So with the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, bloggers out on the net are both decrying the readiness of Linux for the desktop, and trying to figure out what’s left to inhibit it from accessing the mainstream user.

Ok lets be honest, Ubuntu is not mass market ready, but then again, there’s no such thing as a mass market ready computer.  Try to make something idiot proof and the world will build a better idiot.  Everyone who’s ever worked around computers knows the horror stories so I won’t go into it.  But how does Linux compare to commercial OS’s like Windows and OSX?  Well, it probably would work just fine, and in fact I know it does (I have my grandparents on Ubuntu), for quite a significant portion of users.

So users can use it, and its simple-ish, why wouldn’t we want it to go to mass market?  One reason, big business.  Up until this point, Linux has been a hobbyist OS, supported by some badass companies like Google, IBM, and Red Hat.  We don’t really have a mass influx of bad companies into the Linux market.

Look at this very seriously.  The Windows market is LOADED with shit software that every M$ bred moron thinks he can scribble out a .Net yet, or worse yet, C++, application in and make some money.  The Mac market is much better but they’re next for an influx of shit software.  Here in the Linux world, we enjoy relative comfort in that, while we call everything shit software, it is, on some level, good software because even though the methodology of programming may be one you disagree with, it tends to be founded on some level.

Now, Linux does dominate in the realm of the interwebs as far as servers go, and by that stance there is shit software for it in that arena, but fortunately it doesn’t usually make it that far (Rails is an exception, but Rails can be good, it just largely isn’t because they people who program on it are Jerry’s that though Python and PHP were too hard).

But lets take this realistically.  If companies started developing en masse for Linux, you’d have this big corporation come along with some damn product, and all of a sudden they decide for whatever dumb reason that they don’t like how something in a library works (say, glibc), so they fork it.  Now, you’re probably saying “isn’t this the point of open source?” and yes, it is, but this isn’t the problem, this NEXT aspect is the problem.  Say that program was a HUGE program, something tons of people used.  Like AOL for instance of yesteryear.  Well what if all the distro guys swapped over to this version of glibc that may end up having huge fucking issues with every little thing on the planet, which they then rush to fix with duct tape and superglue, until its a hotch potch of shit software left and right.

Then you can’t do ANY friggin thing in the Unix philosophy anymore, you have win32.  Not like you can really have 2 versions of glibc either (you technically can, but to me it’d seem like way more of a headache than it was worth)

Well that was just one company.  If Linux went mass market, you can imagine that big business would get in and do the library branching, interject their unwanted opinions into a large amount of projects, start buying out projects and draining them down with crap code, forking development, and all of a sudden you have the world’s biggest clusterfuck on your hands.

And then on top of it, you have shit software abounding.  Everything does everything, but nothing well.  Now it becomes an even bigger chore to find a package that actually friggin works.

I work as a Windows programmer as my day job, and I know what some of these software vendors do and it amazes me to no end, one that they did it and two that it even friggin works.  Knowing all of this, the moment the mass market starts creeping into Linux like it does in the Windows and Mac world, I’ll end up switching to a better OS which embraces its hobbyist roots, maybe FreeBSD or Plan9.  Sure they don’t have the most features, but they accomplish their damn goal and damn well, and don’t worry about become accepted on the mass market.

I’m a physics student in college and I also work as a programmer for the Department of Environmental Quality here in Oklahoma, so believe me when I say, I’m inundated in an atmosphere of real scientists, but it never ceases to amaze me how, when observing society, how many people claim to be on the side of science, or use the term “logical” when the person has absolutely no place using the term.  I’m sorry but anyone who has a degree in Philosophy or Humanities should be barred from using the term all together.  I’ve found the vast majority of them to have a highly subjective definition for “logic”

I guess part of it descends from the attitude of some people to define a term however they damn well please.  Sorry guys, if you can’t prove it, its not real.  Despite the fact that English is an atrocious language (especially our Americanized version of it), words do have definitions and meanings and changing them just gives anyone with better things to do that think up new definitions to words all day a major headache.

Read more

Is Microsoft on the ropes right now?  It certainly seems so with the high levels of attacks they’ve been levying on the Linux and Mac market (even though M$ does own most of Mac, I’d call their attacks on Apple merely a charade for the public).

It may seem like they’re clearly trying to take the lead, but everyone in psychology is familiar with the defence mechanism, which alludes to the possibility that Microsoft is about to have a corporate-equivalent of a stroke.

And honestly, if I were Microsoft I’d be sweating it too.  Its getting to the point where Ubuntu Linux is matching OSX in the eye candy factor (though I’d argue its been vastly superior for years now, especially since XGL and Beryl came onto the scene), its much faster than 7 or XP, in many arenas, much more secure than Vista or OSX (“Vista SP2 most secure OS”…yeah…right, apparently they’ve never encountered OpenBSD or the grsecurity Linux kernel, even the NSA likes Linux), and invariably cheaper (who wants to spend money on an OS AND have to pay for support when they can have a free OS that works most of the time and you only have to pay for support when/if you need it, but even then, there’s plenty of documentation around the web about how to do things, so you really don’t even have to pay for support, though the same could be said about Windows, but sometimes there’s that one situation no one has ever tried before).

So it could be very good news for us Linux fans.  With Google’s Chrome OS coming up (albeit its not truly Linux, it does at the very least include the Linux kernel), OSX on the rise, and Windows 7 on shaky grounds (with the MS Word injunction, and all of the anti-trust litigation surmounting M$ right now); it could very well be the start of the decline of Microsoft’s empire.

You know what they say, everything with a beginning, must have an end.

Read more

This message was originally sent to the Daily Oklahoman as a letter to the editor but I decided to post it here too.

Note: This letter was written to Oklahoman schools but its easily applicable to quite a few colleges, check your institution’s policies and such, they may be hard to find. Also, this document, like all content originating from me on this site, is Creative Commons, By Attribution licensed, feel free to use it in your efforts

Edit: Sent list:

• Sent to Gina Wekke, Director of OSRHE Campus Compact who’s duty is “articulating the importance of civic responsibility as an outcome of higher education.”
• Sent to Robert Lindley, Executive Directory of Community Outreach at UCO, on OSRHE Economic Development board
• Sent to Debbie Terlip, OSRHE Student Relations Liason — Response: “This is an institutional issue and the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education have no jurisdiction or ability to resolve it.”

Update: The Daily Oklahoman has expressed interest in this letter and would like to do an article on it, w00t!

————————–Begin Message———————————-
Dear Oklahoma Colleges,

I’m writing on a seemingly small, but in actuality a large, concern of mine regarding the conduct of local colleges in regards to intellectual property.

The issue starts at my own alma mater, where I am a computer science major, after trying to petition the school to simply sign a form stating they had no intention to sue a non-profit organisation under which I was working on a well known open source compiler in my own spare time. The institution not only put up a strong resistance to simply verifying that they would not claim ownership of code I own and have the right to do with what I will, but also informed me that in working in the project, if I wrote code for the project and used it as classwork this would qualify as plagiarism. Further, the very concept of me having any ownership of school work, such as my graduate thesis, was simply preposterous.

Now these concepts seemed to strike me as absurd. First, why would an institution put up such resistance to simply signing a 1-page waiver acknowledging that they would follow their own policy and allow me to retain ownership of code written on my own time? Are they wanting to reserve the right to change their minds if one of their students comes up with the next big thing?

Second, how is reusing one’s own work in multiple places plagiarism? Did I not do the work myself and adequately met the requirements of the assignment? I’m not sure where these institutions get off, but it would seem infinitely more logical to not reinvent the wheel. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be held responsible to learn important concepts, but if I’ve already done the assignment once, it seems counter-productive to do it again. It seems to me again that the institution wants to reserve themselves the right to claim ownership of code.

Third, I’m not sure where these institutions get the concept that my own ownership of my hard, uncompensated, work is not my own. I hate to inform these institutions but if I’m going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an education ultimately to be compensated with a simple piece of paper, I find it only logical that I also retain ownership of works I create myself without significant support of the institution (any and all knowledge is paid for by my tuition and the government, as is the case in public institutions).

My ideology of backlashing against these concepts may seem absurd to some, but its really not. The above ideals are those practised by top engineering institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and others. If one reads into the history of Silicon Valley, they’ll find out that two important components for its success are both research into practical arenas (originally electronic warfare), and University support of students. The second is a little vague, but Silicon Valley institutions participate with students turning entrepreneurs in arenas such as licensing of intellectual property, better policy on collaboration and ownership of university collaborative projects, and allowing professors to consult for these new institutions.

Now forgive my prudence, but as far as I’m concerned, universities first concern should be to educate their students and promote innovation, but it seems as if a large majority of institutions have a adopted a corporate-like policy of furthering profits. While profit for institutions is by no means a bad thing, doing so in an ineffective manner that compromises the degree of education given to the students is inherently bad.

I think that universities locally have a superb opportunity to improve the economy of our state and locality, and further greatly progress technology, and create a new stream of businesses in our area. Is it a coincidence that some of the best places for technology based startups are Silicon Valley, CA, Cambridge, MA, and even Austin, X when these locales are located right over top of some of this country’s top engineering institutions? Doubtfully.

I love Oklahoma and especially living here and its honestly a shame that I may have to move away to not only get a competitive education but also move into an institution that has policies meant to encourage innovation. Until then, I hate to inform my alma mater that I won’t be doing anything spectacular that could make them any money, because of the level in which I disagree with their policies.

When you’re talking engineering colleges, names like MIT and Stanford pop up.  When you think of technology you really think about Silicon Valley in the Bay Area of California.  You may even think about Cambridge, MA (its a little less known but still important startup bed).

Well, considering the prestige of those colleges is it any wonder that all the industry sticks around?  But honestly, is it really the academics themselves that are creating those entrepreneurs?  The video bellow has an interesting thought…

What’s the interesting thought?  Not that these colleges have good academics (for there are quite a few colleges with just as good if not better academics), but rather that they work with their students after graduating, not finding jobs, but creating them.  The universities encourage their students to start their own companies and work with their students in licensing of intellectual property, and encourage their professors to consult for the new companies being created by students.

Honestly, when you look at it, that’s quite brilliant, and it seems to work.

That’s scores different from how my college is (they claim ownership of all of my classwork with no ability for me to license it back, and the very thought of me F/OSS’ing my graduate thesis is obscene).  I guess we know who’s method works better….

Ok here’s the scoop.  I’m starting work on a Linux distro meant to be run as a live OS with persistent changes on a USB flash drive.  The distro is targeted at Computer Science students so they can take the distro with them.  I’m debating building it as a desktop OS as well to be used as a primary distro.

The basic jist is that the distro is meant to be run on lab computers in CS departments and allow access to university resources.  These include things like Windows/CIFS shares, Zephyr/XMPP, and things like that.

Here are some of my current ideas

• Window Managers

e17

Great window manager, just currently unstable

KDE

Already built into the package manager I’m thinking of using, seems to be a dev favorite

GNOME

Stable and simple

• Programming Software

  • emacs/vim (both graphical and console versions)
  • Various programming language integration versions for above editors
  • GNU Compiler Collection (the whole thing, C, ADA, Java, etc)
  • Java JDK (depending on redistribution licensing but it shouldn’t be a problem)
  • Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs with various plugins
  • gdb/DDD
  • dtrace (depending on usability)
  • Various other compilers like GHC and SBCL
  • Developer tools for AIs and such (CommonLisp and PROLOG stuff)

• Usability Software

  • OpenOffice 3.1
  • Compression software (tar, unrar, 7zip, etc)
  • OpenSSH (obviously)
  • Firefox
  • Rhythmbox

• Math Software

  • Maxima
  • IT++
  • GNU libmatheval
  • Octave

• Documentation

  • Free Documentation and tutorials for programming languages and theory
  • Software to cache web pages locally so they can be pulled up without an internet connection

• Security Software

grsecurity/PAX

Help mitigate attacks against the system and also has the added benefit of forcing the CS Student to code properly and prevents them from doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing

SELinux

Again, helps mitigate attacks and prevents the user from doing things with code that he shouldn’t be doing

ClamAV/chkrootkit/rkhunter

Just in case

• Package Managers

Nix

I have a preference for Nix because its purely functional (id est, non-destructive) which will help mitigate issues with dependency hell, and also allow easy rollback to previously working software if testing new versions. My issue is that because its purely functional, it’ll use up a lot of drive space. Flash drives should be large enough where this isn’t an issue, but there would probably be the need for a cleanup script that’ll clean out older versions

Pacman

This one is good because its on a rolling release system and has lots of packages (pacman is Arch Linux’s package manager), it just doesn’t offer the flexibility of Nix

APT

There’s always Debian’s package manager. It could prove to be difficult, however, to run this on a rolling release system because of how its designed. Preferably stay away from this package manager and other staged release package managers

If you like where this is headed, you can help out or you can at least give me some ideas for the OS.  Included software, underlying systems, stuff like that.  Obviously I’d like to use as much F/OSS code as humanly possible.  I’m not opposed to stepping outside of the bounds of F/OSS, but due to licensing regarding redistribution, I figure it’ll be a heck of a lot less of a headache.

Excerpt from a Slashdot convo over at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/11/007216

Exactly why is F/OSS better?

It’s subject to peer review. Some of the best programmers in the world have access to, and readily submit, code for F/OSS projects (not to say that EVERY F/OSS project is superior mind you).

Look at why hackers use it. Aside from their ability to heavily modify their system, they’re also extremely paranoid. I know plenty of hackers that contribute code and readily fix problems in F/OSS code because of their own paranoia.

Look at why the DoD and NSA use it. Its laid out like an OS should. ACLs, chrooting, SELinux, all of these help make it much easier to protect their own systems.

Want a really good blast at Microsoft? OpenBSD, its been around since 1994, there have only ever been 2 exploits off of the default config, and one of them was for a legacy version. Heck OpenBSD + pf is what the Defcon guys use.

And quite damn honestly, code that’s open source has met the firing squad. Hackers CAN see the code and compile it themselves, making it EASIER to find exploits, but yet Linux is regarded as far more secure just makes me think about how secure Linux REALLY is in comparison to NT. If you could place the NT Source code in the hands of someone competent I’m sure it would be hell for M$ (just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse than MS08-067).

So there are plenty of operating systems out there and more are gaining ground.  OSX and Linux are really starting to punch holes in Microsoft’s to-date stranglehold on the consumer/business desktop OS market, but these OS’s are not without their own problems.

First OSX.  Lets step through my issues with OSX step by step.  First is that OSX is based on BSD-UNIX (and the Mach kernel), namely FreeBSD, a operating system family emphasizing F/OSS, and while this in and of itself is not a problem, what Apple did with it, is.  OSX was turned spawned out of not only BSD-UNIX but also numerous other F/OSS projects that then formed a good portion of the basis for OSX.  Apple then essentially threw a pretty GUI on it, and made it so it will only run on their proprietary hardware.  I know there are other aspects of OSX, but I cannot get past this part because it totally circumvents the entire F/OSS model and philosophy.  Second, Apple’s OSX is horribly insecure.  Yeah, few virus’s exist for OSX but that’s because it’s more obscure than anything else.  Heck Vista was called more secure than OSX and you may be asking why this is.  Well, a lot of the open source codebase that comprises OSX hasn’t been updated in huge amounts of time.  Furthermore, OSX doesn’t do any modern sort of heap/stack/library protection or randomization.  It inherits a lot of UNIX’s security, but its legacy security.  It really needs to be brought up to date.  Finally, my last problem with OSX, is that Apple doesn’t contribute any F/OSS back to the F/OSS community.  I would be a hell of a lot less critical of Apple Computer if they simply contributed back to the F/OSS community.  It could be anything really, from simple tools to make life easier on UNIX, to open-sourcing their filesystem, to even making OSX/UNIX application interop easier, but none of this has ever come to fruition.  Plus, it seems like in general, Apple users have something crammed up where the sun doesn’t shine about F/OSS (example).  This isn’t always the case but seriously, loop-holing around BSD style licenses is one thing, but flat out ignoring the GPL is just not cool.

Read more

[rather scathing rant]

So I just got back from a Cyber Security Club meeting at my school.  I decided to sign up and attend a meeting, expecting maybe 10-15 really nerdy people like myself that live, sleep, eat, and breathe computers, or at least a healthy population of people who know about computers.

I can say I was severely disappointed.

I went in and there were probably 60 people in the club, I can point out maybe 10-15 of which qualified under my expected population.  The rest of the group were people that I’m familiar with the type.

I must give an example.  This woman WAS here this evening too mind you.  This woman was in the Cyber Security Program and was in a Java class I took last semester.  Java…as in the programming language that’s excellent for programmers but a hit to take for non-programmers.  There were no prerequisites for this course.

So this woman is in a full blown programming course and we’re maybe 2-3 weeks into the class (maybe it was prior but I think it was like 2-3 weeks in) and she turns and ASKS THE PROFESSOR HOW TO SAVE A FILE!!!!!

IS THIS THE KIND OF PERSON THAT’S GOING TO BE RESPONSIBLY FOR NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY?!?

And worse yet, aside from the 10-15 people that I pointed out, the rest qualify either under the same classification as this woman or just the hyper students that aren’t really into computers but are just there to play video games.

Ok so maybe they want a job change.  Frankly I think if you haven’t had anything to do with computers up until this point that you shouldn’t be going for issues of national security, but maybe I’m missing something.  I’ll give them at least the benefit of the doubt.

So they were also electing club officers and one of them noted how he was in the club last year and they talked about cyber security but they never actually did any of this (he wanted to setup a lab, which I agree with), but really, is the cyber security club just a couple of talks and a lot of people playing video games?

I came to the club because the description was (and I quote):

Inspires learning of all things technological through trial and error, reverse engineering and professionals within the field.

And none of this was even apparent that they did any of this.

Maybe I’m missing some huge fact but really…..this is absurd.

[/rather scathing rant]

Heading back to college tomorrow.  Updates will be a little more sparse for a time but will pick back up again soon.

I’m currently working on a few projects, including Arduino stuff.  I’ll keep you all posted for further information