The Linux Extremist

It is a beautiful morning in West Sussex. The torrid summer, at long last, appears to be fading, and the sunshine is pleasant rather than oppressive. I got up, looked out over my garden, I heard the birds singing. I got myself a coffee, and then sat at my PC. I typed in a post about my adventures with BSD. Then I switched on the news.

On the news was John Reid, the Home Secretary; he announced a plot had been foiled.  Its intent, he said was “to bring down a number of aircraft through mid-flight explosions causing a considerable loss of life”.

My intial reaction is not repeatable in polite company. My girlfriend travels by air all the time, so it’s not like I’m removed from this. I imagine her reaction is going to be just as livid when she finds out she can’t take hand luggage on the plane any longer, thanks to the terrorists.

That, however, is a minor consideration. Let’s review what the terrorists had in mind, which is very similar to what they did on 9/11. In the name of “Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate”, they intended to seize planes full of innocent men, women and children and kill them all. Unable to strike against military or political targets directly, they intend to make civilians feel unsafe in the hopes they can scare us into submission. Obviously the terrorists didn’t read about what happened when Adolf Hitler tried to bomb London in order to achieve the same aim. Here’s a clue for any terrorists reading: it failed.

What’s inexplicable is that the terrorists should be able to look at Lebanon and see the same thing; Israel hitting Beirut has fuelled defiance, not destroyed it. In Israel’s case, defiance doesn’t matter as they are going after military targets, namely Hezbollah’s infrastructure. In the terrorists’ case, as the aim is destroy our will to fight, they are pursuing means which are counterproductive to their ends. They would be better off trying to create a dance craze which causes hip injuries.

Really, the terrorists are unenlightened, uneducated jerks. Sun Tsu advised in the Art of War to “know thy enemy”; they don’t. Sun Tsu also advised, “know thyself”. I wonder if they have sufficient brain cells to remember their postal codes let alone know who they really are. People who embrace extreme ideologies tend to be those who have a weak hold on their own identity and need to find purpose and meaning in their lives by being told what to do by others.

Given this, I doubt reasoning with these people would achieve anything. So I have a suggestion: unleash Jack Bauer.

All right, I’m speaking as a “24″ junkie; I am operating under the assumption that there is a real life equivalent. However, I do admire the way that Jack Bauer deals with terrorists: I’ve seen him shoot one in the knee, break another’s fingers and use electrical shocks. I’ve seen him shoot terrorists and grab them by the wound to make them talk; this was particularly enjoyable when he did it in Season 2 to a “little rich girl” who was “playing terrorist”. The fictional organisation to which Jack belongs, the Counter Terrorist Unit, also has a specialist in causing pain to suspects.

In the West, we are rightly reticent about using torture; we regard that as the hallmark of barbaric regimes. However it’s clear that the terrorists simply do not have the same scruples that we do; it would seem they regard our reticence as a form of weakness. For example, the terrorists should be just as aggrieved by the treatment of the Muslim minority in China. The difference is, the terrorists know that the Chinese will use Jack Bauer-esque methods or worse to get them to talk, and kill them quietly as a punishment.

Our political leaders could change tactics; they could enable MI5 and the FBI to start doing things the Jack way. I doubt there would be little opposition among the general public. I suspect that they don’t do so because of fear of some very vocal special interest groups. Ironically, it is many of these special interest groups that would be most adversely affected if the terrorists did achieve their aim of global hegemony.

Meanwhile, we should compliment the police and security services in Britain for a job well done in foiling today’s plot. One can only hope that they have the tools, in the absence of a Bauer-esque mandate, to prevent further incidents. Perhaps this latest incident will serve as a reminder that this mandate would be useful.

As many people may be experiencing the same plethora of ads for online pharmacies, it’s important to review the side effects of the drugs on offer.

Viagra - known side effects include headache, flushing, dyspepsia, nasal congestion, urinary tract infection, abnormal vision, diarrhea, dizziness and rash.

Less common effects on other bodily systems are as follows -

Cardiovascular: angina pectoris, AV block, migraine, syncope, tachycardia, palpitation, hypotension, postural hypotension, myocardial ischemia, cerebral thrombosis, cardiac arrest, heart failure, abnormal electrocardiogram, cardiomyopathy.

Digestive: vomiting, glossitis, colitis, dysphagia, gastritis, gastroenteritis, esophagitis, stomatitis, dry mouth, liver function tests abnormal, rectal hemorrhage, gingivitis.

Hemic and Lymphatic: anemia and leukopenia.

Metabolic and Nutritional: thirst, edema, gout, unstable diabetes, hyperglycemia, peripheral edema, hyperuricemia, hypoglycemic reaction, hypernatremia.

Musculoskeletal: arthritis, arthrosis, myalgia, tendon rupture, tenosynovitis, bone pain, myasthenia, synovitis.

Nervous: ataxia, hypertonia, neuralgia, neuropathy, paresthesia, tremor, vertigo, depression, insomnia, somnolence, abnormal dreams, reflexes decreased, hypesthesia.

Respiratory: asthma, dyspnea, laryngitis, pharyngitis, sinusitis, bronchitis, sputum increased, cough increased.

Skin and Appendages: urticaria, herpes simplex, pruritus, sweating, skin ulcer, contact dermatitis, exfoliative dermatitis.

Special Senses: mydriasis, conjunctivitis, photophobia, tinnitus, eye pain, deafness, ear pain, eye hemorrhage, cataract, dry eyes.

Urogenital: cystitis, nocturia, urinary frequency, breast enlargement, urinary incontinence, abnormal ejaculation, genital edema and anorgasmia.

Cialis - known side effects include headache, dyspepsia, back pain, myalgia, nasal congestion and pain in limbs.

Less common effects on other bodily systems are as follows -

Body as a whole: asthenia, face edema, fatigue, pain

Cardiovascular: angina pectoris, chest pain, hypotension, hypertension, myocardial infarction, postural hypotension, palpitations, syncope, tachycardia

Digestive: abnormal liver function tests, diarrhea, dry mouth, dysphagia, esophagitis, gastroesophageal reflux, gastritis, GGTP increased, loose stools, nausea, upper abdominal pain, vomiting

Musculoskeletal: arthralgia, neck pain

Nervous: dizziness, hypesthesia, insomnia, paresthesia, somnolence, vertigo

Respiratory: dyspnea, epistaxis, pharyngitis

Skin and Appendages: pruritus, rash, sweating

Ophthalmologic: blurred vision, changes in color vision, conjunctivitis (including conjunctival hyperemia), eye pain, lacrimation increase, swelling of eyelids

Urogenital: erection increased, spontaneous penile erection

Wellbutrin - common side effects: Feeling Restless / Anxious, Dry Mouth, Incomplete or Infrequent Bowel Movements, Dizziness, Abnormal Trouble Sleeping, Excessive Sweating, Involuntary Quivering, Loss of Appetite, Weight Loss, Feel Like Throwing Up, Throwing Up, Stomach Cramps

Infrequent side effects: Ringing in the Ears, Itching, Hives, Rash, Severe Headache

Rare side effects: Hepatitis caused by Drugs, Cannot Focus Thoughts, Hallucination, Feeling Faint. Seizures. Chest Pain, Abnormal Liver Function Tests, Confused, Delusions, Paranoia, Having Thoughts of Suicide, Blurred Vision, Throat Irritation, “Change of Life” Signs, Muscle Pain, Drowsiness, Fever. Taste Problems, Temporary Redness of Face and Neck, Heart Throbbing or Pounding, Diarrhea, Frequent Urination, Nervous, Feeling Weak, False Sense of Well-Being

In short, despite what idiot spammers tell you - don’t buy your drugs online, and for goodness sake, before buying any drugs, consult your doctor.

Like many people using ADSL, I decided to be cheap and not fork over extra money for a fixed IP address. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. I recently had difficulties because of what the previous owner of my IP address had done with it, though probably not intentionally. I found that my IP address was on a black list at Spamhaus, the organisation that keeps track of addresses which push out unwanted e-mails.

It’s not at all surprising that I would get an IP address of this kind. In June 2006, Microsoft found that some 5.7 million PCs were infected with malicious software which had turned the computers into “zombies”; i.e., the PCs were under the control of the hacker who had infected them. The zombies were then used to initiate sending spam or denial of service attacks.

The idea of a group of hackers being able to reach out and control my PC is not a pretty one. It was bad enough when they could make it impossible to work; in the autumn of 2003, my company was infected with a virus that would automatically shut down a PC as soon as it booted up. It was spread through networks and not everyone had the sense to yank out their Ethernet cable in time. It was only through the efforts of a QA person who was studying to be a support technician in his spare time that we got up and running again in only a few hours.

Adware provides an additional annex to the chamber of horrors; when I had a Windows PC, I used to somewhat amuse myself by using Spybot Search and Destroy and seeing what my PC had become infected with next. Fortunately, I never used it for anything serious, like putting in personal details; I had it just to play Rome: Total War until the pain of Windows outweighed the advantage of the game.

Zombies, viruses, adware, spyware: a Windows PC is not one’s own. The strange thing is not that Microsoft refuses to learn from their mistakes; given their history, this is not unexpected. What is strange is how many people simply put up with it. In 2004, the market research group IDC estimated that Windows share of desktop PCs would fall by 2007, but that fall was only to 94%. So what is perpetuating this ‘Net of the Living Dead?

Part of is undeniably Microsoft’s aggressive strategy in dealing with hardware vendors and the fact that people aren’t necessarily looking for an alternative when they should be. However, part of the blame lies at Linux’s doorstep; its strengths, being Open Source, translates into a weakness, namely, there is no marketing department with the same muscle as Microsoft to get the word out. Linux advocacy has a role to play in this; it requires that users who have benefitted from the Linux Revolution ensure that its message spreads to those who are unaware of it. If you see someone ditching a spare PC, show them how Linux can revive it. If someone has had a computer that has become hopelessly infected with viruses, show them the superior performance and security of the Linux way. There is an element of self interest in doing so; so long as we are encumbered with the ‘Net filled with zombies oozing their own brand of pestilence and gore: overstuffed inboxes, awful denial of service attacks and also crowded out bandwidth will be a plague. If the Linux Revolution succeeds, this may enter into the realms of the past; and then maybe, I can send my e-mail without anyone thinking I’m advertising Viagra.

There’s a fine line between heroism and madness; sometimes, one can get a glimpse of that line being crossed. On Sunday, I saw a Sky News reporter in Northern Israel standing on a ridge outside of a town, wearing a flak jacket and informing the audience that Hezbollah rockets were still raining upon her area. The report was interrupted by the sounds of loud Hebrew radio chatter; apparently a police vehicle had pulled up just outside of shot and was telling her that it wasn’t safe and that she ought to get out of there. Undaunted, she carried on and the police drove off.

Speaking as a normal, safety-conscious human being, the police warning would have made me take shelter. However the journalist seemed to believe that because she was reporting on a situation, that she was standing outside of it and couldn’t be harmed by it. This is not an uncommon assumption; journalists often appear to think they are on the outside edge of human experience, not affected by change, and living in an isolated pocket of their own.

This perception also applies to the recent changes in technology. Yes, journalists are aware of blogging and citizen reporting, yet they somehow retain the belief that it is an animal that can be tamed, controlled, utilised, so that they can maintain their present position. This is simply not the case; blogging is going to continue its onward march, and if journalists don’t adapt to the changing times, they are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

Journalism, particularly on television, is nice work if you can get it. A good example is the programme “Fox and Friends”, which is broadcast in the morning in the United States and in the early afternoon in Europe via satellite. I’ve only watched it a few times, but it appears to involve a group of 3 people sitting around and laughing at each other’s jokes for 3 hours. Yes, they may have to get up early in order to be on the air at 6 AM, but the rest of the day can be spent fishing, sleeping or watching Muppet porn (though one shudders at the idea of journalists spending their time watching Kermit and Miss Piggy bumping ugly). Journalists get to invent panics (for example, a recent Daily Express headline predicted that the UK’s August was going to be hotter than July; this has not happened), attend big fancy dinners with politicians and if they snap pictures, kill members of the Royal Family with immunity. If they run out of ideas, they can merely reproduce ones from Reuters and Agence France Presse; seeing the sheer number of times a Reuters article is reproduced is instructive in this regard.

Bloggers, on the other hand, mostly hold other jobs; we’re reporting what we see around us. We do not get paid, and we certainly do not get sufficient free time to go angling for carp. We don’t have expense accounts, we don’t have Reuters or AFP, and we certainly don’t sit outside of a situation; we are part of it and the reporting that stems from bloggers is the view from within, which often times is better than the view from without. A good example would be the present crisis in the Middle East: which is more reliable in conveying the emotions and experience of the people on the ground, bloggers who actually live in the affected areas, or the young lady who obviously believed the thickness of her skull would afford protection from a Katyusha rocket?

Furthermore, the aura of journalistic infalliability has been severely punctured as of late; their sources are not better than ours. The Memogate affair, in which Dan Rather of CBS was shown by bloggers to have relied on forged memos in order to attack President Bush, indicates that fact checking at major news organisations is simply not as tight as it should be. It also indicates that bloggers are making sure the “official” journalists are staying on the straight and narrow.

Sky News has obviously been unnerved by this; a recent advertisement of theirs indicated that they were going to be “relaying the experiences of people on the ground”, namely, they were going to start relying on bloggers. The Guardian has made similar moves and the Telegraph has blogs for their journalists. The air is slowly being let out of the journalists’ bubble, perhaps, or they may be attempting to ride the animal rather than realise they are going to have to be subdued by it. I suggest the latter. If so, it may very well be that in the future our news will be from aggregators of blogs, and the broadcasts of bloggers; the likes of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite will be a distant memory, consigned to the same ash heap upon which also lay the horse and carriage, vacuum tubes and pet rocks, items whose abandonment was considered an undeniable symbol of progress.

One of my pet peeves at the moment is the proliferation of home equity loan commercials on the backwaters of British television. These commercials try to make it seem that the way out of debt is to get more debt. The most annoying out of these ads is the one for a loan company called Picture, which tries to make the whole process of getting hopelessly in hock seem a jolly affair. The jolly silly bugger in the ad talks on the phone to the jolly silly bugger at Picture while his jolly silly wife films the entire conversation, which is just as much about football as it is about getting a loan. The fellow casually borrows £25,000 without skipping a beat, and supposedly they’re all going to live happily ever after thanks to putting their home at risk. The whole thing looks like it’s “loans for idiots”; given the rise of personal insolvencies in the United Kingdom, companies like Picture appear to be in an idiotic market.

Still, catering to stupid people has generally been big business. P.T. Barnum reportedly said “There’s a sucker born every minute”, and proved it with little schemes like posting a sign saying “This way to see the Egress” with an arrow in order to relieve congestion at his shows. Many people did not realise “Egress” means “Exit”.

Microsoft apparently also believes the future belongs to morons. Users of their products are consistently pelted by incredibly annoying messages apparently intended to lessen the effect of their lack of cerebral capacity. Does there breathe a user so base that he or she did not want to kill Clippy, that annoying little “help” animation embedded into Microsoft Office? Microsoft’s messaging overkill also occurs when installing their products; they keep on telling the user about all the wonderful features they provide. Now, it’s one thing to use sales and marketing messages when trying to get the user to buy a product, it’s quite another to keep up with the messages after the user is putting it on the machine. In my case, these messages imbued a deep desire in me to throw rocks at the PC I was working on; I found myself shouting, “I’m installing it already, stop telling how bloody wonderful it’s supposed to be!” Much of my anger stemmed from knowing they were lying; of course one could ask why Microsoft feels it necessary to reassure the user after they’ve bought the product. Are they trying to minimise regret in advance?

Of course making products for dolts leads to products which only dolts could appreciate. In Microsoft’s quest for glory and profit, they tried to create an operating system which caters to every need and desire of the user. They reckoned that it’s good business to be making every last decision for their customers, and they would be thanked for unbundling any “unnecessary” software selections. This hit a snag, as bunging everything into the operating system has made it more buggy and vulnerable. The user profile, in light of these issues, has to be upgraded to something more intelligent in order to maintain their Windows PC; they are obliged to deal with virus scanning, setting up software firewalls and using spyware removal tools. In response, Microsoft is now providing these tools now to their users, however, the additional complexity is still something the user needs to be aware of in order to sustain their PC. This is not some idle speculation; I have dealt with users who had no technical skill at all, and found their PC had become overloaded with spyware to the point where it was non-functional. I had to teach users of this kind how to deal with it; invariably there was a sigh, likely in response to the added complications that operating their computer had just acquired.

This is one of the reasons why an intelligent user must love Linux; it is for grown ups. The operating system doesn’t pester you with messages; it’s rather like being given the car keys by your father for the first time and being told, “Take her out for a spin.” Where you go, what you do, is up to you. Linux assumes that I am going to take the time to study my computer and gain a basic understanding of how it works; there are plenty of materials to assist me. It assumes that I am going to think about what I am doing when I set it up. It lets me customise the components that it utilises. The result is a computer which runs as intelligently as I’ve been able to customise it. In short, Linux was created by intelligent people for intelligent people, and this has led to an intelligent product which functions intelligently.

Of course, there are plenty of people who want to call Picture loans and not have to think about such matters. Being dumb is often quite a popular thing to be; Brittany Spears is more boffo than Stephen Hawking. Furthermore, numbskulls do make a contribution to society; their excess cash fuelled the Dot Com boom and all of them will eventually become a rich source of fertiliser. However, it should be noted that it is usually the constructs of genius that endure: Gustave Eiffel’s tower is still admired today, a pile of dung from a village idiot in Provence is not so well respected. Linux is enduring, adapting, growing into the operating system of mobile phones and video games consoles, not just PC’s and servers. Windows appears to be under fire due to delays in Vista, security issues and is apparently in retreat in the web server market. They still have time to turn this around; however, they’re going to have to realise users do have brains, and more importantly, they can use them. Armed with this bit of understanding, they may survive; hopefully their compatriots at Picture won’t be so lucky.

Everything one needs to know about politics can be found in the scripts of “Yes, Minister”, a British comedy programme which detailed the fictional career of the Right Honourable James Hacker, MP. One of the more pertinent lessons doled out by the show is that politicians will seize upon half-baked initiatives in order to prove to the public they’re doing something. This faulty logic was encapsulated by what one of the characters called “The Politicians Syllogism”. A syllogism, for those who haven’t come across one before, is a form of deductive reasoning, comprised of a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. The Politicians Syllogism goes as follows -

We must do something
This is something.
Therefore we must do this.

Of course this is about as good, the character notes, as saying the following -

My dog has four legs.
My cat has four legs.
Therefore, my dog is a cat.

The Politicians Syllogism is applicable to the latest initiative out of the American Congress, the so-called “Deleting Online Predators Act”, or DOPA for short. The act, passed by a margin of 410 votes to 15 in the House of Representatives, intends to forbid schools and libraries access to “social networking” sites. The FCC is obliged to define these sites as any that allow users to chat to another, maintain a profile, and post personal data. Some commentators have already noted that this description would apply to sites like Ebay and Amazon.

The politicians are doing this, quite frankly, because it’s easy. The latest scare created by the media is that MySpace has become nothing more than a recruitment ground for paedophiles. This act is a very simple way to show that both Democrats and Republicans “care”. Doing “something” also prevents questions about why rank and file members of the US Congress are paid $165,200 per year, plus benefits and expenses.

Of course, sending paedophiles for a ride on Old Sparky set to “Extra Crispy” or castrating them with a rusty butter knife would be certainly more effective (it would definitely cut the recidivism rate). However, such measures would not command a bipartisan consensus, and therefore be less likely to pass; “something” would not be achieved.

However, something in this instance is the worst sort of nothing. If we apply Lenin’s old query, “Whom does this benefit?” to the act, we can quickly ascertain that it certainly does not benefit the children the measure is intended to protect.

According to the Pew Internet & Life project, only 23% percent of adult Americans have gone online from somewhere other than home or at work. Even if we assume that children’s proportion is marginally higher, this does not account for the vast majority of internet users. These figures also do not account for people using MySpace at these alternative locations; given the filters already placed on salacious content, the library or school environment was already not conducive for accessing questionable material.

Just as the act is unlikely to benefit users, it is just as likely to hit sites like MySpace and any site that offers an element of social networking. It also hits policy makers in schools and libraries; their independence in deciding what is appropriate material has been taken away and put into the hands of the Federal government. Power has been shifted to the centre, bureaucracy empowered, and there is no solid reasoning behind it.

It also does not benefit good governance. A solid objection to this act is the supposition that it makes about human nature; it seems Congress has read their Jean Jacques Rousseau. Without the acoutrements of civilisation, Rousseau suggested, men automatically behave better. Similiarly, Congress suggests that without the tools to make man bad, he will not become bad. Considering that paedophiles are motivated by unnatural lust, it seems that even if a fraction of their prey were made unavailable, they would not stop in their activities. Only the aforementioned ride in Old Sparky (or the rusty butter knife) would stop them completely; the fear of being stopped in that manner would make some, not all, realise that life is more important than gratifying themselves.

So whom does this benefit? The bureaucracy is the biggest winner, given the additional powers they will receive. Also, Congress will get a few days of a few positive headlines for doing something. Individual representatives, in a tough election year, will be able to tell the folks back home that they tackled the scourge of internet paedophiles, and with a bit of luck, (but not too much luck as the incumbency rate in the House is around 90 percent) they’ll continue to collect their large salaries for a job which demands the occasional loud bit of nothing. One can only hope that the nothing produced in the next session will be of better quality.

It’s not everyone who can say that they used to work for a character straight out of Monty Python, but I can. Specifically, I worked for a real-life variant of the Dirty Vicar. For those who are not familiar with that sketch, the Dirty Vicar was a character (played by Terry Jones) who simply could not stop himself from groping well endowed women while letting fly with a raucous shout of “I like (insert rude word for breasts here)!”

Apart from admiring the breasts of female staff, the real-life Dirty Vicar had one other major obsession and that was sales. Presumably it was his repeating the word “sales” often and loudly that got him the job as Managing Director; one hopes it was not his use of the “f” word in every sentence. He used to destroy many of my carefully laid out plans because he could not understand the relationship between doing things the right way and getting sales; rather, he thought that having something semi-working now was better than something that worked perfectly tomorrow. He was so desperate for immediate uplift that he would sacrifice the company’s prospects over a medium or long term to achieve it.

Furthermore, he was constantly trying to squeeze customers for every penny in the wrong sort of way. For example, I had to argue very strongly against his proposal to automatically include an extra in our online shopping basket; the tickbox to remove it was subtle and could easily be overlooked. It had been tried before; many customers were overcharged and said they would never purchase from us again. Within months, the results of his “all out strategy”, if it can be called that, were predictably horrible, and I am pleased to say that eventually he was relieved of the burdens of his position.

That’s an admittedly extreme example of how the drive for sales and the ambitions of salesmen and their marketing bretheren can wreck a company’s online prospects. However, as an Open Source advocate, I have to wonder how much of Linux’s advantages stem from having much less of this kind of pressure. How much of Microsoft’s problems, in contrast, stem from these influences? What is the evil that salesmen do?

In my experience, salesmen want a simple life. The good ones will acknowledge this is not possible and learn to live with it; however, they’re in a minority. The bad ones will promise the customer or their superiors everything in the world and for it to be delivered yesterday, without any reference to those who actually have to build the solution in question. This is yet another extreme example, but in my first management role, I was obliged to pick up the pieces after a technically ignorant sales person told an equally technically ignorant customer that our website would have a “telepathic” interface. It took some explanation of what internet technologies can and cannot do for the customer to realise that I wasn’t going to be able to build a solution to read her thoughts.

One gets a hint of the “telepathic” salesman upon examining the site for Windows Vista. Some of the claims made for it are laughable; for example, the site states “..with Windows Vista, the operating system adapts to you, rather than the other way around.” Considering how Microsoft makes so many decisions for the user as to what software should be on their desktop, there is a very large distance between rhetoric and reality. It is not outrageous to suppose that this gap is maintained in so far as what the sales and marketing people are promising to the public and what the development staff can actually deliver. What is worse is that there is a hint of salesman-driven rationale in how Microsoft develops its products: they are always bigger, always have more features, they’re always more glossy. It is sales logic which would automatically assume that this is somehow “better”.

The difference with Linux could not be more stark; in the absence of this pressure, an operating system has emerged that was developed with the sole goal of getting it right. This is not some idle vanity among technologists; the results of the Open Source approach have proven very useful to business. There is a reason that Apache powers 68% of all webservers, for example. That said, there is a lot of mileage in simply approaching technology with the proper respect for the boundaries of rational planning.

While I was suffering in my labours for the Dirty Vicar, a parallel project was in motion in the same company; in that case, the lead developer was well known for his dislike of sales and marketing. He was often heard to tell them, “No, I’m not going to do it, it’s a hare-brained scheme and it won’t make us any money.” He was tolerated due to his obvious skill and intelligence; he was outstanding at mod_perl development. The result of his project was an e-commerce solution that won an award; the project was also immensely profitable. I’m not suggesting that all developers should have his moxie, nor do I consider it realistic to believe that the sales folk at Microsoft and elsewhere will leave their technology staff alone, even if superior results were more likely. However, the companies that do learn to restrain the ambitions of their sales staff may prove to be the most successful; many are already happily relying on technologies which required little or no salesmen to develop, this should prove to their satisfaction that developers don’t need pestering folk goosing them every 5 minutes like a Dirty Vicar to produce elegant solutions. That voodoo which salesmen do may be a necessary evil, but the dosage should be kept to the barest minimum.

I could redefine the word “livid” today. I am riding on a lava floe of anger, bubbling and fuming with sulfurous rage. The name of my pain is MS SQL; and the cause of my fury is that it doesn’t play well with others.

My company’s website is in the midst of a transition; my predecessor, rather stupidly, decided that the company was going to go with Microsoft technologies and this has to be rectified as quickly as possible. Why? Well, firstly, it’s the cuckoo in the nest - my company is part of a larger group, and all the rest use Open Source technologies. Second, the costs of licensing as well as maintenance have gone up. As a result we are changing over, slowly; my company’s site is now a mixture of PHP and ASP pages. Some of the PHP sections call upon XML feeds generated through a query to MS SQL.

MS SQL is supposed to be an industrial strength database. Microsoft claims it “was engineered for enterprise data management for organizations of any size”; they also claim that their XML support “help organizations seamlessly connect internal and external systems”. Experience has now proven that this is absolute nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the feed when it works, but empirical evidence from the live environment has shown that the additional queries are killing the database server. The server is a well specified box, and should be able to handle the queries just as easily as it did when it was hosting the entire site. It can’t.

Fortunately, there is a way around it - I’ve told my developer to run a query every 24 hours which will take the necessary data from MS SQL and store it in a hash table in MySQL. The PHP code will query MySQL rather than utilise an XML feed. This change will reduce the dependency, though we will have to remember to run the chron job every time there is an urgent update and ensure that the query runs correctly. Overall, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud of a problem; the timetable for shifting completely to PHP / MySQL has been moved up a gear.

However, I am not soon going to forget how badly MS SQL plays with others, the issues this has created, the customer complaints and the sheer amount of pain that we are going through. I try to console myself with the thought that these are “growing pains”; we will mature from having gone down the Microsoft way to a point where we are doing things using proper Open Source tools. From my perspective, that day can’t come soon enough.

Government is generally the home of bad ideas, but occasionally there is an exception. The much-touted One Laptop Per Child project falls into that category.

The idea is simple: in order to help developing nations to leap over the obvious economic and infrastructure barriers which prevent them joining the digital age, a project was initiated to build the cheapest laptop possible; the target price is $100 per PC. I recall reading an article at the start of this enterprise, written by its director Nicholas Negroponte; he said directly that in order to achieve the balance of cost and performance, they were going to have to use Linux.

Promising indeed. The result is apparently a perfectly serviceable little machine running Fedora Core with a specialised interface called Sugar. Already, the governments of China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand have expressed an interest. However, there are some hidden dangers within this project, and it’s unclear if the foundation’s management is working to address them: some of these countries have so many problems with corruption that it’s difficult to see how the project will benefit those it intends.

Nigeria is the easiest and most accessible example; they have placed the first order for 1 million of these laptops. However, it’s difficult to see what mechanisms are in place so that the laptops will reach their intended recipients. Nigeria has some of the worst ratings for perceptions of corruption according to Transparency International; they are ranked 152, along with Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Furthermore, there is an existing digital culture in Nigeria which has a large, active criminal element. It’s rare to find someone who has not received an e-mail that involved what is known as “Advanced Fee Fraud”; namely, the scams that offer riches plundered from a dead West African official. A large part of this activity is run out of Nigeria; indeed, the leading anti-fraud website, Scamorama, refers to these criminals as “The Lads from Lagos”. In aid of this criminal endeavour, Nigerian hackers have left their markers all over the ‘Net; typing in “Mugu Guyman” (Nigerian slang for “idiot”) into Google yields loads of sites which these online fraudsters have used to harvest e-mail addresses.

Thus we should be concerned that the laptops are being sent not into the hands of children who deserve it, but those who will misuse this valuable tool. I emphasise the word “tool”; tools are value-neutral and can be used for good or malign purposes. A hammer can be used to build a house or to beat someone to death; similarly, a PC can educate and enlighten, or it can give the “Mugu Guymans” a cheap means (complete with wireless internet) by which they can perpetuate criminality.

The website for the One Laptop Per Child foundation has little information about how this issue is to be addressed; I suggest they should anticipate and ameliorate this risk before any of the laptops are shipped. Generally speaking, it is a brilliant initiative and an excellent means by which Linux usage is going to be extended. It would be a pity if this stellar idea was diminished by the mendacity of those in recipient countries who care more about themselves than the good of their nation’s children.

There is something deep in the British psyche that helps us to get accustomed to waiting. We wait in queues at the Post Office. We wait in line at Tesco. We stand and wait in the rain for buses. Perhaps the most elegant expression of this aptitude for patience is how we’re able to simply let restiveness wash over us, more or less, when waiting for a train. When I had to take the train to get to work, I was used to the idea that there would be a delay or cancellation; so were my bosses - if I was in late, all I’d have to say was “train”. They’d say “oh”, and that was the end of the matter.

I’ve noticed that this is not an American attribute. Whenever I go to New York I’m still astonished at how the “Time waits for no man” philosophy prevails, even if it does mean that one is risking death in one of their taxi cabs when it blasts through an intersection at Warp Factor 11.

Given the latest delay to Vista, I can only assume that Microsoft wants their users to become more British. It’s as if they’re telling us that the Vista train will be arriving soon, after delays due to signal failures near Southampton (the Bermuda Triangle of signal failures) and leaves on the line. Given the 2% drop in their share value yesterday, it appears that the New Yorkers on the Stock Exchange are still telling them to hurry up. It will be interesting to see what the result of this tension will be.

The investors should not be surprised that Microsoft is late. I was a beta tester on what was known as Windows NT 5; when I received my copy, I was warned by a colleague that it was a “bit of a dog”. Typical understatement: if it was any more of a dog, it would have carried fleas, kept me awake with howling at midnight and left copious excretal presents on the carpet. It thoroughly destroyed the test machine I used. I didn’t bother filing bug reports as it was difficult at times to tell where the errors ended and functionality began. In the end, NT 5 was so late that Microsoft’s marketing department could only put a happy face on matters by calling it “Windows 2000″.

That said, perhaps investors should be grateful that Microsoft has being delaying Vista’s launch; a hastily released product might be like Windows ME, in other words, it might become laughably infamous for being buggy and unstable.

All of this is good for Linux users. We can laugh at Microsoft’s timescales, because the delays to the last release of Ubuntu Linux were measured in weeks rather than Microsoft months, and Debian 4 is going to hit its target of being released by Christmas. We can laugh at Windows Vista’s claims of greater security, because these been blown to pieces by Symantec’s suggestion that it is going to be even more unstable than XP. We can laugh at the idea that Vista’s performance will be better than its predecessor as it’s clear that it is going to require even more powerful hardware to run.

We can also chortle at the fact that while Vista is caught in the mire, Steve Ballmer is making ridiculous statements such as “I want Microsoft to be in all of the good important big growth businesses in the world”. It’s about as preposterous a nation as the rail companies in Britain wanting to build cars when they cannot even get the trains to run on time.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the latest delay is that it only precipitated a 2% drop in Microsoft’s share value; given the proliferation of alternatives to Windows, you would think that investors would be less British, more New Yorker about Microsoft’s prospects. For the moment, though, they seem to be more or less shuffling about on the platform, reading their newspaper, cursing the delays. However unlike when a train arrives at a British station, all may not be forgiven with a sign of progress; when Vista turns up, patience may have finally run its course.