The Irish Penguin

The announcement that many people wanted to hear is imminent. Early rumours abound on various sites but possibly by the time you are reading this, Dell will have already made the official announcement that they are to ship Dell PC’s with the Linux operating system - Ubuntu. This is the major breakthrough that Linux as a desktop OS has been waiting for. Now all Linux communities -be it Open Source, Free Software, Linux for home or business that is your cup of tea - must help Dell sell this dream.

The most obvious way to help is for bloggers or people with websites to display a prominent ad for Dell Linux boxes. Let’s show Dell that by listening and embracing the Linux community that we can help them out. Each and everyone can be a partner to Dell and it is in everyone’s interest that Linux market share grows. A bigger pie means that more hardware vendors will support Linux and having the Open Source desktop OS in the limelight will mean more development work for Open Source programmers. For consumers, it brings choice like they’ve never had before - the modern day Linux OS thoroughly outshines it competitors. I do not make this comment lightly. But this week I got my first glimpse at the 3D accelerated desktop for Linux - it is incredible! It leaves Vista for dead. And comparing the two side-by-side there is only one winner.

So let’s help Dell sell Linux. I’m going to be emailing them after the official announcement to get my Dell Linux ad. Never has marketing been such a pleasure! And never has the Linux Desktop looked so good!

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_Community_Must_Help_Dell_Sell_Linux ]

We’ve tried to start this before and never quite finished it. You can check out the site at www.frogface.org. This time things went smoothly, however I had to struggle through my hangover on Saturday while I polished off the final details. A big kudos to Veedles who did a smashing job creating the images and logo for the site - and now that she is the queen of web design is gonna spruce the site up even more over the coming weeks!

The Frogface project is an effort to create a user friendly scuba dive logging application which runs on any computer. It’s still not ready for everyday use so us developers will have to keep beavering away for a while. Things are going well recently as I escaped my horribly busy work schedule in order to get phase 1 of the project done. Ganesh is working on getting the menu’s together over the coming weeks and I’m gonna try and get my head around beautifying the user interface and making it look real pretty. As they say, “There’s more than one way to skin an app!”

Here’s a superb 12 minute animation which features crisp industrial post-modern backdrops puncuated by expressively crafted chararcters; all done in Blender - an open source 3D modelling on the verge of the big time. It’s a hefty download so you’ll want a broadband connection, but it’s worth the wait. Just sit back and simply enjoy these wonderful graphics by visiting the download section at http://orange.blender.org

This is just a quick post covering a sound problem I encountered when running OpenSuse 10.2 with Nvidia nForce 430 and Asus M2NPV-VM. The solution that worked for me is to open the /etc/modprobe.conf.local file and make sure it includes the ‘options line below

#
# please add local extensions to this file
#

options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack

This did the job nicely. I found the solution here, which has a lot more detail.

Here’s a quick survey which you can fill in to help the OpenUsability project, which studies how you use a computer. The less you know the better as this study is especially interested in getting a broad cross section of the public to respond. It only takes a few minutes so why not give it a quick go!

http://test.openusability.org/UCCASS/survey.php?sid=43

Gary McKinnon is a computer programmer who likes UFOs and rainy Sundays. Curiousity got the better of him so he went searching online for UFO conspiracy theorys and photos believing that the evidence to date suggests that US was hiding something Roswell style et al. Not exactly a profile of a notorious threat to national US security yet. His curiosity brought him to various US military networks which he then found were remarkably easy to access given that apparently the username and password were the same in several cases and security was incredibly lax. He managed to find some folders containing pictures of nice shiny UFO-like things and got excited as his dream of seeing became a reality. Heart pumping he clicking on one of the files. As them image began to slowly come up on his screen his dream was cut short - one of the administrators had noticed him in the system and promptly cut him out…

Needless to say, the US authorities were pretty pissed about the whole episode. The UFO equivalent of a trainspotter had managed to waltz around their systems like a kid in a candy store because aledgedly their administrators couldn’t do their job properly. You would think that given the background to the case Gary would have been handed down a punishment apportionate to the crime - after all no one got hurt, no one was killed or maimed in the incident. It is alledged that some damage was done but Gary maintains that such allegations are false and in an article on .NET magazine outlines how the figures don’t add up. Given the facts of the case to date and what Gary’s motivations, it is unlikely that someone who wants to keep a low profile in a system to look around for information is going to go deleting files for the sake of damaging a system.

So instead being given a big slap on the wrists, some UK jail time or 400 hours community service cleaning viruses of peoples computers Gary is being threatened with - get this - extradition to the US, a 45 year prison sentence to be served on US soil only and, worst of all, a possible handover to the US military trails. This latter point wouldn’t be good, not only against the backdrop of Guantanamo bay and big orange jump suits, but because of ‘alledged threats by the US authorities in New Jersey to see Gary “fry”, which could be a reference to the electric chair’. ‘Currently, the US civil legal authorities are not calling for the death penalty (which would stop the extradition to the USA under United Kingdom and European Union law), but such a penalty is possible if the case gets hijacked by a US Military Tribunal, once Gary is physically in the power of the US authorities.’ [http://freegary.org.uk/]

So our UFO trainspotter is in a bit of bother. It’s sad then to hear yesterday that John Reid, UK home secretary, has given the green light to ship Gary McKinnon off to the US. He’s already lost his job, girlfriend and has been in poor health in recent hearings as the stress of the case takes it’s toll. He has never denied his actions and has taken responsibility for what he has done. He has already suffered enough. Will it really do any more good for the US to show how big and mighty it is by beating the soul out of this guy in order to show who’s boss. It might be better to spend that energy on employing a few new system administrators who know how to put passwords on a system instead.

This opinion piece was based in part on the following BBC News item.

At last the fight against anti-consumer record labels crippling music purchased online is looking to be at an end. EMI have decided to make their songs sold on iTunes free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) - a technology which prevented users playing back their music on any device of their choice. This is probably one of the most important changes that could have happened in the delivery of online music and is set to transform the industry and reduce piracy. As EMI boss Eric Nicoli said,

“We have to trust our consumers. We have always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and convenient.”

The new tracks will cost about 30 cent more per track. But the advantages of this greatly outweigh the cost increase and the tracks will also be of higher quality. In addition, customers who have already bought tracks will be given the option to pay the difference in price to make their entire existing collection DRM free.

The move is set to put pressure on other labels to stop restricting consumers’ freedom to choose how to enjoy the music they’ve purchased. A victory for choice, economics and anti-piracy in the music industry. This post is based on a news item on the BBC at the following link. So read more of the good news there. Here’s to EMI taking a leading role in the music industry and setting the ball roling on the most important music issue today!

A big congratulations goes to Sun Microsystems, who have finally open sourced Java - under the GPL, if you don’t mind. This is the move that will finally stop me criticising them so I’ll shut up now. In addition, they’ve very kindly given me permission to use their Joint Copyright Agreement for my Frogface project (just thought I’d plug that one again!) which is ticking along nicely on www.sourceforge.net/projects/frogface

Man of the moment is Ganesh, who’s managed to submit the first non-me patch to the Frogface codebase and, along with all the other Frogface developers, has demonstrated great patience as the project gets up on its feet!

Finally, a big shout goes out to Vee who’s working her little socks off studying at the moment. All she’s missing is the hang’n'cheese sandwiches to complete the student lifestyle - mainly cause she doesn’t have the time to make them!!!

You would think that if you or your friends lined Apple Computer’s coffers buy purchasing a load of Apple gift cards off them that the least they could do is let you easily trade in those gift cards for a purchase. Well, maybe not. Here’s another story that shows how customer friendly the big Apple is.

Which is pretty much about as friendly as I’ve ever found Apple’s customer service. Here’s the skinny on TheConsumerist.com.