Although all Linux distributions basically consist of the same set of tools and applications, it seems to matter a lot which one you use. It’s just like with cars, while any of them would probably suffice for your daily uses (getting you and sometimes somebody else from spot A to spot B), the choice of a car requires serious considerations. “What will the neighbors think? Is it important how much gas it takes? Is the color important? Do I need all optional safety features? Does it need to just work or be tuneable?”

Newsforge has written an article which lightheartedly analyzes what the choice of Linux distribution says about you. E.g. this is what the typical Gentoo user is about:

If John Wayne had been a Linux user, he would have used Gentoo. Gentoo users are pioneers, people who like to live close to the metal, and don’t mind hurting themselves on sharp objects. Some feel that Gentoo users are simply lazy louts who always want to have a ready excuse for why they are not doing constructive things with their computer, other than compiling or recompiling the latest kernel, app, or hapless passerby. The official Gentoo motto is, “If it moves, compile it.”

This page is an ongoing effort to document my experience with the Linux distributions that I have used over time. More to come here….

The server hosting the domain sspaeth.de had to move as the old provider closed down. It’s on a vServer hosted by 1blu.de now. I chose them due to their low price and a traffic flatrate, however my experiences have been mixed. The hotline guys are friendly and they have a regular phone number for it. However, I am not sure how competent they are: e.g. the rescue console doesn’t work (the rescue system starts but the server log shows that ssh is not enabled, so you can’t log in and they are “waiting for patches” from Plesk, the vserver admin software. Damn, can’t they enable the ssh service themselves? So once the operating system goes down, you’ll basically have to reinstall the server.

Also they only provide a Suse 10.0 installation, and as there is no “repair mode”, it’s hard to change that. I am not familiar with Suse, and I don’t liked it too much. The console version of yast, their admin software, sucks badly. Also the package management was really bad, dependency handling drives one crazy and they include tons of unneccesary dependencies (I was never able to uninstall the graphical Xserver for a computer that doesn’t even have a monitor attached). I was also unable to update to a newer version of Suse: their is no apt-get dist-upgrade and after upgrading the packages, it would not start anymore. I did not even bother to ask the helpline guys for help. To cut a long story short, here is what I did:

I took a statically compiled busybox (a kind of swiss-army knife for computers) and used that as my login shell. I then removed the complete operating system (exept the busybox binary) while the computer was running it. Next, I installed a Gentoo Linux image in the same place, configured a bit, rebooted… (my thumbs still hurt from crossing them so hard) and …. it worked! A friendly Gentoo Linux shell greeted me on login.
Yay! Now I am back on a Linux distri that I am familiar with and that only installs the stuff I really need. Puuh, now back to do real work!

update tablename set field = replace(field,'search_for_this','replace_with_this');

I you look How Firefox 2.0 Will Be Marketed, you’ll see that they’ll run TV ads and push the functionality aspects rather the fact that it is free and open source. Thus they are entering the market head to head with Microsofts IE, where the Firefox-advantages are not necessarily that great in the long-run (Microsoft just needs to redirect some of their infinite monkeys from typing Shakespear to adding whistles to their new IE). What makes Firefox special is that it is open. That people can build upon it and derive new browsers from it. By going more and more mainstream Mozilla runs danger of giving that advantage away. Hey, if that tiny geek market is not large enough you should have a look who is going to install the web browser on their parent’s machine or in all the companies’ boxes. Mozilla, Mozilla, mind your origins and also keep in mind that accessible source code is not what makes an open source project open.

P.S. Found out about this through Dave Neary

UPDATE (2006-10-26): LWN (access with subscription only until next week or so) writes about the same issue and agrees that toning down the free aspect is the wrong way to go. Nicely written, check it out when it gets public.

Congratulation Stefan! ETOY won the 2006 SWITCH – Innovation Award:

An der dritten Preisverleihung des FÃ

Spent more of the evening watching Quarks, a popular-science show. Its topic: “how to lie with numbers”. Some of it was actually quite interesting.

Quiz question: You are offered a job with a yearly salary of 10000. You have two options:
– an increase of 1000 each year (after the first year)
– an increase of 250 each 6 months (after the first 6 month).
Which option do you choose?

Also interesting: Benford’s law, stating “that lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit 1 occurs most frequently and larger numbers occur as the leading digit with less and less frequency as they grow in magnitude, with 9 being the least frequent leading digit.”
More specifically the leading digit 1 has the probability of 30.1%, 2: 17.6%, 3: 12.5%, 4: 9.7%,…,9: 4.6%
Accounting firms apparently use this distribution to check whether the distribution of bill sums is “regular” or shows some oddities (in the tv show they edited 70 out of 10000 bill items (taken from the tv channel’s accounting system) to be just below 5000 in order to simulate a company where people can spent up to 5000 without asking their superiors, and the accounting company detected the oddity.)

Spent the evening watching an animal documentary on WDR. It examined and compared the intelligence of human kids, monkeys and birds by exposing them to similar experiments.

E.g in one, they put some food on one side in a horizontal pipe which has a “trap” in the middle and provide some stick for pushing the food.
Small kids will frequently push the food in the trap and don’t get anything. Older ones recognize the trap and push the food in the right direction, avoiding the trap. The monkey succeeded first in pushing it right. However, in another attempt he pushed it into the trap… he then took a screw driver and just unscrewed the pipe from its fixation and shook the food out of the pipe. Great! The bird would take a stick in its peak and pull the food out of the pipe. It nearly fell into the trap in one attempt and you could see how the bird stopped, let the stick go and went around the (glass) pipe to examine the situation (it succeeded in “lifting” the food over the trap in the end).

Another experiment involved self recognition in the mirror. Interesting program!

I spent a quiet weekend together with Almut. It was good to finally unpack our bags which were still lying around untouched from our UK holidays. We also enjoyed our Schwedenofen, a real, (kind of) open fire is a nice and relaxing thing to have.

Next week, I’ll have to finish some article revisions and start on doing the data analysis on a new set (still looking at Knowledge reuse among reusable software components). It’s going to be a busy week.

This post is just a shameless copy of this Boing Boing article and which I fully agree with:
Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea — and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world’s digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs’ worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible.
In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won’t be free — though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it’s because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can’t bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of blinkered thinking does Microsoft — which could be capable of pursuing lots of profitable strategies that don’t involve fighting the future tooth and nail — no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it’s time for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect and CEO.
I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.

Digging in against open source commoditization won’t work – it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: “better together,” “unified platform,” and “integrated software.” There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won’t .

Saw the BoingBoing post about the copyright threats based on the photos of the Aquage shampoo. Aquage doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. There is a clear exception in the Copyright Act that permits people who are selling or advertising a product to make and display photos of the the stuff they are selling, precisely to stop this kind of effort to control secondary markets. The exception is set out in Section 113(c) of the Copyright Act:

“(c) In the case of a work lawfully reproduced in useful articles that have been offered for sale or other distribution to the public, copyright does not include any right to prevent the making, distribution, or display of pictures or photographs of such articles in connection with advertisements or commentaries related to the distribution or display of such articles, or in connection with news reports.”