John McCain is relying on “Joe the Plumber” as the symbol of his economic message. But Joe the Plumber’s real first name is really Samuel, and Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a plumbers license. So if “Joe the Plumber” isn’t really Joe and isn’t really a plumber then what does that say about John McCain’s economic message? It says McCain is a fake too. That’s not change that I can believe in.

OH OH OH – The Republicans are sooooo offended by Obama’s “Lipstick on a Pig” comment. He’s so mean – he’s so sexist! But as Obama has said many times, McCain just doesn’t get it. Obama was calling John McCain’s message of fake change a pig. Obama isn’t calling Palin the pig – he’s calling Palin the lipstick!

After watching both the Democratic and Republican conventions I see a different message coming from each camp. The Democrats speak the language of peace. The Republicans speak the language of war. The Democrats talk about unity, that we are one country and one people. The Republicans are divisive. They talk of people like us vs. people like them. The Democrats see a future of peace and prosperity. Republicans talk of war, service, and the honor of service and sacrifice.

The Democrats call for getting off of carbon based fuels in 10 years advocating wind and solar and dealing with the issue of global warming. The Republicans call is “drill here now”. More oil, more coal, and more nuclear. The Democrats stress the economy. The Republicans stress abortion. The Republicans claim we are on the verge of victory in Iraq. The Democrats believe you can never win a war that should never have been fought in the first place.

But one thing both parties are running against is the last 8 years of George Bush. America went from the biggest surplus in the history of the world to the biggest deficit in the history of the world. We went from $1.00 a gallon gas to $4.00 a gallon gas. We went from the most respected nation to the most feared nation. We went from a nation who said “Never Again!” after the concentration camps in Germany were liberated to a nation that has accepted the use of torture. We are a nation of secret prison camps and a nation where the government listens in on our phone calls and both parties and both candidates approved it. We have allowed the Tobacco lobbyists to pass out checks on the floor of the Senate during a vote. We have allowed the insurance companies to determine when to pull the plug. Churches have gone from being funded by tithing to being funded by the government. And as they say, one can not server two masters.

So we have to ask ourselves, who are we? What have we become and what do we want to be? Do we want our cars to be electric or still run on gasoline 10 years from now? Do we want war or do we want peace? Do we want a planet that continues to get hotter or do we want to address the issue of clean energy? Are we in the “End Times” or are our best days still ahead of us. Clearly we all want change. This election is about whether you believe change comes from Washington, or if change comes to Washington. Who do you believe will create the future you want to see?

Ever wonder why Windows and Mac application tend to install and “just work” and Linux applications don’t? Is it because Windows and OS-X is a superior operating system? I think not. When it comes to the raw power of the operating system I don’t think anyone would seriously call Linux inferior. Most experts consider Linux superior. I certainly do. That’s why I run Linux on all my servers. Yet when it comes to installing and running applications in the Windows and Mac world everything generally installs and just works. The user is running the application in minutes. However in the Linux world application rarely just work and often require days to get it right. One has to search Google and consult experts to make any headway at all.

Why is that? I think the answer lies in both the Open Source culture and the economics that drives the development process. Windows and Macs are commercial products. Software is written by people who are paid and the employers expect results. The company has to make enough of a profit to keep the doors open. So to do that they have to make a product worth buying and that isn’t expensive to support.

In the open source world people are generally not paid and often just want to get something working. Once it works they are done with it. It’s not as important to get it working well or to write good documentation and polish the product. Geeks write software for geeks and expect the users to have geek skills or geek friends to help them out. No one is getting paid and documentation consists of typing your error code into Google and hoping to find a discussion list somewhere where someone else who had the same problem has found a solution.

To develop a commercial application it takes about one third of the time to get the product working and two thirds of the time to get it working correctly, add all the necessary features, make things automatic, make the software visually attractive, make the commands intuitive, and develop good documentation. A product is considered a success when the program “just works” and “does everything” that a program is expected to do.

In the commercial world this is necessary because that’s what people want to pay for. If a program is buggy, poorly documented, missing obvious features, requires cryptic commands, lacks menus, has no configuration interface, and has poor or no documentation then the company is going to have to pay people lots of money to answer phones and listen to customers scream at them. Years ago companies learned that they can reduce their costs and increase their sales by getting the software right so that people didn’t need tech support.

I used to have a small software company. I wasn’t a one person operation but I did all the development, documentation and tech support myself. So if I screwed up people were screaming at me. When someone reported a bug or an obvious missing feature I fixed it immediately. My motto was “compiled fresh daily”. In reality it was often several times a day. But if the problem was fixed then people wouldn’t be calling about it. The same is true for documentation. If someone asked a question I made sure it was documented so that the next time they wouldn’t have to call because it was in the manual.

In the open source world no one is generally responsible in this same way. They don’t have a commercial incentive to get it right and therefore they usually don’t. After all, getting it to work is the fun part. Polishing the software and documenting it is that hard part. Why do the hard part if the software runs? If you have a problem join an email list or Google it they say. If there’s no money then there’s no funds to hire professionals to write manuals. You don’t do end user usability testing. You don’t get feedback from your support department. Open Source is a different culture. It’s free, but you have to do more of the work yourself.

Of course this distinction between open source and commercial software isn’t universal. There are Windows programs that are pure crap and Linux applications that are quite good. But you can’t help but to notice that almost all Linux/BDS/GPL/Open Source apps are configured by editing text files and very few have menu options. Windows and OS-X applications almost all use menus and rarely have text file configurations. The difference is that menu based application represent a higher level of polish than non-menu applications. The programmers took the time to make the software easy to use.

The Solution:

To solve this problem we would need to get the same level of expertise into the Open Source world as we do in the commercial world, and somehow do it without money. Sounds impossible, but if you think outside the box and get innovative then “impossible” is just another word for “challenge”. What we need to do is to create a partnership between the right kinds of people. In this case I suggest we bring in the educational system.

Colleges and trade schools are in the business of training students to function in the real world so they can go out and get jobs working for companies who pay them so they can eat. Companies need people who are ready to go to work and have some real experience so they don’t have to educate the employees themselves. And that’s where the Open source world fits in.

Suppose that the education industry partnered up with the Open Source world and had their student work with Open Source projects as a real world learning opportunity? For example students taking courses in technical writing can work with developers to produce high quality documentation for open source software. People training for tech support position could become online tech support for free software projects. These support and tech writers could give feedback to the developers to make changes in order to make the programs user friendly and eliminate confusing features and unnecessary settings.

Additionally people taking computer programming courses and software design courses could also get involved in free software projects to add polish to existing programs. Instead of editing a text configuration file with the VI editor they could have a menu system and a help system that creates the configuration file so the user doesn’t have to learn yet another set of cryptic commands. The documentation folks can work closely with the help desk group so that the manual cuts down on the tech support calls. And the open source developers could learn some skills as well about how to get a program from “barely works” to a finished product and how to learn social skills so that they lose the habit of belittling the end users.

This would be a win/win/win/win solution in that the education world will be able to give their students real experience working on real projects. The student would have real world experience and have something to put on their resume of something they helped accomplish. Employers will have people to hire who are ready to go to work the first day on the job. And the Open Source world will have quality software that doesn’t suck so bad that people won’t use it for free.

All we need now is for someone to spread this idea around and find people to hook up education and open source and make it happen. I’m hoping some schools will read this and pick up on the idea.

However – the morons at MySQL decided to redefine the meaning of “localhost” and when an application uses “localhost” the client libraries force it to be redirected to talk to the Unix socket /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock instead of the TCP port. Why they did this is crazy beyond belief but there’s no way to override it short of downloading the source code and fixing it and recompiling MySQL which is the standard answer that you get whenever you complain too much about Open Source.

I however don’t give up so easily. I found a Linux utility called “socat” (socket concatenate ?) that allowed me to create a fake Unix socket and pipe it to a TCP port. And it worked – for a while. But it wasn’t reliable. As long as I was awake and in front of the computer it worked fine. But as soon as I went to sleep it shut down. So I wake up to a mailbox full of “my web site is down”.

So – I put it back on the main server till I find a real solution.

But – this is yet another example of why open source will never fully replace paid for software. If you have a commercial product people can call up the vendor and scream at them to fix bugs. When I sold commercial software and someone called me needing something fixed or added I usually had it the same day. However in the open source world you have a lot of people who have a highly inflated sense of importance who think their software is the greatest thing that was ever written and it’s crap!

What it comes down to as far as I can tell is the VI editor that comes with Unix causes brain damage. I’m totally serious about this. The VI editor absolutely sucks. It’s years behind editors I got with DOS 20 years ago and is an example of how to make an interface that totally sucks. I have refused to learn this editor because I find it offensive. I do most all my editing with a Windows editor, Textpad, and I run Samba on the Linux boxes so that I can mount them from Windows. That’s because there are no good editors in the Linux world. Other than that I use Pico which is a great little Unix editor for quick and dirty but still isn’t up to the kind of power I had in DOS or even CP/M (Wordstar) which is a better editor that any text mode editor in the Unix world.

I’m still waiting for Linux to catch up to CP/M!!!

My theory is that when people use VI it lowers their standards as to what good software should look like and causes their minds to physically alter in a way that leads to VI syndrome leading to delusions that their little piece of shit software is the greatest program in the world and that they are just so superior to microsoft that it’s just a matter of days before Microsoft collapses and everyone accepts Linux as God.

But what the open source world doesn’t get is that Windows programs actually WORK! If you want to install a windows application you download it, click NEXT, AGREE, NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH and the program is running. In the Linux world this almost never happens and when it does you’re almost sure that something has to be wrong. In Linux you have to edit cryptic config files with poor documentation. Then you try to run the application, get an error, Google the error, and go back and edit again. After many hours you might have it working or you might have to give up.

Out here in the real world localhost = 127.0.0.1 everywhere EXCEPT in MySQL. Not only did they hard code the bizarre behavior but have no way to override it. In fact they do the opposite. Whatever you set the configuration to they override it and force you to use the Unix socket. So doing something that should be simple becomes a nightmare. And you can’t talk to them because they have VI syndrome.

Q. Excuse me, can you give me directions to the Tech Museum in San Jose?

A. You don’t want to go there. The Exploratorium in San Francisco is much better.

Q. But I’m meeting a group of people and we already have tickets to go there. Can you give me directions?

A. Well, that was a mistake. You all would have had a much better time at the Exploratorium instead. Maybe you all can sell your tickets and go to the Exploratorium?

Q. Maybe that would have been better but we have Tech Museum tickets and the rest of the group is waiting there for me and I just need directions to get there.

A. Well, did you look it up on Google maps?

Q. No – perhaps I should have, but I didn’t. I just need to know how to get there. Can you give me directions?

A. Well if you had looked it up on Google maps you wouldn’t need to be here asking for directions.

Q. I know that. But I didn’t look it up, I don’t have a computer with me, and I just need directions about how to get there.

A. You know if you had a Palm cell phone you can download Google Maps and then you would know how to get there without having to burden people like me with your questions about asking directions. You have a responsibility to at least try to figure it out on your own before you pull over to ask directions. And if you had decided to go to the Exploratoruim in the first place you wouldn’t need to know how to get to the Tech Museum. It’s people like you who go to the wrong museums and don’t look up where you are going on Google maps, and don’t have a PDA cell phone that ruin life for everyone else. I have deemed you unworthy of an answer.

Q. Thanks for NOTHING! All I wanted was an answer about how to get somewhere and all I get is a lecture.

A. Hey, I’m just trying to help! It seems to me that the “burden of humility” should be on the person asking for assistance, not the person providing it. I think that your response above is actually more arrogant than what you are complaining about. I’ve been to both places and I don’t think it’s wise to go to the Tech Museum. You should get offended when someone who has been down that road before tries to tell you that the premise behind your question is ill founded. If it’s not, can’t you simply ignore the response instead of arguing with it? If you don’t want my help you shouldn’t have asked for it.

A friend of mine from Missouri came to visit me here in the San Francisco area a few weeks ago. He has AT&T and I have Verizon. I used to have AT&T in 2003 but I switched because the service sucked. But I had wondered if 4 years later if it was as bad as it was then. it was.

Everywhere we went I had signal and Phil didn’t I remember that I used to have trouble getting calls in my apartment and he had the exact same problem. I can drive from san Francisco to San Jose down 280 and not lose the call. He can’t. We even hiked in Yosemite and for 2/3rds of the hike I has signal. He only had signal when he was at Yosemite Lodge. Town after town I could make calls and he couldn’t.

So even if the IPhone is great it’s only going to be as great as AT&T. If they can’t get signal then they can’t make calls or surf the web. IPhone users migh find that all they have is a fat calculator. It will be interesting to see if people are actually happy with it once they buy it.

So I get it downloaded and try to install it on an Asus motherboard that’s about 2 years old. It has a dual core Athlon processor (939 pip) so it’s at the sweet spot of what Linux likes to run on. I ran the install and it came up in 800×600 mode. Not smart enough to figure out I’m running a 1024×768 screen, but what really bothered me was that the cursor was invisible. In order to get the cursor back I had to get rid of the graphical boot. (I didn’t like the graphical boot anyhow but it should have worked).

After getting it to come up I tried to get it into 1024×768 mode. I’m running an older LCD generic monitor. It’s a Samsung 570V. Every time I tried to set the configuration to 1024×768 it would change it so bizzare settings like 1300xsomething. I spent 2 hours screwing with it and failed to make it work. Nothing I did worked and if it doesn’t work when I do the ordinary right thing then who’s fault is that? Not mine. FC6 works.

The next thing I did was download the Live CD. I chose the x86_64 version with KDE because I like KDE. So when I go to burn the CD the ISO image is too big. The image is about 900 megs which is too big for the CD. So – I report it on Bugzilla and here’s the response:

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.

Summary: 64 bit KDE live CD too big to fit on CD

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242185

jkeating@redhat.com changed:

What |Removed |Added
—————————————————————————-
Status|NEW |CLOSED
Resolution| |NOTABUG

——- Additional Comments From jkeating@redhat.com 2007-06-01 21:49 EST ——-
It is not labeled or advertised as a “LiveCD”. It is a Live Image, this particular image is for DVDs or usb sticks of appropriate size. We cannot fit it on a CD without sacrificing a bunch of applications. x86_64 hardware is far more likely to have a DVD reader in it.

——————

Clearly they don’t give a damn if it works so I’m not going to report any more bugs. The comment that assumes all 64 bit CPUs have DVD drives is beyond rediculous. Most of my servers neither have CDs or DVDs because servers don’t need them. Why waste valuable power for equipment you don’t need unless something is broken.

It also didn’t work when trying to burn it on a DVD and it didn’t work installing it to a USB stick. So I downloaded the 686 version which was smaller and it burned onto a CD. I booted it up. There are a lot of error message on the screen but it did come up. One of the things I wanted to do was get a good USB boot so I don’t have to haul around a CD drive to boot from when I want to fix my servers. So after booting up I saw there was an option to install the Live CD on a hard disk. So I put my USB stick in, wiped out the partitions, and tried to do an install.

The install looked a lot like the regular Redhat installs. I chose to let the system choose the partitions automatically. It did, but after a few more dialog boxes it decided that the root partiton wasn’t big enough to install. So instead of a 1 gig flash drive I tried a 4 gig drive. I got the same error, not enough space.

Then I tried out the CD to see how I liked it. Tried to run Firefox but it wasn’t there. As far as being useful it have very little. It’s definitely not a Knoppix. Even basic tools lik fdisk were missing. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t as good as the rescue CD.

My conclusion, the folks are Fedora should at least test the release to see if it works. I say that they should show up at a Linux users group and pass out copies to see if real people can make the software work as it’s supposed to. If they had tested this before they released it they would have known it was seriously broken.

Just because a product is free doesn’t mean that if it’s sucks that no one should complain. Being free doesn’t lower the bar. The bottom like is that Fedora 7 doesn’t yet work and it should be unrealeased and then rereleased when it passes the install test. F7 isn’t done yet. Send it back to the kitchen and cook it some more.

Here’s the Document.

Back in 1992 I was involved in a number of interesting projects. I had a software company called Computer Tyme Software and I was looking hard for undocumented API calls to that I could control more aspects of the operating system through the ment language I had developed. I had also met with Novell’s Ray Noorda and had written a proposal that Novell get into the desktop operating system market with a 32 bit Unix like DOS and I wrote a partial specification for this operating system and sent it to Novell.

Here’s the story on that.

Novell however, instead of working with me to develop this idea decided to screw me and went off and bought out Digital Research and bought Unix from AT&T and Wordperfect and managed to screw it all up and started Novell’s decline. Had Novell worked with me and taken a different course history would have been significantly different.

Little then I know then that my name appeared on secret confidential Microsoft documents as a person who should be denied information about DOS and Windows beta programs. I think this could turn out to be interesting. Love to find out more about this.