Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

INUX is spreading exponentially, or is at least nearing that pace. But how does the expansion work or what is it based upon?

One person learns Linux, thereby acquiring experience and knowledge (not necessarily expertise). It is a self-taught approach which involves a valuable learning curve. In turn, parents the friends, among other parties, get exposed and that ‘Linux knowledge’ is passed on. Colleagues form a more positive mental image — that which breaks preconceptions as to what Linux looks like (no bug-riddled applications and command-line stereotypes). That impression is then passed on, it propagates.

Knowledge is power. The ability to support the operating system of peers makes Linux adoption like an avalanche going down the hill. Knowledge and familiarity only needs that flame that lights it up and starts the domino effect. Linux will spread like fire as soon as it gains steady inertia. It is only a question of momentum and we are on the cusp of significant changes.

PAM is everywhere. It comes in different flavours and the way to chew it varies as well. This essay is not about meaty cuisine, but rather about the plague of the electronic age. Anywhere one has an opportunity to gain, spam will prevail. Several days ago, the MATLAB Web site got flooded by endless spam and many innocent contributers got false E-mail notifications, me included.

Spam should not be attributed to and associated with just E-mail. An initiative by AOL at al. to eradicate spam through taxation has most recently been criticised harshly. Genuine mailers begin to suffer financially, to make matters worse than the need to purge spam. This morning it took me approximately half an hour only to purge spam. As for the impact spam has on my life, I continue to tolerate spam through:

• E-mail
• Forum subscriptions with site addresses
• Forum messages
• Guestbook entries
• WordPress comments
• WordPress trackbacks
• PHP-Nuke links
• PHP-Nuke news submission
• Wiki
• Referrer spam
• Zombie attacks

I have set up cleanup/purging cycles in my schedule, with frequency dependent on severity. The chores at hand are still a very time-consuming activity and it gets worse by the day. I recently had a fierce argument over someone who used to comment spam. This involved someone who was possibly in cahoot with the spammer. Some spammers deserve a death penalty. If not practised law, then at least as an effective deterrent. Related item: WordPress Comment Spam Prevention

EVR the past few years I have grown closer to my older sister. We have always gotten along just fine. She is a wonderful person, yet sometimes ideaology gets in the way. Allow me to elaborate if I may.

We are both computer scientists, but she insists on using Windows. She has never tried anything else and her job involved programming for that platform. This observation was the next worse thing to me realising that had gone to interviews at Microsoft. She did that once several years back and once again more recently. If she worked for the ‘dark forces’, that could possibly lead to tension between us. I sure hope that the prospective employer and recruiters ‘Googled’ (or MSN’d) her name to discover she comes from a ‘wrong neighbourhood’. Her brother is a stubborn Linux advocate, though it may be irrelevant altogether.

Bottom-right, from left to right: Me, my father and my sister in our younger days (click for full-sized version but beware: 1.3 MB JPEG)

OMPARING computers a human:

SuSE is rather hard to get, but others say she likes everyone and is rather easy.

Interpretation: SuSE (Linux distribution, can be pronounced “Suzie”) is rather hard to get (5 ISO‘s to burn), but others say she likes everyone (hardware) and is rather easy (to use).

Related item: Linux Chauvinism

HERE is a certain stigma or two among Web designers. Blaming of Web design be attributed to miscomprehension of design principles. Take for example some astigmatic accessibility issues, among other key factors such as browser ‘racism’. These mistakes illusrate clumsiness in Web design and infuriate minorities, which comprise equally-important Net citizens.

Pedagogues in the field of design are either unaware of accessibility matters, or they cannot be bothered with them. In due time, they recommend Flash, user-agent (Web browser/reader) sniffing and the like — all of which are bad practices for the large majority of sites, if not all. It is dishonourable to many users who must suffer due to such cretins, owing to laziness in learning and implementation.

Then comes the issue of content, which can assume user proficiency at times and thus leaves many surfers baffled. The author must escort the less technically-inclined hand-in-hand. For example, one should always abstain from equivocal text that does not attempt to clarify the main points made. In my sites, I tried to incorporate a full ‘acronym striping’ facility, using style sheets. Those of us to whom English is not the mother’s tongue should hopefully be able to digest the key points.

In summary, there seems to be dissociation and estrangement when it comes to the small majority of visitors or customers, i.e. there is no desire to give contentment to all. This is one of the biggest crimes committed in Web development, authoring and design, more so in cases where the site gives exclusive information, e.g. where it serves as a gatway to governmental agencies.

EOPLE’S opinions and favourite choices are respresentative of their individuality. Mocking these things is like mocking the person. In practice, admitting that you detest a particular film or song would upset anyone who likes it, not only those involved in the production. To expand on this point, merely anything we choose is a representation of our choice and judgement, so it can be a person’s default search engines or primary operating system.

One way to be liked by others is to praise everything they like and stay quiet otherwise. Either like everything, remain impartial and rave about nothing that gets you hyped up. An outspoken character has very few merits, but we sometimes need to unburden ourselves and be critical.

Wallpaper from Houghi (click image above
to enlarge; non-lossy PNG version)

With Novell’s release of XGL and Red Hat’s answer to all that eye candy, one begins to wonder if flame wars could awake over X — an Open Source graphics and interaction component.

An advantage to free software is that it is an environment where competition can thrive, choice is always available and different solutions exist for the same problem. However, it’s also fair to say that free software is disadvantaged where competition breeds, choices are forced on unsuspecting users and diverse technologies fight each other.

Related item: Next Generation of X