Thursday, April 16, 2009

Ubuquity for Firefox

Just how badly can an awkwardly phrased sentence be lost in translation?
きまり悪そうに言えばどれだけひどい文章の翻訳で失われるのですか?
ما ضاع في الترجمة من الجملة أن تكون أسوأ بكثير الحرج؟
Потерянные в переводе приговор будет гораздо хуже, смущение?
Perduts en la traducció de la frase seria molt menys compromès?
Tabt i oversættelsen af sanktionen ville være langt mindre engageret?
Perdu dans la traduction de la phrase sera beaucoup moins engagé?
אבד בתרגום המשפט יהיו הרבה פחות עסוקים?
Zapomenuté překlad hodnocení bude mnohem méně vytížených?
Forget the score will be much less busy? it


Simple phrases are simple to translate
単純なフレーズに簡単に翻訳している
من السهل ترجمة هذه العبارة البسيطة
Легко перевести эту простую фразу
קל לתרגם את זה פשוט ביטוי
Je snadné překládat jednoduché věty
Jest łatwa do przetłumaczenia proste zdanie
Ito ay madaling isalin ang isang simpleng pangungusap
It is easy to translate a simple sentence

Ok, I cheated, but Ubiquity for firefox is still really cool. Lots of cool tools to make for a powerful web experience. I'll write more about it later after I have played with it more.

Digital Literacy: Comparing iPhone and Desktop Linux adoption

Apple selling many iPhone and grabbing a decent market chunk can't be used to show Linux has somehow failed. Apple convinced insecure and wannabe nerds (and some real nerds too) that a big shiny new gadget will make them look cool. The Linux Community is trying to convince people that enjoy finger painting and story-time that reading and writing are valuable skills that that can benefit you throughout your entire life.

I am sure this sounds like typical fanboyism, but have you ever listened to someones excuses for not wanting to learn to read, write, or learn basic algebra? It is the same excuses: It won't be relevant to the career I want, I get along just fine speaking, that's just for smart people. Well, how is it that Linux can be both demonized for being inferior AND only for the really smart computer genius type. Might it be worth a moment to try and see what they see? Honestly, that is what convinced me that despite the fact that it was HARD, and there were things I had to LEARN or even REMEMBER, it was about communicating, building, developing, and working together in a radically different way. I think it took me about a year to get comfortable with Linux, several more before I really began to see why it is used in all the places that it is, and why people feel so passionately about it.

Some people see a computer as a fancy typewriter for papers, a canvas for painting a picture, and an easier way to send letters and pictures than via snail mail. digital music is just another way to listen to music. For all those old things done in new ways, there is something uniquely special that can be expressed through a computer that isn't just a digital form of the same old thing in a different way. There is something uniquely powerful that enables people to fundamentally work different, and only Linux is where people can share instantly and unlimitedly the tools to express yourself and communicate with the world DIFFERENTLY.

Sure, Microsoft and Apple let you push the button, but just like reading and writing, no matter how good the story is told, don't think that is any kind of substitute. You just aren't talking about the same thing. It isn't digital literacy.

But don't worry, sure I am making a big deal out of nothing. You can already read and write, and computers are really just like books where it is easier to fix mistakes without wasting paper. There are nerds out there that take care of this stuff so that normal people can use them like books. Doubt learning how they work would ever be something worth anything to the 'normal' user.


I stopped paying attention when it went from "The year of Linux" to "The year of the Linux Desktop". Didn't anyone notice what happened in between? Further, The Year of the Linux Desktop was 2004 with the release of openSuse. The Year of Linux was 1997 with the Internet. If you care about being literate in a digital age, you know about Linux.

Wish I had made the effort to learn earlier, but guess just happy to be there. Having been there, there is just no way to explain to an adult illiterate person the value of learning how to read and write. I know it sounds elitist, but it really just struck me today how similar the arguments are. Think about it.

RPM v. DEB

RPMs and DEBs are just different. While I am a fan of apt-get, they make a lot of assumptions and take away from a lot of the configurability that an rpm allows. Of course, the same old argument between Linuc and Windows in general, is that it is whether or not it is useful to the average individual to take the time to learn the difference, and as usual no, but just the same, that is no reason to take such configurability away. Most people never install anything ever, especially not system "stuff". So where is the line? Each to their own :)

I find it funny, and a little sad when I hear people trying to tell other people what to do or how to standardize Linux. If you make hardware and you would like your hardware to work with other peoples hardware, and both pieces of hardware are in development, then there is room to suggest a standard and find some way for your stuff to work together in the end. On the otherhand, if someone writes a great program, but only specifies dependencies in a README, but never bothers to package it, you have three(ish) basic options: 1) Deal with the fact that it isn't package and compile it yourself. 2) wait for someone to package it for your system, then install it, or 3) Package it yourself.

Not to make it out to be more work than it is, but packaging takes time and effort. From what I have seen, programmers are almost always a different group of people from package maintainers. Any project that packages its own software likely has the job of just package maintenance.

deb packages are also very configurable. I don't think there is anything they can't do. Technically, there is nothing in its design to stop someone from a deb package running the binary every time you install it and never actually installing anything. Just the same, debs can install repositories, it just isn't standard to do that. Personally, I think it is better to let people choose whether or not they want their installed third party software to be self maintaining along with the rest of the system. If there is a repo, make note of it on the website and in the documentation. All a deb has is metadata, install script, uninstall script, and files. This means debs can do anything scripts and files can do. :) as for what apt-get does is store the metadata such that it can know what script sets have already been run, and if others need to be run, etc. The limits comes down to what the package maintainer chooses to put in their install script.

rpms are easier to build and maintain. debs are much more of a pain in the ass. debs are convenient for the vast majority of users, and they are a lot of work. Would deb users like to see every project out there have a deb available? Of course! But at the sacrifice of development time, or your own? Even if debs were "always better in every way", you are only talking about an end product and not the time that went into putting it together.

So whenever I hear someone say "I wish there was a deb", I say "Your probably not alone, why don't you go do that! Never done package maintenance? Wonderful, here's the manual and if next week you are still confused, i'd be happy to walk you through it."

Linux is about personal responsibility that can ideally easily benefit everyone, imo. Not everyone can really handle that.

Friday, April 03, 2009

Morality and principles of capital punishment

I have weighed all the difference evidence and such out there regarding the death penalty and such as I found it difficult to decide what to support and its relationship to my own philosophy. In the end, I think it is unjustifiably expensive, and horribly immoral, but not immoral for what I might call "the typical reasons". I think it is immoral that a person that was not a victim is the executioner, and the sterile atmosphere trying to make it appear so "humane" is just disgusting. The state has a compelling interest in justice because we pay them through taxes to be the benevolent and fair moderator, and if a person has possibly committed a crime that morally justifies death, the state should get to make the final decision, but them actually doing the killing is wrong.

I like what (I have been lead to believe is true) goes on in Japan. Honor killings. If you have been dishonored or wronged in such a way that means the criminal deserves death, they can issue you a permit, more or less, to hunt that person down and kill them. THAT is honorable. THAT is humane. THAT is moral. It isn't a "bad dog" that needs to be put down, this is a living human being that deserves to DIE! Let a man (or woman) in such a position face their death with some dignity, and the face of the person they wronged be it with a rope around their neck, or a knife swiftly jabbing into them. Let that face be the last thing they see before meeting their maker up close and personal. Not behind some sterile glass where the "victim" sits right along site the criminals lawyer. What a sick and pathetic situation for both parties.

Making the family responsible for the execution of an individual not only puts responsibility where it should lie and make them accountable for their accusations, but could also brig a type of closure better then some damn shrink is going to give them helping them "talk about their problem".

If you are morally object to killing the person yourself, or none of the members of the family will kill them, or possible closest friend (maybe put that in a will? In the event of my murder, I entrust the undersigned to avenge my death. Hmm...) then the person should get life imprisonment. Further, if the victim is against honor killing / death penalty or the such, then no revenge death can be granted.

Why is is that justifiable homicide can be a defense, but only after the fact? Premeditated justifiable homicide can only be committed by the state? That just doesn't seem right.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Free is hard *whine*

Liberty and personal responsibility are strange beasts that in todays world of regulations and bailouts, such ideas are foreign at best.

On the Mac vs. Linux argument, a leaked presentation by Steve Ballmer showed that from their own internal research, Linux and pirated windows is what hits them the hardest. Just in desktop space alone, 1 of 4 copies of windows are pirated, and Linux on the desktop outnumbers mac by more than 2 to 1.

Linux is particularly strange because anything that could be called marketing just doesn't operate in the way we have been trained to look at it. Ubuntu and Linux in general make solid baby steps, and with regard to anything that is important to you, that is actively being developed, the speed of development is blindingly fast. How many times in alpha would you report a bug only to have the problem fixed and an update available within < 24 hours. Scary. But if you are just standing back waiting to see how it is going to look different, it is unlikely you will see much.

Microsoft taks about great this, and great that, and while I was reasonably happy with XP (till SP2), there really wasn't anything XP ever offered that couldn't be got from 98 and 2000. It was great they brought them together, and I am sure it was a lot of work, but even from 98/2000 to 7... has WHAT you do changed really changed so much? I see many changes in how things are done, but not what is done... at least in so far as what Microsoft actually does. For what I do, the tools provided for Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, let me do more things in more creative ways where the time saved due directly to the efforts of the developers is greatly appreciated. The more I get involved in development, the more I am amazed how many projects are one person in a MASSIVE bottom up structure. Put in a little effort, and it is easy to have a direct influence... assuming you can actually make a constructive contribution.

Windows does give a great amount of comfort and stability. If something doesn't work, there may be one thing to try, and after that, your done. Anything breaks, just reinstall. Very easy and simple. In Linux, one is always drowning in possibilities. If something doesn't work, there is unlimited number ways to go about resolving the issue, and if it is broken, you never really know if it will be fixed tomorrow, a year from now, or never. Some people just can't and don't want that type of close relationship with their computer.

Windows is like riding the bus, and Linux is like owning a car... in too many ways.

and imo, Mac is like the trolley at Disneyland.

Why Linux sucks?

It is a strange world, I'll admit. One thing that I tell people looking at adoption is "get ready to relearn everything you thought you knew about your computer". I find your signature particularly ironic because I think Linux philosophy has many close parallels to the philosophy of conservatism and virtually immune to the damning effects of democracy.

One of the things that I feel has hurt Windows over the years is that Microsoft has lost touch with what works. Development is strongly driven by criticism, and what people want is what they will get. This is most apparent in Vista where their top down development model was strongly influenced by user feedback. It SEEMS like a great idea, and honestly it is almost difficult to understand why it failed so miserably.

This is where Linux takes almost the opposite approach, but 'approach' seems to imply a type of central control that does not exist, but looking past that; Linux is COMPLETELY decentralized. Not only is development bottom-up, but so is influence, criticism, standards, motivation, and anything that might be interpreted as 'marketing'. With the money being removed from the structure of Linux development, it is really one of the purest / idealistic forms of liberty to have ever existed. While today I don't think many fundamentally understand the difference between Liberty and Anarchy, I think many are dumbfounded that a pure merit based system that completely relies on personally responsibility could have accomplished anything. I consider myself a pretty hard core libertarian compared to some (but that may have something to do with living in California), but as I get more involved in Ubuntu development, I often don't understand why anything developed this way doesn't just cause all my hardware to burst into flames.

On the flip side, you can only get so far making people do things they don't want to do. In Linux, If I want something that doesn't exist, it is my personal responsibility to develop it or get it developed. Yelling at the computer and flaming message boards only gets you so far, and it should be of little surprise that no one is intimidated let alone motivated to rush out on their free time fix that issue for you. At the end of the day, someone must actually write the code, and do all the things that are involved in getting that code to you, and in by far MOST cases, writing a code patch and emailing it to you won't be good enough. You don't want me to code it; if you use Ubuntu, you want me to write a blue print, register the appropriate branch, put together a team, write the code, debug it, test it, share it, get it reviewed, revise it, propose for merge, voted on and approved, merge, package, and integrate into repository; and as if that wasn't good enough, you want it for your platform, back-ported, automatically updated on your system, and then maintained indefinitely. Sorry, but the only way I am doing that in my free time, for free, is that I really want it myself, and even then, if we disagree, if I am stuck doing all the work, I am going to implement and design parts however I feel like.

So while it may seem really rude or a brush off when people say "do it yourself", it isn't that they are heartless or lazy, I think they are really trying to save you some effort. If you consider the greatly consolidated steps mentioned above as 'X', and 'Y' as the amount of effort it may take to convince someone else to do the work, does it really need to be explained that 'X < X + Y', ALWAYS. The common defense is that 'X' is somehow less for a seasoned developer than for a novice / non-programmer. Sure, but why is that a problem for the developer? Further, which programmer specifically subsidize your ignorance? Are you asking me to do it? Hmm.. let me check my inbox... nope; let me check my launchpad account for new blueprints or teams I have been subscribed to... nope. *Whew* well that was a relief. You must have been talking about someone else.

If you don't want to develop, and you don't manage a team and pay for development, and you kinda just want it to work, people will be happy to let you know that a that level of influence, and that level of personal responsibility, that level of merit earns you "whatever exists". No one dictates these rules, it is just nature. Imagine being stranded on an island, whose responsibility is it that you survive? If ALL your faith is in the coast guard to come bail you out, you could put all your effort into waiting patiently, screaming at the sky, or setting the island ablaze to get their attention. Any of those things may very well be effective. In this brave new world we live in, you will likely be lucky enough to be picked up on a big brother satellite that will see your movement and come out to investigate what you are doing there before you even realize you aren't in Hawaii. But what if they DON'T rescue you? Is your last dying breath going to be made writing a letter to your senator via bottle, explaining your martyrism to poor naval patrol? And while after you are long dead and there is some boat out there named in your honor, maybe you could have taken a little effort to just see what kind of resources are available on the island that could be out to use to start a new life for yourself.

Yeah, personal responsibility is a bitch that way sometimes, huh?

The thing I find interesting is that all bureaucracy is optional. There are great standards, and the only punishment for not following them are completely intrinsic; rare are there real rules with real consequences compared to so many things are fake rules with fake consequences made up by people in the name of "the greater good". Sovereignty and liberty are strange creatures.

If all this seems somewhere between 'too much work' or 'fan boy drivel', and personal responsibility is unrealistic or just a buzz word, then it really doesn't matter what OS you pick and more than your vote actually means anything in an election. It will always come down to picking the lesser of two evils, and being upset either way.

And really, in such a case, I'll agree that Linux is likely your worst possible choice.