The Linux Extremist

Today, September 17th, two gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun who was working in a hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. Apparently, she and her bodyguard were shot several times in the back by her assailants, who then ran off.

This follows several days of violent outbursts from the Islamic world to an academic lecture given by the Pope in his native Germany; he was stating that violence and religion should never go hand in hand. In the course of that lecture, he quoted a Byzantine emperor who had some very strong criticisms of Islam because of its adherence to violence.

Let’s re-examine this situation for a moment. The Pope says that violence and religion should never go hand in hand; as part of this lecture, he quotes an emperor who in his critique of Islam, states the same. The reaction of the Islamic world can be largely encapsulated by the statement of Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Mali, a Somali imam, who told his congregation: “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.”

The word “irony” springs to mind. It is obvious to anyone who anyone with reason and logic that the reaction of the Islamic world proved the statement of the Byzantine Emperor correct. The irony deficiency in parts of the Muslim world is staggering.

Let’s spell it out, since they obviously have problems understanding this: if they wanted to prove that Islam is a non-violent religion and thus the Emperor wrong (remember, the Pope’s lecture was not a critique of Islam in particular, he was criticising religions that endorse violence), they should have protested with calm, tranquility, and dignity. Rather, the public is assaulted with images of burning effigies of Pope Benedict, the raised fists, the angry shouts of crowds in Jakarta, Karachi and elsewhere. Islam looks extremely poor in this light; it also makes Islam look like a faith for the thin skinned.

The Pope did try to do a service by raising interfaith discussions to an academic level; he wanted to talk about de-linking violence from religion; he said such a link goes against the “nature of God”. Quite so; the good shepherd seeks to guide his flock away from the wolves. The Islamic world missed an opportunity to prove that the rhetoric about their faith being a “religion of peace” was not so much marketing; rather, this episode has diminished Islam in the eyes of the West. A Sky News poll of the British public on the morning of September 17th asking if the Pope should apologise further had a resounding 91% No result. This is all the more astonishing because the poll was taken before the Pope made his additional apology during his Sunday blessing.

The death of the Italian nun will only add more fuel to the flames. It is one thing to burn an effigy; killing a harmless nun, whose primary concern in life was tending to the ill and injured, is an entirely new category of depravity. Islamic leaders should step up and condemn this brutal act, quickly. So far, however, there has been silence on this subject.

This is a pity, because the Pope’s good intentions and high hopes can only now appear to be misplaced. If we are to achieve his noble aim of delinking religious faith and violence, there has to be an understanding of the rightness of this concept. However, it is quite clear that those who gunned down the nun, burned the effigies and raised their fists in anger do not agree. The sad result is that only more violence is likely to follow.

This has been a fairly humourless week, full of pressure at work and the sombre anniversary of September 11th. On a brighter note, there was a good joke to finish it off from an unexpected source, namely, the British Conservative Party.

Apparently the Conservatives hired a design agency to give them a new logo, the goal of which was to portray growth and renewal, yet reliability. The result of this exercise was a tree. Supposedly it’s an oak tree, but it looks more like a few random brushstrokes. Lord Tebbit, a Conservative peer, said it looked like a sprig of broccoli. To me, it’s hilarious: it’s another example of rebranding gone mad.

Let’s consider the tree as a symbol: perhaps you too have been walking through a park on a summer’s day, with blue skies and soft breezes, and the grass almost glows in the afternoon sunlight. As you stroll along, thinking how lovely England is at this time of year, your eyes happen upon a tree swaying gently in the breeze. Your pleasant reverie is then broken when a mongrel dog belonging to a tattooed gentleman drinking a can of Carling Black Label stops for a moment and marks its territory on its trunk.

I am not alone, to be sure, in making this mental connection. Nor am I alone, I am certain, in thinking this amateur piece of pop culture frou frou more belongs to London sophisticates who appreciate modern art than to the country as a whole.

The whole travesty goes to prove a particular point, which my father taught me long ago. It was a lesson learned from his work: his job involved going to various international organisations, meeting with businessmen, technologists and bankers. Out of this experience, he said, that he had discovered that beyond the wall that separates the powerful and famous from the rest of us, one finds that those on the other side aren’t any smarter than we are. In fact, they’re often more ignorant because they’re removed from what real life is like.

The new Conservative logo is a prime example. Does anyone really think that picking what can generously be described as a “soft focus tree” for a symbol actually means that the Conservatives are more electable? People on the other side of the wall think it does; people on this side believe that it’s much more important to have clear, beneficial policies which help the nation prosper. But then again, those on the other side of the wall think that it was Labour rebranding itself as “New Labour” and adopting a more modern appearance and outlook that won it power; in reality, it was policies that promised not to return us to the days when the unions went on strike every five minutes and left the dead unburied, plus a chance for a change that were the actual reasons why they won the day.

As in politics, the pattern holds true in business and technology. The walls that companies build between themselves and the public blind them from what it is that people actually want and need. A good example is the new Microsoft Zune music player. Because it looks like an iPod, functions like an iPod, Microsoft’s management thinks they’re on to a winner; all they need to do is somehow make it “cooler”. However, Microsoft has missed a trick, as Apple has been thinking beyond the wall and about the future: for example, this week Apple revealed their “iTV” device, which is going to speed up convergence between computer and digital television technology.

Of course, the emergence of Linux and BSD variants is also due to this wall. When one can’t get what they want or need from the marketplace, there is a tendency to go make your own. Many users have done just that.

Still, the wall does serve a purpose; it provides entertainment, certainly. Watching the Conservatives and Microsoft scurry about trying to figure out what it is that we want and being clueless in what they deliver is highly amusing. In the case of Microsoft, it gives something to which aspire against. But it should also be empowering for the individual; it’s clear that politicians are neither smarter nor more logical than the average citizen, perhaps with that being abundantly clear, more “average citizens” will take the plunge into politics and restore representative government.

Furthermore, as it’s clear that Microsoft is not led by great geniuses; perhaps as a result, more developers from atypical backgrounds will want to get involved in Open Source; this is already happening. The author bios for the O’Reilly book, “Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason” indicated this: Dave Rolsky, for example, “has worked as a paperboy, supermarket bagger, temporary secretary, ear-training and music theory teaching assistant, and every so often a computer programmer, specializing in Perl.” And yes, the Perl / Mason combination is an excellent solution.

Perhaps it would seem peculiar to think about the last Pope when one is discussing stupidity and potential responses to it. However, I can’t help but think of Pope John Paul II. He once said, “Stupidity is also a gift from God, but one mustn’t misuse it.” By challenging the foibles of those on the other side of the wall, stupidity is used as an impetus for improvement, whether in politics, technology or society. The presence of leaders in any sphere that are not that smart, should compel us to strive towards greater intelligence. Perhaps that is what the Pope meant; if so, as seems certain, he has been one of the few on the other side of that wall to whom “not that smart” would be an terribly inappropriate description.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of desktop computers in a more wretched state than those I saw this morning. They had been sitting in an unventilated storage unit that had no climate control whatsoever; it’s important to note that this has been one of the hottest summers I can recall as well. My colleague and I bundled them into the back of a Volkswagen Golf for a rather bumpy ride back to the office; at that point, the damage had been done by the conditions, it was difficult to see how it could be much worse.

The machines were all the same model: the Packard Bell iMedia 1307. For those who aren’t familiar with this model, it comes with a Celeron D processor, 256 MB of RAM, SiS graphics, and strangely, these had a 160 GB Hard Drive.

It was going to be something of a miracle if they started up; however they did. Still, the result was not particularly pleasing: the machines come with Windows XP Home as standard. It was clear from the outset, however, that it was not running happily. There was a definite grind and churn. Once booted, Internet Explorer was sluggish.

I would have been tempted to leave it alone; it might have been sufficient to say that these were “functional”, more or less, and let it be. However, these PCs were going to be used in a demonstration to customers. The idea of the customers thinking my company was as sluggish as these machines was as unpleasant as it was untrue.

Among the assets I had was an old Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics card. Fortunately the iMedia 1307 has a spare AGP slot. Also, the case construction makes it inot difficult to open and install additional components. As a test, I installed the card in one of them and then put Ubuntu Dapper Drake in the CD ROM drive. The Live CD worked well: all the hardware worked straight out of the box. I decided to install it, and see if Linux could bring something as wretched as this back to life.

Installation was peculiar; just a note of warning, the CD ROM drive scratched the first Ubuntu CD I put into it. A second CD and attempt resulted in the installer crashing. Another attempt with the same CD worked. After about an hour of installation and then downloading the latest upgrades, the PC was virtually reborn. It booted in approximately half the time that it took to boot Windows XP.

To put icing on the cake, I installed the nvidia-glx drivers; these are obtainable by going into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and searching for “nvidia”. Once installed, it’s worth going into Applications > Accesories > Terminal and typing the following:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

After typing in your password, and Gedit opens, search for the following text - “nv”. You’ll be led to a section where the video driver is named. Replace “nv” with “nvidia”. Save, and then reboot; you’ll know if it was successful if a large Nvidia logo appears for a moment while the computer is booting.

The computer was by now amongst the living; to add some final sparkle to its performance, I put Swiftfox on as its main browser. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s relatively simple; I got the appropriate package from www.getswiftfox.com, and installed it using the GDebi installer that offers itself up as a default option. The only difficult portion was changing all the Firefox links to Swiftfox - this can be done by right clicking on “Applications”, selecting “Edit Menus”, drilling down to the Firefox item, then right click and selecting “Properties” on Firefox. Replace all instances of “Firefox” with “Swiftfox”.

With the added graphics card, Ubuntu and Swiftfox, the iMedia 1307, in spite of being roasted, was turned into something decent; it is definitely not an embarassment. It would indeed be an ideal computer for someone who just wants to do web browsing and basic office tasks. In this case, however, it’s a relief that it merely works well.

I remember with perfect clarity where I was exactly five years ago today. It was a gray day in Welwyn, Hertfordshire; I was working as a project manager for a small consultancy there. This was my first job after returning from a stint in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it had been a comfort to come home.

As I was typing away, a colleague poked his head through the doorway and said to me:

“Hey, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre!”

My initial thought was that it was a terrible accident; it would not have been the first time that a plane went awry and crashed into a New York skyscraper. In 1945, a bomber got lost in some mist and crashed into the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building, unlike the World Trade Centre, was built to last; the incident was rather like a toddler running flat into the Great Wall of China. The bomber crew was killed, there was a small fire, but the tower withstood the impact without much difficulty.

My boss brought me back to the present when he suggested that we all convene in the meeting room to watch the news, since the radio was not particularly forthcoming with information. We went downstairs and switched on the BBC. They were replaying the footage of the first plane striking; the angle of the footage was deceptive, it looked as if a Cessna or other light aircraft had hit the tower.

“Awful.” I said. I thought of my mother, who was in the New York area that day, and I wondered if she was watching this.

Just as I said that, the second plane hit. This made it obvious that it was no accident, rather, it was a co-ordinated attack.

The rest of the day is something of a blur; I was very worried because my mother sometimes went into the City for language lessons. I first spoke to my father, and both he and I tried to reach her; the phones were overloaded and we had no success. Fortunately, she sent us both an e-mail letting us know that she was alive and well.

While that was a relief, work after that point was impossible; I went home and watched the news all through the night as the pieces of the puzzle came together. It was a moment, I believe, when the entire world was dumbfounded, sad, and angry all at once. Estimates of the dead ranged up to 10,000; fortunately, the real total was less than a third of that.

It was immediately obvious that we were at war. Britain was not going to let America go it alone in this struggle, and it was pleasing that the Prime Minister went to the United States as quickly as he could. It became clear, rapidly, who had done this, namely, Al Qaeda, and where they were hiding, Afghanistan. The sounds of war shifting into gear, the rumble of the tank on television, the sonic boom of a fighter jet in the distance, became part of the grim symphony of the days that followed.

I don’t think anyone would argue that going into Afghanistan wasn’t the right thing to do; no one who has any sense of decency whatsoever would say the events of September 11th were justified. My boss at the time said, “Well, America got this for backing Israel. I hope they’ve learned a lesson.” He backed down after I forcefully told him to shove it up his rectal cavity and explained that my mother was in the firing line. I stopped working for him not too long afterwards.

Let me reiterate: there can be no justification for acts of this nature. It does not matter what cause it is. Airliners full of innocent people were taken over by extremist hijackers to turn them into flying bombs; they were intended to kill as many civilians as possible. In the West, whenever we hit civilians in a military strike, we consider it a mistake, express regret, and work ever harder to be more precise in what we hit. Al Qaeda’s targeting of civilians was not incidental, it was on purpose. Nothing could be more diabolical.

The strange thing is, five years after the event, many people have forgotten the initial outrage and indeed, how united the world was by this event. Just as a reminder, the only government which did not express sympathy in some form was Iraq. Because September 11th has gone down the byways of memory, people have lost sight of the brutality of Al Qaeda, and the need to keep pursuing them.

To be fair, much of the singularity of purpose may have been lost by the war in Iraq. This is not to suggest that this is what President Bush or Prime Minister Blair intended; far from it. They saw Saddam Hussein as yet another avatar of brutality and terror in the Middle East; Saddam was also incredibly stupid in not revealing his lack of weapons of mass destruction in a forthright manner. The aftermath has consumed the Western world’s attention span. It has led to a delusion (rather like what my former boss had) that somehow terrorists can be appeased or dissuaded; this mistaken view is comforting because it’s easier than fighting.

However, it’s not true. We have no basis upon which to speak with Al Qaeda, no common ground upon which to meet, no halfway point which we can arrive at. Al Qaeda wishes those of us dead who refuse to live under Islamic hegemony. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter. We are either going to have to destroy them or they will destroy us.

This statement of fact should not be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of the United States. One of the nastier trends to have emerged in the past five years is the rise of Anglophobia in America. This is in spite of the help and support Britain has given from the beginning; Prime Minister Blair told the Americans, “With you at the first, with you to the last”. He meant it, in spite of the heavy cost in both money and blood. However, my experience has indicated that this sacrifice is not appreciated by the Americans; rather, there is a tendency, particularly among conservative Americans, to berate Britain for tolerating Muslims in our midst (though they represent only 1.6 million out of a population of 60 million; also it’s worth noting America has a substantial Muslim population as well) and criticising us for being “weak” and “socialist” whenever the opportunity presents itself. At best, Britain can expect a pat on the head from this segment of American opinion for being a loyal “poodle” of the United States, rather than to be seen as a brother nation, a fighting ally, and a comrade in arms. Obviously, not all Americans feel that way; however those who don’t make no effort to silence those who do. One hopes that Britain’s policy makers are realistic to enough to realise that in essence, we have to join in this struggle with the Americans, but in the end, we matter very little to them. Indeed, we are on our own.

So here we are after five years. Terror still rages, the fires of memory do not burn as brightly as they should, there are even tensions between nations that should be the best of friends, given that their bonds have been reforged by war. In ten years, fifteen, twenty, I wonder what we will have to say. Certainly, the world has not become a happier place in the past five years; it has become more fractious and violent, we are living in a period of war and tension, a time of testing perhaps, which will challenge our resilience as a civilisation. Will the test have been passed in the next five years? Will we move on to the “broad, sunlit uplands” that Churchill spoke of during the Second World War? One can only hope so; for the moment, however, it remains to carry on with life as best as possible, carrying the flame of rememberance, and the grim determination to see the present struggle to a successful end.

It’s very rare that a change on American television news is reported in Britain. However a move by CBS News has been widely noted here; they replaced an old male newsreader with a perky, female one named Katie Couric.

This should mean virtually nothing to viewers in the United Kingdom. To be fair, we do get CBS News’ evening broadcast but anyone who goes to bed at a sensible time would never know it: it runs on Sky News at 12:30 AM.

My girlfriend arrived late this past Friday due to a flight delay, so we had the rare opportunity to watch the programme while we were settling down for the evening. I had to explain to her who the perky American woman was; I also had difficulty communicating that somehow her taking over the role was considered important.

The programme is less than 30 minutes long and in terms of providing “news”, it seems rather poor compared to the channels we get in Britain. The use of emotive terms in items which should have been merely describing facts was notable; furthermore, there was a certain maudlin quality about some of the segments, including the item in which a reporter visited the town where United Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001. If anything, it was a “news digest” with an editorial slant.

So why the fuss? Why has even the ancient and venerable Economist run an item on something of such minor importance? Apparently, it’s because this is the best counterblast the Old Media can summon up against the New Media.

Ms. Couric’s predecessor, Dan Rather, was felled by the New Media. His credibility was destroyed after a blogger noticed that memos that stated that President Bush had not honourably served in the Texas National Guard were fakes; Mr. Rather, however, had assured everyone they were genuine. The management of CBS somehow think that a lot of hype, perky Katie and yes, a bit of work on their website is going to help.

The programme, as previously noted, is something of a flop as a journal of record. The website is a bit better; it’s a standard site, running off of Linux and Apache, and like many news sites, it has videos to accompany its articles. The videos, however, again have the emotive rather than factual slant which appears to be the big problem with the entire news division.

In addition to standard news, there is a blog for Ms. Couric. Presumably this is an attempt to ensure that CBS can fight blog with blog. That said, it’s not always clear if Ms. Couric writes the items or her staff do. Every blog has a “voice”, and her blog appears to be a cacophony. Overall, most of it is fairly bland; what I found amusing were the “Word of the Day” items. I am surprised that she believes people don’t know the meaning of “Nonplussed” and “Ubiquitous”.

Overall, I have to wonder if this is the best that CBS can do. Is this what they were getting the overseas press worked up about? If they really believe that this is going to break ground online and on television, they are sorely mistaken. As television, it has none of the grandeur or eloquence of say, Sir Trevor McDonald. As an online offering, it is not nearly as exciting as what is happening in the world of blogging. Ms. Couric may not be entirely unpleasant on the eyes, but it takes more than perk to gain and retain viewers. At best, I suggest that CBS may have slowed the bleeding, but there’s nothing about Katie that means the bleeding is going to stop.

Yesterday, I was asked by my boss to analyse a new competitor’s website. I tried not to laugh too hard while looking at it.

What was creating my amusement was not the operating system or web server software; they’d gone for a perfectly sensible Linux / Apache combination. I merely found it funny that their site was entirely composed of old-fashioned .cgi scripts. This was Perl programming, circa 1997. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it’s terribly out of date, rather like seeing someone on the street today using a hugely heavy mobile phone from the 1980’s.

This is not a criticism of Perl, mind you. There are many wonderful sites still using it; but most of those had developers with sufficient brains to switch to mod_perl, which offers far better performance, and requires no re-writing of one’s original Perl scripts. Our competitor isn’t that bright, fortunately.

That said, while making out-of-date technology choices for a new venture is definitely bad, maintaining out of date technology for an interim period is a close second.

My company is brighter than our adversary; we fully intend to migrate to PHP / MySQL, which is current, thriving and modern. However at the moment we’re stuck with a great deal of ASP: classic ASP (not ASP.NET) a technology that is reaching its end.

Classic ASP is in steady decline. I can’t think of any major sites that have been launched with it recently; they would look as strange as our competitor using old-fashioned Perl. To me, it’s always been diabolical; to do something as simple as say, turning a bit of text from lower case to upper case, which only requires one command in PHP, requires writing a function in ASP. Furthermore, debugging classic ASP is right up there on my favourite things to do with dentistry and paying taxes. Worse, classic ASP is the home of VBScript; every respectable programmer I know spits on Visual Basic, particularly in its pre .NET form. In their eyes, VBScript opened the door to web programming for people who couldn’t be bothered to learn a proper language.

Truly, being in the classic ASP ghetto is a maddening experience; I know that my developers can do better, they’re certainly talented enough. I also know that if Microsoft pulled the plug on classic ASP support tomorrow, we’ll have a big problem. Lest this seem a dramatic statement, it’s useful to remember that it’s the Microsoft way. For example, they pulled the plug on Visual Foxpro; considering it’s a 32 bit, single threading application, that may not have been a bad idea. Still, it is dislocating; but so long as “progress” is achived in Microsoft’s eyes, they don’t seem to care.

It is true that classic ASP pages are supposed to port into .NET to a point, they do require “minor alterations” to achieve this. “Minor alterations” in my experience means “rewrite and debug”.

There is also a pointlessness inherent in this technology; it’s like continuing to embroider one’s knowledge on how to make buggy whips or perform maintainance on steam powered locomotives. A few people may need to know, or even find it interesting, but the rest of the world has moved on.

As ever, Open Source looks far more intelligent in comparison. Our competitor made an error in not going the mod_perl route, but it’s not a fatal one. Mod_perl’s support for the old and the new means they can utilise its strengths while they learn how to use technology properly. I certainly don’t intend to tell them, however. Hopefully we will have moved on by the time they’ve figured it out. Classic ASP will have reached an end at that point so far as I am concerned; it will be a welcome development when this end is reached for everyone else.

The drama that is British politics today is morbidly absorbing. It’s rather like watching a horror film that’s truly terrible to behold, but one looks through gaps between one’s fingers anyway.

I’m a patriot, I love my country. As much as I despise the Labour Party, I love Britain more; I know that their present round of in-fighting makes the country look weak and has induced a state of undesirable paralysis. If, God forbid, a crisis did come tomorrow, how would we handle it, given such enervated leadership? All they seem able to do is act like a gaggle of spoiled brats fighting over the last buttered crumpet on the plate.

There is a lesson in this episode, however. It shows the dangers when ambition becomes more important than merit, when self interest gets confused with the greater good. Truly, what we are witnessing is the limits of politics, when it tips over the line from being a necessary evil into something destructive.

Politics is not just something that happens far away in Westminster or Washington; in my experience, the machinations within companies can be just as complex and destructive. I work in management; I’ve had many times when I’ve had to pull the knife out of my back. What’s horrible is when it happens out of trying to do good: many times, I’ve had my desire to be helpful confused with a political play, and suffered the consequences for it. It’s given me stress; it’s made me ill. I’ve had periods of the dry heaves or worse and while in the throes of nausea wondered if I should simply return to coding. I’ve wanted to strike the politicians in my company with a large stick and remind them that we either will hang together, or hang separately.

It’s not like being political is the road to success: I’d like someone to point out a company that was both highly political and highly successful. I can’t think of one off of the top of my head. Rather like how politics is presently destroying the Labour Party, far too many people pursuing their own agenda weakens any organisation or business. It prevents rational decision making. It deters progress; certainly, my desire to be bold or innovative has been curtailed in political organisations because it’s simply dangerous. It’s not difficult to imagine that others have been similarly inhibited.

We can see this problem played out on a larger stage with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. I can say with certainty that Gordon Brown should not be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. There are far more thoughtful and qualified individuals (yes, even in the Labour Party) than he. Anecdotal evidence that I have received and read suggests he is quick to take offense and never forgives. In other words, he’s something of a psycho. But better and more stable men than he won’t stand up, even if the country would benefit, because politics strangles their willingness to give it a try.

Perhaps if the fine gentlemen and ladies who lead the nations of the world actually lived up to their rhetoric about caring for the welfare of the nation first, as opposed to nursing their egos, and if the minor politicians in companies throughout the land thought about actually providing excellent service, brilliant products and creative solutions for their customers as opposed to their petty vendettas, we as a nation, and a civilisation, might get somewhere. However, it’s difficult to discern many people having this much perspicacity. It’s too bad, really. There is nothing quite like being in an atmosphere where people do truly work together, and alternatively, nothing quite as bad as living with the regret of missed opportunities.

In case you haven’t heard, Prime Minister Tony Blair has set a timetable for his leaving office. Well, OK, it’s highly unofficial and the Sun newspaper reported it; the full story is likely to be of lesser importance in that publication than the “Phew! Wot A Scorcher!” feature with a buxom model showing her assets in full along with an utterly false “come hither” stare.

All right, perhaps it’s not a certainty. However even if it is just informed conjecture, it is entirely possible that Blair will leave in not too long a timescale. It also appears likely that he is leaving (mostly) of his own accord.

This is proper, just and right. Things pass; fads, fancies, people, empires, all have their heyday and then fade out. In 1997, Blair was “da bomb” in so far as a man who speaks in a series of painful pauses could be. It seems laughable now, but people actually believed him when he said “things can only get better”. Even people like me, who never believed him, temporarily found his presence refreshing because the Tories’ time had come and gone; admittedly, for me, that sensation lasted all of five minutes. Still, all of Europe aspired to imitate him; during his first European Union summit in Holland, he managed to make the other Prime Ministers look like utter twonks by being the only leader that didn’t look thoroughly daft while riding a bicycle.

That golden period of his reign is long gone. There came a point where having a media-savvy Prime Minister turning out soundbytes became staid and dull; the falsehood at the heart of such an approach no longer sold. Blair at least has the dignity and self-awareness to realise that his hour has come and gone, and it is time to find a new role beyond the sunset of his career.

At a certain level, apparently Bill Gates understands the “way of all flesh” too. According to the Economist, he is obsessed with the fate of Digital Equipment Corporation, a giant that was reduced to nothing, and is very concerned that Microsoft doesn’t suffer a similar fate; that apparently was a reason why he appointed Ray Ozzie. A good choice, but probably too late.

Item: consider how Microsoft has been trying to diversify into everything from MP3 players into video games consoles. This is indicative of a company which is trying to find an additional revenue stream on top of a core business which could become dangerously vulnerable.

Item: consider how that core business, operating systems, has reached a point of absurdity. I find new evidence of this every single day. Yesterday, for example, I found out Internet Information Server 6 comes with a feature that limits the size of a download. Some fiddling can make it right, but for those who say, have to import a huge list of addresses for a mass mailing campaign, it is absolutely absurd. Microsoft apparently never thought of this. They also never realised that the cycle of making their operating system ever larger and building in more functionality was going to make it ever more difficult to debug and deploy.

Item: consider how Windows users are being bombarded with viruses and trojans, to the point that “zombie” PCs are a genuine internet menace. Yet we have little visibility on how Vista is going to be less vulnerable to this problem, on the contrary, it may be even worse.

All these factors in isolation would not be fatal; they only become so because Microsoft does not realise that they are problems at the heart of their business model, and they are not willing to face up to the truth. They lack the introspection to realise their hour of total dominance has passed. They want to keep hold of the days when they set the pace of the IT market, and the idea Mac OS challenging them was laughable and Linux on the desktop was the preserve of a few enthusiasts.

If they can embrace the idea that decline is inevitable, they may be able to salvage something. They need to understand that at some point, their stranglehold on the market will dissolve and to plan for it. Digital Equipment Corporation never did such planning; by the time they woke up, it was too late.

Is Ray Ozzie the man to plan for decline? It’s difficult to say as of yet; Microsoft is still far too much Bill Gates’ company to be anything other than full of arrogance and swagger. I have heard he is a thoughtful man; hopefully he has read his history. Speaking as someone who is something of an amateur historian, he seems to be inheriting a decayed throne, rather like the last Emperors of Byzantium, with its greatest days in the past, and the memories of previous glories only preserved in artifacts and rhetoric. The empire in this case could be rejuvenated through modesty and specialisation. If not, it will roll over the horizon of history and eventually, out of relevance.

If this seems a fatalistic point of view, I’d have to say, yes it is. To err is human, and anything built by man if it lasts long enough is bound to screw up to the point of no return. We can rail against it, be like Dylan Thomas and “rage against the dying of the light”, or accept it like Tony Blair; but no matter what, that hour will strike. It will be interesting to see what happens as that time approaches for Microsoft.

For a Linux / BSD devotee like myself, visiting Distrowatch is like being the proverbial kid in a candy store. There are so many variants of Linux to discover and each has its own particular emphasis and individual strengths. One of the more unusual ones I’ve seen is the “Christian” edition of Ubuntu, the latest version of which was released on September 4.

My curiosity got the better of me and I took a look; I had no idea what could make an operating system particularly “Christian”. I found out that it has a top notch Bible study program called “GnomeSword”, a daily Bible verse feature, and extensive parental controls for web content. If I had a child, I would definitely want to install this on their PC; in so far as an operating system can promote good, wholesome family values, or at least drive one’s offspring crazy by limiting their access to Pamela Anderson pictures and thus heartily amusing the parent who installed it, this does it, and apparently does it well.

This is yet another development which indicates the flexibility of Linux; not only can it be adapted for a variety of devices, including mobile phones and games machines, it also can be tailored to suit a variety of interests and causes. Other distributions like Geexbox appeal to those who want to have full multimedia compatibility. Some distributions focus on compatibility with different languages; the Japanese distributions like Vine and Berry Linux are evidence of this. Linux is evolving outward, becoming ever more personalised, and greater choice is becoming increasingly available. Its flexibility is allowing it to be an operating system that is simultaneously for everyone and for a niche.

Strangely, this is something that Linux has in common with the British aerospace industry, circa 1940. There were many wonderful aircraft houses like Supermarine, de Havilland, Hawkers, with so many interesting and specialised designs, like the Spitfire, the Mosquito and the Hurricane, and yet many of these airplanes were powered by Rolls Royce Merlin engines. One “engine” (”kernel” if you will) was adapted to various roles and it worked surprisingly well.

In contrast, Microsoft is rather like Ford Motor Cars circa 1920. They would say of the Model T car, their first big hit, “You can have it any colour you like, so long as it’s black”; this worked fine up until General Motors offered customers a variety of colours. Microsoft has problems with diversity: Vista appears to come in flavours ranging from vanilla to vanilla. Their “distributions” would never have anything as exotic as, for example, a Christian edition. Rather, the basis of choice seems to how much one is lulled by marketing: if you’re skeptical, you can pay $199 for Vista Home Basic, or if you buy the sales message completely, you can pay $399 for the Ultimate edition. Truly, Vista’s six editions seem paltry compared to variety afforded by Distrowatch’s top 100 distributions of Linux and BSD.

Microsoft has only reinforced this “confined” impression with minor, silly mistakes. One of the more ridiculous items making its way around the web recently states that one cannot alter the Vista opening theme music; it can neither be changed nor muted. The explanation for this, according to Microsoft’s Steve Ball, is that this one opening theme is “a short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react.”

Somehow I think even inexperienced users don’t need an audio cue to know that their computer is conscious. Here’s a hint for those who dont: if you can’t do anything, it’s not. If the screen is black, press the Power button. If you are unable absorb these instructions, don’t bother to use a computer in the first place.

I digress. It is clear that the lack of choice on Vista sound and the development of Christian Ubuntu show the two ways in which the future of computing could evolve; one emphasises being confined within the straightjacket of a particular proprietor, the other emphasises the glory of choice. Yes, choice can be confusing, even maddening; however, at least it allows one to march to the beat of their own drummer, or indeed, dance to their own tune.

My recent work with Microsoft based solutions has been both painful and unpleasant; trying to get e-commerce software that wasn’t stable working with Windows 2000 and Internet Information Server 5.0 to work with Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6, was a process fraught with worry.

Fortunately, however, the transition went off without a hitch. The performance of the system did improve with the addition of new hardware. While throwing iron at a problem is generally not the best nor recommended answer, it is a more coherent answer than Microsoft often provides.

Debugging Microsoft errors has led me to a number of items which indicate that their software contains a soup of patches for symptoms of problems rather than actually dealing with the problems themselves. It’s rather like taking a cough syrup while one has the flu; the germs remain, but the cough becomes more manageable. The server is ill, but its sputtering is subdued.

While I was dealing with IIS 5, I was concerned that system resources were being used efficiently; I was particularly troubled by IIS 5’s memory allocation to dll files, which could be a cause of crashes. Rather than have a patch solving this particular problem, Microsoft created a tool to deal with the symptons, the IIS 5.0 Process Recycling Tool. The tool, according to Microsoft:

“…runs as a service on a computer running Windows 2000 and Internet Information Server 5.0. The purpose of IIS5Recycle is to recycle processes, minimizing the effects of resource-consumption problems before performance and reliability are affected. This tool automatically recycles IIS processes based on configurations stored in the Windows registry. “

Let’s examine this statement in more detail; IIS 5.0 apparently is lacking in an important aspect: it cannot prevent resource consumption problems. This tool is provided to mask this issue, standing in place of an actual fix.

One might expect an upgrade would solve this particular problem. However, in this instance, the developers have continued with this masking in IIS 6, albeit in a more effective guise. This is evident in Microsoft’s explanation on how “Worker Process Recycling” functions:

“In an overlapped recycle scenario, the process that is targeted for a recycle continues to process requests while the WWW service simultaneously creates a replacement worker process. The new worker process is started before the old worker process stops, and requests are then directed to the new process. This design prevents service interruptions, because the old process remains in communication with HTTP.sys to handle requests until it shuts down. Because the shutdown timeout value of an overlapped shutdown or startup is configurable, the worker process can be terminated while it is still serving requests, if it does not finish draining requests within the time limit.”

Did you get that? This “feature” is to hide the fact that a crash has occured. Rather than again, deal with the problem of resource allocation at source, Microsoft has opted to hide the symptoms of the crash.

Using Microsoft makes me feel like I’m a stage illusionist; I am expected to provide the image of stability, using slight of hand and more powerful hardware. Yes, there remains a debugging process whereby we can attempt to find if any of our code is creating the resource problems. However, it may very well be that the problems lie within the framework itself, outside of our reach and impervious to a genuine resolution.

All this reminds me of a former boss who used to rant on about getting “quick wins”. The philosophy of emphasising “quick wins” led to results which dealt with symptoms rather than providing an actual cure; the eventual result of so much patching was an unstable solution that needed to be rebuilt from top to bottom. “Quick wins” have a very bad habit of coming back to haunt the person who requested them; I’ve always had a preference for genuine solutions. With Microsoft, I’m just not getting them.

This past week, Windows Vista was made available for pre-order on Amazon.com. While Microsoft has been saying that they’re producing a “high quality” product, the lessons provided by Internet Information Server should make one pause: how much of what Vista contains is more of this masking rather than actually dealing with problems in the software? How often is the phrase “quick wins” being thrown at the Vista development team? Without visibility on this, it is impossible to feel comfortable with the arrival of this new Windows, which is good, because this can only help Linux.