Blogging Ottinger (tim)

What? Microsoft a scofflaw? Say it ain’t so!

Okay, we all knew they were, but when it’s Europeans fining an American business, I think we’re supposed to act shocked. I’m not. But then I tend to value justice above local loyalties… and I’m not sure M$ has been good to/for America. After the David v. Goliath days when IBM was the evil empire, I think maybe it’s been “meet the new boss/same as the old boss”.

OTOH, I do have a deep inner satisfaction when M$ gets kicked… I think it’s that they’ve gotten away with so much in the past. Still, justice demands only the penalties and only the rewards one earns and deserves. I want to see justice done, and need to sometimes swallow a sense of revenge. If they deserve less damage, I pray the courts will give less damage.

I do think they’re doing good things with the .NET stack (C#, etc) and I’m glad for that. I just don’t think they’ve been model citizens. I would rather they were innovating, and did so legally and fairly. I think that’s possible, though I don’t think it’s all that likely. There isn’t a shareholder’s balance sheet line for “plays well with others” or “takes the moral high ground”, and corporations live by pleasing shareholders (who are typically interested in selling out the stock to make money, not in owning part of an ethical business).

I hope that the ruling is just. I would hate to see even M$ treated unfairly.

This is what I did with my Sunday afternoon (from 3pm sunday to about 1:00 monday)

“There’s accidents everywhere,” said Cindi Fox, a communications specialist with the Iowa State Patrol, this morning. “Everyone needs to stay home.”

Little damage, none of it serious? I saw dozens and dozens of freshly-wrecked cars along I80, and quite a few were upside-down or on one side. I remember at least four or five semis that looked as if something very serious had happened indeed. Well, I guess it’s all a matter of what you consider dangerous.

The biggest problem was that there were patches of really, really, really bad road rather than a continuous stretch of them. As a result, people would hit the rough stuff at 50 miles an hour or more, sometimes with cruise control on. If you have cruise or hit your brakes, you’re in for it. Likewise if you’re going 55 when you hit some of these.

Assuming you can do installs over the net from public sources (no private wizardry) and can use CDs/DVDs, and assuming that you have a new PC with no operating system at all on it, how long should it take you to set up a working machine with developers tools and office software? Oh, and you should have all the latest versions and patches.

On a Debian Linux box, using the netinst CDs, I would expect that I could have the whole thing up and running in less than an hour with compilers, IDEs, graphics editors, web editors, C++, Java and Eclipse, Python and one or two IDEs, C# with MonoDevelop, OpenOffice, Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, an IM client for four IM services, CD burning software, media players, and documentation for all of that. And, of course, I would have the latest versions and patches supported by my choice of OS “vendor”.

I talked to some people, and opinions vary. I am interested in “reasonable expectation” from people who’ve done this on various Windows operating systems, Mac OS/X, and various Linux systems. I suspect that I’m unfairly spoiled by Ubuntu/Debian/etc.

I got the computer that will be my wife’s laptop in a rush because I need VisualStudio.NET for a class next week. Sadly, I find that VisualStudio 2005 and its installer have incompatibility problems with Vista. Great. My whole reason for spending money from savings now instead of after four or five more months of saving up, and it’s going to be a time-consuming ordeal.

The first VS.NET installer work-around is in progress now, where I have to copy the installer disks to my local drive (2nd disk first) and run it from there. In vista, the installer won’t run from the CD drive.

The first major annoyance with windows Vista is that everything confronts you with an EULA acceptance screen, and all the license agreements are monstrous tomes. The idea of all my software uses being hedged in by lawsuits is a little troubling. I’m not sure what I’ve agreed to, and I don’t know how I’ll ensure that all my family uses the software in strict compliance. Does that make your skin crawl?

Second disk copied. Copying the first. I’m grateful for xcopy still being a windows feature. It’s been a long time since I have had to use backslashes for command lines. It works fine, though.

The second annoyance is that the Vista UI is clunky, in that the things you want to do are usually a few cascading menus away. If it weren’t for Win-R/cmd it would have been far worse.

The mouse controls won’t put enough acceleration on my touchpad, so I have to make multiple swipes to get from one corner (say the start button) to the other (say the close X button on a full-screen program). It takes three left-to-right swipes to move a half-screen window from the left side of the screen to the right, regardless of mouse speed. Likewise, it takes two swipes to get from starting a program to the “Cancel or Continue” dialog’s “ok” button. Maybe inconvenience is the new usability. When you have to do a lot of seeking and clicking, this touchpad sensitivity limit is not your best friend. That might be my computer more & driver and not Vista. Is it like that for everyone?

Another windows annoyance is the reboots. Not only do you have to do them often when installing software, but they take forever to complete. I have much faster times from all-the-way off to fully-logged in on my Linux machines including my laptop. I never have to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel. I suspect vista doesn’t really draw a distinction, or perhaps it’s because open files can’t be moved, renamed, or deleted in Vista.

Ah, first disk is copied now. Starting the installer.

People say Vista is pretty, but I can haver nicer compositing and better UI choices and tweaks with Beryl. Or to Mac OS/X. Vista has only one real look-and-feel choice. You can tweak colors and some trivial settings, and that’s about it. I can’t even change the location of window buttons to get the X away from the minimize/maximize buttons. It’s Vista’s computer, I just live here.

The desktop comes pre-cluttered with third party icons. All these trial offer icons need deleted. I also need to get rid of the IE and Outlook buttons. I don’t want to invite all the web’s viruses into my wife’s machines. It’s Firefox and Thunderbird for us.

It troubles me that windows doesn’t respect my browser choice like Linux does. When I set firefox as my default in Ubuntu, everything starts firefox for web browsing. In windows I set firefox as the default, and Microsoft programs still launch the internet exploder. Another reminder that Vista owns this box, not me.

The lack of a package manager is a real problem. Every software title you might want, you must first find online, and then download and run the author’s installer. Chasing down all my software seems a waste of time. Of course, each program you run, including installers, has a permit or deny dialog, and may also have a “Cancel or Continue” dialog later on. I’m going to have to find out when there are updates, and then I’m going to have to repeat this process. Debian APT will fetch upgrades for all your software. It’s a single command, can be done with a GUI, and (in Ubuntu) is done periodically by the “update manager”. Not just your operating system… your compilers and office software and games and database servers… the whole shebang.

Oh, look, only one desktop. How quaint. How do you windows manage with all their running programs cluttered up in one screen? I immediately download VirtuaWin, but I can’t install it because another installer is running. In Debian Linux I can likewise only run one copy of APT at one time, but I don’t notice so much because it can install all my apps at once. Here I can do one at a time, and only one installer at a time. This will take a while.

Everything is downloaded to the desktop by default. I guess that’s almost convenient, but the desktop (as I mentioned) is cluttered to begin with. I’ll have to delete all the installers once I get the software loaded.

The two advantages so far are 1) that we were able to reformat my wifes iPod to use vfat, so we can load songs and podcasts from our Linux machines, and 2) that (after web searches and incompatibility work-arounds) I was able to finally install my copy of Visual Studio 2005.

So far the only thing I like about vista is that I can use programs whose authors decided to support *only* windows. Linux people get used to proprietary developers ignoring them, and tend to work-around problems (or wait for some other open-source group to work around it for them), that’s the only thing I *don’t* like about Linux.

Ah. Now I need to download patches to try to solve the incompatibility problem for VisualStudio.NET 2005. I download the patch for vista first, and it dies saying that the program it’s looking for is not installed. I later download it again and it works (for about 1/2 an hour it keeps working and working… followed by a reboot). Oh, but then it didn’t really work. After the reboot, I’m told to get and run the patch again.

I’ve spent the whole morning trying to install visual studio on vista. I installed Mono and MonoDevelop and some additional tools in Ubuntu Linux, and it maybe took me 4 minutes. And I never had to reboot. Three or four hours with Vista and I’m not even installing Resharper yet. Sigh. I was really hoping to work through some of the examples my colleague will be leading Monday using the Visual Studio environment. I guess I better not plan on sleeping much tonight.

BTW: after I got done giving permissions for it to run, reshaper installed very quickly.

Another service pack. “A program needs your permission to continue.” Sigh. I’m twenty minutes into the service pack and still waiting for it to finish.

Okay, it looks like I can run my applications. It’s now 2:00 in the afternoon, and I started before 9:00. I took a break for a sandwich and 1/2 hour to go get my rental car, but otherwise its been all sitting here on the laptop, swapping disks, searching the web for work-arounds, blogging, and waiting for things to finish.

Enough angst for one day. But basically if you want to know what it’s like for a Linux or Mac guy to run vista, it’s easy: tape two fingers of your left hand together, put a sock over your right, randomly remove or disable 1/2 your programs, ad then try to do some work. It’s a lot like that.

Here’s the page for http://www.update.microsoft.com in firefox:

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.
	
To use this site, you must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.
	
To upgrade to the latest version of the browser, go to the Internet Explorer Downloads website.
	
If you prefer to use a different web browser, you can obtain updates from the Microsoft Download Center or you can stay up to date with the latest critical and security updates by using Automatic Updates. To turn on Automatic Updates:
	
   1. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Security.
   2. Click Security Center, and then make sure Automatic updating is turned on.
	
To enhance the security and performance of your computer, make sure Windows automatic updating is not turned off.

At least there’s a work-around.

C# gets bigger all the time, and the Mono team (mOh-nOh as in “monkey”, not mono as in “one”) have been doing a great job of bringing the language and platform into use in the Linux world. Banshee, Beagle, and FSpot are quite popular Mono applications, among an impressive and growing set of open-source applications

I will admit that I’m spoiled. I’ve worked in eclipse, and I’ve worked in VS.NET with Resharper, and I have worked in Python and C++ and other languages using make-integrated and macro-enriched vim setups. I have been pretty productive in those environments. I have also looked at MonoDevelop one time before, and thought that I should take another glance. The nature of my spoiled-ness came out in my complaints about MonoDevelop. Its biggest problems may be that we’re used to much more than it can offer… so far.

There are people in the world productively using mono, and I use some mono-based software every day (Tomboy notes, among others). I think these apps work well and look very good. I assume that they’re being developed in MonoDevelop, though I don’ t know it for sure. Most of my complaints are about features present in Eclipse or VisualStudio.NET+Resharper that I would really like to see, and of course those are both mature systems. There is also the likelihood that MonoDevelop developers have different productive habits than I have, and I’m just unhappy because it doesn’t fit my personal style whilst all the time glossing over the things that it does supremely well.

Ubuntu at this time supports the barely-usable version 0.14.

Here are some loves and hates with 0.14:

I’m now looking for a nice ubuntu repo for the 0.1rc1, recently released. I am looking forward to a much better user experience and much more comprehensive editing support.

According to an Ars Technica report and a similar report at ZDNetit is now legal under the EULA to run windows in a virtual machine. You can now stop hiding your parallels-equipped MacBookPro and your many VirtualBox Linux machines.

Come into the open and breathe freely again. They’re no longer gunning for you. They’ve decided that they will let you own you machine if you’ll just continue to be a customer.

My friends doing OS work tell me that virtual machines like VirtualBox are the best thing that’s happened to computing in a long time.

Ignoring the advice to never blog about blogging…

I have been watching my blog traffic for some time. I have some days with relatively heavy hits (heavy for me being maybe 300+) and some light days (100 or so). On the days when I have over 400 hits, I suspect a lot of spidering going on in the world.

I don’t know how often the same people visit, whether I have several hundred visiting every week or a hundred and some-odd people visiting every day. But I do know that by a large margin, most of the traffic here is “direct” meaning that people have bookmarked my site or are using rss readers to keep up with me. Thanks for hanging out with me.

The most popular pages are the home page and after that are my two popular programming papers. The first is the article on naming program variables, classes, and methods, and the second is an article on using the vim text editor (like a pro).

The second largest source of readership is from google. People are usually searching for some opinions or information about guitar stuff, one of the two popular papers above, or some forgotten lore about Linux or programming in general. Imagine that: outside of my circle of friends, my blog is primarily of interest to programming geeks and guitar nuts (AKA: my peers).

Got the album today. I decided to do a quick first impression of each song. Note that even if I read the lyrics, I’m never entirely sure what these songs are about.

I am not unhappy with the album by any measure, and I’m happy to have these songs in my collection. The album is easily worth the price and the anticipation. Edison Glass has such a wonderful way with layering rhythm, instruments, and voices and their arrangements and instrumentals are always excellent. I hope that this album does very well, indeed. While I was a little disappointed with the way the second half trailed off to softer and softer songs, there are plenty of high points in the 12-song project. I think that the album will provide me with a lot of enjoyment in “random shuffle” mode as well.

I will likely return to this post with more thoughts as the album has time to settle in, and especially as it merges into the regular rotation. It’s a very good sophomore project. My recommendation is “buy”.

Part 2 of the Linux Foundation’s interview with Linus Torvalds has some nice sound bites about patents.

I have a minor mention in a recent CIO Magazine article. I provided some fodder for Esther Schindler’s recent Getting Clueful article 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development. Sadly, the credit didn’t mention my being an Object Mentor and an agile coach. I’m only agile developer Tim Ottinger, and I suppose that’s just fine though I would have preferred a little more mention of my company and mission. The excerpt:

Agile developer Tim Ottinger suggests that IT managers begin by looking at agile values, to learn whether they can really buy into the methodology. “Agile requires a certain release of control and change of values,” Ottinger says. “If they’ve enshrined long hours and centralized control, or if they’re suffering through relational problems (labor/management style), or if they want larger commitments done faster instead of more measured, regular success…well, you see. There is a reason that some companies have a lot of trouble transitioning.”

There is a LOT of SNOW here.

My driveway and sidewalk took me all day (from 1:00 until after 5:00) with only one break and with three shovels and an ice scraper working. All four of us were out there moving the heavy stuff from the driveway to the edges. I know the driveway isn’t very long, but I’m sore and aching from the all-day work. Admittedly, the two younger kids were not able to shovel like the bigger teen boy and myself, but it was a lot of work.

In places the snow was over two feet deep, and the bottom had a nice crust of ice. I’m grateful for the ice scraper. The snow piles on either side of the driveway by the street got well over four feet high, and we had to top them in order to get more snow out of the way. I am now envious of my neighbors who have snow blowers. Those would have helped so much. On the other hand, we don’t get a lot of these big snowstorms, and maybe I will be glad to not have spent the big bucks on a blower when the weather turns warm in March or April.

The snow was coming down pretty hard, so as soon as you have one area of the drive cleared, you have to go back over the previous area to take up the half-inch of snow that accumulated while your back was turned. We did the porch and sidewalk several times. The driveway was already covered over by the time we got back inside the house.

My windows are all covered with ice, and of course the snow and ice is clinging to the screens. What fun.

I didn’t see one snow plow today. I guess those guys are pretty busy just keeping the major arteries cleared of snow and free from accidents. I’m glad there was no school. Not only did I not have to drive in this, but I had three helpers today.

For tonight, I commit myself to hot drinks, multivitamins, and lots of over-the-counter pain killers. I’ll also keep looking out the window. I may have to go back out once or twice.

Since Steve requested them, I’ve put up some photos of the snow.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to stop a particularly nasty move in the senate. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 includes among its odious bits some legislation that prevents third parties from examining and busting invalid patents. Like the one on clicking a link, or the one on writing loops in code, or any of the millions that have prior art and are obvious. If mad patents cannot be attacked by third-parties, then we as programmers will become increasingly afraid to code as all obvious mechanisms become covered by patents and we will have to pay for defense from mad lawsuits.

As with all legislation, this act has good parts and bad parts. I’m not totally against all that it does, but the harmful bits are ugly.

We need to get some money into the EFF right now.

I guess you shouldn’t bother trying to get a loan from these guys:

It’s hard to be clear in those tiny spaces, but it’s sad when it reverses the message like this.