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

OW can Microsoft ever permit the existence of something interoperable? To a company so aggressive, interoperability is the very face of evil. It is a threat. What it comes down to is the equivalent of a destructive competition, which is counter-productive to humanity. It portrays the core danger of monopolies, whose power and scale can deter any resistance attempts. It embodies the scenario where people take risks only to avoid what is adverse to ideaology — steering away from the ‘norm’. Windows has become a norm. Its avoidance symbolises a state of social outcasting, at least in people’s perception.

Whether it was Java, or C, or even OpenGL, such technologies had to be ‘extinguished’, at least in accordance with Microsoft’s agenda. Even Adobe’s Flash (Macromedia takeover) and the PDF format are bound to be replaced according to the Microsoft Grand Plan. What about DivX and WMV? MP3 and WMA? The formats Microsoft have proposed are not only inferior in terms of performance, but also they are proprietary.

Will that trend ever stop? To critical IT professionals the current state-of-affair is like a pungent knife in an open sore. To many others, this entire manipulation from up above is misunderstood and thus perceived as innocent. The ‘cattle effect’ is to be attributed for some inertia, not to mention pre-installed software.

On to page 2

SDIR.COM have published a large number of screenshot galleries today. They all come from different ‘flavours’ of Linux: from Arabian Linux to Mandriva and even the latest of SuSE (version 10.1, shown above).

What I generally find awkward are distributions of Linux that go by names such as Linux XP 2005, and yes! They look quite similar to Windows XP as well. I guess that Apple Mac crossovers are not any better. For each his/her own.

There are bugs that bug the user and bugs that lead to catastrophe. Below lie two examples of critically-buggy applications, which I recently decided are worth listing.

1. Windows 95 – Blue Screen of Death

I still remember, as a most classical example, the days of Windows 95. The operating system failed to cope with unhandled, misunderstood packets that ultimately gave the blue screen and required a reboot in most cases. Sooner or later people got hold of so-called ‘nuking’ software — one among virtually dozens of GUI-based free downloads. That little tool gave its owner the ability to unleash upon others the infamous ‘blue screen of death’.

IP address of the target computer was all one needed. It was easy to determine one’s IP address even when dynamically allocated by a dial-up ISP. Instant messengers (ICQ was new and hot at the time) simplified the process tremendously and tools that interacted with the IM existed as well. This gave your friends and foes the ability to ‘take you down’ whenever they desired.

Sooner or later, anti-nuke software was becoming mandatory. Yet another application to run in the background if you want to survive without rebooting and losing some invaluable work. Not good.

During the holiday, yet another critical flaw with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 was found. Lessons have not been learned even 10 years later. The promise and efforts to make Windows more modular seem unfruitful.

2. Timely Example: WordPress 2.0 Bugs

I previously said that the release of WordPress would be premature. I said so as soon as rumours emerged. Matt Mullenweg spoke about an undetermined release that precedes Christmas. Boxing Day was the point when things took a gentle dive.

I now write about 40 messages a day in the WordPress support forums, making a voluntary contribution throughout the holidays, as promised. The pace of bug reports is worrisome. That aside, the WordPress Web site was not prepared for the demand either. There was a site migration issue on the very same date as the release and coding bugs emerged all too soon in the forums where they continue to resurface.

WordPress 2.0 was intended to be named after a Jazz musician, as always. ‘Stan Getz‘ was among the top contenders. I believe that WordPress should not be called Getz because it might give a favoured artist of mine a bad name. WordPress 2.0 is more like Milli Vanilli (sarcasm and an overstatement).

Earlier today a version database downgrader for WordPress was released. A few people regret the upgrade, but many are very happy with the new features. Whether the frustration supercedes the benefits is an important question. The answer is yet difficult to deliver and the situation hard to judge.

KDE and its future “Plasma” for user interaction (source)

T is no secret that I am an avid KDE fan. I would definitely choose it over GNOME for most purposes. I use GNOME as a desktop environment almost every day, but only while at work.
KDE is simply more powerful and appears to have a brighter future ahead.

There recently emerged a commotion due to a message from Linus Torvalds (‘father’ of Linux), wherein he expressed dissatisfaction with GNOME. It seemed as though his outspoken involvement in desktop ‘camps’ stirred a storm in a teacup. Typically, Torvalds not only avoids talking about competing operating systems, but also avoids criticising non-profit initiative such as GNOME, which support his kernel and make it more popular across the globe.

During the holiday I came across an insightful blog post from QDevBlog. It encapsulates many the thoughts among KDE users and the KDEdevelopers. It also includes many valuable facts that I was never aware of.

The recent discussions on KDE versus other Linux desktops – accidentally started by KDE-user Linus Torvalds – showed an interesting new development in the eternal debate. First of all it didn’t come as a surprise that Linus uses KDE, after all Fritz Elfert made it very clear back in 1996 that KDE stands for “Kernel-Hackers’ Desktop Environment”, when Kalle and the German IT press still pushed “Kalle Dalheimer Experience”.

[...]

To be even more explicit: It’s a fairy tale that end users will decide against KDE when given the choice, and it’s a fairy tale that KDE is more difficult to use than any of the alternatives.

[...]

KDE is all about ease of use, contemporary functionality, and outstanding graphical design, and we make it better and better with every release, in all three aspects.

One of the commonest Web activities involves information discovery and fetching using search engines. It is worthwhile to adopt habits that make that activity a more efficient and productive one. For example, the user can be delivered 100 results per page (in Google at the least). When using GoogleBar, the plug-ins can be configured to get 50 results by default. This is valuable to users on a fast connections.

I am sometimes surprised, on the other hand, by the lacking support for efficient keyboard navigation. Neither Google nor Yahoo use accesskeys in the results page. It always bogs down to having to scroll down (or go to the top of the page) and then aim at the fine numbers to skip to the next page.This is laborious if there are many pages to browse through. Some arrow-shaped buttons exist for that reason in various toolbars, but no keyboard accelerators are bound to them. Moreover, they only accommodate the more basic functions.

I am aware that my request is a ‘power user’ feature, but why not incorporate some keyboard shortcuts (accesskey) to make SERP navigation quicker? It is very simple to implement and it adds just a few bytes to the page. Size-wise, it is affordable even if the large majority of users take no advantage of it.

Related items:

• Universal Accelerators
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Navigation

The dashboard (back-end) is the
main enhancement offered by WordPress 2.0

O start off, I would like to spend a couple of paragraphs to accommodate a rant. As I previously mentioned, WordPress 2.0 is intended to be out before Christmas. In reality, there are a few difficulties and many reasons to avoid premature releases. I don’t mean to spoil the enthusiasm. Yet, I truly think it would be a misjudged decision to rush the release. Patience is a true virtue here due to the arguments listed below.

There are several bugs, which are sometimes fatal, e.g. browser crashes. Some time ago I raised the concern that AdBlock for Firefox has conflicts with TinyMCE, which make editing impossible to some. A release before Christmas is desirable (if not both compelling and necessary) because of massive holiday season downloads. However, why give WordPress that dreadful “buggy FOSS” reputation? Needn’t LAMP be respresented with its highest dignity? One must stick to the very same traits which earned version 1.5 nearly 1,000,000 downloads.

WordPress began to be adopted by many large companies. Many such companies run extensive public sites and intranets. Among the big names: Apple, Yahoo, MSN and About. Only yesterday it was revealed that Yahoo would liaise with WordPress for their hosting, which is exciting news indeed.

Why is that particularly exciting news? MSN and Yahoo are search giants, yet their range of applications extends far beyond that as time goes by. They handle the task of information management and thus must (or are expected to) provide rich content. And yet, Google is the largest among the three and much like the others it boasts a huge community of bloggers. Google started with search and moved on to Web-based applications, tools pertaining to information and data mining. Yahoo grew from communities, content, tools, and services. MSN grew from an operating system and a browser that points to MSN by default. All taken into account, WordPress can receive a great deal in return (not monetarily of course).

One wonders: where is Google in all of this WordPress hype? Their official blog is very poor in terms of functionality and presentation. Their main ‘courier’ or ‘messenger’ , Matt Cutts ¹, has been on WordPress for months despite Blogger and Blogspot being available. The Code Manger, Chris DiBona, on the contrary, uses Google’s services rather than his old personal domain. So while Google’s Code Manager, among many others, have settled on Blogspot or Blogger, Matt Cutts refused to do so (or put more politely, preferred to abstain) and registered his own domain (running WordPress of course) where he became a sort of a messager — an oracle — of Google search algorithms. The community that is thirsty for SEO tips syndicates his blog using feeds, of which there are plenty. He is used to writing plenty of items about gadgets, film reviews and the like, but due to the versatility of WordPress feeds, his subscribers are able to set aside the ‘noise’ and get Google inside infomation exclusively. The important fact is that Matt Cutts’ blog is far more popular than these “get your blog among splogs in a 30 seconds procedure” spaces. Google could learn a few things from Matt (Cutts/Mullenweg) and given that they are kings of Open Source, it is surprising that it is them who have not adopted WordPress yet.

¹ Cutts leaks information to SEO-savvy or curious audience of Web developers, much like googleguy in Webmaster World.

F I ever undertake a repetltive task that pertains to research, I wish to either automate it using existing (preferably free) tools, script it (e.g. bash, Perl or MATLAB which is by all means expenesive), or costomise the desktop environment to minimize the number of moves, clicks, etc. Productivity through convenience can be achieved using clipboard stacks, mouse focus policies and so forth.

I find Linux to be a powerful tool in research. Windows, for instance, could not replace the multi-tasking capabiltities and expresiveness of Linux. Macs likewise, although they are most popular among designers, technical designers included. They are not, as far as I can tell, an optimal programming platform considering the price which they sell for. Singularity from Microsoft is intended to address the deficiencies related to Windows in the research sector. It is Singularity, as well as Monad, that ought to endow Microsoft with the platform that suits so-called “power users”. Monad is a command-line tool for Windows, that has been hacked a few months ago and will therefore be excluded from Windows Vista. In the mean time, KDE will remain my favourite desktop environment. Linus Torvalds could give a polite nod.

Desktop environement productivity tools and essays:

• Desktop Mouse Gestures
• Program Invocation Methods
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Previews on Desktop