computer via an entire ‘ring’ of machines, using SSH. I wanted to see how this affects speed and responsiveness in applications that ‘travel’. Needless to mention, this also cripples all computers in that ring. This observation has some interesting implications on its own. These intermediatory machines can be perceived as purposeless routers. If one computer in the chain is reset, the whole chain collapses and the connection is lost. It may also take a while to re-build, which to me at least, is amusing.

Cluster Control

On to some more extreme uses of SSH, some time ago I read about use of SSH to control entire computer clusters in parallel. In essence, the user will be sending any given command to an ‘army’ of computers (clients or computational hosts). The tool is not very flexible, but can be valuable under particular circumstances.

SuSE Linux, my favourite distribution among all, is set to take over in New Zealand.

A deal has been struck to allow agencies throughout government access to open-source software and support from Novell at preferential rates.

…

The deal will centre on Novell’s SUSE Linux server and its Linux Desktop, but agencies will also be able to access other open-source products such as MySQL and Jboss with full support, says Novell NZ general manager Matthew Christie.

This comes at a time of some financial trouble and expected lay-offs, which nonetheless should not affect SuSE’s roadmap.

Novell layoff rumors swirled this week, but analysts were quick to dismiss any doomsday scenarios involving the SuSE Linux operating system.

MMS and Winamp, among other popular music players, begin (or have long ago begun) to lag behind more bloated applications such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. Bloated software from the giants is continuing to develop and evolve. The target audience is easily manipulated into using anything that comes along these large marketing ‘pipelines’, either pre-packaged or pre-installed.

AmaroK is a fully-featured player/playlist management suite for KDE (Linux). Believe it or not, it boasts an endless amount of features that got me overly excited. I have been toying with AmaroK for the past couple of days as if I was a 1-year-old that has just discovered baby wipes. Here are the top 10 features the way I personally perceive them:

• Lyrics of most songs can be brought up at the speed of a mouse click. This does not only apply to popular chart hits.
• Album covers are easily fetched and displayed, also at the speed of a mouse click, apparently using an Amazon service
• Smart list accumulation is handled by the application
• ‘Jump’ function (equivalent to ‘j’ in XMMS)- character patterns are searched for among all songs. Indexing makes subsequent matches immediate. For example, type in “dless” and every song in your playlist which contains that string (even part of a word) will be listed immediately for you to select.
• Universal keyboard shortcuts like the ones XMMS offers. The user can change track, for example, while desktop focus is placed upon another program.
• Show all songs from the same artist, often subcategorised by albums while any song gets played
• Media library management – breakdown of songs to form trees of artists, albums, or genres
• iPod synchronisation built-in and included in the core of the application. I rank this feature low as I use a Palm Tungsten for MP3′s, not an iPod. For iPod owners this might be considered a “must-have” feature.
• Popularity analysis – for each song, statistics are recorded, e.g. time last listened to, time first listened to and related songs/artists. That feature makes my log files merely obsolete
• Transparent on-screen display (OSD), just like in XMMS

The following bulletpoint cannot properly be labeled “features”, but they are also worth listing, perhaps as “selling points”:

• Rich graphical user interface, which is highly customisable. This includes some 32-bit transparencies.
• External small GUI, much like that which is offered by XMMS/Winamp. This enables the user to control playlist flow without taking up plenty of screen space.
• Various plug-ins I have not had the luxury time to play with, yet

On File Type Support

Support for MP3 files is not build-in when SuSE 9.3 initially gets installed, which is a PITA (setting aside that primitive, buggy variant of Real Player 10, which has spyware tendencies). The same applies to Fedora Core and has become a major notoriety. Other distributions like Ubuntu are no exception.

For SuSE, one needs to get update and recompile the multimedia components with MP3 support. This is something I discovered when I set SuSE up a few days ago. That possibly explains the declined pace of blog posts, by the way.

As for Ubuntu, XMMS with MP3 support can be trivially installed using the package manager called Synaptic. By default, older versions of Ubuntu (at the least) come with no application that handles the MP3 format. That is just a painful reality as far as I can gather.

AmaroK supports a variety of formats including WAV, OGG and the like. In fact, virtually any filetype is supported, provided that it is understood by the underlying multimedia layers.

I am pleased to have discovered that Google encourage and support Open Source in American schools. Apart from the fruit of Summer of Code, Google have just decided to fund Open Source projects in a state where students are urged to adhere to ‘free as in freedom’.

I believe it is likely that we shall see more of the same. Expansion of the Open Source ‘realm’ directly hurts Google’s main rival, which is Microsoft. It devalues the commercial equivalents and pushes down the cost.

School is a fantastic place to learn, but what if you could introduce students to open source projects, with real problems to solve, and fantastic developers to work with? We thought that would be a pretty terrific way of spending the summer, and with the help of 40 open source, free software and technology-related groups, that is exactly what we did. We call this project the Summer of Code.

…

Now that summer is over, we’ve got a new thing going. Today at the Oregon Governor’s office in Salem, we’re announcing our support of an open source initiative which two men, Bart Massey and Scott Kveton, at two schools, Oregon State University and Portland State University, have worked very hard to create. Over the last few years, they have collaborated to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide. We’re pleased to be able to support their efforts with a donation of $350,000.

The item, by the way, was written by Google’s Code Manager, with whom I raised my concerns over Linux negligence in the past. This item proves that Google have truer intentions of giving back to the very same community they stem from. Summer of Code was apparently just the beginning of something bigger. In fact, as Google rely on many Open Source projects like Apache, they are able to use their financial strengths to improve code and return it to the community.

There is more on this story in Oregon’s news.

Related items:

• Google Make Media Player Inter-operable
• Sun-Google Pact
• Google OS – What if?