Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Well, after Microsoft saying that it darned well will not support opendoc soon, we find that someone else will do it for them. How many other companies and projects have to do this before microsoft admits that it is doable. I guess it’s like the difference between what we can afford and what we want to afford. I suppose that the real problem is that Ms has never been all that big on supporting an open standard. It prevents people from having variations, and variations are how you differentiate yourself in a market. Well, that and control of your distribution channels.

When there is an open standard, the software becomes commoditized. It is easier for free projects and minor operations to compete head-to-head on quality, speed, realiability, etc. That’s not the way that old-style companies work. In fields well-established enough to have standards, this will be the way of it. I am hoping that companies cannot use patents as a artificial means to prevent commodization of software, because the market wants commodity software. When we work against our market, we kind of deserve what we get. At least in a capitalistic society.

It’s going to get easier for consumers, harder for producers, and maybe this is as it should be.

Well, this was my first shot. I loved it. It did a very fine job of hardware detection, simplified disk setup, initial app selection. Congratulations to the Debian Installer team. You guys came a very long way with this. This was the easiest installer I’ve ever used, much easier than Windows (any version). It was almost as easy as a live CD boot. Wow.

I don’t know what you’ll do to top it. Even if it was not graphical, it was ridiculously simple. I had one hardware problem, a crummy ethernet card (built into the board) .

This was a joy anyway, because this is one more machine that won’t be running windows again. My in-laws will be free of the upgrade treadmill and will be able to run without the windows popup adware and viruses. Live will be more normal. Ahhhh.

Just for future reference: you should download the debian net installer ISO via bittorrent. Really. It’s located at http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/i386/bt-cd/. It’s the community-friendly way to get it.

Of course, you should probably make use of it. Start replacing all your windows systems with Debian GNU/Linux and enjoy a modern, windowed, net-browsing, email-writing, photo-editing, office-automating, wonder. And share it with your kids, parents, grandparents, neighbors and strangers. It’s nice when you’re allowed to share what you have.

Be happy.

Was there an editing problem? THIS ARTICLE is about microsoft getting savvy to the zombie problem (hmm… seems like a windows problem) and their quick empirical investigation of same. However, the first paragraph is so unrelated that it had to be some cut-n-paste error (as is common among windows programmers):

Microsoft has threatened to withdraw Windows from South Korea if the country’s antitrust agency forces the company to remove its Instant Messenger and Media Player from the operating system.

I don’t see any zombieness in that, unless it was an editor or reporter who hadn’t had his morning coffee.

In the Citizen Microsoft article, published October 2004, we see that a rising tide does not lift all boats. This came up in a conversation this morning, and I thought maybe it was worth rehashing again. It was interesting then, it’s interesting still.

I think that the company has been making a kind of turn around partly because of changes in personnel and partly because Bill Gates got married, had a child, has had to get out of the office more. I know that they’ve hired (and sometimes fired) better people in more recent years, and actaully have ECMA standards for C#. I would like to think that the Microsoft of the future will have different tactics than the M$ of the past.

I keep hoping and looking for signs.

The right way probably would have involved using an xml or html parser to extract the text from the document and then my program could have dealt with it. On the other hand, the right thing can be to do the simplest thing that might possibly work.

The data was a log from a chat program. The problem was to extract certain lines. The issue was that the log was in html.

I was in python, where I love to be. I could have gotten any of the wonderful parsers and spent time working though the code, and would have had the right answer. It would have handled all the tags and nested tags and what-have-you. And there are other tools in the world to de-html-ify text that I could have used. All of that would have been more “proper” than what I did.

What I did was create a regular expression < [^>]*$>, and compile it with re.compile. Then I read lines from the file and used my tag pattern to substitute all patterns for blanks: tag_pattern.sub('', line). Was it as wonderful and perfect? No. Could it be confused by tags that split across lines? Sure. Did it parse my input jolly well? It sure did.

Okay, a commercial tool needs to be smarter, but this was for fun and for friends. I didn’t care enough to be that careful, though. I wanted something to get the job done, and I got it done. Sue me.

I was joking with friends today about stupid one-liners in Linux. The dumbest being the one I’m most guilty of: cat $file | more. This is silly, of course, because one can easily use: less $file instead. I picked on a friend for doing cat $file | grep somepattern, and several of us admitted to using less-than-brilliant pipelining from time to time. I have even found unnecessary pipeline silliness in scripts or tutorials by respected administrators. I guess we all deserve a little forgiveness sometimes.

Awk is a very nice little tool for one-liners. I have to admit that I generally use it as a substitute for grep + cut, and that’s okay. Awk doesn’t mind. I can’t tell you how many times I sucked information out of a file using a command like awk '/pattern/ {print $2}' $filename. I used to use it for much heavier tasks, but now I find that Python is better suited to the heavy lifting. Awk does my light jobs.

Here’s a common pattern (a clue that I need to write a nice shell script) when I don’t have as much CPU accessible as I think I should. I first use ps -fu tottinge | less to get a list of my processes. When I see something that I know should not be running (usually a konqueror thread or a flash viewer or sometimes a media program that didn’t fully exit) then i try ps -fu tottinge | awk '/procname/' to get the list of just the ones I care about. If I’ve got that right, then I add code to extract the process id and kill the process: ps -fu tottinge | awk '/procname/{print $2}' | xargs kill.

If there is just one or two processes, I can get it done more quickly with top and my mouse buffer.

To become skilled in awk doesn’t take much time, just a good tutorial to get you started and then a few one-line programs to use as examples. Once you get used to it, you’ll find a million uses. Well, that is, if you are writing shell scripts. You can become effective very quickly.

Through the podcasts, I have just heard my first episode of The Adventures of Maisie. It’s definitely sitcom material. The episode I hard was one where Maisie helps an heiress get into a magic act as “occupational therapy”. It’s some interesting writing, and quite a bit of fun. Not normal male OTR fare.

it really bothers me that programmers may be looking at the code generated by Visual Studio to learn proper programming technique

This is from Petzold’s Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind, brought to my attention by the Object Mentor blog. Really a wonderful article, which struck a number of notes with a non-windows programmer like me.

It’s long been my assertion that a decent programming languague + a decent library doesn’t need tools that patch around its insufficiencies and overcomplexities. I offer Python as one example, though I know that I just bragged on an editor (spe) that has completion. I think that Java and C++ are examples of programming languages which need a lot of automated support, being beyond human ability to keep juggle niggling details and fat api sets.

But maybe that’s just me.

Re “dynamic layout“:

I don’t know anything about Avalon. I was surprised and pleased to hear that MS is using layouts now. I did some window programming a long time ago and hated pixel- or dialog-unit- relative positioning and spacing. The next time I started playing with GUIs for fun it was in WxWindows, and I immediately saw that row sizers, column sizers, gridsizers, etc. were the way to go. I remember how we were scratching our heads at Micropoise about how much space to leave for internationalization, knowing that in WxPython it wouldn’t an issue since I used sizers. Nice to see that MS is finally getting the message. Now if they can just teach front page to stop doing it and let the browser determine the page width. I hate seeing skinny columns in the middle of a big page.

When you go shopping, you know how kids tend to wander off, and you have to track them and repeat their names about a billion times to get them to come back? I think I figured this one out. Rather than a leash, you need one of these gadgets and a small onboard navigation system to follow a beacon you wear on your belt. See, this could work. They irresistably follow you wherever you go. No solution on keeping their hands off the merchandise, other than the standard zip tie. Yes, I’m kidding. Relax.

Of course, it’s just fun to say “galvanic vestibular stimulation”. Doesn’t it trip rollingly off the tongue? Err.. rather… something like that.

I love NetCraft. I’m always fascinated by the graphics and reporting. Today I was enjoying the October 2005 web server results.

I wonder how aware people are of the prevalence of open source software, and how much the very existence of the web relies on open software and open standards.

Netcraft also gives me more reasons to love blogsome!

I was entertained by an article from one of the news aggregators (maybe all of them) about various properties of Wilma. Very interesting. I am curious about the dielectric stress bit.

OpenBSD turns ten today. Happy birthday, and thanks.

If you’re going to play Old-Time Radio programs at bedtime, and especially if you are going to leave a bunch queued up (just in case) you probably should avoid mysteries and horror stories which include women screaming. It’s not coherent with your goal of sleeping all the way through the night.

Sure, after the market demands it, the competitors have it, and a plugin is released to the world, Microsoft gets with the program and looks into possibly supporting ODF in the next version of M$Word. I hope they do it well. It’s just nice to see them responding.

If only they don’t create another extended subset (the usual tactic for subverting a standard) we’ll all be happy.

More on linux GUIs: there is this really cool 3D GUI by Sun for Linux. I think it is innovative in having thick, rotatable windows and a 3D panoramic background. The pics tell it all.

This is getting a lot of press right now because there is a new live CD. You can burn a copy and try it out on your computer I understand from comments that it works best on an NVidia card, and that it is to be run on more hefty PCs. Also, apparently it’s still in the tender, young days of early use so it may crash. But it’s a mighty cool idea.

I just heard today that firefox is number one!! I hope it’s true! It’s time for the people to own their browser, instead of being held for ransom by any one vendor (esp one with disdain for internet standards). There are many criticisms of Micro$oft’s browser online, mainly focusing on lack of standards support.

Whether firefox is faster and more secure or not (I think it is), whether you love IE or want to stop its spread, it’s good to have a browser that supports the standards rather more fully and which works with tabs. It’s better to have browsing owned by an open source project (a kind of public trust) rather than a corporation (criticisms of their past behavior aside). Just for fun sometime, google for “internet explorer standards” and see what you learn about IE. Web designers hate it.

Firefox and Apache together mean that the web is now owned by its users, and it helps to ensure that nobody can erect a toll booth on the superhighway.

Beyond all of that however, is that it’s a very nice browser. And today, it looks like a hundred million.

A friend asked me to discuss this theological issue of predestination. Whooo, what a question. People very well-skilled in theology can’t describe this well in a blog post, and neither will I. I am not qualified to give a final answer, but what I can do is give some links and some ideas. But be careful, because the water gets rather deep.

Remember that nobody is saved by the study of theology. I think there is benefit to theology, but it is an intellectual pursuit of systematic studies, and useful to the extent it instructs us in simplicity and fascination with the Creator and our salvation. A fascination with controversies may not be useful, and may not be resolvable.

Can anyone believe the bible and not believe in predestination? No, I don’t think so. I cannot hold to a doctrine of a sovereign man. God is not unable to assert His will upon the stream of history, or our bible could not exist and be true. The bible clearly declares instances of foreknowledge and planning and selection of individuals for ministry before their birth. I don’t see how we can ignore that.

But yet there is also evidence of free will and free moral agency as well. This is why the issue becomes difficult. If it were all one, or all the other, then one would not need to think about it. It could be taken for granted. But as it is, we are subject to consider the evidences both ways and also apply some human reasoning. We are in deep waters, indeed, and almost certainly at risk of great theological error.

You may believe in predestination, and still be at odds with many who also believe it because ofwhat you believe about predestination may be different. Even how one phrases different beliefs about predestination may be different, and precise theological words can confuse the initiate. So be careful. You may need a theological dictionary to be certain about some links and descriptions.

Typically questions about predestination are really questions about whether God is the author of evil and whether it is his choice that all unsaved people are damned eternally against their will. This leads to a side issue, whether Jesus and the church are all wasting their time trying to rescue the perishing. One may go so far as to ask whether a human life has any significance at all or is rather trapped in a predetermined, preordained, irresistably-scripted pseudo-life.

I can give my denomination’s beliefs, with which I concur (hence my denomination):

VII. FREE AGENCY
We believe that man’s creation in Godlikeness included ability to choose between right and wrong, and that thus he was made morally responsible; that through the fall of Adam he became depraved so that he cannot now turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and works to faith and calling upon God. But we also believe that the grace of God through Jesus Christ is freely bestowed upon all men, enabling all who will to turn from sin to righteousness, believe on Jesus Christ for pardon and cleansing from sin, and follow good works pleasing and acceptable in His sight. We believe that man, though in the possession of the experience of regeneration and entire sanctification, may fall from grace and apostatize and, unless he repent of his sin, be hopelessly and eternally lost. Godlikeness and moral responsibility: Ge 1:26,27; 2:16,17; De 28:1,2; 30:19; Jos 24:15; Ps 8:3-5; Isa 1:8-10; Jer 31:29,30; Eze 18:1-4; Mic 6:8; Ro 1:19,20; 2:1-16; 14:7-12; Gal 6:7,8 Natural inability: Job 14:4; 15:14; Ps 14:1-4; 51:5; Joh 3:6 Ro 3:10-12; 5:12-14,20; 7:14-25 Free grace and works of faith: Eze 18:25,26; Joh 1:12,13; 3:6; Ac 5:31; Ro 5:6-8,18; 6:15-16,23; 10:6-8; 11:22; 1Co 2:9-14; 10:1-12; 2Co 5:18,19; Gal 5:6; Eph 2:8-10; Php 2:12,13; Col 1:21-23; 2Ti 4:10; Tit 2:11-14; Heb 2:1-3; 3:12-15; 6:4-6; 10:26-31; Jas 2:18-22; 2Pe 1:10,11; 2:20-22

Now, speaking more personally with my position stated to avoid misleading , I can cover some ground.

Absolute Predeterminism

There is a theory of absolute determinism, which includes you having a paper cut on a particular finger on a particular day — a kind of fatalism, in which God has to have absolute control or else He is no sovereign, and is not in control. In a Calvinist theology, God chooses who to save and who to damn, and there’s not a thing we can do. We can neither refuse or accept. I like Calvin, and recommend his Institutes for reading by any committed Christian as a challenge and a means to appreciation. However, this is not the view I accept. I disagree not because I think God to be incapable of running the universe in full sovereign predeterminism, but because I read scripture to say that he did not.

If we don’t follow absolute predeterminism, there remains special and general predestination. Some may excuse these as attempts to rationalize opposites but I think that it’s the more scriptural understanding.

General Predestination

Most simply put, whatever God decrees will happen is going to happen, one way or another. I do not deny it. Whether by absolute plan or perfect improvisation, when it is is willed to occur, it will occur. This explains the end of day, the rapture of the church, signs of end times, as well as all the prophesies fulfilled in the birth and death of Christ.

Special Predestination

God specifically chooses individuals and plans their roles. I do not deny this. We have rather clear examples of this in our bible.

However, saying that both of these things is true does not say that every event and every life is subject to hard determinism. Both of these may be true, and it may also be true that there are other individuals and acts which are not predetermined in a hard way.

Free Will

I believe that we are given grace by our Lord and freedom to exercise it. I believe that evil is in the world primarily because people act wrongly with (or sometimes without) evil intent. My beliefs are approximated in an article written by Dennis Bratcher. I believe that free will is constrained, that there may be choices not left to us (for instance, no man could have chosen to be the Christ of his own will). This is further developed and described by Dabney among many others more qualified than your blogging friend.

Outside of Time

I think that we have to consider that God exists outside of time, and created time for us to inhabit. As a result, ideas about pre-, post-, past- and future are not entirely reasonable. To one living outside of the time/space continuum, a supernatural being (as one would have to be to create nature), time looks different. It works differently. Causality and phenomenology are different. I can’t pretend to understand it beyond that. But I think there is more than simple free agency (”God has no control over us”) and simple predeterminism (”everything is mandated by God”) would have us believe.

It May Not matter

Whether God is the ultimate planner, or the ultimate improviser, or both is impossible to tell. If he is either, he will appear to be the other in the eyes of humans. We can’t tell. We know from Ephesians 2:10 that we are living lives of divine appointment, and from the warning to Esther that if we do not take our place and do our part then others will and we will miss out. So maybe either. Maybe both. Maybe there is a spectrum from A to B (predeterminism to free will) and the answer is along the line somewhere. Maybe there is an answer C that we can’t or have faild as-yet to conceive. If our species does not yet know all there is to know about mathematics and physics, then why should we assume that we know all about our God? In both, we are only exploring and describing the reality that pre-existed our race.

My recommendation is to choose to do right whether because you believe you cannot do other wise, our because you must not do otherwise. Good is good. Seek to increase your piety either because it is inevitable, or because it is not. Love because loving is brave and deep whether or not it is painful or avoidable. Live as if you are doing it courageously, whether you really believe that you are or not. Then when your time ends, you will have done all that was required (or ordained) and will be a good and faithful servant.

What’s wrong with microsoft? Really, what’s wrong with those guys? That’s a question I often am heard asking. Actually, the article deals with windows and windows products. My real issues have less to do with the products than with the company itself.

A funny thing about following God: you aren’t necessarily called to success. The prophets of the Bible often would proclaim truth only to receive abuse, time and time again. Often the kings who were warned did not repent, did not turn, and were not saved. The prophet’s duty was something different. Perhaps it was worded best by Mother Theresa: “God has not called me to be successful; He has called me to be faithful.”). Maybe it’s best that we know to simply do what is right, and let the chips fall where they may. After all, some people take opposition as proof that they are right. So maybe rather than control and manage them, we’re better off to choose to give them either interest or disinterest. We cannot choose what will happen in the world. We can only choose where to be involved.

Sometimes a life of surrender takes you places where you would never have gone, some of which are beautiful and some of which are kinda awful. I have had an amazing inability in my past to predict which places would be wonderful and which would be difficult.

So the journey is not intellectual, where one chooses what works best and moves forward with planned and measured steps. This is how one conducts business, and how one would plan a long-term trip, learning from experience and covering the same ground more carefully the next time. Instead, we are given fresh challenges at all times, and each challenge changes us. The experiment is not repeatable because the subject is different every time. The “safe” paths , in retrospect are no longer the paths which seem safe. The decision-making mechanism is new.

The journey is not emotional, where one chooses to go to the places that provide the greatest comfort and self-satisfaction. Instead, we often are pulled into situations which are uncomfortable and often these are the ones where we learn the most. We seldom revisit comfortable places.

So the journey of the soul is unique. We never cover the same ground twice, or at least not as the same people. The journey is one of waiting to see where we end up, rather than planning our course according to our goals. We are led, rather than being self-directing. It is experiential, faith-based, and new every morning.

Well, the first and happiest bit is that OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out! Start the party rolling! Download a copy and share it with all your friends and acquaintances. You can now import Word Perfect files, and do programming in OOo with Base and XForms. Or so they say. I’ve not tried.

The second bit is funnier! Someone has released an OpenDoc plugin for MS Word. So much for MS being excluded from the market when OpenDocument is specified. Ha!!

Why do I think software patents are wrong? Oh, maybe because of things like the butthead who thinks he owns textual formatting.

I feel better now. Thanks for your indulgence.

I am pleased to be the instructor for the next Object Mentor 4-day Advanced OOD class on November 8th in Gurnee, IL.

I like this class. It is all built on design principles, and not any specific programming language. On the first day we teach some basic UML, and basic OOD principles. There is a good dosage of hands-on collaborative work in UML. It is appropriate for relative novices in the early days, but the material becomes a bit more heady (”Advanced”) somewhere in the 3rd day.

The most exciting part is the collaborative, hands-on exercises Students team up solve (at least partly solve) problems together using Object-Oriented Design principles, newly-learned design patterns, and basic UML.

This is my first public class with Object Mentor, and my first at the Gurnee facility. I’m looking forward to having more personal interaction with students, as well as hearing different viewpoints and perspectives of people working in different industries.

I just read The Parable of the Ice Cream Store at Dying Church. While poking around a bit at related sites and posts I also saw references to Barna’s new book Revolution whose reviews weren’t altogether great.

I must be dense. I come to a realization and find everyone else has been banging the gong for years. I need to get out more. Of course, there are no new ideas in Christianity. Everything has been discovered and revealed a very long time ago. It’s just new to me, and sometimes to us.

I was talking with a retired pastor about church issues this week and it was suggested that years ago (35 years or so) the church turned to God and said “Hey, thanks for the great work! We’ll take it from here.” I wasn’t a Christian then, though I was alive and was attending a church. I was in single-digit years then, so I probably wouldn’t have understood what he was talking about at the time. Maybe now I do.

It’s spiritual simplicity, and it will make us abandon plans and schemes and agendas. Abandon recipes for converting friends and witnessing to coworkers. We need authenticity, not rehearsal and gimmicks. I think maybe it can only come from example and action. Maybe we can “be still” in ways we’d not considered before. Maybe we need to abandon these adult values of planning and control and repeatable results and try something different. Being “in the world and not of it” seems to require something of this.

I don’t know for sure, but I feel a thumb in my back and is pushing me into something good, but I’m dragging my feet. It’s not going to be complex, or intellectual, or emotional. It’s something else entirely. When I truly reach spiritual simplicity, I will be in a very new place. I need a simpler heart, some single-mindedness; to will one thing.

It means that I have to abandon my preprogrammed modern mind, though. I have to stop looking to learn how to make spiritual things work. It’s inviting, but alien. Maybe that’s what was really meant by “receive like a child” — not to be unquestioning or naive, but to have a simplicity that goes beyond effort and intellect.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m anti-church, but I’m interested in the pattern of dissatisfaction and the pattern of dysfunction we see. I found a lot of resonance with Jake Colsen recently, and some good advice. He writes it all in the form of a novel, which I find a little annoying, but that’s neither here nor there.

Here is an excerpt from Jake Colsen’s book, So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore

“Those that treat leaders as if they have some special anointing are the most susceptible to being deceived by them. It seems people who assume or who are given the most human authority forget how to say no to their own appetites and desires. It is so easy for any of us to end up serving ourselves when we think we’re serving others by keeping an institution functioning. But not all of those who do it end up so broken. Many are real servants who only want to help others and they’ve been led to believe this is the best way to do it. Always separate the failure of the system from the hearts of the people in it.

“Any human system will eventually dehumanize the very people it seeks to serve and those it dehumanizes the most are those who think they lead it. But not everyone in a system is given over to the priorities of that system. Many walk inside it without being given over to it. They live in Father’s life and graciously help others as he gives them opportunity. “

There is more information about the “De-churched” in another article.

The EFF has a critique of digital rights management (DRM).

Part of the argument is that DRM is unprofitable in all of its incarnations so far, and harmful to the music industry. Perhaps they ask the wrong questions:

Given the total failure of DRM to date to enrich creators or prevent unauthorised Internet distribution of works, it is a pity that NAVSHP started with the premise that the world needs more DRM, rather than exploring whether that is indeed the best way to foster the development of the home audiovisual market.

A more reasonable and balanced approach would be to start by asking, “How can we enrich creators and encourage creation?” and “If DRM vendors claim to be able to enrich creators and prevent unauthorised Internet distribution, what evidence can they offer in support of these claims?”

Another key bit was considering the presupposition that users are somehow under contract regarding the use of properties they’ve purchased:

Does a user form a “contract” to eschew playing a DRM CD on her MP3 player simply by bringing it to the cash-register and paying for it? The entertainment industry argues that the simple act of buying a good like a DVD or a CD is a contract through which consumers agree to waive their rights under copyright to their detriment and a rightsholder’s benefit. Unfortunately this report reinforces that spurious assumption without any analysis of the underlying legal reality.

I found the article interesting and enlightning. I think consumers don’t want DRM, and I pretty sure that any scheme they come up with will be defeated by pirates immediately. It restricts the use, not the theft, of property. I don’t want to pay extra money for licensed devices so that I can have my fair use rights restricted. I think that DRM is strictly about a company trying to control its customers.

According to reports, there has been a “major breakthrough”. I hope so. With a history of cancers in my family (maternal) I’d be ready to celebrate!