The Linux Extremist

As I went out for lunch today, I passed someone in the street who looked so much like the famous director Michael Winner that I did a double take. The resemblance was extraordinary. However this guy was firstly, walking, and secondly, carrying his own shopping - not something Michael Winner needs to do.

It is kind a pity that it wasn’t him. He is, after all, the man behind “Death Wish”, the film starring Charles Bronson, who plays a vigilante that wipes out all manner of scum through the course of 5 movies.

It is long past time that Bronson got out the gun oil and pocket cannon and returned to the silver screen. There is a new target for him to take out.

Two days ago, I got a phone call from my bank saying that there were suspicious transactions on my credit card. Apparently someone had been having some fun - spending approximately £500 off of my card. Kudos to the bank, they spotted something unusual - and it was clear that I was the victim of fraud.

I would feel less bad about this if I wasn’t so very careful about identity theft. I go to big lengths to ensure that I take all the necessary precautions. However, a story from today’s paper indicated that even the best of precautions doesn’t always work:

An Indian call centre employee was arrested yesterday for allegedly creaming off £233,000 from British bank accounts.

HSBC bank said yesterday that the fraud had hit 20 account holders in the UK, all of whom had been informed and reimbursed.

	Nadeem Kashmiri escorted by ‘cyber squad’ detectives

The arrest was made after HSBC filed a complaint saying that Nadeem Kashmiri accessed “personal, security and debit card information” while working in the group’s Bangalore call centre and passed them on to associates involved in the fraud.

An HSBC spokesman said that the fraud had been noticed by security systems that had been in place since 2002, when the bank first started call centres in India. “The security record of all of our Indian offices is superb,” he said, adding that the fraud had been found and reported by Indian employees.

However, the union Amicus called for all companies to “rethink their offshoring strategies”.

He looks pretty smug, doesn’t he? Hence the idea of Charles Bronson giving him a good moment of fear before he eats a bullet.

The truth be told, there is really no such thing as total security. There never was, and there never will be. All we can do is make it bloody inconvenient for fraudsters to use our details. It’s so not much eliminating risk as managing it.

It is good that banks are obviously being proactive in trying to detect it - but it’s a never-ending chase to catch up to the fraudsters, who don’t care what a complete pain in the arse they are.

So, Mr. Winner, if you’re reading this - if you want a hit on your hands, perhaps this is an idea for a plot: Death Wish VI: Revenge of the Defrauded.

I’ll be perfectly honest. The PC I presently have at work is driving me mad. It’s not because it’s bad; with Xubuntu it’s running competently. What is making me crazy is the comparison between this machine and what I have at home. With an 8 MB broadband connection, the latest graphics cards and hardware - the difference is noticeable.

My company laptop has somehow disappeared into the netherworld with all the socks that get eaten by dryers. So I’ve had a serious look at how I can turn this old Dell Dimension into something with a bit more oomph.

I have several goals in doing this -

1. To just make it so that I don’t have to hear the damn thing - the hard drive churns, the power supply on this Dell has a low hum which is irritating.

2. To make it faster - at the moment, it’s adequate. But adequate is not “perfect” nor even “good”.

3. To have a long lasting backup - for as and when my laptop does arrive.

4. And also, to do it all cheaply.

Happily the world of 64 bit computing is now cheaper than ever. With parts totaling under £250, it is possible to turn this Dell Dimension XPS T600 into something much more decent.

Let’s review what’s on it at the moment -

1. Pentium III processor - this has to go. One of the blessings of having Xubuntu is that I can use a handy monitor which shows me what resources are being consumed at any given point - CPU, memory or swap - the CPU is the one that regularly maxes out.

2. Nvdia GeForce 4 video card - it’s not bad, but not great. No DVI output if I ever got a decent LCD monitor.

3. 10 GB hard drive. I suspect it’s 4200 RPM. It also sounds like scraping metal. This has to go too.

4. DVD-RW drive. That stays.

5. Soundblaster compatible sound card. Fine.

6. 440 MB of RAM. Adequate - it never maxxed out. However, it won’t be transferrable.

7. Netgear MA311 802.11b PCI wireless network card - the wireless network here is “mixed”, meaning it caters for both 802.11b and 802.11g - for some reason, the 802.11b card works better. It also is automatically detected by Xubuntu. It stays.

So, to get this PC up to speed for under £250, I need the following parts -

1. AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. For an astonishing £64, one gets into the world of 64 bit computing.

2. A Gigabyte GA-K8U motherboard. Gigabyte have been very good about providing motherboards for modern processors that still can use AGP graphics cards, which tend to be bargains. At £32, this is also a cheap motherboard.

3. A 400W power supply - I’m rebuilding a Dell, so there are some gotchas to keep in mind; for one, a Dell PSU won’t work with anything but a Dell motherboard. Furthermore, getting rid of the old PSU at least means I can get one that’s much quieter. A decent one costs around £12.

4. Western Digital Caviar (WD800JB Special Edition) Hard Drive - 80MB, at 7200 RPM, and with an 8MB cache. This should solve the problem of the grinding hard drive. This too is cheap - at £31.

5. Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 DDR Non-Parity CL3 - the motherboard I’ve selected can take 2 GB at 400Mhz or 4 GB at 333 Mhz. I’m going for 1 GB at the higher rate. This should be more than adequate for Xubuntu and leave room for expansion later.

6. Inno NVIDIA GeForce 6200 256 MB graphics card - after much thought and research, I picked this card. As this is a work PC, I’m not going to be playing Doom all day. However, I want sufficient firepower to look at and edit graphics, and also have a DVI connection to an LCD monitor. I want to avoid ATI, because their Linux drivers are proven to be unreliable. This card seems to provide the right balance of qualities required. It also costs only £30.

Should the company pay for it, the project would cost a grand total of £236.03 with delivery costs and taxes. But at the end, we can see the resulting machine, a 64 bit PC with better than adequate graphics and memory, plus one that won’t drive me crazy listening to it all day. In theory, it should be very fast and agile; if the project is allowed to come into fruition, I will report the results here.

Addendum - looks like the case is going to have to go, as Dell is not a standard ATX size.

People wouldn’t generally assume being handy with Linux as having any romantic implications. I too didn’t think so until this past week.

Unlike I lot of Linux geeks, yes, I’m spoken for. My lady has an old Dell Latitude LS. She had spent a fortune on it, loved it, thought it was perfectly sized and elegant. It was with more than a little regret that she had replaced it. Worse, the new one was heavier and she’d been concerned about hurting her back by lugging it around.

However, thanks to Linux, it is very likely I am going to be able to revive her little Latitude. It’s no problem - a wireless card, a new battery, a new adapter and a good shot of Xubuntu, and it will be up and running again. The hope and happiness in her voice was a beautiful thing to hear. It was also the first time I ever found that my technical skills had a romantic edge to them. Usually, technology is something to be squirreled away into corners outside of a relationship. But this proved that anything, even technology, can be romantic given the proper context. Linux for the one you love can be a beautiful thing. I can already picture how happy she’ll be when she has her laptop back, restored, easy to use and out of the clutches of the Redmond Mafia.

So perhaps that’s a tip for other geeks out there who are spoken for, or even ones who aren’t. You can combine your technological life with dating. When your beloved is ready to throw her PC out the window because it’s crashed yet again, smile sweetly and with great tenderness say, “Let me fix that for you.”

One of the hazards of running a website is that you can open yourself up to all sorts of spam. Registering a domain and then pushing a website out onto Google is a god-send to the greedy little trolls who are seeking out any and every e-mail address they can find.

I usually don’t bother to read spam, but just out of curiosity, I looked at one of these messages this morning. It made me think that the Colonel from Monty Python (as played by Graham Chapman) was going to somehow appear and say, “Stop that, stop that, it’s silly”. Note the contents of this particular message -

Even if you have no erectin problems SOFT CIAzLIS would help you to make BETTER SE X MORE OFTEN! and to bring unimagnable plesure to her.

Just disolve half a pil under your tongue and get ready for action in 15 minutes.

The tests showed that the majority of men after taking this medic ation were able to have PERFECT ER ECTI ON during 36 hours!

VISIT US, AND GET OUR SPECIAL 70% DISC OUNT OFER!

=======there’s a fight we’ll be a lot more help there than here.”‘ maybe I’d have a listen. For now, I understood only one thing: he had to The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing normally, but halfway down it was as if something pulled it to the side, and but he didn’t appear to notice. He held his practice sessions directly He nodded at me seriously, as if to say, I won’t chicken out. His nose

stay here and learn on this level - which is quite a bit higher than the “That’s what we in Harmont call the thieves who risk their lives in the

Apart from taking out the link, that’s the complete message. Note how it is swinishly idiotic crap. It’s loaded with bad grammar, poor spelling and the quotation at the end is utterly nonsensical. Yet, each and every day I get between 6 and a dozen messages of this type. From time to time, I also get messages from the widows of African dictators hoping to involve me in money laundering schemes, with the sole intent of laundering my money.

I can delete these messages and laugh a bit at them, though they are a nuisance. There is a serious side to it however - the European Union estimates that in 2002, spam cost businesses approximately 2.25 billion Euros. And of course, one wonders why spam should exist at all as a viable form of advertising - if no one did purchase Cialis this way, or tried to get hold of the bank accounts of Nigerian dictators, the spam would stop.

So who are these idiots? Are they little old grannies and grandfathers who don’t have sufficient net savvy to tell the difference between a fraud and the genuine article? Are they the people who move their lips while reading the Sun? Is it the bastard who cut me off in traffic the other day? Perhaps it is these people, just as much as the spammers themselves who need to be hunted down. They should be put in re-education camps and told the following:

1. Don’t be stupid - it’s never a good idea to buy prescription medication online and without consulting a doctor.

2. Don’t be stupid - no product is going to instantly make you into a millionaire or a sexual bull moose.

3. Don’t be stupid - no one seriously wants to share the looted billions of Nigerian dictators with you.

4. Don’t be stupid - you didn’t win some lottery you never entered.

5. Don’t be stupid - any company that can’t spell its advertising correctly is unlikely to be reputable.

Of course stupidity appears to be increasing at the same time that our knowledge is expanding. We have so much information but so little wisdom and common sense, and it is in the gap between the two that the likes of spammers thrive. One can only hope that this chasm narrows, lest the spamming industry, such as it is, will continue to plague both business and private individuals. And I will want to continue to see both the spammers and those who respond to spam hit with a birch cane repeatedly. Strike that, drop a forest of birch logs on them.

One of the items that has hindered Linux adoption has been the lack of desktop systems that come pre-loaded with it. It’s not always fun, nor easy, to set up Linux - the uninitiated really don’t want to know about ndiswrapper, or troll around message boards to find out about drivers and hardware compatibility.

This is really a pity, because this state of affairs means there are many users who still remain in the dark about Linux’s performance, reliability and stability. If Linux is to conquer the desktop, it is likely that it will need to make some appearance as “just another OS choice” like Windows or Mac OS X. Worse, it means all but the most custom built systems are going to require paying a fee to Microsoft (or Apple) before one can build their Windows system. Still worse, those custom builders seem to be outrageously expensive.

This state of affairs, however, may be about to change. I recently saw a website which gives me hope - System 76 (www.system76.com). They specialise in building laptops and desktops which are bundled with Ubuntu Linux…and nothing else. They have systems which rival both Mac and PC platforms and even ape their appearance; for example, the resemblance of the System 76 Koala system to the Mac Mini is uncanny.

While System 76 is unlikely to be a rival to Dell anytime soon, it is progress. One can only hope that the arrival of Ubuntu - a powerful, reliable desktop OS - will make the likes of Dell sit up and take notice, and perhaps offer greater choice to their customers - namely, let them get out of the Windows rut. But certainly the arrival of Ubuntu Dapper Drake and System 76 is not likely the beginning of the end of Windows dominance - but to quote Winston Churchill, it may be the end of the beginning.

I had been aware of Damn Small Linux for some time, but I never really gave it much thought until yesterday. I am an Ubuntu devotee, and for me, that had been that.

However, I saw the following in the Damn Small Linux store yesterday -

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/Damn_Small_Machine

It’s a Linux equivalent to the Mac Mini. It runs off a USB drive, so there’s no concern about disk speeds. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Linux equivalent to the Mac Mini - except it’s lighter, faster and made of metal rather than plastic. OK, it doesn’t appear to have wireless built in, but it is definitely an achievement for the DSL folks.

It also is a poke in the eye to Microsoft. It’s a hot topic of conversation about how much more power one is going to need to run Vista. This elegant little machine is a riposte - one can have an elegantly functioning computer with less.

If they had a version available in Britain, I’d be definitely considering it.

My father, in his travels, has met Bill Gates. I don’t think I’d be creating a problem for him now (as he recently retired) by saying that he was unimpressed. Apparently Gates was rude, he was distracted, and when he sat, he rocked back and forth in his chair, an action which reminded my Dad of people with dementia.

The only similarity between Gates and my father is that Gates is apparently going to join the ranks of the retired. This is good news. However, we have a pretty unappealing legacy to deal with, namely, the Microsoft business model and continuing dominance.

The Microsoft business model is inherently wrong. It’s akin to Donald Trump’s building strategy and just as flawed: namely, that things simply have to get bigger and more gaudy. Trump wasn’t satisfied with having big and splendid casinos in Atlantic City; he had to build the Taj Mahal. Microsoft isn’t satisfied with building Windows 2000 or Windows XP - they have to build Windows Vista. The only difference is that the Taj Mahal bankrupted Trump; because of the aggressive (abusive?) relationship that Microsoft has with hardware suppliers, they’re likely to get away with it.

But no one is asking the question - do we, the consumers, really need Vista? Recent estimates show that some 16 percent of users are still happily running Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME. In 2005, it was estimated that some 48 percent of businesses were still running Windows 2000. Given this, there is no logical, obvious requirement to upgrade, except due to Microsoft discontinuing support for legacy OSes.

Or rather, there is no obvious logical reason for those who use the OS. For Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Intel and AMD), there is a very logical reason - a new, larger and more resource hungry OS drives a cycle of hardware as well as software replacement, a never-ending money making machine.

The arrival of Linux as a desktop OS shows that there can be an end to this cycle, or at the very least a modification. Firstly, Linux is not like Vista, in that the kernel is separate from the applications - system tools are small and specialised, not bundled into a giant mess like Vista or XP. Thus there are distributions that suit both the most powerful and the most aged machines - yet the distributions for either are not “legacy” or “backwards” variants. Furthermore, being able to add components at will gives the customer choice in what kind of OS they want to have - one that does everything, or one that does a few things. With Vista, as with its predecessors, this level of control is simply not available.

Perhaps Gates, in spite of being obviously not entirely living on the same planet as the rest of us, does understand on some level that the new Linux model is proving more robust than the ever expanding Microsoft OS model. Perhaps this is driving him into retirement. Perhaps with his departure, there will be some serious thought at Microsoft as to how their philosophy and practices need to change; if not, there is likely to be an erosion of the viability of their business model. And perhaps one day, once Linux has gained sufficiently in PR to challenge Windows on the desktop, Microsoft will at long last meet their Taj Mahal.

I remember back in 2004 that I had procured a new PC for one of my staff, and he insisted on putting Linux on his machine. He also insisted that he had to put Opera on as well. For him it was the gold standard of browsers, particularly on Linux.

I have long been acquainted with Opera; in my business, it’s good for auditing any websites you build as it’s the most unforgiving browser. Code errors which IE passes over are picked up in Opera. Thus if you have a site that functions perfectly in Opera, it can be truly said to be a sturdy solution.

That said, Opera’s claim to be the fastest and best appears to have been eclipsed by the coming of Firefox. Opera 9, perhaps, is an effort to reclaim the title. Does it succeed?

I spent a day using it to find out. The answer is simply - it’s great, but not an improvement enough on Firefox to provoke a switch.

This is not to denigrate it - the browser is fast, clean and unlike Firefox, it has an e-mail client built in. Again, it is still the most unforgiving browser and this is helpful for those in the development arena. There are a number of skins (I prefer Freestyle) to make it very attractive. The new widgets feature shows promise; though I must say that the FTP Widget is a dud - it merely prepopulates values for a web based FTP tool.

So in the end, it’s a case of 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Both Firefox and Opera are excellent, outstanding browsers. Firefox may just have the edge on speed, particularly with the tweaks I’ve described in an earlier post. In my case this means I use Firefox as my primary browser but Opera is always on my PC as well.

I recently stopped chatting on a politics website because it was clear that it had become infested with idiots. The worst among them was quite possibly the most stubbornly dumb and patrionising person I’ve ever encountered online. I can’t say that it’s often that murder occurs to me, but it was clear that this person was wasting oxygen by being alive, and would serve a greater purpose as compost.

His particular obsession was Open Source, deriding it as some sort of Communist plot. Perhaps some of you have seen nice little pieces of pop art like this one:

Of course, this is a joke. However the walking, talking rectum to which I refer takes it literally.

I have some bad news for him and for anyone else who believes this. Open Source is good for business, actually.

How so? Well, first and foremost, Open Source reduces the costs of entry into the marketplace. If I want to set up a website selling widgets, I don’t have to pay ridiculous Microsoft license fees in order to build my solution, nor do I require expensive software to develop it in the first place. Similarly, if I am setting up a new business and I need office software for my people, I don’t require signing my soul over to some bank to provide it.

But beyond this, Open Source is encouraging a new model for software development. The term “paradigm shift” gets abused, but in this case it’s absolutely correct. The old paradigm meant that each business had to develop its software suites in entirety - it had to hire all the developers, project managers and QA personnel in order to build and release a solution. For a company whose business isn’t software this seems an extraneous expense. It’s much cheaper to pay for some developers to initiate and guide a project, and then tap into the vast expertise of the open source community to provide additional ideas, skills and testing.

Furthermore, it’s a proven methodology for producing great software. Compare Internet Explorer to Firefox, for example. Compare Ubuntu Linux’s on-time releases to Windows Vista’s tardiness.

This is not some airy fairy concept either - companies such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein have actually taken this route and with great success as an article in CIO Magazine states:

Financial services companies are getting in on the open-source action as well. What began in 1997 as an internal effort to consolidate integration development at international investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) has become Openadaptor, a Java-based open-source integration platform. “The most common thing you have in a bank is communication between systems,” says Steve Howe, DrKW’s vice president and head of open-source initiatives. In the late 1990s, the company set out to create a standardized programming interface that would keep internal developers from having to reinvent basic code for every new project. The code behind the interface was shared with all of the company’s developers, and each was able to make suggestions for—and sometimes even changes to—the source code. The result was a dramatic decrease in development time for connectors.

And:

The system worked so well, in fact, that DrKW hired software development collaboration provider CollabNet, which hosts collaborative development environments for both commercial and open-source projects, to release its connector platform in open source as the organization Openadaptor. DrKW wagered that if other organizations got involved, it would result in further enhancements to the platform. The idea worked. The core software currently sees more than 8,000 downloads a month of the organization’s site. And while no one knows exactly how many corporations are taking part, Howe says that Deutsche Bank, Hallifax Bank of Scotland, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland are all involved.

So far from being some sort of Communist plot, Open Source is a wave of the future. The new paradigm is a shift away from proprietary software to businesses sharing development resource to build solutions - this encourages code re-use and allows for standardisation, improving communication between businesses. The customer benefits because the code less full of errors and institutions have less trouble communicating between each other, furthermore the cost component of what they pay for goods and services is reduced.

Of course none of this will penetrate the thinking of those who are bound to the old paradigm. They’d rather that scaremongering about latent Communism won the day. However, it appears businesses have woken up to the fact that such scaremongering is the marketing tool of the desperate, or in the case of the aforementioned idiot, the asinine.

I have been thinking about my grandfather a lot lately; I thought of him a great deal yesterday, as I was putting the Xubuntu PC together out of spare parts.  He passed away in 1997, but I could almost hear his voice registering approval as I assembled all the spare parts, tested it, made it run.

People come to Linux by various means; some just get tired of Windows and are looking for something different.  Others want what’s best, or hip, or trendy or cool.  My father is a technologist who is in favour of Open Source, and he definitely had an influence.  However it’s my grandfather’s values I feel most strongly as I work on Open Source and write this blog.

My grandfather was an opponent of waste.  He used to pick up old bicycles that had been thrown out; he’d repair them and get them functioning again.  He used to do the same with radios and television sets.  He came from a Scandinavian background, had experienced poverty in the west of Norway, the land of his birth.  He lived through the Great Depression and World War II.  He dug his own garden, he scrimped and saved.  Waste was anathema.

He was left behind by the computer era, but had he been born in a later time, I suggest that he would have opposed Microsoft and all its works.  Waste is inherent in the Microsoft model.  Microsoft are counting on you, the consumer, to ditch your computer every few years and upgrade to something bigger, bulkier and more powerful - but not necessarily better.  Knowing him, he would regard this Xubuntu PC with pride - taking what once was considered waste, and turning it into something useful.

I loved my grandfather.  While he was not a great man by conventional standards, he never was an executive nor did he rise high in any profession, though he was a talented storyteller and musician as well as a tinkerer - he was a great man to me.  He still lives on in the things I do - writing, tinkering, and yes, enjoying old music.  And so I owe much of myself and all to him.  If somehow beyond this world he can read this message, tusen takk, Far.