Beagle-geeks Rejoice!

If you don’t follow Nat Friedman’s blog, maybe you missed the screenshots of the new Beagle interface concepts that came out of a hackfest.

(Yes, I blog-poach for all my relevant and interesting stuff.)

Stretch Armstrong FAQ

Q: No, it’s not related to anything relevant, but… isn’t it time for a special “Lance” edition of a re-introduced retro toy Stretch Armstrong?

A: Yes. It’s time.

My Latest openSUSE Contribution

Somehow I got it in my head that I want my home machine to be a host to multiple virtual machines from now on. A machine for Windows. A machine for Novell Linux Desktop. A machine for my wife. You get the idea.

And I decided to host it all on a SUSE Linux 10.0 system. Of course, SL10.0 has not been released yet, so there will be some adjusting to do.

Since XEN is not quite ready for Windows yet, I decided to implement VMware Workstation. But on new kernel versions, VMware can be a real challenge to get going. You have to assimilate a lot of stuff to get there.

So, the result is a new page on opensuse.org. It’s my first non-marketing contribution to the openSUSE project. But now, after too much monitor-staring over the weekend, it’s time to go out and play.

Technorati openSUSE links

Blog-Comment-Spam

Finally having had enough of spam for porn and auto-loans in this blog’s comments, I enabled the word verification feature.

Subsequently a recent post of mine garnered a different kind of spam comment than I am used to. So, I Googled some text from the comment, and whaddaya know. I’m not so special afterall! The dude is spamming bloggers by the dozen.

Not that I think that this guy actually reads the blogs he spams, but if he ever were to read this entry: my blog is not high class. In fact, to me “high class” is a completely prententious term used by the completely classless.

Furthermore I would want him to know that it’s totally disingenuous to appeal to people’s ego in order to get them to populate his quaint little blog directory project. Cheap memetic tricks are the hallmark of spammers. ¡Que barfadero!

SUSE Linux 10.0 offer on shopNovell

This is kind of cool. For those people who like having the official box and media rather than doing the free download thing, Novell is taking pre-orders for SUSE Linux 10 and discounting the shipping.

Reader insight on my openSUSE positioning suggestions

I received the following in a reader comment to my post about openSUSE positioning.

most usable” - in what terms? in whose terms?
i am not just throwing stones. i am just not sure that SuSE useability is number one. there are easier to use distros out there.
do you mean most application support? redhat might even shade that.
so good intentions are good intentions but that useable claim strikes me as questionable.
if it becomes truly useable we will see more PC deployments, no?
or did you mean server?
hmmm… lots of questions, it seems
–jamds governor*

No worries about throwing stones. I did not take it that way. (Although I am a bit bent that you identified a piece of puffery that I totally overlooked.) “Most usable” is certainly a high-level goal of the openSUSE project. But you appropriately identify that it’s an unclear statement, and a claim that is very debatable as it reads right now. Once I looked at that part of the text, I have to admit that it’s so obvious that I’m embarrassed to have overlooked it.

I’ll discuss this with Greg.

*”jamds governor” is also known as James Governor, who is an analyst at Red Monk.

Technorati openSUSE links

openSUSE: My openSUSE desktop

I recently updated to beta 3 of SUSE Linux 10.0 (the artist formerly known as “SUSE LINUX Professional”).

So far, I’m loving what this version is becoming. It’s already looking very sleek, and is performing very well for me.

Yes, I am using KDE. Having spent over a year using GNOME–that’s since I switched over to Linux as my primary OS–I decided that it was time to build proficiency in “the other side” before it starts to seem too much like “the other side.”

There are some things I like about KDE better than GNOME. (GNOME is still too familiar to me to grant KDE any stake to the “overall superiority” claim just yet.) I think that its mostly the polish it has. It feels more like it’s its own operating system, with its own personality. By comparison, I had often felt that Linux (GNOME) has too generic of an interface–too bland of a personality. KDE is somehow warmer. But maybe it’s just that “exporing a new desktop interface” feeling. (If this initial impression incites lecturing comments, or worse gets used by someone to bolster an argument on KDE’s superiority, then you may have overestimated my longterm allegiance to this initial, whimsical impression. That sentence was meant to be read as quickly as possible. Always the overzealous wordsmith…)

I have my three main Novell applications working well. That would be GroupWise, GroupWise Messenger (still via gaim–Kopete pending time coincididing with remembering), and the iFolder 2 client. I would prefer to be on iFolder 3, but I have been dreading the 4GB re-synch of my folder up to the new iFolder 3 server.

openSUSE comes loaded with OpenOffice.org 2, and Novell is still standardized on v1.4.x. My other laptop–because one of the ways I stay in touch with my technical roots is by still needing to have more than one laptop–has Novell Linux Desktop on it, and hence OO.o v1.4 on it. I have been exchanging documents back and forth through the iFolder, and OpenOffice 2 has been really good with the backward compatability. (Not perfect, mind you. There was an Impress document that had some weirdly embedded charts from Calc in it, and hoo! was that ever a mess.) But overall, I can’t wait until Novell standardizes on the 2.x version. It’s a really solid revision up from 1.x.

Finally, the chameleon in my wallpaper is from a picture I took while in Madagascar. (Some may ask: “Why Madagascar?” To them I say: “To see things like this chameleon!” Those people typically give me funny looks.) Unfortunately, it was probably a set up. Later the same day I saw many of these poor buggers invariably stuck at the end of a short stick, the other end of which was in the hands of a 6-year-old boy. This one was not in quite so direct a danger. It was on a small island to which my wife and I went as part of a day tour, an island that had a colony of Flying Foxes living on it. I later figured out that this poor chameleon had probably been sequestered from his nearby native habitat to this little island to be a tourist curiousity after having been bought from one of those six year old kids. The humanity! And the herpetology.

Technorati openSUSE links

Barcelona Bound

I arrive tonight, and I’ll be in Barcelona this coming week for Novell BrainShare. I hope to say “hi” to many of the regular attendees. Come up and hello me in the lab. I’m also doing a few sessions that my name does not appear on…
IO132, with the great Guy Lunardi
BUS131, with Aaron Weber (of former Ximian fame)
TUT223, with the Evil ZENworks Scientist, Martin Buckley

Ah! The practical side of Firefox extensions

(Yes, my comments on this are maybe a year late…)

Although the Pornzilla extensions were brought together on a single page to optimize the browsing of pornography, they’re actually handy for a lot of other browsing. Pornzilla pulls together some of the best FF extensions available and puts them a convenient list. But, perhaps some people will be scared off by the page’s association to pornography.

It’s curious, because so much good innovation–from the initial adoption of VCR (subsequently, the DVD) to the first profitable online Internet businesses–has been driven or promoted by the pornography industry. I recall JustOn, a very cool web file sharing startup in silicon valley that my company acquired. Some called them “JustPorn” because of the main content that much of the startup’s initial userbase shared.

Sex is forfront interest for us humans, yet we still have so many complicated taboos. For example, SpreadFirefox has a whole page discussing Pornzilla, but they do not host the Pornzilla page on their own site. In fact, using search on the main Firefox site, you won’t even get a single result with “pornzilla.” I very much understand why they don’t host the page. Further, I think they’re wise not to–just look at the comments on the SpreadFirefox page.

While pornography drives a lot of cool tech innovation and adoption there’s still so much stigma that most companies see it best to avoid. Still, you can’t deny the technology advancements that the industry has produced.

–Rev

P.S. On a related note, HBO recently had an enlightening documentary on the industry. It challenges its audience to look at the pornography industry differently.
P.P.S. There are staggering statistics about the economy and history of the modern pornography industry in the U.S. in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness.
P.P.P.S. I am in no way advocating nor speaking against pornography in this post. I am merely exploring a point of interest about the schism between social taboos and technology advances, and how even one of the most successful open source projects to date is affected. (See, even I feel like blogging about this requires a disclaimer!)

Dork Sighting at Great Wall of China

[I drafted this on 8/19, and apparently never hit "publish post." This one has photos, so if you're using an aggregator of some sort, you may want to view the orgination site for full effect.]

The Novell Asia Pacific management team held a wildly successful three day partner summit here in Beijing. On day three, we took the delegates to the Great Wall of China for some team building activities.

Still without my luggage, I was in a nice new linen shirt I had purchased, and some shorts I had borrowed from my friend Justin Taylor (Novell’s Chief Strategist for Identity Management). But I the only shoes I had were the ones from the plane flight…they’re nice! Pegabo, from Italy. But, damn, I looked the dork tourist in them with shorts on the wall.

Adding injury to insult, Justin, wheezing from the climb up the wall, hugged me like a silverback, his shirt sweat-soaked shirt leaving his territorial mark.

US state plans to abandon Microsoft Office

For those who think that the OSS revolution will be driven by Desktop (or any platform role) may find this interesting.

Make no mistake: Microsoft’s primary product (and entire strategy) is Office. They use it to drive Windows, Exchange, and the rest of their software stack. OpenOffice.org has a way to go before many power users will feel like it’s truly “good enough.” But news stories like this one herald a day when Microsoft Office’s dominance will no longer be granted straight out of hand.