endperform.org

Over the past week, I’ve had nothing but problems with our internet connection here at the house. I must have called into their support center at least 8 or 9 times over the course of the week, and if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, you’ll know that hasn’t been a pleasant experience. The first few days they had said there was an outage in the area, so they couldn’t send a tech out. Friday comes, and I end up calling again. The tech tells me they noticed the downstream signal is weak, and that I should call back in when I got home from work, which I did. The tech I got in touch with at that point had me do the same, exact thing I had done about 5 other times. I was beyond livid at this point, so I politely told him I’ll wait it out. The net connection today has been stable, but I’m still going to switch over to ATT for cost reasons. I can’t justify spending 70.00 a month just to be screwed around with when an issue arises. On top of that, Beth got accepted into culinary school so we want to try to rework the budget to be able to deal with the student loan payments when they start rolling in.

The thing about all of this is that there isn’t a choice as far as high speed goes, really. There’s either Comcast or ATT, two big companies concerned about the bottom line. Someone from the Comcast executive offices is supposed to be calling me. Unless by some miracle they can match ATT pricing, they can kiss me goodbye as a customer, period.

What am I talking about? See this post on the official Google blog.

I had a long diatribe here, but I broke a promise to myself that I wouldn’t get too darn political on this blog, so therefore, I edited it.

Some of you may have heard about the goings-on surrounding Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, and how he was convicted of killing his wife. Most recently, he lead police to her body in an effort to get his sentence reduced. An interesting idea came up on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site that sparked a lot of controversy. Exhibit A: Brainstorm Idea #10930. The summary is that the submitter things sending a laptop to Reiser while in jail would give him a chance to contribute to society. Ignoring the fact that the laptop would never see it’s intended recipient, some of the comments got rather interesting. Eldmannen, the originator of the post, sees Hans as a ‘victim’ in all of this and has some rather ludicrous thoughts.

There’s this gem:

mtrausch,
Whatever, it was just one kill. Big deal. Others have killed way more. George W Bush is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Also if he commit a crime, he should be locked up so he is no harm to society. But he should still be allowed participate and contribute to society so that he can become a good and productive citizen.
Plus, she deserved it. She cheated with Sean Sturgeon, embezzled money from his company, and was an irresponsible mother who abused illegal substances such as ecstasy.
Let this be a lesson to all; avoid post-order mail brides.

chipbennett,
It is much better to let him be a productive citizen of society that contributes to society, than have him locked up and do nothing, just waste tax money.

neon,
It is not like he killed Gandhi, he just killed his wife.
Perhaps other people can work on it too, but Hans is the genius who designed it, he can make bring the best to it.

And this is the comment that spurred me to post this:

Endperform,
She was a irresponsible mother abused illegal substances such as ecstasy, putter her kids at risk and who dated Sean Sturgeon a dangerous serial-killer who have admitted to killing 8 people and leaving a ninth for dead.
* http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser

I cant imagine the tremendous stress and abuse that poor Hans must have endured. :(
Driving an kind and peaceful man into such an act. :(

“He took someone else’s life and should have to pay for his crimes.”
The guy is paying for his crime. He is doing time.
But he should be given an laptop so that he can be a productive citizen and contribute to the society.

Poor Hans? The guy KILLED HIS WIFE. Eldmannen seems to think Hans is the victim in this, and that his wife drove him to murder her. If you’re having problems with your significant other, there are ways to fix or defuse the situation. If he was really that ’stressed’, he should have separated from her, or better yet, divorced her completely. The fact remains that he killed his wife. We don’t know the exact surroundings of the murder, but to say in no uncertain terms that she deserved to die is just completely insane.

Jon posted an interesting entry concerning KDE3 vs KDE4, and I was all geared up to post a comment to it, but I figured I would go ahead and share my thoughts here, since I had been pondering writing about this topic to begin with. He mentioned a couple of points that I’d like to weigh in on myself. I’ve summarized the points since I haven’t had a chance to ask if I could repost portions of his blog here.

I disagree with the thought that KDE3 is only for power users. I’ve sat quite a few people in front of a KDE3 setup who were totally used to Windows and they didn’t have any issues getting things done. In one case, one person actually liked the fact that settings were at his fingertips and not buried behind various shields. The fact that KDE4 is trying to simplify things doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to appeal to everyone. In fact, some may view this as going along the lines of the Gnome project. My biggest beef with Gnome is the whole GConf setup, and the fact that I have to dig through a special editor to customize some settings. I shouldn’t need to go into a registry-like setup to tweak things. KDE3 exposes these things in via the system settings and various configuration settings, where they should be.

KDE3 was, and still is, a perfectly good desktop for home users. For most people, they may not get into all of the settings, only accessing what they need to. The settings themselves are organized well enough that most wouldn’t need that much hand-holding (if any) to get around things. For some reason, the thought that KDE3 was for power users only just kinda bugs me a bit, especially after seeing quite a few new users take to it nicely.

With that said, let’s turn to KDE4. I’ve tried it, and wasn’t too keen on it at the time. I may give it another shot when 4.1 final is released, but I’m still not sold on it yet. To me, it seems like they focused on the “ooo, pretty” aspect of the desktop and went from there. I wouldn’t call KDE3 vs. KDE4 over just yet. It’s going to take some time before people completely migrate over, myself included.

I was inspired to write this based on an idea over at the Ubuntu Brainstorm. The idea was to add X11 and graphical configuration tools to the Ubuntu Server install. The main reason, the poster said, was to get more switchovers from Windows 2003, and allow for less mistakes when a server is set up. I don’t really agree with this sentiment. Personally, my feelings on Linux servers is based on real life experience. I feel that you should know something about configuring your server via the configuration files before deploying your server. Why? Consider the following scenario:

Bob is typically a Windows server administrator, but he’s heard about Ubuntu Server Edition with Gnome and managed to get his boss to agree to allowing him to install a box to host an instance of a popular web application. Bob is familiar with GUI configuration tools since he’s coming from a Windows background, so he figures he can install this machine pretty easily. Bob starts to configure the server using some of the nice GUI utilities provided. He then decides he wants to reboot the machine to make sure the changes he made continue to work. Much to Bob’s chagrin, his beloved GUI doesn’t come back up. Unfortunately while mucking with the configuration, Bob disabled GDM, and thus disabled his GUI. Bob now has a black screen with a login prompt. Bob may know enough to log in, thinking his GUI comes back up, but he finds that he’s at another prompt: [bob@server:/home/bob]$ Since Bob is unfamiliar with Linux, he now has to spend time trying to figure out what he needs to do to get his GUI up and running.

Now, what would happen if something failed on that server and the GUI couldn’t be restarted easily? Bob would have no clue as to where to start, and would have to find someone to help. I had a similar experience back up in PA where someone had messed with some settings via a GUI on a Linux server and inadvertently disabled X and changed permissions on key files. Ever since then, I’ve advocated X-less server installs. In my mind, if you deploy a server, you should know what to do in the case of a failure and not rely solely on GUI tools to hold your hand throughout an installation. Maybe I’m too old-school or just short-sighted, but I feel that if you’re going to run a Linux server, you best at least know where to find configuration files and how to navigate via the terminal.

Don’t get me wrong, GUI admin tools do make life easier, but one should really know the underlying configuration before rolling a server out into production.