The Vista beta 2 displayed the potential of Microsoft’s new operating system, too bad that the included performance issues became worse. Last week I was called into a client’s office to try to figure out why a custom written command prompt application took twice as long to complete in Vista. By no means is this an apples to apples comparison but the results are surprising. This particular application written in Fortran an compiled in Windows XP took about 2 hours to complete it’s calculations on a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz machine running XP. The same application, running the same model, on a Pentium D 2.8Ghz machine took over 4 hours to complete when running Vista. Without even knowing that I have primarily used Linux as my main OS for the last month they inquired on the benefits of migrating to Linux as they own the source code the the majority of the tools they use. Since none of their tools venture out of the command line world, porting them to Linux could be as simple as a recompile.
Last Saturday someone inquired on my impressions of Vista and Linux. Again there was no reason for the person to suspect that I run Linux, but they inquired anyways. These people are not the technical type, they know how to use their computers to aid them in their work and that’s about it. The simple fact that these people are frustrated with Vista and more importantly know Linux exists surprises me. While others have in the past proclaimed the respective year of proclamation the year of Linux, to date no substantial “mass†migration to Linux has occurred. I will not grant a single entity the privilege of the icon for a year. However, the next three years will be interesting, especially if Microsoft manages to piss off any major game studio (e.g., Electronic Arts).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Well yesterday both Gentoo 2007.0 and Aptana milestone 8. Thanks to some bugs in a previous release I was able to test milestone 8 on Gentoo last week; that was before ATI’s drivers went kamikaze.
Overall I am impressed with milestone 8, it features more advanced support of PHP, including variable highlighting. With Gentoo to install Aptana just make a folder in /usr/lib called aptana, then extract the archive to that point. After that make a file in /usr/bin called aptana, open it in your favorite editor (nano) and add the following:
#!/bin/sh
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
exec /usr/lib/aptana/Aptana
Save the file and do a chmod 755 on it so that it becomes executable. Now try typing in the command aptana& into your terminal. If all goes right you should see the aptana splash screen. If you get a bug, look at the log file it directs you to. Should you see something like org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] then your mozilla path is not correct. If the executable fails in general, you need to make sure you have the JRE 1.5 or newer. To get this just run emerge -p sun-jre-bin (you don’t have to use Sun’s JRE but that is what I use) if you like what you see then rerun the command without the -p. Once portage finishes doing its stuff, try executing Aptana again. It should work then, if not search the Aptana forums.
I am trying to download the 2007.0 LiveDVD (the 2006.1 installer is so old it no longer syncs to portage correctly), which I should be done downloading now, except a bunch of freeloaders are hogging all of the bandwidth. Downloading commenced last night when there were 32 seeders, and 98 of us downloading with about 34 completed downloads. Shareaza ran all night and now over 380 people finished downloading, there are about 340 downloading right now an only about 150 seeders. Checking my bandwidth logs, I continually maxed out my uploading last night at 50KiB/s while my average download was under two thirds of that speed. To say the least, I am disappointed. I can download at 1MiB/s (megabyte per second) tops, to be fare I should be downloading at least as much as I upload (on average). However I have seen nothing of that sort, I’ve uploaded something like 200% of what I’ve downloaded. In all likeliness what is happening is there are a bunch of freeloaders that set their upload to the lowest possible and then leech off of the rest of us. P2P is about sharing, and if you do not want to share, do not participate.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Yep, forget it, use GNU Octave instead. For calculus 3, rather linear algebra and differential equations, there is a lab which requires the use of MATLAB to due things that can get ugly. One particular use is for Gaussian elimination for finding values of several variables that solve a set of equations. Occasionally a write up is required for certain parts of the problems completed in lab. Checking work previously done in lab when doing the write-up is always reassuring. Going back to the computer lab is not convenient, and the 200USD that it costs for a student license of MATLAB can go to better use. That’s where GNU Octave comes in; it’s GNU’s MATLAB replacement that accepts nearly all of MATLAB’s commands. For Gaussian elimination, Octave sure beats writing a PHP script to do it (which I did on Monday).
On a side note, getting Aptana to work on Gentoo is fairly painless, though its installation doesn’t comply with the Gentoo philosophy. Maybe when it comes out of beta I’ll help get it into portage. I’ve also written a simple bash script for loading Aptana, which will be available in the tools section on this site once I figure out exactly where Aptana’s files should go to be consistent with Gentoo’s installation methods. Since at the U of M they don’t automatically load the modules necessary to run MATLAB at login, and the matlab command doesn’t do it automatically I’ve written a simple bash script that should take care of this. It’s available for download in the tools section.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
In the Computer Science/Electrical Engineering building at the University of Minnesota, there are several computer labs, some run windows, others “UNIX”. These “UNIX” labs consist of Sun workstations (with the odd keyboard, not sure if they are SPARC or Operton based). Instead of running Solaris or Open Solaris, both closer to being “true” UNIX distributions, they run Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux distribution, not a UNIX distribution. Heck, GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for “GNU Not UNIX”. Yes, it is UNIX-like but it is still very different in a theological sense. The oddest thing they did with Ubuntu is to use the Gnome login manager, but they aren’t using Gnome as the desktop manager, instead they are using the stupid desktop manager built into X server. EMACS and g++ are the ‘tools’ that are to be used in the class. Today, however nano replaced EMACS in one’s group. Mozilla wouldn’t launch on any of the terminals, so links2 was substituted in one’s group. Everyone else just complained and twiddled their thumbs as the internet wasn’t ‘available’ for them to complete their lab.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
If you haven’t seen the recent claims from the fraudulent law firms of Daniel Wallace and Maureen O’Gara it is advised that you check out Slashdot and read the article.
A note: The following is considered a rant of sorts, and may include indecent language and sexual/racial/other slurs that may offend members of my audience but because of my firm believe in no censorship I will keep the slurs and vulgarity in this post.
Well they claim that the GPL license is unfairly setting a price on GPL’ed software and that this hurts big business. They say that the FSF should remove the GPL and LGPL from its acceptable open source licenses. They claim that the price that the GPL sets is just ‘unfair’ for competition and is undercutting big businesses.
GPL is nothing more than a price fixing scheme designed to drive software vendors out of business
said Maureen O’Gara. What is this stupid bitch babbling about? So we are supposed to believe that the GPL is evil, eh? Well I think we should believe that this stupid bitch is evil. She for one should have her legal license revoked and then sued by the FSF, whom she is attempting to sue for the GPL, for slander. I would like to see the book thrown at this lousy excuse of a human.
The GPL is a license, an open source license that requires any works derived from the works that are released under the GPL to be released under the GPL. The GPL requires the developer and distributor of the program that is released under it to also provide the source code for free to anyone and everyone who may want it. This license is seen as communistic and evil by Bill Gates and others in Microsoft, but in fact their EULA is even more evil then the GPL, the EULA was designed to remove the user’s rights, the GPL was designed to give the rights to the people.
The EULA is closer to something of a dictatorship, such as Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, or Hitler since all these governments were by the select few, and for the select few. The GPL gives the power to the people, demos in Greek, and when the people have the power then you have a democracy, not a communism, since in communism the people aren’t allowed to participate in the government. It is technically illegal for one to take a CD of Windows XP Pro and a valid CD key that one owns and create a Windows LiveCD (or DVD) similar to a Knopix, or Gentoo LiveCD. Why? because the EULA forbids it by punishment of the law. The EULA is the real evil since it restricts the user’s rights. The GPL only says that you can’t claim the program, or any of it’s code as your own if you didn’t write it, and therefore if you include any of the program’s code into a application of your own, you new code must fall under the GPL because of the use of the GPLed code. You don’t like the rules? Then write your own program from scratch and then release it under any license that you choose. The GPL was never intended for profit of the code released under it.
What is wrong with the GPL? Really why does big business have problems with it? I mean, how can a bunch of amateurs really compete with a large corporate conglomerate such as Microsoft or IBM? Or do companies such as SCO want to use GPLed code but not release the product under the GPL out of greed? No one can compete with free eh? Then why did Novell buy Suse Linux? Novell is now using and supporting all open source software, and most of its old proprietary software has gone away. I believe that they use the GPL as their open source license. If a company is making money from a product that is also available on the internet for free then why is this lawsuit even close to being valid? I have just disproved their case.
The lawyers also dare to accuse groklaw of some things that are not true at all.
Groklaw’s article
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
