The Linux Extremist

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.

When I first tried Firefox on Linux, I thought to myself “Things simply don’t get better than this”. I had never used a quicker browser; it seemed to be making the most of my broadband connection. Never before had the internet seemed so accessible.

I then learned about some tweaks one can apply to Firefox. After making these modifications, again, I thought, “Well, it couldn’t get better than this!” I have been very happy with its performance and wondered how it could be improved further still. Given how fast it was, it seemed unlikely.

Happily, this has come to pass. An optimised build of Firefox for Linux, called appropriately enough, Swiftfox, is by far the fastest and best browser I’ve ever used.

For Ubuntu users, installation is painless. Simply one has to go to www.getswiftfox.com, and click on the link to get the Ubuntu distribution. The package works well with Ubuntu Dapper Drake’s GDebi package management system and installs perfectly.

However, a slight bit of tweaking is required to make it available to the menu system. First, go to Applications >> Accessories >> Terminal. Then type in the following.

cd /usr/lib/swiftfox/icons

This will take you to a directory with all the Swiftfox icons you’d care to use. In my case, I chose to use the 128 x 128 pixel icon, which is entitled mozicon128.png. I tend to like to keep all my menu icons in one directory, namely, /usr/share/pixmaps. In order to get the Swiftfox of my choice into that directory, I typed

sudo cp mozicon128.png /usr/share/pixmaps

Type in your root password when asked, and then the icon will be copied into the appropriate directory.

One can keep using both Swiftfox and Firefox; the only problem is that every time one engages either programme after using the other, it acts like it is a “first time” launch. In my case, I chose to simply replace any launcher for Firefox with a launcher for Swiftfox. In order to do so on the main menu in Ubuntu, right click on “Applications” and select, “Edit Menus”. The Alacarte Menu Editor will appear. Select “Internet” on the left hand side of the panel. Then right click on the Firefox icon on the right hand side of the panel, and select properties. Click on the Firefox icon, navigate to /usr/share/pixmaps, to find the Swiftfox icons. All instances of “firefox”, whether in the title or in the Command should be replaced with “swiftfox”. Once done, click “Close”.

All that said, it is possible to make Swiftfox even faster. Start it up, and enter in “about:config” as a web address. Scroll down to a value entitled network.http.pipelining.requests. Right click on that and choose “Modify”. Swiftfox sets this value at 8; with a good broadband connection, one can push it to 30 without any problems.

Once this value is set, then right click anywhere on the screen and choose New and then Integer. Enter the new value’s name, which is nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and set it to “0″.

With Swiftfox and these small tweaks, I’ve had a browser which is definitely the best web browsing experience to date. In fact, I can only think of one fault with it. Really, the developers have done such a bang up job making it so that Linux users get the most out of the web, surely they should do it also for the users of BSD.

The War on Terror has been brought home to me on several occasions. My mother was in the New York area on September 11, 2001; trying to get through to her on the phone without success for 2 hours was a genuine “heart in the mouth” episode. Fortunately, e-mail still worked and she wrote back to me.

Additionally, I had a long walk home thanks to the terrorism on 7/7; trains as far out as West Sussex were out of commission. I remember standing on the train platform and using my mobile phone to do a text message roll call of people I knew in the city, to see if they were all right. They were, thankfully.

My most recent brush with terrorism was far less traumatic and annoying than these previous incidents. As I was waiting to board the plane to go to Frankfurt last Saturday, I glanced up and saw two security officers dragging a man dressed in dark clothing off of the ramp leading to the airplane. The officers were swift and ruthless. The suspect was dragged off forcefully, and then made to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs, which proceeded past the window of the waiting area.

I have no idea if he was Al Qaeda or just some loony, but it was clear that the fellow, who appeared to be of Asian / Middle Eastern origin, was somewhere he didn’t belong. If he was a terrorist, he failed. If he was a loony, then he was completely bonkers to go skulking about without a proper security pass. Given that we haven’t heard anything on the news about this incident, I suggest it’s the latter rather than the former. Still, it had the feel of a close shave.

The War on Terror is very real. I tried not to laugh too hard when I saw Michael Moore say on television that “There is no terrorist threat”. It’s very clear you don’t live on the same planet I do, Mike. I wonder how he would have felt if he saw the same incident I did last Saturday. I also wonder how he would have felt if he had overheard a security guard say, as I did, “Yes, the government has just broadened the ban; we’re not allowing people to carry any cosmetics or powders on the plane as well as gels and liquids.” But as Mike probably flies solely on private jets (how very environmentally unfriendly of you!) I doubt such incidents even register on his radar.

The temperature of the conflict went up a bit this week; President Ahmadinejad of Iran made it very clear that he’s not going to stop his country’s nuclear programme. The United States is angry, the United Nations is reeling, but it looks like the world is going to be paralysed by indecision about what to do.

However, something must be done. Let’s put it bluntly, President Ahmadinejad is a complete and utter loon. I’m not saying this lightly. He provided ample evidence of how barmy he is in a video distributed by an Iranian website last November. The video quotes him saying that when he made his maiden speech at the United Nations, one of his colleagues said that he saw a “glow of light” around the President.

Rather than suggest that his colleague needed to have his eyes checked, he said:

“I felt it myself too…I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking.

“They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

This is not his sole brush with insanity; worse, he has stated his desire to “wipe Israel off the map”. Such a person should not be allowed anywhere near nuclear technology (unless he suddenly decides he wants to irradiate himself), let alone be allowed to possess a bomb. Forget reasoning with him either; it’s akin to trying to talk to a lunatic with a gun. Rather, he should be treated like a lunatic with a gun; the priority should be to disarm him.

I am sure that the leaders of the world know all this and more; I can imagine the jokes about him having a Napoleon complex doing the rounds at all the fancy diplomatic dinners. However, there is a complete lack of willingness to deal with this problem. The Russians and Chinese like cheap oil and probably secretly snicker at how Iran pokes America in the eye. The French are no-shows in this struggle; let’s not forget how they set a new record for the world’s quickest surrender by first pledging to lead the new UN mission in Lebanon, and then saying they would commit a paltry 200 troops. It was only the shame of seeming weak compared to Italy that made them change this position.

Britain and America are thoroughly occupied with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are due to leave office within a relatively short timescale, and thus their political capital is spent. There really is no one who is in a position to do anything particularly tough.

Fortunately, there is one soft option and it is provided by technology. I suggest that we consider hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities with an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb.

EMP technology, according to Globalsecurity.org, has been tested and can be effective. It’s non-lethal except within several meters of the epicentre. It will completely fry the computers and electronic equipment that Iran is using in their programme. As such, if Iran doesn’t comply with the will of the international community, detonating such a device should be acceptable to everyone. If Iran decides to build these facilities again, they will have to start from scratch. In which case, we can launch another one.

This is just an idea; I am sure a military expert could poke holes in it. However, there is very little of this kind of discussion happening at present. There is a flurry of paperwork and nonsense at the United Nations, accompanied by the hand wringing and posturing that have become typical among modern politicians. I suggest that they need to start doing something, rather than engaging in this flimflammery. The consequences of doing nothing are going to be dire. Given this, it is time to be as forceful and purposeful as any Heathrow security guard would be with any loony or saboteur. I have to say to the world’s leaders, do something, please.

As an insatiable blogger, I don’t just write in my blog, I read others as well. One of the more interesting threads I’ve been following lately has to do with the travails of a young lady who is just getting introduced to Linux. She’s been playing around with Live CDs in the hopes that one distribution is going to work perfectly with her wireless card. Unfortunately, the chipset she’s working with means this isn’t likely; it’s a Broadcom wireless card, and native Linux support is iffy at best: in fact, I’ve not heard of it working except with some hacking around. Most of the time, one has to use ndiswrapper. I’ve done it myself; all told, it took less than 10 minutes, and I was up and running.

What struck me about her plight is her apparent refusal to just install a distribution of Linux on her hard drive. What she wanted was to somehow slipstream these hacks into a Live CD, or alternatively onto a USB key, before daring to actually take the plunge.

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but this simply isn’t going to work. Working with Linux does require having a sense of the value of play, and being willing to engage in it, even if that involves risk.

“Play” is an often underrated word. Strangely enough, I learned its true value from John Cleese. A very long time ago, when I was a trainee with the British computer company ICL, I saw a videotape of a speech he gave regarding the virtues of “play”. He was doing this in his capacity as the owner of a training videos company called Video Arts.

Mr. Cleese stated that a study of the most effective people in British organisations had in common their ability to play. By this, he meant play with ideas, notions, scenarios and yes, mechanisms. Much of the time, play is a process of experimentation as well as amusement.

This thought reoccured to me when I was learning about Linux; I’ve often had to engage in informed “play” in getting various device drivers to work. At the beginning, I made plenty of mistakes; I screwed up machines, wiped them clean and started again. But trying out new ideas showed me what worked and what didn’t. The feedback loops from these processes combined and eventually I knew what I was doing. This blog’s how to sections are an attempt to provide the results of further “play”, so as to assist others in their “play”.

My advice to anyone who is as nervous about moving from the Live CD state to an “installed” state is this; back up your critical files onto a USB key or writeable CD and go for it. Yes, there is an overhead if not all of your devices are instantly detected by Linux; to be perfectly honest, Linux is better at this than Windows. I have never been in a situation when I’ve installed Windows and not had to have a packet full of CDs with device drivers on them.

Get used to the idea, if you’re a newbie, that you may install the OS a few times before you fully get the hang of it. Be prepared for making a mess of things and experiment. Once you’ve gone through the learning curve, then share the knowledge you’ve gained with others. But above all, keep hold of the element of play; be prepared to try new ideas, even if they sit outside the how-tos on the web or in books.

In the final analysis, this is one of the strengths of Linux; engaging in this process means that the average Linux user has a lot greater idea about what is going on with their computer than the average Windows serf. From knowledge comes the ability to customise and control, and thus, better computing. Not bad for a virtue as underrated as play.

Some of the people reading this article may be using a brand new laptop. I have some news for those individuals: your ceaseless hunger for ever more powerful machines is responsible for everything from the recent Dell and Apple battery fires to the next dot com bust. In other words, you’re naughty, evil and bad.

It’s not me who said this, rather it was stated in an article entitled “Crunch Time For Power Hungry Silicon”, written by Richard Waters, which appeared in Monday’s Financial Times Europe. According to him, our need for ever more powerful lightweight machines is creating a problem as battery technology is not keeping up with the demands of new processors. In his opinion, it’s doing things like “streaming racy videos from YouTube” or “cruising your friends photographs” which is causing a “fever in your laptop’s silicon brain”. The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect in our attempts to extend present battery technology. The mobile internet is about to be frozen in stasis. We’re all going to die or be poor, whichever is worse. Film at 11.

All this drama strikes me as rather funny. Personally, I can use all the multimedia features of the internet without any trouble using a relatively old laptop, one which isn’t likely to burn down my house. The difference is, I’m using Linux.

It appears that Mr. Waters has difficulty getting to the root of the problem; the real issue is the operating system. What if I were to tell you that it is possible to have a fully functional, modern desktop PC running off the same processor that is used in handhelds and other small portable (i.e., low power) devices? It’s true; a company in Britain called Iyonix PC (www.iyonix.com) offers PCs using the Intel Xscale processor. It’s intended for use with RISC OS, but also can be used with a variant of Debian Linux, a solid choice of modern operating system. With Debian and either KDE or GNOME, all the features that a modern user could want for office tasks, web browsing and potentially even streaming video are available, with a fraction of the normal power requirements. This fact simply is not well known.

The dirty little secret of the PC industry is that most users don’t need as much of the processing power and energy usage as they are presently consuming; the Windows / Intel cycle of creating an ever larger operating system which requires ever more processing power to use it is creating this situation. Users just are not aware of alternatives, and alternatives are not presented to them; there’s big business in keeping them in the hamster wheel of hardware and software replacement. There’s not enough of a sales story for people like Microsoft in saying their latest product will be more efficient in its use of resources, as opposed to having more novelty.

To be fair, those who do present an alternative are not helping matters either. It’s disappointing, but Iyonix are not offering a laptop. Acorn PC, a defunct British manufacturer of RISC OS PCs, just had its trademark bought by another company; this firm has decided to offer standard Windows laptops rather than doing something really interesting and offering the low power, high performance PCs that consumer can and should get.

In fact, the only low power device that is presently a working model of this concept is the $100 laptop that is being produced for children in the third world. This laptop proves that one can have a machine running Linux with wireless internet capabilites, with a processor that only requires a human turning a crank to make it work.

For the moment, however, we are going to live with the threat of exploding laptops; Dell and Apple are likely to be the butt of jokes for some time. I am sure any employee presented with a new laptop from either of these manufacturers is going to have a slight worry that their boss may be trying to kill them. The battery manufacturer, Sony, just slashed its profit projections thanks to these recent incidents. Perhaps there will be a slowdown in the development of mobile technology. This actually might be a cathartic experience for consumers and businesses, and refocus their minds on what is really important: efficiency, quality and durability, and frankly what would be really magnificent, an Xscale laptop running Debian, accessing the wireless at high speed while remaining cool and collected. For the moment, though, that’s just a dream.